Farther aft on A-Deck a bewildered young American tourist, who thought the ship had been blown up, leaped from her bed nude and dashed from her cabin. Amid screams and confusion, she was caught up in the press of human traffic in the corridor before she noticed the stares of others. She had to fight her way back to her cabin for her pajamas neatly folded beneath her pillow.
A twenty-six-year-old American secretary returning from an overseas job, who also slept au naturel, awakened alone in her cabin, trapped beneath a fallen upper bunk. She struggled futilely in the dark, crying and screaming all the while, until her door was thrown open by a husky, tall steward who lifted her from the wreckage of her bed and carried her to the corridor. As he started down the passageway and she realized she was safe but naked, she pleaded that he release her. “Put me down!” she screamed, but he ran on. She beat her fists upon his chest until he, apparently unaware in his shocked state that it was a woman and not baggage in his arms, dropped her, and she retreated to her cabin for appropriate clothing.
There were some who fled from their cabins without clothes and left the ship in that condition, but they were the exceptions. Most decided to take the time to dress or throw a bathrobe over nightclothes. Many left the ship with suitcases. Ellis D. Hill, an Aramco official returning from Saudi Arabia, toted bottles and sterilized water for his two-month-old twins.
And there were others who dressed “sensibly” for the emergency at hand. Mrs. Josephine Fornaro, returning to Roxbury, Massachusetts, from her first visit to Italy in forty-six years, donned a dress, stockings, shoes, two sweaters, a jacket and a hat. The only thing this seventy-two-year-old lady could not find was her lifejacket. But she was calm and unworried as she left her cabin on the port side of the Boat Deck. It was only later when she saw people from the lower decks coming up to the Boat Deck in their nightclothes and covered with oil, that she began to have her doubts. “I’m going to die,” she whispered to herself.
A-Deck was the waistline of the Andrea Doria, marked on the outside of her black hull by a thin belt of white. As C-Deck was at the normal water line of the ship, A-Deck was at the emergency line. It was known in marine engineering as the ship’s bulkhead deck, serving as a steel cover over the transverse bulkheads which divided the ship into watertight compartments. Ideally, if the deck were an unbroken cover, no water flooding one compartment could overflow into another. But then how could anyone pass through the cover to the decks below? Some compromise in this ideal must be made. Warships, designed to withstand as much punishment as possible, have as few and as small stairway openings in the bulkhead deck as practicable. But passenger liners are built to accommodate passengers. The Andrea Doria, designed for luxury and beauty, had seventeen stairways running through A-Deck, and these necessary accommodations for passengers on the long ship now served as openings for the sea, flowing in at the level of A-Deck, to pour down to the decks below.
Passengers on B- and C-Decks who did not escape in the first five or ten minutes following the collision found themselves struggling against a stream of oil-blackened water flowing down the slippery, slanting stairways. It was a terrifying thing. People learned quickly that it was easier to crawl than to walk, better to help your neighbor than to try to push ahead, wiser to recite the Rosary as one progressed step by step from a purgatory than to cry out in helpless anguish.
The weak, the elderly and children were helped in the flight from the lower decks toward safety by crewmen and other passengers. People were not only going up the stairs; many were struggling and tumbling down. Parents carried their little ones on their shoulders and on their backs. Belief that the boilers had exploded spread rapidly through the tourist-class spaces on B-and C-Decks as the black oily water spread. Worst of all was the compartment in which the Stockholm had struck. There smoke and paint dust were thick and the decks awash with water. Crewmen quickly closed the door hiding the wrecked starboard side of C-Deck from the passengers on the port side.
People poured into the corridor in their night clothes and gasped for breath in the smoke and dust. “Abandon ship,” cried two cabin stewards who remained at their posts. Mrs. Liliana Dooner, an attractive twenty-four-year-old Italian woman en route to rejoin her New Jersey husband, whom she had married when he was stationed with the navy in Naples, hoisted her two-year-old daughter Marie to her shoulders and headed for the stairway.
