Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  The senior officers reviewed the situation: the extent of flooding below decks, the list, the expected Coast Guard tugboats, how much time was left, the abandoning of ship. Captain Magagnini reported that all passengers were off the ship, and that all accessible cabins had been searched. In this, he was relaying information from the purser officers who in turn were relaying reports from various stewards who had made various checks. But there had been no systematic search. Some stewards had looked into the cabins at their stations; others had not.

  Probably at the very same moment the staff captain was reporting to Captain Calamai that all cabins had been searched, Robert Lee Hudson awoke alone in the pitch-black hospital room. He had the odd sensation that he had been sleeping on the wall. It was like the start of a weird, vivid dream. He climbed uphill across his bed, easing himself off the bed until his feet touched the floor. The floor sloped parallel to his bed. He groped his way to the corridor and looked down the long, empty hallway. All was still and deserted and it took several moments for him to realize where he was and what must have happened. He was alone on an empty, sinking ship. Water was rising in the cross corridors to the high side of A-Deck. The low side of A-Deck was under water. Hudson looked down at his body clad in white pajamas and seriously wondered whether he was dreaming or had actually awakened to this. He seemed to be awake and yet it seemed impossible that he was alone on the luxury liner which was listing at an incredible angle for no reason that he could discern.

  “Is anybody here?” Hudson screamed, and he heard his voice travel down the empty, silent corridor. “Help!” he called at the top of his voice, but there was no answer. He stumbled down the corridor with the sensation that he was walking more on the walls than on the floor. He groped his way up the stairs to the open deck and breathed deeply of the salty early-morning air. From the empty high side of the stern, he slid down the deck to the starboard side. But the last of the crew already had gone forward to the bridge. Hudson saw the empty ropes and cargo net over the side of the ship. In the distance, he noticed several lifeboats. The night was lovely with the soft yellow glow of the moon and the stars and the calm sea. There was no indication of any disaster other than the incredible list of the Andrea Doria. Hudson’s mind was unclear and confused.

  For some reason, he climbed down the cargo net, became entangled and dangled there until a lifeboat from the Tidewater Oil Company tanker Robert E. Hopkins, which had arrived on the scene not too long before, came beneath the net. The tanker’s chief mate, Eugene Swift, in command of the lifeboat, reached up and grabbed the limp body of Hudson, who seemed to be in a state of shock. The American sailor was the last passenger to leave the Andrea Doria. He was the only survivor taken aboard the tanker which had sped fifty miles to the disaster scene. As far as Swift could see, the decks of the listing Italian ship were deserted.

  In the wheelhouse of the Andrea Doria, quite unaware of the activity on the stern, the officers expressed their opinion to Captain Calamai that the ship had to be abandoned. The captain wished to remain until the arrival of the tugs. The discussion went back and forth over the same points as it seemed apparent to all that the ship, then listing almost 40 degrees, could not survive another four hours.

  “There is nothing more to be done,” Captain Magagnini concluded. “It is senseless to stay aboard, Commandante, a senseless risk of life. We can wait for the tugs in the lifeboats.”

  The officers, each holding on to something for support, silently waited for their commander’s decision. It was their prerogative to suggest, his to decide.

  “You go,” he said gently. “I will stay.”

  They protested but they understood: he wanted to go down with his ship. Monsignor Natta, who was the captain’s confessor, spoke a few words to him. The chaplain had come to the bridge after the ship had been emptied of passengers. The captain listened to his spiritual advisor and to his officers who interjected suggestions. But it was his friend Magagnini who forced the issue when he said firmly, “It is useless, but if you stay, we will stay with you.”

  To those men who saw him at this time, Captain Calamai seemed to have aged ten years in the six hours since the collision. His broad chest, straight back and determined mien had sagged as if he himself were as near death as his own ship. His spirit was gone, his voice hardly audible, and in his gray eyes his men saw a sadness so terrible that for decency’s sake each averted his gaze from the captain’s face. There is nothing so tragic, these men of the sea knew, as a shipmaster losing his ship, whatever the cause.

