Surviving the Andrea Doria: A Memoir
			   Andrew J. Hanson
			     26 July 2016


{Preamble: Sixty years ago, at 10:09am New York time on Thursday, 26
July, 1956, the inbound ocean liner Andrea Doria sank in 225 feet of
water just off the Nantucket light ship, following a collision with
the outbound ocean liner Stockholm, significantly postponing its
scheduled arrival in New York Harbor.  54 people perished.}


We had spent the year 1955-56 in Torino, Italy, where my father, an
alumnus of the Manhattan Project, was working on establishing a
postwar nuclear physics research program at the university.  I was 12,
the oldest of three children, and a fourth was on the way, the subject
of shopkeepers' patting my mother's belly and approvingly murmuring
"Torinese, eh?".  As the time came to return to the US, my father
arranged to fly back early to New York to check up on his research at
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and to get our car out
of storage for the drive home to Illinois.  The rest of the family
finished packing up and preparing for a luxurious voyage from Genova
to New York on the Italian Line's already-legendary Andrea Doria.

During our stay in Italy, we had indulged in numerous visits to
various parts of Europe, and had discovered that literally every town
had vendors selling unique handmade ashtrays advertising the town and
some local landmark.  We collected an enormous number of these as
souvenirs, and they all were packed carefully into a huge wooden crate
along with whatever else would not fit in our other luggage, which
included my trombone (I don't remember playing it much, but there it
was).

Boarding the Doria in Genova was an exhilarating experience, as
embarkation always seems to be.  We set up camp in a four-bunk Tourist
Class cabin on an A deck corridor stretching forward under the
starboard Cabin Class section, and before long we were holding our
breaths in anticipation as we sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar
and into the open sea.

I have only scattered memories of the voyage itself.  The four of us
did not spend much time in the cramped cabin, which had one outside
porthole above my bunk, with a mysterious steel lid that could be
clamped down to cover it, though why one would do that I could not yet
imagine.  A letter from my mother suggests there was a lifeboat drill
of some sort, but if there was one, I do not remember it, and I would
have remembered if we had actually taken out lifejackets and assembled
on deck - that had been a big deal on our outward bound voyage on the
USS Independence. The lifeboats were in any case adjacent to the Cabin
Class upper decks, and not part of our normal environment.  The steady
stream of movies, activities, gathering at the swimming pool, and lots
of Italian food kept us from thinking about much else, though every
once in a while the weather got rough enough for a few of us to get
seasick.  We caught glimpses of the travelers in Cabin Class, who
seemed to be having more fun, but the physical barriers between the
Classes were impenetrable even to small children, and we never had any
idea what went on forward of our Tourist Class enclave in the stern.
As the last days came, accompanied by our anxious anticipation of
arriving in New York, I remember the weather being cloudy and
unpleasant, with a steady wind, and the ship always seemed to be
tilting in one direction, to the starboard, as though the wind were
pushing it over somehow.  Little did we realize the import of this
offhand observation.

At last, it was July 25th, and we were by then very ready to arrive in
New York Harbor the next morning.  There was a gala dinner to
commemorate that last evening onboard, then we packed up our
traveling bags, and went to bed early, wearing our underwear instead
of our nightclothes, in anticipation of leaping out of bed and racing
to the top deck to see the Statue of Liberty at dawn!

We were sound asleep when a great jolt and otherworldly groaning of
metal against metal startled us awake.  In the top bunk next to the
porthole, I was nearly thrown to the floor, but caught myself and
pulled myself to back to the hull, my heart racing to see electric
lights passing by at arm's length outside my porthole where there
should have been empty ocean.  Without any thought or instruction - my
mother had not seen the ghostly presence sweeping by us outside the
porthole - I grabbed the wing nut on the metal cover that had
accompanied me for so many nights, unscrewed the catch, slammed it
down over the porthole, and fastened furiously.  By this time my
mother, always a problem solver with a cool head under pressure,
already had things under control, and was ripping the life-jackets
from their stowage in our clothes closets, somehow got us each into a
life-jacket, and, finding herself with a remaining child's jacket, she
fastened it so that it sat just above her pregnant belly.  We fled in
our morning-ready underwear through the door into the hall, and found
the entire hallway already tilted nearly 20 degrees to starboard, so
that we were walking essentially on the border of the left-hand wall
towards the aft stairs leading to the upper decks.  An acrid yellow
smoke roiled against the ceiling lights; we knew something was
terribly wrong behind us, where closed watertight bulkhead doors
separated us from the collision area a mere hundred feet away.

