Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  The rest of the world, of course, did not know. Maritime experts were giving their opinion to the public, some guardedly, that the modern Italian liner, constructed in conformity with the standards of the International Conference of 1948, would not sink. In the house of Lloyd’s of London, where the clocks were five hours ahead of eastern time, the maritime insurance men worked through the day in a funereal atmosphere, checking the news tickers regularly, knowing full well that this sea disaster would undermine a sea safety record of a generation and that, if the Andrea Doria did sink, it would equally undermine the trust in all the international standards of ship stability.

  In Italy, where news of the collision reached the streets early in the morning and the fate of the Andrea Doria hung in the balance throughout the day, people feared the worst. The disaster spread profound shock through the leading seafaring nation of the Mediterranean. To the people of Italy, the Andrea Doria meant more than any ship ever meant to the people of the United States. The Italian liner had been recognized throughout Italy as representative of that nation’s renaissance as a seafaring nation. With more than half of her ships destroyed in World War II, Italy had rebuilt steadily so that by 1955 she had regained a position second only to Britain’s Cunard Line in carrying the most passengers across the North Atlantic, from Europe to New York and back again. The Italian Line carried more than 100,000 passengers a year in 1955 and again in 1956 and again (despite the loss of the Doria) in 1957. It was the Andrea Doria which represented this success at sea for the people of Italy. The Andrea Doria among all the ships of Italy, in short, was held in a special love, like the first-born son of an Italian family.

  In Genoa, the home port of the Andrea Doria, shocked and silent citizens filled the Piazza de Ferrari to wait the day long before the large white building in the square which housed the home office of the Italian Line. The news that came forth from the building was sparse.

  Mrs. Calamai learned of the disaster from a glance at a banner headline across the front page of a newspaper’s extra edition while she was out doing her morning shopping. She headed for her home in a run, her eyes burning with tears. A small crowd had gathered at her front door, but she burst through them, hardly aware of the people, and locked herself in the sanctity of her home. Her younger daughter, Sylvia, who was sixteen, screamed out in anguish but then took to comforting her mother.

  The following day, this warm and gentle woman told Michael Chinigo, a reporter for the now defunct International News Service, of the hours she had spent following radio reports on the fate of her husband and his ship.

  “I had to gather my strength to inform my husband’s aged mother. I did so, and told a white lie when I assured her he was safe. My heart kept coming up in my throat because I wasn’t sure at all. I spent five hours of torture, minute by minute, as I followed the succession of events by radio and frequent calls to the offices of the Italia company.

  “I alternated frantic calls with prayer. I don’t remember how many prayers I offered and how many supplications I made. I do remember invoking God’s intercession to avoid loss of life and spare my Piero. I knew my husband’s temperament and his dedication to the navy code of honor. I knew he would go down into the sea with his ship unless he were ordered to leave it by someone high up.

  “I mentally went down with him a hundred times until I learned that top officials of the Italian Line had asked the Merchant Marine Minister to order my husband to abandon ship.”

  She couldn’t know of course that the order had been radioed to the scene too late to reach Captain Calamai, who had been persuaded to leave his ship by the insistence of his fellow officers. But she did ask the reporter to get word to her husband that their elder daughter, Marina, who he knew was traveling to London, had arrived safely. “Please tell Piero,” she said, “we are well but will continue to worry until we hear from him directly. Tell him to telephone.”

  Captain Calamai expressed his thanks but declined the invitation to board the destroyer escort Allen which came alongside his lifeboat at about 8:30 A.M. He preferred, he told the United States warship, to wait for the promised Coast Guard tugboats. The destroyer escort, returning from a training cruise for Navy reservists off St. John’s, Newfoundland, had reached the scene before daybreak but after the rescue operation had been completed.

  Captain Calamai’s torturous vigil came to an end five minutes before nine in the morning when he sighted a squat, black-hulled craft with white superstructure advancing slowly toward him from the north. The small boat turned out to be the Coast Guard cutter Hornbeam, bearing the designation W394 on her hull, which had left Woods Hole, Massachusetts, seven hours before. The cutter, equipped with towing bit and equipment, rounded the sagging bow of the Andrea Doria and came alongside lifeboat No. 11. A spark of life fluttered in the haggard face of Piero Calamai when he recognized the small craft as the long-awaited tugboat. Helped aboard the cutter, Captain Calamai climbed directly to the pilothouse of the small boat to take up the problem of towing with the young lieutenant, Roger F. Erdman, who commanded the Hornbeam. The other men in lifeboat 11 and from lifeboat No. 5 also climbed aboard and were happy to accept steaming hot coffee from the Coast Guard crew. Thirty-one men in the third lifeboat accepted the hospitality of the Navy’s destroyer escort Allen, while waiting for word of the outcome of the conference in the pilothouse of the cutter.

