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SS Andrea Doria
359 Plays1 year ago
The pride of postwar Italy meets her tragic fate in nighttime fog near Nantucket!
If you like Killer Shipwrecks be sure to check out Killer Biographies: https://www.killerbiographies.com
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Transcript
Introduction & Sponsorship
00:00:05
Speaker
Today's episode of Killer Shipwrecks is brought to you by Terry's Turpentine offering natural solvents of unnatural quality.
00:00:36
Speaker
Episode 10.
Episode Milestone & Initial Doubts
00:00:38
Speaker
Number 10, very significant double digits. There was some some doubt some question in our mind, you know, when we switched to a new platform this year. Seems like ages ago. Yeah. And we wondered, are we gonna are we even going to get to 12 episodes? But we didn't know.
Change in Episode Plans
00:00:56
Speaker
No we sailed off into unknown territory if you will super courageous fantastic ship last week and it completely messed with my plans for this week wow because i was i was really excited to do a shipwreck where they find some bodies they find some bones.
00:01:14
Speaker
And then you did the Mary Rose and there were 92 complete skeletons recovered. And I was like, okay, I'm never going to match that. That's like from a numbers perspective, hard to match. It's like a cemetery. Yeah. It was like an underwater cemetery down there. My point is that I was all ready to look for a good ship where they recovered some bones. And then I was like, what's the point?
00:01:37
Speaker
So I went in a different direction this week, but I'm going to try to be more disciplined and not go so heavy on the biography this time. I had no problem with it, but I just don't want to cut into market share with killer biographies coming soon. And you know, we owe it to our sponsors to keep it kind of lean. You know what I mean? Like get right to the point.
00:01:57
Speaker
So with that anchors away, let's get started. I want to take you to Europe today to start.
Italy's Post-WWII Economic Struggles
00:02:06
Speaker
It's right at the end of World War Two. And unlike America, which came out of World War Two with the economy
00:02:15
Speaker
booming, just going like gangbusters. Italy had a rough go in World War Two. They sided with the wrong team. They signed up with the Axis instead of the Allies. So that was one mistake. Problems. They came out of the war with a lot of problems. The economy was not strong. A lot of their ships had been wrecked. They tried fascism. Didn't work.
Andrea Doria's Luxury & Design
00:02:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:37
Speaker
They tried the fascism. So one of the things that they did do after the war was they built a couple of really nice boats, passenger liners, you know, like big fancy cruise boats that would, you know, go across the Atlantic to New York. One of them was named the Andrea Doria. Does it ring any bells? That sounds so familiar. Was there a musical or was there some song written about this boat? Beats the shit out of me.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. That sounds very familiar. The Andrea Dorio was ready by the early 1950s and it was described as not the biggest passenger liner operating in those days, nor was it the fastest, but it was considered the most beautiful.
00:03:23
Speaker
really classic, beautiful Italian design and like valuable art on it. Some people described it as a floating art museum, had three separate pools, one for each class.
00:03:38
Speaker
of passengers on the ship. Wait, what year was it constructed?
Andrea Doria's Transatlantic Voyages
00:03:42
Speaker
Launching 51 makes, I think, roughly 100 trips across the Atlantic. It does 50 round trips, basically, on its route. It starts in Genoa. Genoa is the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. Fantastic. And that is its home port.
00:04:01
Speaker
And it's named for a guy who is a famous navigator back in the 15th century or 16th century, also a Genoese guy. Anyway, the year that we're going to be interested is 1956. Andrea Doria is on one of these trips from Europe to New York. It's almost done with the trip, basically.
00:04:25
Speaker
12 hours away from New York, it's got, let's say roughly a thousand passengers and 500 something crew. The captain is a very experienced guy named, let's see, let's make sure I pronounce it correctly.
00:04:43
Speaker
Kalamai, not Kalamari Kalamai. This guy was known as the Appetizer.
Stability Issues & Safety Norms
00:04:50
Speaker
He was a veteran of both World War I and World War II, although in World War II, of course, he was fighting for the wrong side, but we'll let that pass.
00:05:00
Speaker
Very well regarded, very experienced guy, and everything looks great. He's bringing the Andrea Doria across the Atlantic. He's 12 hours out of New York. He's passing. Oh, you're that close to New York? Yeah, 12 hours from finishing the trip. It's late at night. We're in late July of 1956.
00:05:20
Speaker
It's five years into its service and it's done well so far. As beautiful as it is, it does have a couple of anomalies that like for one thing that they're supposed to do is as they use up their fuel on the long trip and as some of the fuel tanks get empty on one side, what they're really supposed to do to keep the ship totally stable is fill those empty fuel tanks with water to provide ballast on that side.
00:05:48
Speaker
But regularly, because the fear is that if it ever does get hit by something, that if one side is much lighter than the other, that the ship will list severely, will lean over severely at an angle like
00:06:03
Speaker
Anything over a 15 degree angle is going to be problematic. Truth is they know they're supposed to fill the tanks with seawater. They never do because it's a hassle. Like then when you get into New York and then you have to refuel, you have to empty out all that seawater. So they're kind of used to cutting that corner. The other corner that they are cutting that night
00:06:24
Speaker
First of all, when you hear cutting corners in a show about shipwrecks, I think, I don't know, is that a signal or a sign or a premonition? There's so much blame to go around for what happens on this fateful night, that fog, dense, dense fog.
00:06:43
Speaker
And apparently dense. Oh, they're in a fog situation. They're literally in a dense fog. And apparently that is something that happens in that shipping lane south of Nantucket. It sounds for that. Didn't that happen to Kennedy? Did he get lost in the airplane with the fog? I was thinking about that. Was he going to Martha's? I think it was a navigation thing. It was fog, perhaps in the air, not necessarily in the boat.