  Captain Calamai, somewhat weak and unsteady upon his feet, was led down to the Boat Deck and to the ladder midships at the position of lifeboat No. 7. Just as the sun peeked over the horizon, bringing the first silvery rays of dawn at 5:30 A.M., the men climbed over the side and down the Jacob’s ladder to lifeboat No. 11. They left the ship in reverse order of rank. Staff Captain Magagnini, second-in-command, reached the lifeboat last and looked up to see Captain Calamai leaning against the deck railing, alone on the vast ship. The old man—and now he literally looked like an old man—seemed as if he were about to topple over the side because of the angle of the deck upon which he stood. He made no move to leave the ship.

  “Come down,” the staff captain shouted.

  Captain Calamai waved his hand as if to brush away the lifeboat. “Go, go away. I remain.”

  “Either you come down or we’ll all come up.”

  “Go,” said the captain again. “I’ll wait for the tugs. If need be, I’ll swim out to you. Go.…”

  Captain Magagnini climbed up the swaying rope ladder to the deck and told Captain Calamai that the men in the lifeboat all would return aboard the ship unless the commander came down. The master of the Andrea Doria at last nodded his assent. Captain Magagnini again went down the ladder so that the captain could be the last man to leave his ship. This time Captain Calamai followed him.

  It was shortly after 5:30 A.M. The light of the new day was breaking fast. The Andrea Doria was abandoned.

  Chapter Twelve

  “SEAWORTHINESS NIL”

  As the lifeboats were being hoisted and secured aboard the Ile de France, Hans Hinrichs, the writer, reflected upon thoughts which must have occupied the minds of the hundreds of travelers gazing safely from the decks of the rescue ships upon the silent, dying Italian liner. The Andrea Doria never could have been more beautiful than she was then in the blue-gray light of the early dawn. The tiles of her three swimming pools sparkled as the sun, red and fiery, rose and overpowered the soft yellow of the moon at the opposite end of the sky. Hinrichs felt transfixed by the cyclorama of color and beauty as he stared at the graceful lines of the Andrea Doria against the vastness of the ocean which surrounded her. “If her doom is decreed,” he told himself, “this is the time when she should sink into her briny grave.”

  Captain de Beaudéan obtained his release from the Andrea Doria a few minutes before 5 A.M. as soon as his lifeboats returned empty, indicating there were no more passengers to be rescued. “You may go—thank you,” said the Andrea Doria by signal lamp. Captain de Beaudéan then radioed the Stockholm, implicitly asking her permission: MASTER STOCKHOLM—ALL PASSENGERS RESCUED. PROCEEDING TO NEW YORK FULL SPEED. US W H THOMAS STANDING BY ANDREA DORIA. NO MORE HELP NEEDED—MASTER ILE DE FRANCE.

  At five minutes past six, the last boat was aboard and secured and ten minutes later the Ile de France was under way, bound for New York. The leviathan ship moved slowly in a wide circle, circumnavigating the sad Andrea Doria, and as the French ship took her leave the Tricolor of France was raised and dipped three times while at the same time Captain de Beaudéan sounded three prolonged blasts on her steam whistle. It was a farewell salute to one of the youngest and fairest maidens in the society of luxury liners.

  The mournful salute had a tremendous emotional impact upon the exhausted men in the three Andrea Doria lifeboats which bobbed in the choppy sea as the wind rose with the new day. Some men wept openly.

  In lifebo
at No. 11, Captain Calamai sat up forward with Captain Magagnini. The twenty-six other men in the boat kept a respectful distance from their commander. Little was said. It was a time for each of them to think over what had taken place the night before. The activity of the rescue was past, leaving their minds clear for sad and unpleasant contemplation. In the whole world, at that moment, there could not be a man more tragic than this shipmaster who had lost his ship. The men understood that. There was no use trying to console the silent Captain Calamai. The captain brushed aside the offer of medical help from Dr. Tortori Donati. Only when the lifeboat drifted too far from the ship did he murmur to the staff captain who, in turn, indicated to Second Officer Badano at the tiller to steer the lifeboat closer to the ship. The abandoned Andrea Doria would be a salvage prize for anyone who could board her and take her to safety. Although this was hardly likely, Captain Calamai certainly wasn’t ready even to risk the possibility of anyone getting closer than himself to his ship. The prospect of salvage has always been the reason behind the tradition of shipmasters remaining with their sinking ships until the very last moment.