  The cutter Evergreen, maintaining direct radio contact with the Boston Coast Guard, sent word to its headquarters at 9:20 A.M.: HORNBEAM STANDING BY SS ANDREA DORIA. PICKING UP 45 CREW MEMBERS FROM LIFEBOATS, INCLUDING MASTER. WILL ADVISE POSSIBILITIES TOWING VESSEL.

  Back came prompt orders from Boston: HORNBEAM SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT TOW. ITALIAN LINE CONTACTING MERRITT, CHAPMAN AND SCOTT AND MORAN TOWING AND ASSISTANCE FROM EITHER OR BOTH BELIEVED FORTHCOMING.

  The order was hardly necessary. The Doria’s list was about 50 degrees. Her Promenade Deck was in the water and her bow was sagging heavily. Towing was out of the question. Captain Calamai heard the words which constituted the decision of the young Coast Guard lieutenant and he could not dispute them. He looked out at the sea glistening in the sunlight and saw his ship sinking. The sinking itself began at 9:45 A.M., when the ship lurched over on her side at somewhat less than a right angle to the water. Captain Calamai could look down the black interior of his ship’s funnel as the elliptical stack faced him, hovering just above the water line. The ship might have gone at that moment but instead she hovered there, high out of the water and over on her side.

  In truth, she was not sinking at that moment; she was capsizing. So the marine engineer would view it technically, and to him there would be a world of difference. For any ship filled with sufficient amount of water will sink of the weight. Modern ships are designed that they may sink, yes, but not capsize. Compartmentalization, cross flooding and all of the engineering progress in the design of major ships through the years were aimed at preventing a ship from rolling over, and all of these engineering feats were incorporated into international law as enunciated in detail in the various maritime conferences. To the marine engineer, it indicated that there was something unstable or unseaworthy about the Andrea Doria or there was something wrong with international standards and the approved design of ships. Just where this fault lay was not to be known until later, but the very fact that the Doria hung for eleven hours after the collision with her port side high out of the water indicated that she was not sinking because of the weight of water entering her hull; she was rolling over, capsizing. It was a terrible fate for so beautiful a ship. For Captain Calamai, it was heartbreaking.

  At 10 A.M., the sea lapped over the bow, covering it for an instant and then washing away, only to surge up over the bow again. Two minutes later, the ship’s single funnel bearing the red, white and green colors of Italy dipped beneath the waves and the sea flowed in. The Andrea Doria was then completely on her side at a 90-degree angle to the sea, the water flowing fast into the giant ship along her entire length. On
e more minute and the ship was cut in half along her length, the starboard side of the ship gone beneath the waves. The three swimming pools in a row began taking in water. The eight lifeboats on the port side hung rigidly and undisturbed. The ship hovered there and then the bow plunged under, leaving a white wake in its place while the round stern thrust up and out of the water, indecently uncovering the ship’s rudder and twin propellers. She hung there in a final hesitation and then she went down.

  Some of the portside lifeboats, but not all, tore free from the ship at the last and floated away with the long trail of debris that stretched upon the water. Some of the lifeboats, in which the crew had not released the falls, went down with the ship. The Andrea Doria plunged beneath the waves on her right side, bow first. Her stern rose higher in the air and then was gone, sending a small fountain spray of sea water up toward the sky. The Andrea Doria disappeared from sight at 10:09 on the morning of July 26, 1956, two miles southeast of where she and the Stockholm had collided exactly eleven hours earlier. The dark sea was marked with bright green effervescence 700 feet long. The violent bubbling continued for fifteen minutes as the remaining air escaped from the luxurious interior of the dead ship settling to rest on the sandy bottom 225 feet beneath the surface of the North Atlantic.