00:07:06
Speaker
That was so spooky because I just remember from the from the accounts of that crash that he had the thing where he thought up was down. You know, it was so foggy. He just was like, I never want to think up is down or down is up. I want to know exactly where I am all the time. Yeah. Well, we're going to get it. We're going to get like a little flavor of that in today's wreck. Oh, Jesus, Lizzie. Oh, my God. That's so Lizzie jumped right in. But you know what? We haven't heard from Terry in a while.
00:07:36
Speaker
Let's take a brief pause. It might be nice to get to Terry before we get into this ad part of this story. Also, Terry did tell me to say that I didn't get a chance to record this snippet, but he said Tuesdays are twice as nice right now at Terry's turpentine that on select home products, you can get two for one. So Tuesdays are twice as nice. Is this part of our agreement? Are you doing this sort of like, Hey, I talked to Terry. Wow. Okay, great.
00:08:03
Speaker
Hey, I'm all for it. You know, Terry's been a big supporter for a really long time. Anything we can do to help Terry, I'm on board. Well, look, if he's giving, you know, two for one deals for customers, why don't we give Terry a two for one deal on the ads? Could not agree more. Technically, we're supposed to get Lizzie on board. Anyways, let's go to Terry and then we'll come back and hear about the Andrea Doria. Let's do it.
00:08:27
Speaker
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00:08:47
Speaker
That's such a nice touch to wring out the end of the- Is that technically called an outro bell? I've never heard such a thing. Yeah, that's an outro bell. Anyways, continue. Okay, so fog can be an issue in that busy shipping lane south of Nantucket, and it was on that night, very dense fog.
Diverse Passengers & Warnings Ignored
00:09:06
Speaker
Do we know anything about the clientele, the type of people who were on board at that point?
00:09:10
Speaker
So glad you asked we've got everything we got fancy fancy people staying up in the fancy births they include the actress rue roman name means nothing to me but she was a famous actress at the time you know i'm thinking roman not a specific person or so apparently she was a big actress rue roman never heard of i think she was a leading lady at that time.
00:09:34
Speaker
Others included some famous ballet dancers who had defected from Russia. They were Hungarian, I think they had defected from the Soviet bloc. And they were, you know, anyway, they're up in the fancy class of of births or artistic. There's also Cary Grant's wife was on the boat. Cary Grant's wife.
00:09:57
Speaker
And one of the lead there, right? Like you're talking about some rando dancers from Hungary or whatever, but you're like, Carrie Grant's wife is on the ship. Yeah. She's some, another actress I've never heard of. Carrie Grant's wife is on board. The mayor of Philadelphia is on board.
00:10:12
Speaker
Oh, this is the kind of dude that you may actually know his name. I did not. His name is Mike Stoller, and he's from a songwriting team that wrote some of Elvis's biggest hits. Mike Stoller or something like that. The name is very familiar. So he was attributed to a lot of the hit songs in the 50s. Yes. That name sounds familiar, like a Nashville, like pumped out the track.
00:10:38
Speaker
He was part of a, a songwriting duo. It's like that sounds so familiar. Wow. Incredible way to wait. He was not on board. He is on board. So he's yeah. So it's a, you know, it's a fancy boat. Now that's up in the, on the, that's up in the fancy cabins. Oh, wow.
00:10:55
Speaker
But then down in the lower cabins, you have people who are paying less. And a lot of them, a lot of the people down in the less expensive cabins are immigrants, people who are immigrating to the US. This is like the Titanic, right? Like they have the Irish, like the immigrants on the lower level, they're doing the dances and so on.
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if they did the whole thing where somebody naked gets sketched by a heart throb. That happened, yes, with the jewels and whatnot. Okay, so they're going through this dense fog and another corner that gets cut that night is
00:11:33
Speaker
You know, one of the basic rules of the road on the high seas is you do reduce speed in dense fog. Makes sense. There's a retired American admiral aboard who says to his daughter, we're going this boat's going too damn fast for this fall.
00:11:51
Speaker
I will say in Kalamis defense, at least he is, first of all, he's in the correct shipping lane for, you know, there, there's sort of a general understanding of boats coming West should be in this area and boats that are going back East should be in on this lane and driving on the wrong side of the road.
00:12:09
Speaker
as they say. No, he's right. Yeah. And, but he's right. You know, on the correct side of the road, he is going too fast in the fog. But one thing he is doing is he's sounding the fog horn. I think it's like every hundred seconds or something. I don't know how people are sleeping through that. He's like, I'm coming through. Yes, I'm going a bit fast, but I'm going to blast my horn. Get out of the way. If you think I'm going too fast.
00:12:33
Speaker
And the other thing that he does, which is appreciated and which the other ship, which I haven't told you about, does not do another ship. This guy, Kalamai, at least is on the deck. You know, at least he's up there, you know, with his other officers and overseeing, you know, the ship and the fog. Unfortunately, there is a ship coming the other direction, which is not doing the same.
Stockholm's Off-Course Path
00:12:56
Speaker
It has not hit the super, super heavy fog yet, but it is going quite fast. It's a Swedish ship called the Stockholm. And where is this? Where is it coming up now? South of Nantucket, 50 miles south of Nantucket. But how expansive is the area in which these two ships are going at each other? Well, I'm about to tell you. So the Stockholm, for one thing, is it itself is breaking some rules. It's in a lane about 20 miles north of where it's supposed to be.
