Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  Diagonally across the foyer, in the aft left-hand corner, the door to the chief purser’s cabin flew open and from the cabin rushed Chief Purser Franchesco Ingianni, and the two ship’s doctors.

  “My God, the boiler’s exploded!” exclaimed Dr. Bruno Tortori Donati, chief surgeon and medical director of the ship. The other men hastily agreed with him. The boiler casings rose through the ship to the funnel just aft of the foyer and there was every reason to believe the damage in the foyer was caused by the concussion of an explosion in the Boiler Room.

  While the chief purser headed for the bridge, Dr. Tortori Donati and his associate, Dr. Lorenzo Giannini, pushed their way through crowds of passengers to the ten-room hospital on A-Deck below. “It is nothing, nothing, a little explosion in the Engine Room,” the handsome thirty-five-year-old ship’s doctor told passengers who clutched at his uniform. The two physicians assembled the two men and three women nurses billeted in the hospital, and they set about preparing for the arrival of casualties.

  Dr. Tortori Donati stopped in at the women’s hospital to comfort his two patients, both elderly and pathetic women whom he had come to like personally. One was an unlucky farmer’s wife, Mary Onder, who with her husband had hoarded their meager savings for years for “just one last visit to the old country,” and then spent the visit in hospitals. They had sailed the previous April on the Cristoforo Colombo, where, on the second day out, the sixty-five-year-old woman had fallen and fractured her left thighbone. Her visit to Italy was confined to the International Hospital in Genoa, where her leg did not set properly. From the Colombo hospital she had gone to the Genoa hospital and from there to the Doria hospital, and Dr. Tortori Donati sympathized. His other patient had been carried aboard close to death on a stretcher at Naples. Mrs. Rosa Carola, whom the doctor came to know as “Grandma Rosa,” was seventy-one years old and frightened. She was suffering, according to her medical report, from acute pulmonary edema, an unstable heart condition and cancer of the larynx. The ship physician, when he had first seen her, felt in his heart that she would not survive the eight-day voyage.

  Finding the two women terrified by the crash and the subsequent list, Dr. Tortori Donati with a characteristic warmth reassured them that they would not be deserted in their beds. He personally would care for them no matter what happened to the ship, he explained. The Andrea Doria was in no danger, the doctor told the women, but he was needed in the main hospital ward to receive injured crewmen. Assuring them that he would soon return, the doctor left to check the men’s ward.

  He glanced into the ward but saw no one there. An abscessed tooth and a slight fever apparently had not stopped the flight of cabin boy Gaetano Balzano. The doctor hurried back to the hospital main receiving room, unwittingly leaving behind in the men’s ward an American sailor named Robert Hudson who was sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the furor throughout the ship. Although not confined to the ship’s hospital, Hudson had been assigned a bed in the men’s ward rather than in a cabin when he had boarded the ship in Gibraltar. The New Orleans seaman, a slim, dark-haired young man, had injured his back and severely lacerated his right arm in two separate mishaps on the Stockard Steamship Company freighter Ocean Victory. His ship had been diverted to leave him in Gibraltar where he had waited in a hospital for repatriation to the United States on the Andrea Doria.

  The doctor, returning to the receiving room of the hospital, found Dr. Giannini and the five nurses ready for action, but no word of any injured had been received from the Engine Room or the bridge. The doctor was perplexed. Unable to reach anyone on the hospital telephone, he set out for the bridge for direct word from the captain. He instructed Head Nurse Antonia Coretti to stay with the two women patients, told the others not to leave the hospital, and began the long climb to the bridge.

  He was surprised at the angle of the decks and the difficulty he had climbing the stairs. Although water had begun to enter A-Deck in the damaged area of the starboard side, the port side was high and dry in the hospital area midships. Dr. Tortori Donati, wearing the blue uniform of an officer, found himself besieged by passengers asking questions and demanding answers he could not supply. Nor could he push ahead of the throng moving with him toward the upper open decks of the ship. The doctor reached the Promenade Deck, three flights above the hospital, when he heard the loudspeaker announcement for passengers to go to their emergency muster stations. Realizing this meant abandon ship, he turned in his tracks and pushed his way against the throng back to the hospital. He was barely conscious of numerous hysterical and incoherent pleas for help. Most of them, it seemed, were demands that he help find lost relatives. But the doctor pushed on. His first duty, as he saw it, was to get his patients ready to abandon ship.