Paul Sergio, a fifty-six-year-old cobbler on the Notre Dame campus in Indiana, and his wife, Margaret, tried to force their way to the starboard side of the compartment. They had fled their cabin in nightclothes, leaving behind their lifejackets, all their belongings, and a letter Mrs. Sergio had written to their parents in Italy telling of their pleasant and safe trip. A cabin steward, working desperately in the port corridor, untangled legs and arms of those struggling on the sloping deck in the scramble toward a center stairway. Another steward blocked the Sergios’ attempt to enter the starboard corridor. “The ship is sinking,” he shouted at them above the uproar. “You must go up, up, up,” he insisted, pointing to the stairway.
As others rushed by him, Sergio tried to explain. On the starboard side, in Cabin 656, were his brother’s wife and her four children whom he was taking to America. For twenty-seven years he had worked and prospered as a shoemaker in South Bend. Two years before, he had sent for his brother Ross, a carpenter, who had come with his seventeen-year-old son Anthony. Now he and his wife had gone to the old country to visit their relatives and bring his brother’s family back to America. There was his brother’s wife, Maria; Giuseppe, thirteen years old; Anna Maria, ten; Domenica, seven; and little Rocco, four.
But the steward insisted there was no one left behind the door to the starboard side. “Everyone has gone up and you must go up too. The ship is sinking and everyone must abandon the ship.”
Paul and Margaret Sergio, with no alternative, began the long climb to safety. Their search, if it had been possible, undoubtedly would have been in vain, for Cabin 656 was in the direct line of the collision. Maria Sergio and her four children had perished. Their C-Deck cabin had sunk beneath the waves instantly. Three cabins away, Michael and Maria Russo and their two daughters, also seeking a new life in America, died.
It was a long climb topside for Paul and Margaret Sergio and the hundreds of tourist passengers like them on B- and C-Decks. Everyone feared the listing ship was sinking, yet the climb toward safety had to be taken slowly, a single step at a time. Amid the cries, shouting and wailing, each step required concentration lest one slip and be trampled in the crowd. On most of the stairways as men, women and children climbed up, water mixed with oil flowed down. The sea entering the gaping hole in the side of the Andrea Doria flowed down A-Deck the length of the ship and as the ship rolled, the sea found its way down the successive stairways to B-Deck and C-Deck and the engine rooms below. Adding to the turmoil there were those who were fighting the crowds, pushing their way down the stairways to their cabins below in search of loved ones, material valuables or lifejackets. In all, there probably were more than 1,000 people on the move throughout the ship during the first few minutes following the collision. The longest journey from C-Deck up five decks to the Promenade Deck required some ninety minutes of hard labor for men and women, young and old alike. It seemed like an eternity of limbo between life and death.
Chapter Seven
“WE NEED BOATS”
The impenetrable fog, from which the Andrea Doria had emerged for so few minutes, only to meet catastrophe, once again wrapped its shroud around the luxury liner, which drifted on its side in the black sea. Two red lights, which had been hoisted to the ship’s single mast behind the wheelhouse, and the mournful two-blast fog signals indicated to all who could hear that the ship was out of control. As far as the eye could see from the bridge, the Andrea Doria was alone, enveloped in fog. Visibility seemed no more than fifty yards, perhaps less. The radar screen showed the yellow blip of only one ship—the one that had smashed into the Doria’s side, and, for all Capta
in Calamai knew, that ship too might be sinking.
The Doria was now listing 25 degrees. The men on the bridge wondered how much more time remained. Franchini and Giannini, who had been on the bridge since the collision, found time to return to their cabins for lifejackets. Giannini, before leaving his cabin, tucked beneath his shirt a crucifix given him by his mother when he had gone to sea as a junior deck boy seven years before.
In the Radio Room behind the wheelhouse, an awful stillness followed the sending of the SOS as protracted seconds ticked away. Then the answers came in rapid succession. The SOS was acknowledged as received first by the South Chatham radio station in Massachusetts and then from the Mackay shore station in Mackay, New Jersey. The Coast Guard acknowledged the SOS from its radio lookout post in East Moriches, Long Island. The Stockholm answered and asked: WAS IT REALLY THE ANDREA DORIA IN COLLISION?
AFFIRMATIVE, the Doria replied.