  Ten minutes later the Evergreen radioed a report on the over-all situation:

  SS ANDREA DORIA SANK IN 225 FEET OF WATER AT 261409Z IN POSITION 40.29.4 NORTH 69.50.5 WEST. EVERGREEN WILL SEARCH DEBRIS. HORNBEAM HAS REMAINING SURVIVORS ABOARD. LEGARE RETRIEVING A BODY ALONGSIDE STOCKHOLM. OWASCO STANDING BY TO ESCORT STOCKHOLM TO NEW YORK. SUGGEST OTHER COAST GUARD UNITS EXCEPT TAMAROA AND THOSE ON SCENE BE RECALLED.

  The final death throes of the Andrea Doria, which had been a home and a way of life for the men who sailed her, was observed for the most part in a silence of sadness and awe by her crew from the decks of the Stockholm, the Hornbeam and the Allen. Death points up one’s aloneness in this world. Some men wept; others just watched. In the silence aboard the Allen, the Italian crewmen began to empty their pockets of articles belonging to the Andrea Doria and they rendered them, keys, flashlights and similar items, to the sea which had taken the mother ship. They paid their tribute to the silent sea. They wanted no memento of an unlucky ship.

  The Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa was on the way from New York to join the cutter Owasco in escorting the Stockholm back to New York. The persistent grip of the remaining anchor chain finally gave way when the engineers burned through the links at the Main Deck level and Captain Nordenson had again raced the Stockholm violently back and forth, pushing and pulling on the entrapped chain. Chief Officer Kallback and Chief Bosun Eliasson, standing near the anchor windlass, felt the deck crunching and falling away under their feet. They leaped toward the sea breaker wall just as 69 feet of the smashed bow crashed to the sea, taking with it the $100,000 anchor windlass, the entrapped anchor chain and the body of the woman, which could not be freed from the wreckage. It was just a few minutes after 10 A.M.

  The cutter Legare, informed of the body by radio, immediately searched the water near the Stockholm, but only two sharks could be seen. Captain Nordenson maneuvered the Stockholm gently through the water, testing its seaworthiness, and at 10:15 set his course due west, heading back to New York at a speed of 8.4 knots, with the Owasco as escort, to be joined later by the cutter Tamaroa.

  Captain Calamai and his men rested aboard the small and strange Coast Guard cutter Hornbeam while arrangements were worked out for their transport to New York. Exhaustion took hold on the men after their twenty-seven hours without sleep and more than twelve hours without food. The nervous energy which they had spent through the night left them limp and melancholy. The sea, flowing over the sunken Andrea Doria, sparkled in glistening innocence under a bright sun. Captain Calamai, in contrast, looked like an old, tired man. The stubble of beard on his unshaven face was white.

  Taking advantage of the lull in radio communications, the Coast Guard in Boston asked for some details on the collision and extent of damage to the Andrea Doria. The inquiry was routed to the Hornbeam via the Evergreen, and Captain Calamai obliged his host by answering, for the message came back to Boston: MASTER STATED RUPTURE JUST AFT OF BRIDGE IN RELATION TO HULL. PENETRATION ONE-THIRD OF SHIP. LENGTH 40 FEET. VESSEL TOOK 25° LIST IMMEDIATELY AFTER COLLISION. DRAFT NOT KNOWN.

  Such information, which may appear innocuous to the layman, could constitute vital data pertaining to the stability of a ship. Attorneys for the Italian Line, fully cognizant of the lawsuits which would follow, no sooner learned of this divulgence of information than they put a stop to it via the Coast Guard Commandant of the Eastern Area in New York, who radioed to the scene: PASS TO MASTER OF THE SS ANDREA DORIA—ITALIAN LINE REQUESTS UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES DISCUSS CASE UNTIL ARRIVAL NEW YORK. REFER ALL INQUIRIES TO ITALIAN LINE OFFICE.

  Attorneys for the Swedish-American Line, with the same concept of self-preservation in mind, sent similar directions to Captain Nordenson on the Stockholm.

  It was after eleven in the morning when Captain Calamai and his men boarded their lifeboats and pulled away from the Hornbeam. The sea was empty as the two lifeboats containing forty-six men approached the destroyer escort Allen. Summer sailors in the Naval Reserve, lining the deck railings, watched the approach of the lifeboats and presently noticed a shark skimming the water close behind the last lifeboat. The shark seemed intent upon one stout crewman who was sprawled in the stern of the boat, his arms oustretched on the boat’s gunnels and his body leaning outside the boat. It seemed as if the shark needed only to reach up to seize either of the arms. The men on the Allen shouted and screamed at the Italian crewman but he, apparently lost in thought, did not hear them. When after several moments he did turn and look at the monster behind him, he leaped to the center of the boat.