  The doctor, considering stretchers impractical for the task, had the two women carried up to the Promenade Deck. Two male nurses transported Mary Onder, with the help of her husband, who had come to the hospital. Dr. Giannini and two women nurses carried blankets and hospital supplies while Dr. Tortori Donati and Head Nurse Coretti carried Mrs. Carola, who had been put under sedation. The old woman gazed wildly in fear at the doctor as he carried her beneath her arms. As the doctor and nurse stumbled along the corridor with their awkward burden, the old woman cried out in her thick, rasping voice that she was dying and that before she died she wanted to see her daughter Margaret once more. The doctor was skeptical about the old woman’s chances of surviving but he reassured her constantly, telling her again and again what she wanted to hear. She would live, the doctor told her, and her daughter would soon be at her side.

  This did not come to pass, however. The seventy-two-year-old woman did survive that night to live out the few months remaining to her, but her daughter Margaret was killed with two other women in Cabin 230 on the starboard side of A-Deck in the direct line of collision. The fourth bed in the cabin, booked for the sick “Grandma” Rosa Carola, was unoccupied.

  Outside Cabin 230, Benvenuto Iazzetta pounded on the closed door with all the strength of his seventy-two years. As acrid fumes of smoke and dust wafted into the corridor, a steward implored the old man to join the passengers fleeing from A-Deck. But Iazzetta insisted that his wife, Amelia, and her sister, Christina Covina, were trapped alive inside the cabin. The steward tried to force the door open, but when water began to flow through the tilted corridor of A-Deck, he promised the old man that he would send for help and Iazzetta finally consented to go topside as the smoke became thicker in the corridor. For a time, passengers fearfully mistook the smoke as evidence of fire somewhere on the ship. Actually the smoke and white dust fumes came from the smoldering of a fireproof lining which separated the steel plating of the ship’s hull from the wood paneling of the cabins. It was this lining, in fact, which probably saved the ship from catching fire from the tremendous friction of steel against steel produced by the collision.

  Cabin 230 was an outboard cabin with a single porthole. Its door opened on a narrow passageway off the main corridor. In the adjacent cabin forward, four women traveling singly were killed. And in the next outboard cabin, two Italian nuns, en route to study hospital methods in Worcester, Massachusetts, lost their lives. As did many of the clergy on the Doria, they had retired early, at the suggestion of the ship’s chaplain, Monsignor Sabastian Natta, in order to attend the 5:30 A.M. mass, the first of nine masses scheduled for the next morning. In all, ten women, traveling Tourist Class, lost their lives in four outboard cabins on A-Deck.

  Below these cabins, on B-Deck, the Doria’s famous fifty-car air-conditioned garage, providing direct access to the pier, was inundated. The sea quickly flooded the nine cars in the spacious garage, including a $100,000 “idea” car of the Chrysler Corporation which had taken fifteen months to build, and a Rolls-Royce of socialite Edward Parker, of Miami Beach, Florida, returning from a honeymoon in Paris.

  But the Stockholm prow struck its crudest blow that night on C-Deck, where the smallest and cheapest cabins of the Andrea Doria were crowded together. The
families in the cabins in the line of collision, most of them Italian immigrants, never had a chance. The death toll on this deck was confined to the area of penetration, between the watertight bulkheads at frames 153 and 173, indicating further that no more than one compartment was breached by the Stockholm. But the death toll in the thirteen cabins on the starboard side was greater than in the rest of the entire ship. Death must have been swift for the twenty-six persons killed in eleven of the cabins. Those not immediately killed by the Stockholm bow undoubtedly were drowned seconds later as the stricken Andrea Doria heeled on her side never to rise again and C-Deck, normally at the ship’s waterline level, sank beneath the waves.