The freighter Cape Ann radioed the Doria, then the U.S. Navy transport Private William Thomas and the Navy transport Sergeant Jonah E. Kelley, and a Danish freighter and several ships not listed in the radio call sign book aboard the Doria. These responses to the SOS which showed that ships not too far away would soon be coming to the Doria’s assistance were relayed to Captain Calamai on the bridge. The four radiomen on the Doria knew that on all the ships radiomen were delivering the Doria’s distress message and position to their captains. The Doria soon would be receiving position reports from the other ships and then messages that they were on their way.
The Doria’s distress signal over 500 kilocycles, a medium low-range frequency, traveled on a ground wave for 300 to 400 miles and on an air wave 2,000 miles. If the ship had been in the middle of the Atlantic, her call for help would have been heard by shore stations in the United States and Europe and presumably all points in between. Her radio signals were in fact picked up by Coast Guard stations in Argentina, Newfoundland, and Bermuda.
But it was Radioman First Class Robroy A. Todd, monitoring messages on 500 kcs at the New York Coast Guard’s radio-listening station in East Moriches, on the southern shore of Long Island, who triggered the Coast Guard’s Sea and Air Rescue Co-ordination Center into action. Yelling for the other two men on his watch, he handed over the two messages that had come in almost simultaneously from ships with the call signs ICEH and SEJT. The call signs were quickly translated into the names of the two ships and at 11:25 word was sent by a direct teletype circuit to the Rescue Center in New York City: ANDREA DORIA AND STOCKHOLM COLLIDED 11:22 LOCAL TIME LAT. 40-30 N. 69-53 W.
On the tenth floor of an old, dingy loft building at 80 Lafayette Street, one block from the United States District Courthouse in New York City, Lieutenant (senior grade) Harold W. Parker, Jr., swung into swift routine action. He was neither perturbed nor excited. He had no way of knowing how serious the collision might be. It just never occurred to him that either ship might be in danger of sinking, and, as a matter of fact, the Andrea Doria never once during the night and morning hours sent the awful admission that she was sinking. To Lieutenant Parker, the first message was just one more among the 3,000 calls for aid received by the Coast Guard Rescue Center each year. But, as on each call, the action was complex, swift and sure.
On a large chart of the coastal waters, Lieutenant Parker spotted in an instant the location and availability of all Coast Guard vessels in the Third Coast Guard District extending from Rhode Island to Delaware. The district maintained three ships on rescue duty, alternating weekly in three conditions of readiness. In Status-A a ship has its full crew aboard, motors warmed, and is ready to put to sea on notice. Status-B was standby duty, followed by a number to indicate the hours it would take the crew to return to the ship and be under way. Status-C was off duty and not available.
A telephone call to the Sandy Hook Lifeboat Station in New York Harbor and a relay by voice radio put the 180-foot cutter Tamaroa, which was on Status-A, under way three minutes after the collision message reached Lieutenant Parker. The Owasco, on B-6 status in New London, Connecticut, was alerted via the East Moriches radio station. Lieutenant Parker next dispatched the cutters Yakutat and Campbell of the Coast Guard Cadet (training) squadron, anchored in Cape Cod Bay.
Picking up a telephone “hot line” open wire to the Coast Guard headquarters in Boston, he learned that Boston too had swung into action. The cutter Evergreen, returning to Boston from ice patrol duty off Newfoundland, had been diverted to the disaster scene 100 miles away; the Hornbeam, 90 miles away in Woods Hole and the Legare in New Bedford, both on B Status in Massachusetts ports, had been alerted. Every Coast Guard vessel available was dispatched in accordance with the Coast Guard policy that better a ship be sent out and not needed than not sent out at all. In fact, before Lieutenant Parker went off duty at seven o’clock the next morning, eleven Coast Guard vessels had been sent out of port. Three were recalled before reaching the scene. Aircraft in New York and Boston were alerted to fly to the disaster area but the orders were canceled before the planes were aloft because of fog. Coast Guard stations up and down the coast, from the airfields in Bermuda to Argentina, were alerted and took cross radio bearings on the Doria’s radio signals to pinpoint her position—just in case the position sent by the ship had been incorrect. As Lieutenant Parker worked through the night he came to realize that this was the biggest rescue operation of his ten-year career in the Coast Guard. In fact, he decided, it was the biggest since the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. But whatever its efforts, the Coast Guard was not equipped to be of much immediate help to a distressed ship so far beyond coastal waters.