  The Allen was the final ship to leave the scene carrying survivors of the Andrea Doria to New York. Captain Calamai and his officers retired to the seclusion of the captain’s quarters aboard the American ship, where they began to prepare their report on the disaster. Captain Calamai realized no doubt what lay ahead of him: he would have to account for all his actions in the worst sea collision in history.

  Passengers of the Andrea Doria, returning to New York on five other ships, for the most part smarted with recollections of their treatment on the Andrea Doria following the collision. Although first-class passengers generally had only praise for the liner’s crew, many survivors were indignant over the lack of information, instructions and help afforded them. The passengers all vehemently denied that they received any instructions or information over the loudspeaker system.

  On the Cape Ann, eighty-seven survivors, almost all tourist-class passengers, signed a petition complaining of the lack of instructions at the ship’s lifeboat drill before the collision and the absence of an alarm, instructions and organized help from the crew after the collision. But the most serious charge which became public when the survivors reached New York was that so many of the crew abandoned the ship before the passengers.

  The charge cast a stigma upon the integrity of not only the Andrea Doria crew and the Italian Line but the seamen everywhere. One of the sea’s finest traditions had been violated, if the charge were true, and the crew of the Stockholm who had seen the arrival of the first five Andrea Doria lifeboats spoke of it reluctantly. The Italian Line vehemently denied it. No one certainly had kept a check on each one leaving the Andrea Doria or arriving at the Stockholm. Yet the unfortunate truth was to be found in the distribution of passengers and crew aboard the five rescue ships carrying survivors to New York.

  The simple fact was that the Stockholm, which received the bulk of her survivors before the arrival of the other ships, had more of the Italian crew than any other vessel. During the early phase of the rescue, those leaving the Andrea Doria sought the Stockholm when she was the only other ship at the scene. Later, however, the Swedish ship, moored by her anchor chains two miles from the Doria, became the farthest
and least desirable of the rescue ships at the scene. At the end of the rescue operation, limping back to New York, the Stockholm had on board 234 of the 572 crew and officers of the Andrea Doria in addition to 311 passenger survivors.

  The Ile de France, the last ship to arrive, returned to New York with 177 crew and 576 passengers from the Doria. Captain Calamai and 76 of his crew returned on the destroyer escort Allen, while the rest of his crew were divided between the Cape Ann, which had received 129 survivors, and the Navy transport Thomas with 158 passengers and crew. And, of course, there was the Tidewater tanker Hopkins, as gallant a rescue ship as the others, which brought back one survivor: Robert Hudson, the lucky sailor from New Orleans.

  In terms of numbers, it was the grandest, most successful rescue operation in maritime history. Of the 1,706 passengers and crew who had been aboard the luxurious Andrea Doria, 1,662 were rescued from the stricken ship. One of these survivors, Carl Watres, a jolly businessman who had become popular on the Italian liner by playing the piano and singing, succumbed to a heart attack while returning to New York aboard the Stockholm. One woman, Mrs. Julia Greco, died six months later of a broken back suffered in abandoning the Doria. One child was fatally injured in the rescue operation itself, Norma Di Sandro, who had been thrown into a lifeboat by her father. Forty-three persons went down with the ship—all of them, as far as is known, killed in the collision area of the Andrea Doria.

  Six Coast Guard cutters remained at the scene for the mopping-up operation. Debris from the lost Andrea Doria had drifted over a nine-mile area. The final and hopeless search was made for survivors and bodies. But, possibly because of the sharks in the area, no bodies ever were found. For weeks afterwards, though, residents along the coast of Massachusetts, particularly the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, collected souvenirs, including paintings and other works of art, which had floated up from the sunken ship. The Doria’s eight lifeboats, drifting free in the area, were dutifully picked up by the Coast Guard cutters. The Yeaton towed three boats back to New London, Connecticut; the Legare took three others to New Bedford; and the Hornbeam picked up two for its journey back to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The cadet squadron of the Campbell and Yakutat gave their young trainees gunnery practice in order to sink the overturned and splintered portside lifeboats which had survived. The Evergreen stayed until there was nothing more to be done, and at 3:15 P.M., July 26, it anchored a bright yellow 50-gallon drum at latitude 40-29.30 North, longitude 69-50.36 West. Thus the ocean grave of the Andrea Doria was marked by a yellow buoy, a reminder for all who pass the scene afterwards.