The collision they saw

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next: A maritime disaster.

70 years ago, the luxury ocean liner the SS Andrea Doria set sail on its 101st voyage from Genoa, Italy, bound for New York City. Aboard were passengers of many different walks of life: Some, immigrants seeking opportunity. Others, wealthy Hollywood elites on vacation.

REICHARD: But late on the night of July 25th, 1956, the Andrea Doria would find itself on a collision course off the coast of Nantucket.

WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has the story.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: As the Andrea Doria closed in on New York, another ship was leaving. The MS Stockholm—a Swedish ocean liner with a reinforced bow needed to safely navigate its icy North Atlantic routes.

Both the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm were equipped with state of the art technology: radar. They shouldn’t have been able to surprise each other… yet what exactly transpired that night is still debated. How did the two vessels see each other and still collide?

SANDBERG: The actions that took place really were very complicated.

Captain George Sandberg is a professor emeritus with the U.S. Merchant Marines. He’s studied this case for years.

SANDBERG: The Andrea Doria was proceeding in fog as their testimony and the Stockholm which was outbound testified that they had clear visibility. So there was a discrepancy right off the bat.

The Andrea Doria was considered one of the fastest and safest of all of Italy’s ships. The builders still had the sinking of the Titanic in mind, and specifically designed the ship with watertight compartments and 16 lifeboats—enough for every passenger aboard.

The goal was to never need the lifeboats. With radar, the crews would have incredible visibility. But the screens lacked backlight—a dangerous flaw.

SANDBERG: What had to be done in those days was taking range and bearings on the radar and actually plot it on the separate maneuvering sheet and take a series of positions and determine the course and speed and the closest point of approach of the other ship.

Whether the officer on duty aboard the Stockholm was doing that is unclear.

The Stockholm reported clear conditions, but the Andrea Doria encountered a fog bank off the coast. Her captain slightly reduced speed.

On the radar screens, the two ships noticed each other. The rule of the road is for each ship to pass on the port side. So, the Andrea Doria turned hard to the left. The Stockholm veered right.

The radar failure would cost lives.

MOYER: When the bow of the Stockholm penetrated the Andrea Doria, of course, there was a forward momentum.

John Moyer is a professional diver who has gone to the wreck more than 100 times. He says the force of the impact from the Stockholm’s reinforced bow ripped into the side of the Andrea Doria. The resulting internal damage is what ultimately sank the ship.

Within two minutes, the Andrea Doria developed a severe 18 degree list.

MOYER: The staircases were tilted and the hallways were all tilted. So yeah, they all had trouble getting out from below decks up to the top deck where they had to evacuate. I've spoken to a lot of survivors who were there that night and they told me how they had to slide down the deck.

Captain Sandberg says the list also made the rescue efforts more complicated.

SANDBERG: Lifeboats can only be launched if there's a 15 degree list. So that meant that all the port lifeboats could not be used.

Half of the ship’s lifeboats rendered useless. And over the course of 11 hours, the ship slowly sank.

SANDBERG: They sent out an SOS message, and there were a number of ships that responded in the area, notably another very fast, beautiful cruise ship, the Île de France. She came steaming, flew ahead through the fog to get there. And she ended up rescuing I think over seven hundred of the passengers.

The Stockholm also rescued more than 500 passengers, and other smaller ships in the area took some survivors as well.

In all, the collision claimed the lives of 51 individuals. Yet Moyer notes the death toll could have been far greater: there were 1700 people aboard the Andrea Doria.

MOYER: It really is a miracle that so many people survived.

It was the greatest peacetime rescue in maritime history.

Both shipping lines settled the matter out of court, each assuming equal blame and wrapping the investigation quickly.

But that left a terrifying question unanswered: If the Andrea Doria was the safest ocean liner and both ships had radar, what really happened?

In 2001, a master mariner with the U.S. Merchant Marines ran a simulation to try to solve the mystery. But trying to reproduce the collision based on the testimony from the Stockholm’s officer on duty proved impossible.

SANDBERG: In fact, in order if he used that testimony alone, Andrea Doria would have had to make a sharp turn and increase speed to over two hundred knots, which he could not do.

Assuming the Stockholm’s radar was on the wrong scale was the only way the collision happened.

The Stockholm was repaired and went on to sail for several decades. What remains of the Andrea Doria is now resting at the bottom of the ocean.

MOYER: It doesn't look anything like it did when I first started diving on it.

While technology may have failed the ships that night, it’s the monumental human efforts that ensure the Andrea Doria is remembered not just for the lives that were lost, but for the ones that were saved, too.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Kristen Flavin.

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