  The wait for the Coast Guard tugboats stretched into an eternity for the men in the lifeboats, in contrast to the press of action aboard the Andrea Doria which had preceded it. The lifeboats, designed to carry 146, were virtually empty with twenty-odd passengers in each and bobbed like corks on the choppy sea. In Boat No. 11, the officers relieved the weary crew at pumping the Flemming levers which propelled the boat. The sun beyond the bow of the Andrea Doria rose slowly, turning the dim morning into a bright, sunny and white summer day. It seemed incongruous and cruel that the day should be so sunny and cloudless after so foggy a night had brought ruin to the beautiful ship that had been their home.

  The Andrea Doria, slipping farther and farther onto her side, seemed stark and pitiful, dying nakedly in the light of day before the eyes of strangers staring from the decks of nearby ships. Dr. Tortori Donati was reminded of the vigil he had stood at the bedside of his dying father, who lingered in agony from eight in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon. Many of the doctor’s fellow officers were torn between the slight hope of towing the Andrea Doria to safety and the wish that the senseless agony be ended swiftly.

  Daybreak brought in endless succession small airplanes, most of them chartered by the news media. They swooped down upon the Andrea Doria as photographers, cameramen and reporters recorded the scene in perhaps the finest photographs, newsreels and written descriptions of a marine disaster in history. The Doria men in the lifeboats, however, saw the planes as vultures pecking away at a helpless carcass. It seemed somehow indecent in broad daylight.

  No one at the scene knew at that time that the listing ship had been abandoned. The Thomas, which was the only United States Government ship at the scene, reported to the Coast Guard at 7:40 A.M.: NO COMMUNICATION WITH THE ANDREA DORIA. HAS 45 DEGREE STARBOARD LIST. LARGE GASH BELOW STARBOARD BRIDGE WING. LLST INCREASING. SEA WORTHINESS NIL. LAST REPORT CAPTAIN AND 11 CREW STILL ON BOARD. No PASSENGERS. In fact it was believed and reported for some time that the captain and eleven men had leaped from the ship only moments before she sank.

  From the decks of the Stockholm the sky was scanned constantly for a sign of helicopters requested to evacuate the five critical casualties who had been brought up to the ship’s fantail. Captain Nordenson, at the urging of the Stockholm’s doctor, had sent messages repeatedly for helicopters, each one more urgent than the last. At 7:30, two were sighted in the sky, a large Air Force craft and a smaller Coast Guard helicopter, escorted by a Coast Guard PBY Albatross seaplane from Nantucket.

  The helicopters swooped down for a look at the deserted Andrea Doria and then came on toward the Stockholm. It was 7:40 A.M. They had been dispatched at dawn from their bases in Massachusetts—the Air Force helicopter from the Otis Air Force Base and the Coast Guard craft from Salem, both stopping at Nantucket to pick up doctors. The smaller Coast Guard helicopter made the first try to settle cautiously down on a 55-foot diameter rolling plot which was the Stockholm’s fantail. As a landing field, fenced in by a four-foot railing, it was just five feet smaller than the minimum desired, and the morning wind had whipped up to some fifteen miles an hour. Chief Petty Officer James W. Keiffer, piloting the craft, decided against landing. This did not deter Lieutenant Claude Hess from making a stab at the Stockholm deck with his larger Air Force helicopter, but to no avail.

  The men in the two flying beetles then went to work on their specialty, the delicate operation devised in the second World War and perfected in the Korean conflict of lowering a stretcher basket to ground or sea level while hovering in the air above. The Coast Guard helicopter, throbbing in one spot some twenty feet above the Stockholm deck, took aboard the most seriously injured. Norma Di Sandro, still in a deep coma, was the first strapped into the basket and hoisted to the waiting physician in the helicopter. Her identity was still unknown. Dr. Nessling on the Stockholm had attached to her nightgown an identification tag which said only: Italian child born—is recommended treatment at nearest surgical clinic-consequence of fractured cranium.

  Alf Johansson was hoisted from the ship next. The good-natured seaman had appeared to have recovered from the initial shock of the collision. He had joshed his nurses on the ship about his condition, “Maybe I’m not going to die after all.” But a half-hour before the helicopters arrived, he lapsed into a coma. Shortly after the helicopter landed on Nantucket Island, he expired.