Considerably closer to the scene was the 390-foot United Fruit Company cargo ship Cape Ann, returning empty from a chartered trip for the Isbrandsen Line to Bremerhaven, Germany. The twelve-year-old freighter carried a crew of forty-four and only one radioman and he, S. Charles Failla, had closed down the radio shack at 10 P.M., not failing, however, to set the radio’s autoalarm on 500 kcs for distress calls. At 11:23 he was in bed, reading, in his cabin adjacent to the radio room when the alarm went off like a shrill alarm clock. Flinging his book aside, the radioman dashed to his radio receiver in time to catch the Stockholm message and SOS from the Doria. The strength and clarity of the radio signals told Failla, an experienced radioman, that the Cape Ann was close by the distress scene. To be certain of the collision location, Failla sent out, GIVE POSITION AGAIN. Back came a repetition of the SOS with the position. ROGER, Failla replied. STAND BY NOW.
The radioman found his captain on the bridge, close by the radar, where he had been for the past twelve hours while the 6,600-ton freighter was plowing through thick fog. Captain Joseph A. Boyd for all his thirty-three years at sea was still a man who worried in fog. He had heard the auto-alarm go off in the radio shack but he wouldn’t dare leave his radar for one unnecessary minute in a fog which obscured the bow of the Cape Ann. But receiving the news, he put his third mate, Robert Preston, on the radar and rapidly charted his own position and that of the Andrea Doria. The Doria was only fifteen and one-half miles to the southwest, a few degrees off his course to New York.
“Steer 248 degrees,” he told the helmsman as he charged back into his wheelhouse. He telephoned the news to the engine room and demanded maximum speed possible and then sounded general quarters to alert his crew. As the Cape Ann pounded to the rescue, her speed gradually building up from fourteen to seventeen and a half knots, the realization slowly came to the lean, balding forty-nine-year-old Captain Boyd that the large ship he and his third mate had seen speeding by in the fog at about eight o’clock that night must have been the Andrea Doria.
Radioman Failla, tapping out Captain Boyd’s message, thought the men on the Italian luxury liner would be happy to learn that the Cape Ann expected to be on the scene in about thirty minutes. But back came the query from the Doria: HOW MANY LIFEBOATS? Failla answered: Two, and the Doria radioed back: SOS DE ICEH—DANGER IMMEDIATE. NEED BOATS TO EVACUATE 1,000 PASSENGERS AND 500 CREW. WE NEED BOATS.
/> Other skippers turned their ships toward the Doria’s position and sent word that help was on the way. The Norwegian freighter Lionne, 150 miles away, asked the Doria whether she was needed. NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE, came the Doria reply. The Private William H. Thomas, a Navy transport returning to New York with troops and dependents from Europe, was nineteen miles east of the Doria, engulfed in fog, when she radioed: WE ARE SEVEN MILES SOUTH OF NANTUCKET AND PROCEEDING YOUR POSITION. Forty-five miles farther to the northeast churning through the same fog was the Tidewater Oil Company tanker Robert E. Hopkins, which had just left Boston on her return trip to Corpus Christi, Texas. The tanker sent her position and said she was coming full speed with her two lifeboats. Her captain, René Blanc, was a man with nerves of steel. He not only navigated the long, empty and unwieldy tanker through the pads of fog, but he zigzagged full speed at fifteen knots through a maze of small fishing boats off the Massachusetts coast before he could reach the open sea.
To say that these men and the masters of the other ships in the vicinity responded to the Doria’s SOS without a moment’s hesitation would be untrue. But to their credit, they responded readily, knowing only that the Andrea Doria was in some sort of distress, but not that she was in danger of sinking. The sense of responsibility of a ship’s master and the wear upon his nerves when he must decide to put caution aside to risk the safety of his ship and passengers in diverting his ship from course to speed through a thick fog in the hope of aiding a sister ship in distress—this cannot be truly estimated or described by men ashore.
Collision Course Page 11