Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  In another part of the ship, however, Father Thomas Kelly, a young priest from Chicago, gave general absolution to other passengers in the belief there was an actual danger of sudden death. In the Cabin-Class Ballroom, two members of the band led passengers in song to pass the time, while nearby a small group of middle-aged Americans caroled the old favorites of 1920 vintage to bolster their courage. Many first-class passengers congregated in small groups and passed the time with conversation. One thoughtful crew member supplied a group on the Boat Deck with a bottle of Scotch to keep up their spirits. Other crewmen tended to their own spirits.

  And so they waited for one, two and almost three hours without knowing what had happened to the ship nor what was going to happen to it until shortly before two o’clock in the morning. Then the hundreds of passengers on the port side of the Promenade and Boat Decks of the Andrea Doria all saw at approximately the same time the glorious sight of a huge ship. Large block letters in white lights blazoned her name across the night—ILE DE FRANCE. “Praise the Lord,” and “Thank God,” said hundreds of men and women in one form or another. Everyone, or almost everyone, smiled or sighed in relief and some began to sing and some applauded.

  Chapter Ten

  “TELL THEM I DID EVERYTHING I COULD”

  The arrival of the Ile de France turned the emotional tide of the night. Word of the arrival spread throughout the Andrea Doria and changed despair to hope and hope to certainty: rescue was at hand. The Ile de France was the single, stanch reinforcement which in battle changes chaotic retreat into advance and victory.

  For the Ile de France, it was a night of glory. So many things could have gone wrong and all of them worried Captain de Beaudéan, for this was his first sea rescue. But all went right for the French ship. Everything was ready before arrival: the lifeboats, food, blankets, spare rooms, hospital beds. At 1:15 A.M., Captain de Beaudéan saw in his radar scope the cluster of ships at the scene fifteen miles away. Twenty-two minutes later and eight miles away, he reduced his 22-knots speed for a safe approach and he prayed silently and fervently for the fog to lift. And eight minutes later, at 1:45 A.M., the weather complied. The fog broke into patches and disappeared, unveiling a summer night resplendent with a million stars, full moon and a calm sea. Two miles away, Captain de Beaudéan left his radar scope and with his own eyes picked out the Andrea Doria among the four ships ahead of him. Her list was unmistakable.

  “Turn on the lights, all the lights, and let them know we are here,” he told Pettre, his chief mate, as he maneuvered the Ile toward the listing ship. Floodlights on the Sun Deck spotlighted the vivid orange and black colors of the ship’s two funnels. Stretching between the funnels in ten-foot-high block letters the name Ile de France was lighted like a white marquee against a black background, proclaiming the arrival of the ship that symbolizes France on the high seas.

  Despite his many years at sea, the sight of the Andrea Doria caught Captain de Beaudéan emotionally unprepared. The Italian ship appeared still so beautiful, her modern, rounded lines unimpaired as far as the eye could see. She was lustrous in the night, her many deck lights glittering along the length of the ship and the two powerful spotlights on her angled mast casting a bright shimmering reflection on the oily water.

  Captain de Beaudéan had an impulse to do something histrionic. He wanted to comfort those waiting on the Andrea Doria, to call out into the night, “Patience! I am here … the Ile de France is here,” but, of course, he remained silent, gazing through his binoculars at the listing ship. The starboard decks seemed empty and the Doria appeared deserted although he could hear occasional cries from the direction of the ship. Beyond the dying ship, Captain de Beaudéan saw the reflected whiteness of a ship gleaming in the moonlight and he knew it to be the Stockholm.

  Captain de Beaudéan, a shipmaster whose experience had taught him courage as well as caution, maneuvered his 44,500-ton ship closer to the starboard side of the listing ship. When he was as near as he dared to go, he cut his motors and the Ile drifted to a stop alongside the Andrea Doria. Only 400 yards separated the two ocean liners. With the Ile shielding the Doria from the direction of the waves, the water between the two ships was converted to a lagoon, a calm harbor heavy with oil slicks and perfect for the operation of the lifeboats. Captain de Beaudéan reasoned, rightly, that the Ile would be safe as long as she drifted at the same rate as the Doria. Only once during the night did he have to start up his motors and back away when currents set the Doria too close to the Ile. Otherwise the two mammoth ships maintained the same relative position side by side through the night.