  When our only open path to the rear took us to the grand staircase,
we and dozens of others struggled using the handrails to get up the
stairs, now steepened due to the list to starboard.  As we passed the
main public room where a movie had been showing, we saw a hundred
chairs jumbled every which way, sliding downhill to the starboard
wall.  My 10-year-old brother at this point grew unhappy with being
clad only in his underwear, and disappeared, magically rejoining us a
few minutes later at the top of the stairs more appropriately attired.
My mother and I then did the same quick calculation, and figured out
that the last place to go under, if the ship continued to roll to
starboard, would be the "wing", a section of the top rail of the top
deck splayed out over the ocean so one could see all the way to the
front as the ship sailed.  No one else had claimed it, so we staked
out that spot as our safe haven.  Although there was at least once a
garbled voice on a loudspeaker, and someone had strung some ropes
along the deck to protect us from sliding down the deck into the
empty, and potentially lethal, swimming pool, we saw no further signs
of the crew.  When we arrived on the upper deck, all of the starboard
lifeboats were gone, vanished into the mist.  Some young men struggled
to free one of the port lifeboats from the Cabin Class deck to the
front of us, but it was useless; the Doria's tilt was by now so severe
that the lifeboat mechanisms were inoperable.  Almost no one
had life-jackets except us.

  We huddled under the upper rail of the crazily tilted top rear deck,
in heavy fog and eerie yellowish lights, with no lifeboats to go to,
the sea around us completely empty of any sign of potential rescuers.
The moon, just past full, cut through the fog above us.  Looking down
through the rail from the wing, I could see the Doria's port propeller
rising out of the water.  My mother, philosophical about mortality
until her final days this spring, when she passed away contentedly at
the age of 98, gathered us all next to her, and remarked calmly,
"Well, kids, it's been a pretty good life, don't you think?"

Finally, a lone lifeboat from the less-seriously-wounded Stockholm
appeared in the sea below us, and my mother guided us down a slippery,
nearly-vertical, staircase, headed for the lowest starboard rail, and
coaxed us to jump to safety in the water next to the lifeboat (over
the objections of a screaming Italian woman, who ripped me down from
the rail the first time I attempted to follow my more-collected
mother's instructions).  After all three kids had been pulled aboard
the lifeboat, she herself jumped, protecting her belly with her knees
snug against her diminutive life-jacket - I tried to help the crew
haul her on-board, and we kept failing until the participants realized
she had to turn sideways to keep her gravid stomach from catching on
the gunwale!  Only moments after we were all safe in the lifeboat, we
heard a sickening smack on the steel engine cowling beside us: a small
life-jacket-less girl had been hurled by her panicked parents directly
into the lifeboat, and my mother shielded the smaller children's eyes
to protect them from sight.  The crew raced the boat back to the
Stockholm to get medical attention for the fatally injured 4-year-old,
so in fact we were in the very first lifeboat of passengers rescued by
the Stockholm.  As we made our way up a precarious steel stair into
the cargo passage of the Stockholm, we passed a pile of Doria
life-jackets from those passengers and crew who had fled the scene
with all of the Doria's working lifeboats before we even reached the
upper decks.

Luckily for the other passengers, there was no need to hurry, as a
flotilla of rescue ships started arriving several hours later, and all
remaining passengers were rescued long before the Doria sank at
10:09am that morning.  We did not see it sink, taking our crate with
its ashtrays and my trombone to the bottom of the Atlantic, as we were
below decks in the chaotic dining room of the Stockholm waiting for a
long-delayed breakfast.  Because of the serious damage to the
Stockholm -- 30 feet of her steel icebreaker prow was gone, and 5 crew
members had been killed -- it had to sail very slowly, and we spent
another night on-board, arriving in New York long after all the other
rescued passengers.  Because of some issue with the Stockholm's
telegraph operator, my father never received my mother's telegrams,
and did not know for sure until we walked off the Stockholm, onto a
dock filled with photographers and donated clothing for us to choose
from, that we were still alive.  In fact, he had been on the Long
Island railroad going into the City to meet us when the passenger in
the opposite seat raised his newspaper and revealed the unexpected
headline "Andrea Doria Sinking" on the front page of the New York
World Telegram.  The media were everywhere, and my uncle in Indiana
actually saw us walk off the Stockholm live on television.  Being a
practical and optimistic soul like my mother, apparently my father
eventually returned to Long Island while waiting for the missing and
incommunicado Stockholm to arrive and picked up the car, so he was
ready for us when we finally showed up.  My mother was never sure if
that was the right thing or the wrong thing for him to do.


Reminiscing about surviving the shipwreck sixty years later, several
thoughts come to mind.  The first is that, although many people died
and certainly many people were traumatized, I look back on it as a
great adventure, and though I certainly knew that I could have died at
any minute, my mother's behavior made it clear that the only control
any of us had over the situation was to look for problems to solve and
try to make rational decisions.  Each step we took, starting with
putting on life-jackets, followed that strategy; people died as a
result of other decisions, and if the Doria had sunk more quickly, we
would have been among the earliest to reach safety.  Another puzzle
was the question of why the Andrea Doria, a ship with supposedly
unsinkable modern technology (like the Titanic!) sank at all.  The
most convincing story relates to the tilting to starboard that we all
noticed during the last days of the voyage: apparently the port fuel
tanks were running emptier than the starboard tanks, and the Stockholm
unluckily struck and punctured the latter, filling them rapidly with
water and causing such a rapid and severe list that the port water
intakes were above the water line, making it impossible to pump water
into the port tanks to rebalance the weight.  The ship listed so
quickly, floated by the air in the port tanks, that water eventually
flowed over the tops of the properly functioning watertight
compartments, and there was no further hope of saving the ship.  And
then one has to ask - WHY did the collision happen at all?
Immediately after the collision, the owners of the Stockholm mounted a
lawsuit and a vigorous press campaign to place all the blame on the
Andrea Doria and her Captain, Piero Calamai.  The legal hearings had
many flaws, and it was not until many years later, when careful
reconstructions were carried out by Captain Robert Meurn, professor
emeritus at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, Long
Island, and his colleagues, providing convincing evidence that the
inexperienced 3rd officer and radar operator on the bridge of the
Stockholm that night had assumed his radar was on a 15 mile range
scale, while, unperceived on the darkened bridge, it was actually set
on a 5 mile range scale, causing a calamitous miscalculation of the
distance and trajectory of the Doria relative to the Stockholm.
Though he died a broken man, Captain Calamai was finally vindicated by
history, ironically just barely too late for him to be told.  The 50th
Anniversary gathering of Doria survivors was held at Kings Point in
2006, and, having worked extensively with virtual reality in my own
professional career, I had the enormous pleasure of experiencing the
full-scale simulation of the collision first-hand from the point of
view of the bridge of the Stockholm.  The sudden appearance of the
Doria's lights through the perfectly simulated fog bank as the
Stockholm hurtled unstoppably towards the Doria's midsection at 18.5
knots was definitely enough to make your heart skip a beat or two.  I
have not been shy about exploiting my experience on the Doria: it
turns out that many cruise ship captains are Italian, I still speak
passable Italian, and, amazingly, at least twice I have been on board
a cruise ship on July 26th.  Mentioning that I am an Andrea Doria
survivor to the Captain as he makes his rounds greeting passengers has
been a good ticket for a couple of nice tours of the bridge!

  A final thought that has often come to mind is the position of the
porthole over my bunk.  From deck plans of the Doria that I have
studied, I can place our cabin almost exactly, and it was no more than
100 feet, probably only 90 feet, from where the Stockholm struck,
crushing those cabins and their occupants instantly.  The Doria was
traveling at 21.8 knots, or 36.8 feet per second.  Captain Calamai
chose to turn left as a last-ditch effort to avoid the collision, and
the Stockholm reversed its engines and turned hard right.  If the
Stockholm had struck 2.7 seconds later, a definite possibility if
either ship had made a different choice, I would not be here to tell
this story.  Life is indeed fragile and precarious, and it takes many
pieces of mysterious good fortune to become "too old to die young," as
my mother loved to point out.