00:13:26
Speaker
And that sounds bad, but ships back then were kind of in the habit of breaking this rule because you could shave some time off of your overall trip if you got up a little bit further north and took advantage of, you know, the currents or the winds or whatever it was.
00:13:41
Speaker
and you think of like the entire ocean and even a strait or even a certain coastline like it's quite expansive it's huge the boats in question are big so for instance the very beautiful andrea doria is 700 feet long wow
00:13:58
Speaker
And the Stockholm coming the other direction is 530 feet long. It doesn't have as many people on it, but it is north of where it's supposed to be. Okay. So it is really technically in an area that's really supposed to be for eastbound traffic or rather for westbound traffic. Whereas the Stockholm, which is going from New York back to Sweden and is traveling east, it should be 20 miles south of where it is. But
00:14:22
Speaker
On a freeway, would you say that it got on the wrong exit going the wrong way? Like, is it that bad? It's not quite as bad as that, but it is dangerous. It almost is like, it would almost be like if you have one of those freeways where there's a big median in between the two directions, like driving on that median or something.
00:14:41
Speaker
Well, I always wondered with like, you know, the midair collision. I'm like, guys, how in the world is the entire sky? Like what? I don't under there's no traffic. And now you're in the middle of the ocean. Like, can you you're in the middle of the ocean? What are the odds? And I think that that is part of what is probably going through some of these people's minds. It's like, yeah, we have things that we do to try to keep our ships safe. And we have some basic rules like slowing down and fog.
00:15:08
Speaker
But the reality is what are the chances that, you know, you're going to slam into something out here. Good point. Like I could totally see that. Guys, we've been down this lane how many times? And especially if you're a guy like Kalamai who he's been doing this kind of thing his whole life, he knows his stuff. So Kalamai is very experienced. The same cannot be said for the third in command on the Stockholm who is left alone on the deck. It's the first time he's ever been on the deck in charge all by himself.
00:15:38
Speaker
His name, he loved the hyphens. His name was Johann Ernst Karstens Johansson. So both the first name and the last names are hyphens. Like I would have just gone with Johann Johansson, but he needed to like shoehorn in the other names. He obviously wasn't concerned about the jersey. Like if I was ever going to market myself as like, I'm this hero, look at the back of my shirt.
00:16:03
Speaker
his captain's jersey. Yeah, the name starts like at the elbow and like ends at the other elbow too much. And he had been left with under strict instructions from his captain. Hey, come wake me up. If any of these things happen, if we start to see fog, come wake me up.
00:16:22
Speaker
If we get to where there's a boat that's like within a mile of us in any direction, come with me. He has a few things which this guy disregards. Really reasonable, by the way, right? It's within a mile. Just let me know. Yeah. The real cardinal sin that this guy, Carstens Johansson, does is both ships are outfitted with radar, but people are still somewhat new to that whole technology.
00:16:51
Speaker
Apparently back then anyway, it wasn't completely intuitive. Like we see radar in the movies and it's like, Oh yeah, there's that plane. You see the light bleeping and you realize a great video game. Like, of course I know how to do this. Yeah, exactly. It's like, okay, you can see that little bleeping light. That means somebody's near Tom Cruise's plane. Like let's shoot at it.
00:17:11
Speaker
This guy, apparently it was not that intuitive and that this guy, Carstens Johansson, made some basic mistakes in terms of like the scale of the radar image he was looking at. You know, basically when he first started seeing the Andrea Doria on the radar, he thought it was like, I forget, you know, five or 10 times farther away than it actually was. Like his scale was way off.
00:17:38
Speaker
He didn't have one of those stickers that said objects in the rear are closer. He should have. It should have said that. I mean, so many things had to go wrong on this night for what happened, what ended up happening for it to happen. But the other thing is to the extent he was course correcting, actually both guys, to the extent they're course correcting, they're kind of both course correcting in the wrong direction. Oh, perfect storm.
00:18:02
Speaker
So as the Stockholm approaches the heavy fog bank going at its full speed, and as Andrea Doria starts to emerge from the heavy fog bank going at its full speed, they do see each other at the last minute.
The Collision Incident
00:18:19
Speaker
Now with ships this big, as you know, you can't stop them on a dime. Of course not. This is not like a car where you slam on the brakes.
00:18:27
Speaker
So the Swedish ship, they try to like throw it into reverse or do whatever you can to like stop. Particularly if there's a tow rope, like I'm not saying they would be water skiing at the time. Clearly not. But you know what I mean? Like you never go in reverse when there's a tow rope because you can get it in the prop. Are you kidding me? Yeah.
00:18:45
Speaker
So the sweetie tries to stop. He's like, okay, put, throw the engines in reverse or whatever. Like, let's try to stop. The Italian boat tries to turn and outrun the collision, but the effect that that has is they sort of open themselves up to being T boned by the stock. Oh my.
00:19:04
Speaker
This is when I also tell you that the Stockholm as a Swedish ship, which runs in cold waters a lot, has a reinforced prowl for ice breaking. No, maximum damage. Absolutely slams into the side about one third of the way down from the bow. It slams into the side of the Andrea Doria and just opens it up like a tin can.
00:19:29
Speaker
God, wait, this was in the late fifties. Fifty six has been a huge deal to 50 miles, 50 miles off this 50 miles off the south of off the coast of Nantucket, south of Nantucket. It was a huge deal. And of course, you know, news travel more slowly back then, like he didn't have news crews like out in helicopters. So it wasn't this I'm not saying on the level of a Titanic, but certainly like a huge story that sounds like a big deal.
