Desperate Hours Desperate Hours The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria Richard Goldstein John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2001 by Richard Goldstein. All rights reserved Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012 (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, e-mail: [email protected]. 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For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.Wiley.com For Nancy Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I The Voyage 1 “Brace Yourself” 5 2 “A Floating Art Gallery” 8 3 “Take the Doria, You’ll Never Forget It” 16 4 “A Picture of Scandinavian Efficiency” 25 5 “The Times Square of the Atlantic” 29 6 “Each Shall Alter Her Course to Starboard” 35 Part II The Collision 7 “Why Doesn’t He Whistle?” 47 8 “I Think We Hit an Iceberg” 52 9 “Don’t Worry, There’s Nothing Wrong” 62 10 “Need Immediate Assistance” 74 Part III The Rescue 11 “This Is No Drill” 87 12 “How Many Lifeboats?” 94 13 “We Are Bending Too Much” 102 14 “Let’s Pray to St. Ann” 107 15 “We Won’t Leave You” 120 16 “Lady, You’re Lucky to Be Alive” 125 17 “Light Up Everything, Quickly” 131 18 “You Have to Have Courage” 140 vii viii Contents 19 “Get Your Cameras” 147 20 “Bulletin . Bulletin . Bulletin” 154 21 “You May Go, I’m Staying” 162 22 “Seaworthiness Nil” 167 23 “That Thing’s Going Down in Five Minutes” 174 24 “It Is Incomprehensible” 179 25 “How Good God Is to Me” 184 26 “Oh, What a Climax” 189 27 “It’s My Baby” 195 28 “I Lost My Love for Italians” 200 29 “This Is a Jumbled Story” 212 Part IV The Questions 30 “The Passengers Were Highly Excitable” 219 31 “It Could Have Been a Patch of Fog” 224 32 “The Stability of the Ship Was Low” 236 33 “I Could Have Changed Course” 240 Part V The Memories 34 “Why Did I Get Spared?” 251 35 “The Poor Man Was Destroyed” 264 Part VI The Shipwreck 36 “It’s Got the Mystique” 273 Appendix 281 Sources 283 Index 287 Acknowledgments I’m grateful to the men and women—the rescued and their rescuers— who shared their memories of an extraordinary summer’s night on the North Atlantic. For providing photographs or helping me obtain documents and other materials, a special thank you to Commander David Corey, Nor- man Cubberly, Richard Faber, Joe Griffith, Linda Morgan Hardberger, Dr. William Homan, Carol and William Johnson, Captain Robert Meurn, Leonardo and Giovanna Paladino, Lennard Rambusch, Jerome Reinert, and Francesco Scotto. Don Bowden of AP/WideWorld Photos and Tom Gilbert of TimePix smoothed my research in their photo archives. Lennart Angelmo, Robert Bierman, Lars Hemingstam, Mary Kir- son, Henrik Ljundstrom, Captain Robert Williamson, and Dr. Preston Winters helped me locate people whose lives were touched by the colli- sion of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. Henrik Nordstrom trans- lated correspondence in Swedish. George J. Billy, chief librarian at the U.S. Merchant Marine Acad- emy, and Richard Corson, chief librarian at the State University of New York Maritime College, provided pointers for my research there. I benefited greatly from the support and guidance of Stephen S. Power, senior editor at John Wiley & Sons, and Emily Loose, who first saw the possibilities in this story at Wiley, and from the efforts and enthusiasm of Jim Hornfischer at The Literary Group International. My wife, Dr. Nancy Lubell, was there as always with love and encouragement. ix Introduction She was the most lovely ocean liner of her day, a fantastic blend of aes- thetics and technology, a symbol of Italy’s revival from the ravages of World War II. But more than four decades later, the enduring image of the Andrea Doria, viewed in the old black-and-white newsreels, is that of a funnel inexorably tipping closer to the sea as a summer’s dawn gives way to a sun-splashed morning. On the fogbound night of July 25, 1956, the Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ocean liner Stockholm 45 miles south of Nantucket Island. The Stockholm’s bow ripped a massive hole in the Doria’s star- board side, causing her to list severely. Eleven hours later, she was lying on her side at the bottom of the North Atlantic. It was forty-four years since the “unsinkable” Titanic had been sliced by an iceberg. The Doria, too, had been deemed the ultimate in safety on the seas—her radar the most modern, her hull divided into eleven watertight compartments. The Stockholm also possessed radar for the most impenetrable of nights. And yet, as on that April night in 1912 off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the impossible came to pass. The death of the Doria retaught a lesson that speaks to the world of today: The most modern of technological wizardry guarantees noth- ing without a respect for its limitations and sound judgment. A series of miscalculations on the bridges of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm brought the two ocean liners together as if they had been destined to converge. And the loss of the Doria, renowned for her silhouette and her art- work, also told of the fragility of life. One moment we may have every- thing, in the next all can be lost. This was underscored when a woman evacuated by one of the lifeboat crews that saved almost seventeen hundred people—history’s greatest peacetime rescue at sea—was interviewed for the newsreels upon arriving at a Manhattan pier. 1 2 DESPERATE HOURS “I was a happy bride ready to set up home with all my belongings,” the woman said. “I had beautiful clothes, beautiful family jewelry, beautiful silver. I am destitute. I’ve got nothing else, not even a hand- bag. I lost all my documents. I’ve got my husband, that’s all. I hope America will welcome me and help me because physically and morally, I’m wrecked.” In the era of the Doria and the other great liners, travel proceeded at a leisurely pace. Passengers dressed splendidly for dinner. Fine food was coveted and frequent-flier miles unimagined. Ocean liners pos- sessed distinct personalities evoking a sense of place. “Airplanes come off the assembly line by the dozen—a ship is much more of a human thing,” Commodore Harry Manning, who guided the liner United States to an Atlantic speed record in 1952, observed in the aftermath of the Doria’s sinking. “A ship is the property of a nation, a symbol of a nation. It is not only the ship of a company, it is the ship of a people.” The sinking of the Doria symbolized the waning of a graceful approach to travel. Two years later, the advent of commercial jetliners transformed week-long transatlantic journeys into seven-hour hops. The Andrea Doria retains her allure today. She is known as the Mount Everest of the deep, a magnet for divers seeking adventure or perhaps a sampling of her elegant china. But the arrival of high tech in deep-sea diving, enabling hundreds to explore the Doria each summer at depths of up to 250 feet, carries its own peril. The skill and judgment of some divers have evidently failed to measure up to the wondrous equipment, and so the Andrea Doria has continued to claim victims more than forty summers after she departed from the venerable harbor at Genoa for the last time. PART I The Voyage CHAPTER 1 “Brace Yourself ” What a strange tune for a Swedish band to be playing. A puzzled Carol Johnson picked up the strains as she peered into the North Atlantic night through the porthole in her cabin—No. 112 on the motorship Stockholm, en route from New York to Copenhagen and then its home port of Göteborg, Sweden. Carol and her husband, Bill, each aboard an ocean liner for the first time, were eagerly anticipating immersion in their Swedish heritage. Carol, a slim, blond woman, had just turned twenty years old. She was Brooklyn-born, but all four of her grandparents were Swedish immi- grants. Her maiden name was Lundquist. Bill Johnson, a lanky twenty- three-year-old with a crew cut, was the son of a former Swedish-American Line seaman who had come to America as a young man. His father, Charles Johnson, had considered Sweden to be God’s kingdom on earth. Now the son was going to be studying Swedish on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Lund, having completed graduate studies at Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey.