A captain is the last to leave his sinking ship – and if there are people who can no longer leave it, then he goes down with them. That is what the traditional code of honor says. And that’s what Piero Calamai wanted on July 26, 1956, because the commander of the luxury liner “Andrea Doria” wanted to stay on board his doomed ship. After all, it was clear that several dozen people had died in the disaster for which he was responsible – although 40 times more had been saved through his careful actions (and a bit of luck).
Calamai’s officers rebelled against this decision, which was mandatory from a seaman’s point of view but had already fallen out of time. In fact, they even blackmailed him, announcing that they would go down with him if he refused to leave the flagship of the Italian merchant marine. Finally, the captain gave in and left the three-year-old express steamer. Nevertheless, he resigned immediately and never again took on a command on the high seas.
The “Andrea Doria” was the pride of the nation. Launched in 1951 and put into service in 1953, she represented elegant, technically adept (Northern) Italy. With around 30,000 gross register tons, she only ranks 13th among the world’s largest active passenger ships, but she was considered particularly luxurious – even in tourist class. On July 17, 1956, the luxury liner, named after a 16th-century Genoese admiral, left its home port (Genoa, of course) to make its 51st voyage to New York. The passage went smoothly for eight days.
Until the late evening of July 25, 1956. The “Andrea Doria” was to dock in New York the following morning, and the Swedish passenger ship “Stockholm” had set sail from there at noon to cross the Atlantic towards Gothenburg. The sky was clear, but as was often the case, a dense bank of fog had formed on the water south of Rhode Island.
On the busy shipping route out into the North Atlantic, the “Andrea Doria” and the “Stockholm” came closer and closer. The Italian liner had switched off its radar, the third officer on duty on the Swedish ship was insufficiently experienced with its own radar.
At around 11.10 p.m. the “Stockholm” rammed the “Andrea Doria” on the starboard side amidships. And because the Swedish ship had a bow reinforced for driving through ice and a particularly stable hull structure, while the Italian ship was built rather lightly, this accident had catastrophic consequences.
Three decks with cabins were torn up to twelve meters deep. Many of these were occupied the evening before the end of the passage; probably 44 people lost their lives directly as a result of the collision. 14-year-old Linda Morgan, who was in cabin 52 of the Andrea Doria on her way to visit her father in New York, was thrown onto the deck of the Stockholm; she was unharmed while her sister was killed.
The collision tore open several empty tanks on the starboard side of the luxury liner at the end of the journey; around 500 tons of sea water penetrated. However, because the corresponding tanks on the port side were also empty and the crew had refrained from filling them at least partially with water as balancing ballast, as prescribed, the “Andrea Doria” quickly developed a heavy list.
Piero Calamai only had to make one decision – and he made the right one: evacuate. The boats on the starboard side were lowered into the water as quickly as possible, but due to the heeling, they could not be manned as planned. The boats on the port side could not be used at all.
The crew provided efficient assistance. First the “Stockholm”, then also the hastily reversed old passenger steamer “Ile de France” and four US ships took on the passengers and most of the crew; only two people died during the night evacuation, which was a small miracle given the scale of the disaster.
The captain initially refused to abandon his sinking ship. Born on Christmas 1897, he had served on ships since his youth. First in the Italian Navy from 1916, then from 1919 as an officer on civilian ships. In 1932, in the middle of the Atlantic, he jumped after a passenger who had fallen overboard on the “Conte Grande” and rescued him; at that time he was first officer.
After returning to military service in 1940, he successively took over command of a total of 27 different ships from 1947 and proved to be a competent but, if the worst came to the worst, a courageous captain. As “Comandante Superiore” he was something like the admiral of the Italian merchant marine; his younger brother, by the way, had reached a similar rank in the Navy.
After his officers forced him to be rescued, Calamai tried to persuade the commander of a US Coast Guard ship to tow the Andrea Doria to shallower waters. But the US captain refused – his ship, the USCG “Hornbeam”, weighed 950 tons and was just one-thirtieth the size of the sinking liner. On July 26, 1956, at exactly 10:09 a.m., the Andrea Doria sank.
Arriving in New York, Piero Calamai had to face a lawsuit under the law of the sea. But neither the Italian merchant marine nor the US side had much interest in doing dirty laundry. Because the failure to fill up the empty fuel tanks, a major reason for the capsizing within eleven hours after the collision, was common for almost all shipping companies at the time. Dense fog was named as the main cause of the catastrophe – not entirely wrong, but not entirely correct either.
Calamai left the merchant marine prematurely at just 58 and retired to his home in Genoa. Here, on April 7, 1972, he received a letter from a respected US expert on ship collisions, who reported to him that his re-enactment of the accident had yielded a surprising result: the majority of the blame for the collision lay with the crew of the “Stockholm”. As soon as he read that, Calamai died of a heart attack.
The name of his last ship was immortalized by the rumor that one of the last radio messages from the sinking steamer read “Everything clear on the Andrea Doria”. The German singer Udo Lindenberg took up this in 1973 in his song of the same name and sang: “And I believe / That our steamer will soon go down / But otherwise everything is clear today / on the Andrea Doria.”
Since the wreck lies at a depth of “only” 75 meters, it has long been a popular destination for semi-professional divers. However, since 1956 almost 20 other people have lost their lives. Incidentally, the “Stockholm” got a new bow in New York and was sold to the GDR in 1960, which used it as a cruise ship for deserving “comrades” for a quarter of a century – under the new name “Friendship of Nations”.
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