00:19:58
Speaker
Absolutely huge deal. So the Stockholm rips open a huge hole in Andrea Doria. And the place where it slams into includes a lot of passenger compartments.
00:20:11
Speaker
So you have all these crazy stories like there's one guy who I think is a colonel or something in the American military or maybe he's a retired colonel who has stepped to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He survives, but his wife does not like he comes back out of the bathroom and his wife has been killed. Wow.
00:20:33
Speaker
There's a 14 year old girl named Linda Morgan, whose father was a famous newscaster in America. And she and her mom, her stepfather is in bed asleep on the Andrea Doria. The collision happens.
00:20:48
Speaker
She gets thrown on to the on to the Stockholm.
Rescue Efforts & Survival Stories
00:20:52
Speaker
So when the ships separate, when the Stockholm starts going in reverse and pulls apart, she's presumed dead for hours. People figure she's in the water or whatever. And they even tell her father, who's a newscaster back in America, your daughter's lost at sea, presumed dead. Turns out she's actually on board the Stockholm.
00:21:11
Speaker
and she's rescued from the damaged prow of the Stockholm, and she turns out to be okay. Linda Morgan, 14 years old, broken arm, but that's it. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Was there a movie? Has this been like... I do know that there was Jerry Seinfeld, the Seinfeld show episode called The Andrea Doria, where... What?
00:21:33
Speaker
George is trying to get an apartment in a certain building and he's going to lose out because the co-op board wants to rent instead to this woman who has a whole sob story about having survived the Andrea Doria 40 years ago.
00:21:49
Speaker
And so he's competing and he's trying to come up with a narrative about why he's more worthy than this woman who survived at the wreck of the Andrea Doria. Oh my God, that is lovely. When the collision happens that night, 46 people on the Andrea Doria are dead, most of them pretty much immediately, and five people on the other ship, on the Stockholm are killed.
00:22:13
Speaker
But it's considered one of the most successful coordinated rescues of all time because the Andrea Doria immediately sends out its distress signals and the captain, Kalama, is very calm but he says, need all available assistance immediately, situation dire.
00:22:34
Speaker
And so a series of boats, reverse course, or, or, you know, just steam at full speed to get to the site, including a boat called the Cape Anne, a French boat called the Yield of France, a couple of American military boats. They wind up rescuing 1660 people from the Andrea Doria.
00:22:54
Speaker
Most of them were in lifeboats. One of the things that happened with the Andrea Dorio, because they had never followed the guideline about filling up the empty fuel tanks with seawater, one side of the boat was much lighter than the other. So when the accident happened, the boat went listed at a really severe angle, more than 20 degrees.
00:23:15
Speaker
So if you imagine you're on the deck, people said to get it anywhere on the deck, you were like, ouch, sort of on your back, sliding down feet first, trying not to slide too fast. So try not to slide too fast so that you would shoot over and then into the water.
00:23:34
Speaker
But being at this severe an angle also meant that all of the lifeboats which were on the side that was sticking way up in the air were unusable because they couldn't get them from that far up in the air down to the water. So they were already down to 50% of their available lifeboats. Now the good thing, I want to hear what this is.
00:23:57
Speaker
Well, there's some good things. I mean, let's look at the numbers. 1660 people were rescued. Yes. Good point. 46 died. That's a bummer. But 1660, I think compared to the Titanic, everybody sort of viewed this as
00:24:15
Speaker
The Andrea Doria, it took it 10 or 11 hours actually to go underwater. And so that allowed plenty of time to get people off the ship. Gather your passport. Well, I wonder, because we did talk about last week with the Mary Rose, was it the death rate was over 90%, which is a terrible percentage.
00:24:36
Speaker
Of course, that was 500 years ago. So by now, you know, they've got these airtight compartments built into the hall. You're saying that on Seinfeld, they made fun of the people because it wasn't as tragic as perhaps the death rate of other ship.
00:24:49
Speaker
No, no, no. This woman was just saying like, hey, you should rent me this apartment. Like, look at me. I've you know, I was I'm a survivor of the Andrea Doria rescue. Now it does it does become a point of humor later in that episode because George looks it up or actually I think I guess, of course, Kramer being the oddball, like has a book on, you know, oceanic disasters and he already knew all about it. And he tells people the facts and George is like, wait a minute.
00:25:16
Speaker
So 1660 people were rescued, right? Like, and only 40 died. Like, so George has the same reaction you're having where he's like, okay, so it's like a bus accident. Yeah. I mean, that's like better. Yeah. More people die of the flu. I guess, you know, cause if you're there, it's like, okay, well you didn't live through it.
00:25:36
Speaker
But basically the Andrea Doria does a good job staying afloat, you know, of its 11 airtight compartments built into the hall. Only one of them is pierced. And that does lead to a long time before it goes fully underwater. The captain is the last guy on the boat. He does not want to leave the boat.
00:25:56
Speaker
He's has to be talked into coming into a lifeboat. He's just utterly distraught. He thinks maybe there's still people left on board. He won't get off the boat. He's literally like the last guy on the boat. They finally get him to come off. And he is just absolutely haunted by it for the rest of his life. He never takes command of a boat again. He doesn't want to. And at his deathbed right before he dies,
00:26:22
Speaker
Allegedly, the last thing he says before he dies is so all of the passengers are safe. Oh, that's like you can't make this stuff up. There's plenty of fault to go around. And and certainly when this happened, there was still some lingering prejudice toward Italy over World War Two. And people were more sort of inclined to say, oh, the Italians probably screwed this up somehow.