  One smashed cabin in the starboard section was empty at the time. Its occupants, single men, were still up in the public rooms, enjoying the last night out. In the thirteenth cabin of that section, number 664, a fourteen-year-old Italian boy, Antonio Ponzi, on his way to join his mother in Newark, New Jersey, was trapped against the ceiling in his upper bunk on the left side of the small room as the right wall collapsed and water poured into the cabin. The boy cried out to his cabin mate, whom he knew only as Antonio, who had unlocked the cabin door but could not open it. Knee-deep in swirling black water, the young Rhode Island man, Antonio Lombardi, reached up and dragged the teen-age boy through the narrow opening between his upper bed and the ceiling. He then returned to jerking and rattling the jammed door. But it remained a bar to freedom and safety. Then suddenly an iron beam crashed to the floor. Lombardi seized the beam and, using it as a battering ram, smashed the door down with the desperate force and swiftness of a man fighting for his life. They were the only two known to have escaped from the starboard collision section of C-Deck.

  In the wake of death, a wave of incipient terror and confusion swept through the ship as smoke, dust and water, mixed with a slime of fuel and diesel oil from ruptured tanks and pipelines, poured through the corridors.

  The 697-foot ship quavered from stem to stern from the shock of the collision. Liquor bottles trembled on their shelves and toppled to the floor in the bars and lounges of the Promenade Deck. Three simultaneous dances going on at the time came to a crashing halt. Couples fell upon one another in a tangled mass on the dance floors. In the First-Class Belvedere Room, the ship’s most luxurious night club, musicians playing the popular “Arrivederci, Roma,” for the umteenth time, toppled from their podium with their instruments. The bartender vaulted over the bar and sped from the room. The white-haired headwaiter rushed about wiping up spilled drinks and reassuring the bewildered passengers that everything was all right. Most of the passengers, after the first moment of stunned surprise, seemed intent upon reassuring one another that nothing could be seriously wrong. Morris Novik, founder and president of the Italian-language radio station WOV in New York, was stopped short by the collision, one hand in the air (holding a drink), as he was making a fine point to his table companions on his favorite subject: politics.

  “It’s really nothing,” he said. “Let’s sit tight until we find out what’s wrong.”

  Most people in the room did sit tight. Some rushed to the draped windows but saw nothing in the night fog outside. The mothers in the room who had children sleeping below acted like mothers.

  Actress Ruth Roman, for one, kicked off her high heels, forgot her dancing partner and rushed from the room. She made straight for her double cabin 82-84 where she found her three-year-old son still sleeping. “Wake up, Dickie,” she said softly, shaking him by the shoulder. “We’re going on a picnic.” She gathered lifejackets and blankets from the cabin and with a firm grasp on her sleepy son’s left hand set off for the “picnic.”

  In the Belvedere Lounge, speculation started moments after the collision. “We’ve hit an iceberg,” exclaimed one woman loudly. “It’s an explosion in the ship’s machinery,” one man stated firmly. Others suggested the ship had hit an unexploded mine … or a submerged wreck … or a small fishing boat … or a large freighter. There was plenty of speculation and very little fright. The first-class passengers in the lounge expected an announcement would soon be forthcoming and while some headed for their cabins, many waited for some word, some instructions.

  There was less calm in the Cabin-Class Ballroom where the band had also been playing the popular “Arrivederci, Roma” to a capacity audience. The musicians in the crowded ballroom tried gallantly to pick up the interrupted strains of the song, but after a few bars, the lights flickered off and that put an end to the music. Chairs and tables were uprooted and sent flying across the room along with waiters, dancers, observers, drinks, glassware. In the few seconds before the lights flashed on again, everything seemed topsy-turvy. Chaos ensued as chairs and tables slid across the floor and people scrambled about trying to flee. At the same time, other passengers were fighting their way into the ballroom which was the emergency muster station for cabin-class passengers.

  In the Tourist-Class Lounge one deck down, where an amateur band of crewmen were providing music for what gratuities they could collect, the situation was the same: confusion, shock, bewilderment and much noise. Yet, for Dr. Franco Fusco, a young Genoese physician traveling on a Fulbright Scholarship to Ohio State University, everything seemed to stop, like a moment in eternity. Then above the din he heard a “squawking voice” from the loudspeaker. The young doctor listened, but the Italian words were indistinguishable.