  It was 2 A.M. when the Ile de France came to a stop in the lee of the Andrea Doria. Five minutes later the first French lifeboat was in the water and heading for the stricken ship. Ten other lifeboats hit the oil-slick water in rapid succession. Captain de Beaudéan kept seventeen lifeboats aboard for the safety of his own passengers, reasoning that along with the boats of the other ships, eleven Ile lifeboats, each with a capacity of ninety persons, would be sufficient to evacuate the Andrea Doria in one or two trips.

  Captain de Beaudéan nervously chain-smoked cigarettes as he watched his lifeboats draw up beneath the listing ship and begin to take on passengers. With an electrically powered megaphone, he called to his men, “Be careful,” and yet he realized they had little if any control over their own safety. If the Andrea Doria capsized, the lifeboats at her starboard side would be crushed and thrust under the sea by the huge ship. He prayed that the Italian ship would remain afloat at least for one more hour, or perhaps two.

  Seven minutes after the Ile had arrived, the first Andrea Doria lifeboat tied up at her side. Its passengers were taken aboard through a C-Deck door and up ladders to the port side of the ship, which faced the Doria. The starboard side door facing the open ocean was shut because of choppy waters. The sea off Nantucket was true to form: when the weather cleared, the sea became rough. The long undulating swells changed to short, choppy waves which increased the hazard of lifeboats being wrecked against the side of the large ship. While the motorboats generally continued to bring survivors to the mother ship, the hand-propelled boats headed for the Ile de France, which was the nearest ship to the Andrea Doria. The four non-motor boats of the Stockholm made one trip back to the white ship two miles away, but after 2 A.M. they headed for the nearby Ile.

  Enestrom in an advantageous location near the stern of the Doria worked out a plan with the crew of a French lifeboat by means of sign language. Ile lifeboats tied up alongside his boat, and passengers who slid down the ropes to the Swedish boat stepped into the French boat to be taken to the Ile. A spirit of co-operation and unity spread amongst the lifeboat crews as the men went to extremes to accomplish the task before them. Men pumped the levers of the hand-driven lifeboats until their swollen hands bled. They climbed ladders and ropes to help people down. As the night drew on, some even climbed up to the decks of the Doria to search out more survivors. Each boat seemed to develop its own self-appointed swimming expert to rescue survivors from the water. Jean-Pierre Guillou, a fifteen-year-old messboy on the Ile, dove in to rescue a small child, and Armando Gallo left the security of an Andrea Doria lifeboat to leap into the sea after fireman Fortunato Spina, a 300-pound crewman whose girth equaled his height.

  With the eleven additional boats and the quick turn-around provided by the Ile de France, lifeboats became plentiful along the starboard side of the Andrea Doria. There were in all twenty-eight lifeboats, more than enough for the eight ladders and the rope lines over the ship’s side. There might have been thirty lifeboats except that two Doria boats made only a single trip to the Stockholm. One boat as the last crewman scrambled aboard was kicked away and set adrift. The Stockholm crew refused to allow aboard the crew who tried to desert a second lifeboat. But the men who had laboriously rowed Boat No. 3, whose motor could not be fixed, had no intention of rowing two miles back to the Andrea Doria with just two emergency oars. They waited alongside the Stockholm until a fellow cre
wman from the Doria threw them a line and led the lifeboat to the stern of the Swedish ship, where it remained tied through the night.

  It was Boat No. 3, which, before it left the Doria, took aboard Richard Roman Hall, the three-and-one-half-year-old son of actress Ruth Roman. The actress had slid across the ship from the port to starboard side in a safe, sitting position, splitting her party dress as she explained later “right up to my fanny.” She handed her son to Officer Cadet Giuliano Pirelli, a twenty-three-year-old lad who was serving as a children’s elevator at one of the rope ladders. The boy was tied to the young cadet and was carried piggy-back down the steps of the ladder to lifeboat No. 3, which, during its long, wallowing stay beneath the ship, had been filled with about 120 persons. Pirelli climbed back up to the Boat Deck and Miss Roman started over the rail to the ladder, when the lifeboat pulled away from the ship. The distraught actress screamed for the lifeboat to return, and her young son in the boat wailed, but such were the vicissitudes of rescue.