00:26:50
Speaker
And there were court cases over it and as it turned out, both ships were covered by the same insurer, Lloyds of London. And so Lloyds of London- Hey guys, let's mediate. Yeah, because the trial is getting really nasty and not only are both companies going after each other and saying it was the other one who screwed up, but both countries are starting to sort of
00:27:14
Speaker
get involved in the fight. And Lloyd's of London says, you know, let's let's settle this. We represent both of you. Let's let's do an out of court settlement. And what that leads to in the short run is there's no official determination of who
Post-Collision Analysis
00:27:26
Speaker
was at fault. It seems in hindsight like the Swedish third in command, Karstens Johansson was definitely much more at fault and just did not understand how the radar operated on his ship.
00:27:40
Speaker
So ultimately, you believe that the blame went on the guy with the multiple hyphens. He was to blame for not being able to interpret the radar and therefore put himself and his passengers in danger. Is that ultimately what they determined? Absolutely. And also disregarded his captain's instructions. One of them was, hey, look, if you start to see fog, come get me. Another one is if you think there's a ship within a mile, come get me. Yeah.
00:28:07
Speaker
Also, the Swedish ship was 20 miles north of where it was supposed to be. Now, the Stockholm, amazingly, they do wind up fixing up the Stockholm and it remains in service to this day. It's no longer called the Stockholm. It's changed ownership a few times. Do people know the history when they get on board?
00:28:29
Speaker
Good question. Although if you think about it, it took that collision like a champ and still was able to... True, like a patterning ram, if you're in some sort of competition, it's like, hey, let's get on that shit. Yeah. It was able, I think, to turn around and steam back to New York, even though it didn't look good. Right, like later, hey, sorry about the dent. What?
00:28:51
Speaker
Yeah, the French boat, which was one of the six that raced to the scene, got special respect and credit when it got there. That captain, and I can't remember his name, was very expert. He was worried. He said, listen, we got to be careful. There's a lot of boats in this tiny little area right now.
00:29:10
Speaker
And there's still some fog, so we got to do this right. But he is very gutsy and maneuvers very close to to the Andrea Doria. He also lights up his entire ship. People who were on the Andrea Doria said the moment when I knew I was going to live was when that French boat came and just put on all its lights. And I just had this feeling like I'm going to make it.
00:29:32
Speaker
You know, I see that ship over there. There are people figuring out how to get me. I'm going to make it. So the Ile de France was that a very cinematic moment? Like, how is that not in a movie? This has been depicted in a movie. A million books have been written about it. But a movie like, come on, like with the light of the, you know, I think part of the plot line of Poseidon adventure, you know, is sort of borrowing from aspects of the Andrea Doria.
00:29:59
Speaker
But the Andrea Doria is as much of a clusterfuck as it was the actual collision. The fact that so many people survived was considered a victory for the safety measures which were put into place after the Titanic. Again, if you're part of that 49 or the families of that of the 46, 46, whatever your life
00:30:19
Speaker
like, can you guys be quiet? Will you keep talking about how great this is? It's not great. Well, the other thing is there are lots of people among their survivors who assume that members of their family have died because they get separated during the rescue. And their loved ones get rescued by a different ship. And so it's not until like days later in New York that they realize like, oh, my son's
00:30:43
Speaker
It's a matter of like comparing rescue ships, right? Oh, you were on a friendship. You had French food. We got captured or we were rescued by a Spanish ship. We had Spanish food. The paella didn't agree with my stomach, but I was still glad, you know, for the blanket. They did have bathrooms on board, obviously, because the food was very spicy. I'm not used to the Spanish food. Long line for the latrine. The music was not as good on the Swedish ship, for instance, as on the French and Spanish.
00:31:13
Speaker
Okay, here's one fact about the Andrea Doria that really drew me to this wreck. This shipwreck continues to kill people to this day.
Andrea Doria's Legacy as a Dive Site
00:31:24
Speaker
What? What do you mean by that? Where it landed under the water is an
00:31:30
Speaker
Absolutely treacherous spot. It's like 230 feet down. So it's a little too deep for your garden variety recreational diver. We're not going there. We're definitely. I'll watch a video. So part of what makes it treacherous is that heavy, heavy currents in that area.
00:31:50
Speaker
bad visibility, 230 feet down and because of the strong current and because of the massive amount of damage that was done to the ship that night, the ship has deteriorated through the years and continues to deteriorate. It's described as a very loud wreck. If you dive it, you can hear
00:32:10
Speaker
Metal grinding against metal or metal grinding against the sea floor. It's a shipwreck that feels like stuff is continuing to collapse or could collapse at any rate. Zero interest in being anywhere near there. Of the 22 people who have died diving on the wreck since then... Oh my gosh.
00:32:30
Speaker
a big number of them have been from decompression sickness. Like you've got to come up super slowly if you dive that deeply or that deep. So people who come up too quick can dive the bends. Whoa. And what were they looking for? Like what are they, are they bringing something up from the ship? Were they looking for belongings located in the cabin? Like the Titanic? Like why go down that point?
00:32:54
Speaker
You know, it's sort of all of the above. You know, some people want to especially Italian divers are very fascinated by this wreck. The ship played a big part in the national imagination. My grandparents left their keys. I need the extra keys. Yeah. But people, you know, people are. Yeah. They want to see what they can get from the wreck. You know, one one diver was able to find one of the the bells, one of the ship
00:33:20
Speaker
and able to rig that and have it brought up. Now, one thing is that sometimes in a shipwreck, you'll hear, well, the safe or the vault probably held this and this and this. They think in the Andrea Doria, maybe less so because they were only 12 hours out from port.