  As might be expected following an explosion or fire in any darkened movie house, sheer panic tore across the Tourist-Class Dining Room, one deck farther down where passengers were engrossed in the antics of Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler in a movie called Foxfire. One passenger though had been momentarily distracted before the collision. Miss Theresa LaFlamme, a thirty-year-old registered nurse returning from a three-month vacation in Europe, was surprised to see her cigarette lighter sliding across the table in front of her. Inside the ship in the dark room, she could not sense the ship was on a hard left turn, and the crash of the collision took her unawares. She was hurled to the floor, as tables toppled over and screams pierced the black room until the lights went on. Then she saw the bedlam of people struggling to get off the floor and falling again, of screams and cries, and she told herself, “There must be no panic.” She tried to calm a screaming woman near her, but the woman ran off, and she tried to help another woman and then another. Almost everyone seemed to be running, and those who weren’t scurrying off were on their knees praying or weeping, or doing both.

  One of the first to escape from the scramble in the movie-dining room was Jack Grubenman, who happened to be near an exit. Heading for a lifejacket in his cabin one deck below, he dashed down a nearby stairway to A-Deck and then fell to his knees as the suffocating fumes of smoke and dust in the corridor caught him full in the face. The descent down the stairway had been simple, but it took him almost an hour, or so it seemed, to push his way from the stern of the ship to his cabin midships on the starboard side. The corridor was jammed with people in nightclothes pushing toward the stairways, and each door along the corridor became a roadblock. To get through the door, Grubenman had to plunge in against the throngs moving in the opposite direction. Cabin 290, which he shared with three other men, was empty. Jack hastily grabbed three lifejackets, thinking of his brother Don and sister-in-law Violet whose next-door cabin had been empty when he passed it. But when he reached the main corridor carrying three bright orange kapok jackets, two huge Italian passengers spied him and without a word pounced upon him. He managed to hold on to one of the lifejackets which he hastily wrapped and tied about himself.

  He need not have fought for a jacket for his sister-in-law, Mrs. Violet Grubenman, who had tied a lifejacket securely over her nightgown before rushing from Cabin 288. Jolted in her bed by the crashing which seemed to be directly outside her cabin, she guessed immediately what had happened. She and several friends had discussed that afternoon, when the fog set in, what each would do in the event of a collision. But her plans of that afternoon did not quite work out.
The corridor was a nightmare of smoke and panic. People were running in both directions. There was wailing and screaming. Mrs. Grubenman headed for a nearby stairway but before she reached it, lost her footing on the tilted deck, crashed into a wall and fell to the floor. People ran over her and past her. “Get going,” shouted one man, who stopped short at her prostrated body. But when she turned up her bleeding face to look at him, he reached down to help her to her feet.

  Her husband, Don, at the Tourist-Class Bar, looked out of the window in time to see the white superstructure of the Stockholm slip by beneath a shower of sparks. Then he took off at a run for the cabin where he had left his wife. Down one deck he went, but there in the stern of Foyer Deck he became enmeshed with passengers fleeing from the movie theater and was carried back in the wave of hysteria to the Tourist-Class Lounge a deck above, which became an impromptu muster station for some 200 passengers.

  What panic there was on the Andrea Doria immediately after the collision, even in the darkened movie theater, soon abated into general confusion. From the sundry lounges, bars, card rooms and reading rooms as well as the ballrooms on the upper decks of the ship, passengers headed for their individual destinations. Panic, terror, fright or calmness are all subjective and relative concepts, it must be admitted, and what one person saw as panic another judged as remarkable calm under the circumstances. But if one could measure terror with a geiger counter, the clicking would have become sharper and faster the farther down one went on the eight decks accommodating passengers on the Andrea Doria.

  Actress Betsy Drake, wife of Cary Grant, occupying one of the twenty-nine airy first-class single cabins on the Boat Deck, needed only to put on the clothes she had just taken off and walk down a short corridor to be on an open deck in sight of the lifeboats on the high side of the ship. Only later did she discover the boats to be useless. Two decks down, in a small portside cabin aft, Mrs. Angela Grillo of Brooklyn fought desperately for twenty minutes with her luggage, which had slid against the door of her cabin, before she could escape with her three-year-old son Anthony. Two more decks down, Mrs. Fanny Wells, of Birmingham, who shared an A-Deck cabin with her three young children, was hysterically desperate. Although her cabin door was open she couldn’t leave, for her youngest child, three-and-a-half-year-old Rosemary, was trapped by an arm caught between her bunk and bulkhead.