  One by one, the other three crewmen were lifted to the Air Force helicopter: Lars Falk with his broken neck and fractured skull, Wilhelm Gustavsson bereft of his left eye, and Arne Smedberg with a brain concussion and shattered right leg.

  By 8:30 in the morning, fifty minutes after they had come, the two helicopters and the lumbering Albatross roared away, leaving the men of the Stockholm to cope with the bedeviling anchor chains. Since 5:30 in the morning, when he had become aware that the rescue operation at the Andrea Doria was finished, Captain Nordenson had concentrated on trying to free his ship from its underwater mooring. He drove the ship full speed back and forth but he could not tear loose from the tangled grip of the anchor chains on the bottom of the sea. By 6:30 A.M. all seven lifeboats which had gone to the Doria had returned and were secured in their davits, except Boat No. 7. An acetylene torch and equipment had been lowered to Second Officer Enestrom with orders for him to try to burn through the heavy steel links of both anchor chains. Each link weighed seventy-five pounds.

  But when Enestrom maneuvered to the port chain, he found his small boat so close to the jagged raw edges of the splintered steel bow that he and his crew were in danger of being slashed as their boat rose and fell in the choppy sea. The starboard side was no better and the thirty-year-old officer had the sensation that the bow was about to crash down upon him. Although the men on the ship could not discern it because of the piles of wreckage, the bow was indeed hanging by a few interior strands of steel. Bringing the lifeboat back under the wing of the bridge, Enestrom called up to his captain that the task assigned to him was impossible, and he was given permission to secure his boat.

  In the light of day, the crew made as careful a search as possible of the bow. A good part of it turned into souvenir hunting. They found intact a small red autograph book belonging to Linda Morgan which had lain on the bureau next to her bed on the Andrea Doria. Chief Purser Dawe found a glass cocktail shaker, marked Made in Milan, which was in perfect condition.

  Chief Officer Kallback and Chief Bosun Ivar Eliasson, supervising the burning of the anchor chains at the windlass on the bow, were more successful than Enestrom. The starboard chain, once cut through, roared down its hawser pipe and into the sea. Its detached anchor remained in place, stove into the side of the ship. The other anchor chain, however, when burned through, fell limply on the deck. It apparently was jammed in the wreckage of the bow in the interior of the ship. The ship was maneuvered back and forth again but the heavy anchor chain could not be dislodged.
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br />   Chief Officer Kallback led a contingent of engineers doggedly down to the Main Deck of the forecastle for the arduous job of burning through the hawser pipe which protected the anchor chain in the body of the ship. It was a task that was to take the better part of an hour.

  Meanwhile, the scene had come to look like an international convention of ships at the Times Square of the Atlantic, as the waters off Nantucket have been popularly known. The Ile de France and the freighter Cape Ann had departed, but there remained the transport Thomas and the tanker Hopkins (which had arrived in time to help in the rescue), the Navy transport Sgt. Jonah E. Kelley, the Hondurian freighter Manaqui, the Danish cargo ship Laura Maersk, the British freighter Tarantia and the Norwegian freighter Free State.

  The Coast Guard cutter Evergreen, the first of eleven cutters to take part in the disaster, arrived at 8:06 A.M. and immediately assumed command of the disaster area. Coast Guard headquarters in New York and Boston had dispatched all available craft through the night until a few minutes after 6 A.M., when the cutter Humboldt left Boston. The Thomas, then the United States command ship at the scene, radioed: PLENTY SHIPS NOW. NO FURTHER ASSISTANCE NEEDED. The Humboldt, which would have arrived at about 6 P.M., was recalled.

  The Andrea Doria, meanwhile, leaned farther into the sea. Only the upper edge of the huge hole in her side was visible above the water as the sea seemed to be reaching up to engulf the glass walls of her Promenade Deck. From the air, to those who looked down upon the ship from airplanes, she looked unmarred with none of her wound showing. But from her lifeboats, to the men who had sailed her, she looked ghastly, her night deck lights glowing in day, her red-painted underside showing above water on the port side and the steady gush of water, being suctioned from her Generator Room by a sealed emergency pump, still flowing from the portside vent, splashing into the sea. She would soon roll over on her starboard side, the men in the lifeboats knew.