00:33:39
Speaker
So they think a lot of people had already claimed their valuables and had already started to pack up their stuff and were getting ready to disembark the next day. So that reduced the number of people saying like, Oh, I can, we gotta get the ship safe or gotta bring that up. It sounds like a terrifying wreck to dive on. You know, there are these passageway, like one diver got caught in a passageway.
00:34:00
Speaker
passageway or his line got caught in a long corridor and he could never get back out. But the very difficulty of, in fact, because of this stuff about having to come back up to surface so slowly, really you're looking at a total of maybe 15 minutes of really good dive time on the wreck on a good day, like when there's visibility and everything. Totally not worth it. But did Cary Grant's wife survive?
00:34:27
Speaker
Yes, she did. Wow. Interesting. Okay, good. The treacherousness of the dive paradoxically is part of what draws divers to it. So it's described as the Mount Everest of shipwrecks. And so divers pride themselves on having gone down to that wreck, but you really have to know your stuff. Otherwise you could wind up. I mean, cause if you think about it, so 46 died on the night of the collision on the Andrea Doria.
00:34:55
Speaker
and 22 more have died since then trying to go down to look at that's not a good ratio. Yeah, I feel like that's not on our list of ones that we're gonna totally not again, a video not of any of the tragedies associated with the dives, but certainly to see the wreck. Like I'm curious what the ship looks like and just imagine that night. I mean,
00:35:14
Speaker
I think the cinematic thing is exactly correct. Like with the heavy, heavy fall terrible. Like it's so scary. Yeah. That's incredible. Oh, and then, and, and so there's the dude, I mentioned the Admiral retired Admiral who turns to the daughter and says that, you know, we're going too fast in this.
00:35:33
Speaker
fog. But there's even a woman who at breakfast the morning before the wreck tells her daughter, I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that there was an accident. But I was on the Cape Ann. I wasn't on the Andrea Doria. And sure enough, she, you know, later after the collision is rescued by the Cape Ann. But the daughter swears like, yes, she told me that dream in the morning that she wound up on the Cape Ann.
00:35:57
Speaker
just sounds so scary that it seems like a perfect movie because it's so scary with the fog. You can't see like you don't know what's coming. And then all of a sudden and then how about the little girl like she's asleep and then everybody assumes she died. And in fact, Morgan Linda, they Linda 14 years old, they informed her dad, the newscaster who that that his daughter was lost and presumed dead. And he gave the newscast that night. I think it's on the radio and doesn't mention that his daughter was involved
00:36:27
Speaker
You know, he just like straight ahead, old school newsmen, these two ships have collided, you know, were awaiting reports. She was a one in a million because she was one who was literally transposed. She was put onto, you know, she wound up on the other ship. Incredible. I mean, it is incredible. That is a one in a million. Wow. Can you imagine what was going through her head? Excuse me, what ship on my own now?
00:36:53
Speaker
She says, when the rescuers reach her, she said, I went to sleep on the Andrea Doria. Where am I now? Seriously, you put that in a movie, it's like, wait, woke up on the wrong ship. And the dude who was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and his wife gets killed in the collision, they actually saw that woman's body on the wreckage of the prow of the Stockholm and they started to try to get to it, but then that wreckage fell off into the ocean.
00:37:21
Speaker
They believe she was already dead, but they, you know, had spotted that woman and were sort of working down toward her and then the stuff just fell down into the water. I mean, wow, that is incredibly tragic. The other thing that strikes me is it's like all of these things like, oh, yeah, that that means that's a good idea, the reinforced prow. It'll break through the ice. It's like the unintended consequence of it ripping a huge hole in the beautiful Andrea Doria. Right.
00:37:50
Speaker
You know, part of what drew me to it, as I said at the beginning, is this idea that it's continuing to kill people. And that part of what's going on there is that it is, like you say, such a sort of cinematic fascinating event that I think that's part of what draws people back to try to dive on it.
00:38:09
Speaker
And like I said, a lot of the divers on it are Italian just because they have that connection to the ship. And then just the that 230 feet down, it's just it happened to land in just a perfectly treacherous spot. No thoughts of raising it like there's no way to like it. They never thought about bringing it up.
00:38:27
Speaker
It's falling. No, it's way too dangerous to work on this ship and it's falling apart. You know, if if it had just been a few miles in a different direction, it would have gone into thousands and thousands of deep feet deep in the water because it's right on the continental shelf. So you go a little further and it drops off a cliff and you're looking down into the abyss.
00:38:49
Speaker
So yeah, I think it would be too dangerous to do any kind of recovery efforts. Also, you know, it's not like a ship from like 500 years ago or a thousand years ago. You know, it's from 1956. It's still incredible. I mean, so people are still going there.
00:39:05
Speaker
Oh yeah, very popular. In a way Everest is a good comparison because it's like people die on Mount Everest every year. One of the other dangers down there is something called nitrogen necrosis or necrosis or something that happens where nitrogen builds up too much in your body and you pass out.
00:39:22
Speaker
Were they able to get anything from the ship? Like, are there any relics that are on display or like any artifacts? No. In fact, it seems like more what these people are doing is to go down there and either take footage or just to be able to say that they dived the Andrea Doria.
00:39:40
Speaker
And it's quite a production to to make that dive. And sometimes they get down there and the visibility is just no good. So, you know, they can see a couple feet in front of them and they're just, you know, able to make out the outline of the hull or, you know, a big shape like, oh, this is, you know, part of the boiler room or whatever.
00:40:00
Speaker
But like I said, you know, the guy, it was considered a big coup, the guy who rigged up the ship bell a few years ago and brought the bell up to the surface. They did have a life size sculpture of the original, you know, famous Genoese navigator in the 1600s or 1500s and triadoria. And that sculpture also that's who it's named after.
00:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's who it's named after. And they did recover that sculpture and that's cool. Yeah, that's not nothing. I mean, it was detached at the ankles. So you don't get the feet, but you get the rest of the, uh, life size sculpture together, like suspend your disbelief. I mean, you're only talking about the feet are missing. You want to get the best.
00:40:44
Speaker
uh, workmen to just to try to put on the new feet. Like you don't want it to be super obvious. You can't like throw Nikes on him or some kind of footwear that wasn't appropriate to the, you know what I mean? You can get some professors involved to be age appropriate or time appropriate.
00:41:00
Speaker
I feel bad that the Italian captain was sweating it all those years later and that the Swedish guys seem to sort of skate. Unlike Porcalamai, the Swedish officers went on and continued their careers in navigation and worked on ships and all that. I feel that they did not get their full share of blame. They're like, what's the problem?
00:41:24
Speaker
Yeah, and they wanted, and they wanted to muddy the water with just sort of like, as I said, there was the whole anti Italian thing after World War II. So they were sort of like, oh, and it's one of those disasters where as they get closer to the moment of impact, they're all doing the exact wrong thing. Like they're turning toward each other. And then the dude right before impact, like says, Oh, we can outrun it.
00:41:48
Speaker
And the dude who's the Italian guy, he was like, yeah, you know, I'm going to turn really hard to, you know, and try to outrun the collision. Like he opens the ship up perfectly. So it just gets t-boned almost perfectly bumper cars. Like, what are you doing? Can you just guys both just not cut it this close? It's kind of like if you're walking towards somebody on the sidewalk and you both step to the side, you're trying to avoid them, you know, and you both keep like stepping to the wrong side and it's awkward.
00:42:14
Speaker
It's that, but it's just like 1500 people. I know he's going to go right. I'm going to go left. No, but if I go left, he'll go right. It's like, guys, the other thing is if they're, if they're sounding the foghorn every hundred seconds, it's like, how do you not hear that? Just commit early. Like to me, it's like, if you just commit early, I'm going this way. Do you see me going this way? I'm not wavering. I'm going this way.
00:42:39
Speaker
as they were running out of time to avoid the disaster, both of them simultaneously doing everything to make it actually inevitable that they would collide. Making the wrong decisions, yeah. Were there lawsuits for negligence? Was this like... Oh yes, absolutely. All kinds of lawsuits. And that's when the insurance company steps in and finally does a global settlement because they said,
00:43:02
Speaker
There's so much bad PR and there's so much mud slinging between the two sides that they say, it's, look, this is hurting all of us and it's going to drive up the amount of the awards. So let's say you were saying that the same insurance company represented both sides. So how does that work? That doesn't seem fair.
00:43:21
Speaker
they settle with them, so the passengers or whoever the people are who are suing, and I assume both the respective cruise lines were suing each other as well. But Lloyd's of London, as sort of having clients on both sides, they help kind of in a diplomatic way, they sort of help come up with a global resolution like, listen, there's not going to be a finding of fault.
00:43:46
Speaker
there's just going to be a paying out of money. We will pay out X amount to you and X amount to you, but we're not going to get into who was ultimately at fault. So avoid bad PR, but at least accept some responsibility via the payment. Subsequent, like years later, both scholarly and technical analysis do suggest that it was the Swedish ship, which was more at fault, especially the dude who was at Carstens Johansson, who was just having trouble reading the radar.
00:44:15
Speaker
So it really did come down to the radar, like the analysis proves that had he done the right thing, he would have understood which direction to go. Yeah, in fact, it's sometimes described as the first radar assisted collision or the first radar assisted disaster in the sense that
00:44:33
Speaker
he was making decisions based on radar, but based on a faulty reading of the radar. So in a sense, the radar was contributing to the accident because he was looking at it and he was thinking he knew where the ship was. And in a sense, he might've been even better off at that point if he wasn't
00:44:52
Speaker
looking at it and he was just making some basic decisions based on what he could see or hear. It does remind me of what you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, which was JFK Jr. in the plane, which I forget, did it have instruments? I don't recall. I know that it was definitely one of those, like the fog, he wasn't licensed maybe to fly by instrument.
00:45:18
Speaker
It wasn't rated for instruments or something, but I do think it was, uh, exactly like what you're talking about where you don't know which way you lose perspective of the horizon. And in Kennedy's thing, you know, he thought he, in the plane accident, he thought he was pulling up into the up, you know, climbing in the sky and he was actually driving it straight toward the ocean.
00:45:40
Speaker
Sure. One thing I want to add, I already mentioned the Seinfeld episode, but the Andrea Doria also, there are some songs about it. There was a Polish rock band, which I will not even try to pronounce, which recorded a song in 1969 called the Andrea Doria.
00:45:57
Speaker
The wreck of the Andrea Doria is also alluded to in a Steely Dan song called Things I Miss the Most from their 2003 album, Everything Must Go. A Brazilian rock band called Ligio Urbana recorded the song Andrea Doria on
00:46:16
Speaker
their 1986 album. Tom Clancy once wrote a book where one of the plot points was that an American sub is sort of positions itself next to the wreckage of the Andrea Doria so that enemy ships or Soviet like sonar detection technology will think, oh, that's just the wreckage of the Andrea Doria over there, and they won't pick up the submarine.
00:46:42
Speaker
Clive Kussler has also put it in some of his books. The 1969 adventure novel, The Poseidon Adventure, mentions the wreck of the Andrea Doria at several points. So it did, especially back then, it had a hold on the popular imagination.