  Peter Thieriot, continuing his search for his parents, made three separate attempts to reach their cabin. When he found the direct route blocked, he circled ahead of the collision area and tried another stairway. But again he found his way blocked. No one had seen either his mother or father. Again and again he was told, “They must be around somewhere.” The boy was glum when he repeated his inquiry to Morris Keil, a New Orleans antique dealer with whom Peter had made friends during the voyage. Keil, his wife, daughter and the daughter’s hometown friend, Gay Barton, were among a group of first-class passengers waiting patiently for some word of what to do. “How about some ping pong?” the unknowing antique dealer suggested, trying to cheer the boy up. “No, thank you,” Peter said politely as he walked on. “I’ll just continue to look.”

  He made his way along the Boat Deck to the bow of the ship and then down to the Foyer Deck and the corridor which would lead to Cabin 180. The Foyer Deck, when he reached it, was flooded with water above his ankles. He sloshed through the deserted corridor to a point where he could see at an angle a section of his parents’ cabin. A heavy girder and smaller wreckage blocked the doorway. Beyond, he thought he saw the night air where the outboard wall of the cabin should have been. Yet, to this thirteen-year-old boy, this was not proof that his parents were dead. The idea, if it entered his confused mind at all, did not register. He had no way of knowing whether his parents had left the cabin or not, and so he continued his search on the decks above crowded with people.

  With lifeboats lining up at the stern and at the side ladders, word was passed to the muster stations for the first time for the abandoning of the ship, children first, the disabled and elderly next, then women and finally men. Many tourist-class passengers already had left the ship, but those who had been mustered in the Tourist-Class Dining Room, where the movie had been shown, and those herded on the port side of the Promenade Deck, were led to the starboard-side ropes and were helped in a more or less orderly fashion off the ship. Crewmen linked hands to form a chain around the fantail railing to prevent any further leaping from the deck. Other crewmen lined the way from the Promenade Deck down to the Upper Deck fantail, helping to support passengers on the decks now sloping at a thirty-degree angle.

  In the First-Class Lounge, where calm prevailed generally, men passengers and crew helped women, children and those of advanced age. Passengers were passed from hand to hand to the high side of the Promenade Deck and helped up a ladder to the Boat Deck. Each person was then seated and pushed off for a 45-foot slide across the deck into the arms of a waiting crewman on the low side of the ship and from there led to one of the ladders. Walking without support was impossible. Safety ropes were tied about the waist of most passengers, particularly the women, for the descent down the rope ladder. Children were carried down piggy-back. Infants, perhaps the most difficult to get off the ship, were in many cases balanced precariously across the forearms of men climbing down ladders. Jerome Reinert, a twenty-one-year-old engineer returning from a European vacation celebrating his college graduation, volunteered his services and took turns on one ladder with three other young men traveling first class. There was weeping and wailing, mostly from Italian mothers when they were forced to hand over their children for the descent down the ladders, but by and large, a sense of direction and relative calm characterized the abandoning of the ship from the First-Class Lounge.

  When instructions to abandon ship from the starboard side reached Drs. Tortori Donati and Giannini, who were camped with their patients and nurses forward of the First-Class Lounge, it set off a rush by the thirty-odd passengers who had gathered there. But the two doctors quickly gained control. “No, no, no,” shouted Dr. Tortori Donati, “the sick and wounded must go first … there is plenty of time … the ship will not sink … the calmer you are the better you are.…”

  His words, and perhaps the authority of his uniform, as oil-besmirched as it was, checked the incipient rush. Passengers were quite willing to heed authority once it was exercised, and they waited while the doctors and nurses carried their six patients in blankets across the ship to the first glass door on the starboard side of the Promenade Deck. The first passengers who followed slipped and fell on the linoleum floor which had been splattered with oil dripping from the three women passengers rescued from B-Deck. Dr. Tortori Donati, who had himself fallen and bruised a leg, convinced the passengers to slide in a sitting position across the ship as slowly as possible, using the heel of one foot to brake their speed.