00:47:04
Speaker
And with that many people getting rescued like 1600, I mean, if you just think about it, like then all those people fan out into the world with their stories about how you'll never believe what happened to me. Right. It's not as rare as the Titanic, but still a great story when you survive a shipwreck or you have a relative that survives a shipwreck. That's pretty dramatic. Kind of a bummer that the beautiful ship, the one that was known as the most beautiful passenger liner operating at that time, that's the one that gets wrecked and goes underwater.
Stockholm's Survival & Continued Service
00:47:35
Speaker
Whereas the smaller, less remarkable Stockholm continues to operate until this day. That just has like, you know, like the duct tape on the front, like where it hit the Andrea Dora, but it's fine otherwise. Yeah, it was able. I mean, well, the amazing thing is if you look at images, it does look like the front of the boat has been sheared off. So it's sort of like how in the world did it get back to New York? It doesn't look like it would have been able to do that.
00:48:02
Speaker
There was a news photographer for the Boston Traveler newspaper who won a Pulitzer Prize taking a photo of the Andrea Doria right at the moment when it finally goes under after. You're kidding. 10 to 11 hours of it, you know, listing at a severe angle. It finally goes under and this guy Harry Trask took a photo that shows the ship going. I can't wait to check this out. That's incredible. Was it during the day when it went under or was this like lit up at night?
00:48:31
Speaker
No, it was during the day. Okay. Wow. I mean, most of the collision and the rescue and all that happened at night, but by the time it goes under for good, it's like 10am. Wow. There was also a Chrysler one off prototype of a new car that was going to be called the Norseman.
00:48:47
Speaker
And it was inside the 50 car garage on the Andrea Doria. And so when that went down and was lost forever, they just scrapped that whole line. So there was a one time prototype, the Chrysler Norseman, which never got made.
00:49:03
Speaker
No way. And that's on the Andrea door. Yeah, I'm surprised I haven't at least made an attempt to bring up the car. Don't you think like Yeah, there is some footage of from divers who've gone down there. The wreck is not in great condition. That's why I was I was kind of blown away about your wreck last week delicate things like fiddles they were able to recover. Totally. Whereas this one looks like it's falling apart pretty fast. I mean, it only wrecked like
00:49:29
Speaker
60, 70 years ago, but it's already in really bad shape. And also that there was a huge hole in the side of the ship with the Vasa and with the Mary Rose. They fill up with water through the gun ports, but I think the ship basically goes down as a whole. They do. That's why they were able to recover such a high percentage of the overall ship.
00:49:57
Speaker
But great ship. I mean, this is this is a crazy story.
Discussion on Radar's Role in Collision
00:50:01
Speaker
It's considered the greatest sea rescue in history just because of the number of people who were successfully rescued. But as you point out, that's just sort of a flip side of like, OK, but also just a colossal group of bad decisions that night. Like how in the middle of a huge ocean do two huge boats slam into each other? Tough to accept.
00:50:22
Speaker
Yeah, because again, as you say, it's not like a battle. It wasn't like this was a time of great distress. Like, you know, whoa, it's like, guys, just go slower and honk your horn and everyone commit to a direction like this is not like it's not sophisticated maritime technology. It's a matter of I'm going this way. You're going left. And I'm intrigued by the idea of it being a radar assisted collision in the sense that like, I wonder if neither ship had radar, if they actually almost would have been better off.
00:50:51
Speaker
Like maybe it gave a false sense of security. Like the Swedish guy who goes to sleep, he's like, no, we got the radar. We can leave, you know, Johan Ernst in charge of it. Cause we do have the machines now and the technology. Excuse me, sir. Do you mind looking up? No, I'm looking at the radar. No, but do you mind looking up because it's a ship coming right at us? No, I'm looking at the radar and that ship is on the left.
00:51:12
Speaker
Yeah. The radar says we're, we're fine. We can get 10 miles. The Andrea Doria had two sets of rate to like radar machines or displays. And that was like the latest, latest technology. Well, it sounds like it's the Swedish that didn't know how to interpret the radar. Yeah.
00:51:28
Speaker
Yeah. Great ship. And I'm not going to tease next week, incidentally, because I haven't decided. As you know, there's so many right now that we've been discussing offline, hard to know what's coming next week. I have, I have one final question to ask. Do you have any desire to go on one of these? Like this does feel like it was the era when the passenger liner was still like a glamorous thing.
00:51:53
Speaker
Yeah, I don't. And the funny thing is I was watching some show recently and it occurred to me that I would never want to go on any of these type of cruises or luxury ships of any kind at all. Yeah, because a lot of those cruise ships, like when people go to Alaska or they go to the Caribbean, those things are hopping around sort of
00:52:16
Speaker
they're not going out across the heart of the ocean. You know what I mean? They're going like from island to island or they're going along the coast from port to port, but they're not going through like, there's part of me that would be curious to do that just to see what it feels like being in the middle of the Atlantic at night. I mean, maybe like going, you know, from New York to Great Britain or go to like whatever Liverpool, like that would be kind of cool.
00:52:38
Speaker
But it also, no, thank you. Like, I think I'm good. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I could do it now that we've done three seasons of the podcast, because now it's like every little thing would be in my mind like, Oh shit, you know what? It's, it's a leap year, you know? And whenever David does a wreck, it's a leap year.
00:52:55
Speaker
You know, the irony of these guys do a shipwreck and guess what? They went down and I mean, we can't that's going to happen. Yeah. Great episode. Appreciate it. Let's play our outro music and another shipwreck next week. Sounds good.
00:53:28
Speaker
the best