  Getting from the port to the starboard side of the ship was one thing, not too difficult once one learned the knack, but getting a lifeboat to come alongside was another. A small section of the Promenade Deck was cleared of baggage. But the one door available on that deck was almost directly over the gaping collision hole in the ship. For about a half-hour the two physicians and some passengers shouted to lifeboats passing by, heading for the midsection and stern of the ship. None responded. The lifeboat crews either did not hear the calls in the welter of cries and noise that came from the ship, or, more likely, they preferred not to approach the vicinity of the ominous black hole in the side of the ship which appeared large enough to suck in any of the lifeboats.

  One lifeboat which had been alongside the ship farther astern finally maneuvered forward beneath the open glass door of the Promenade Deck. Once again the passengers who had waited with growing despair surged forward and once again the two doctors ordered them to wait their turn. Meanwhile, Steward Rovelli, on another search for the much-needed jack, happened on the waiting crowd and offered his services again to Mrs. Cianfarra, whom he had adopted as his special responsibility.

  Mrs. Cianfarra hung on Rovelli’s back with one arm around his neck as he carried her down to the waiting lifeboat. The deck of the increasingly listing ship was only about nine feet above the waiting boat. With his ward safely in the boat, Rovelli climbed back on deck and continued his determined search for a jack.

  Dr. Tortori Donati, having established his authority over the passengers near him, saw to it that his patients left the ship first. He himself handed Rose Carola, his heart patient, down to a seaman in the lifeboat as the boat rose to the crest of a wave. A male nurse held the end of a rope looped under the old woman’s arms lest she fall. Mary Onder, whose fractured right leg could sustain no weight, was lowered next in the same manner. The three oil-slick Italian women, their blankets tucked in around them, zoomed down the rope without any help, lubricating the rescue line as they went. The rope here was not like the coarse hemp lines used on the stern. It was smooth, bound in red plastic-like cloth, and was ordinarily used as a safety guide line in a public room during stormy weather.

  When the three women had reached the lifeboat below, Dr. Tortori Donati turned to Joseph Onder and motioned for him to join his wife. Because his patients were his primary concern, the doctor next sent four of his five nurses in the first boat with the patients. He then selected the women among the passengers nearby, according to their ages, to follo
w into the boat. Many of the women needed considerable coaxing before they would venture over the side of the ship by way of a rope, and ten young New England seminarians, returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy City, aided in comforting those whose courage wavered during the ordeal. The young men came forward only when their help was needed, preferring to stand back and out of the way while Dr. Tortori Donati supervised the order of abandoning ship. They themselves refused to leave the ship until all others had left.

  Instructions on abandoning the ship made the rounds of the Andrea Doria by word of mouth. The last group to be notified were the cabin-class passengers who had calmly remained in the vicinity of their muster station midships on the port side. Their muster station had been the responsibility of Third Officer Giannini, who had been busily employed on the bridge from the time of the collision until 2:30 in the morning. Then, as the sight of lifeboats lining up like taxis along the side of the ship relieved the tension on the bridge, Captain Calamai’s concern shifted from the problem of lifeboats to the need for ways to speed the abandoning of the Doria. As Giannini was about to set out for his muster station, Captain Calamai instructed him to lead the passengers to the stern and, once there, to locate some of the ship’s cargo nets and string them over the side of the ship. The captain recalled the practice of using nets to debark troops from transport ships in wartime.

  Third Officer Giannini, who was no relation to the ship’s second doctor, Renzo Giannini, scampered down from the ship’s bridge on Sun Deck to waiting passengers on the Promenade Deck.

  The young blond officer, who earlier had discarded his shoes and socks, impetuously cast aside his lifejacket which he had found too cumbersome for the work he had at hand. Personal fears were forgotten in the fury of work to be done. He was besieged by the anxious passengers when he arrived in his uniform. The questions flew fast. “Are there lifeboats?”