As Andrea Doria approached Nantucket near the end of her crossing, Captain Piero Calamai spotted a fog bank and slowed his ship down. Even with radar to guide him, Calamai remained on edge. These were dangerous waters. Three decades earlier, in the same location and weather conditions, a Norwegian freighter had rammed the new Matson liner Malolo amidships, with her designer William Francis Gibbs aboard.
Andrea Doria’s captain had good reason to worry about collisions. For all her glamour and popularity, Andrea Doria was unstable in rough seas, due not only to poor design, but to sloppy, company-mandated ballasting. Finished only a year after United States, Andrea Doria was designed to stay afloat with only 2 of her 11 compartments open to the sea. The bigger United States, on the other hand, could stay afloat with 5 of her 20 compartments flooded. Earlier that year, an alliance of American shipbuilders and owners lobbied for a relaxation of strict compartmentalization requirements. If the Italians could get away with a “two compartment ship,” why couldn’t the Americans?33
At 11:15 P.M., Captain Calamai of Andrea Doria spotted a bank of lights quickly approaching his ship’s starboard side. He ordered the helmsman to take evasive action by turning to port, but it was too late.
The small Swedish liner Stockholm, built with a prow reinforced to crush Baltic Sea ice, smashed into Andrea Doria’s starboard flank. Both ships had advanced radar systems, but their commanding officers appear to have misinterpreted the other ship’s courses, steering toward rather than away from each other. The sound of ripping steel and smashing wood was followed by the screams of dozens of passengers being crushed to death. As Stockholm drifted astern, the mauled Andrea Doria immediately heeled over to starboard, and her lights flickered out. With a 20-degree list, most of her lifeboats could not be lowered.
Passengers and crew aboard Andrea Doria knew immediately that the ship was doomed. “They had swarmed out of their staterooms and up from the lower decks,” a New York Times reporter wrote. “At no time did they panic. But the list made the footing perilous. On the boat deck the passengers nestled against the high side of the superstructure to await their rescue.”
Eleven hours after the collision, as helicopters bearing TV cameramen circled overhead, Andrea Doria rolled onto her side and sank. The collision killed forty-six people on Andrea Doria, five on Stockholm, which remained afloat despite a crumpled bow. Miraculously, 1,661 of Andrea Doria’s passengers and crew, including Philadelphia mayor Richardson Dilworth, escaped in lifeboats. Most survivors were picked up by the French Line’s Ile de France.34
After the disaster, one of the lobbyists hoping for a relaxation of American maritime safety standards called William Francis Gibbs, who had refused to support them.
“Gibbs,” he sighed, “you’re always right.”35
Yet to the millions in American households who watched Andrea Doria capsize on their television screens, the lesson was different. The disaster was their first television image of a big liner going down. They had read about the sinking of Titanic and Lusitania. They may have seen illustrations, out of artists’ imaginations, of what happened to these long-ago ships. They may even have seen newsreels of the burning of Morro Castle, a disaster then two decades in the past.
But all that was history. This was today. The Andrea Doria disaster proved a devastating blow to United States and other great passenger ships. The horror of the images on the new medium reinforced the accusations of sloppy navigation and improper maintenance by the shipping lines. Suddenly luxury liners did not seem much safer than those cramped turboprop planes now making noisy, bumpy flights across the Atlantic. And a new and faster aircraft, the jet, would soon be leaving its contrails across the skies.
27. TROUBLE ASHORE
As the 1950s proceeded and the Big Ship prospered, the “happy prospect” of designing a sister ship to United States kept William Francis Gibbs working long hours into his seventies.1
By all outward appearances, Gibbs & Cox, with a staff of one thousand, did not seem to be resting on its laurels after designing United States. Fortune magazine reporter Richard Austin Smith, writing about Gibbs in 1957, toured the great engineering firm just as it was finishing the design of two new medium-sized liners for the Grace Line: the 14,000-ton Santa Paula and Santa Rosa. Both looked like miniature versions of United States, except with only one funnel. Overall, Gibbs & Cox was grossing between $7 million and $8 million and clearing a profit of $400,000 each year from its Navy contracts.2
But Smith noticed that there were rumblings of discontent among the staff, especially younger designers who felt frustrated by what they saw as the traditionalism of the firm. Some in the Navy agreed. Although Gibbs & Cox was working on new designs for destroyers, it was well behind its competitors in developing newer types of craft such as submarines and aircraft carriers. It was an era when the Navy was looking hard at nuclear energy to drive powerful new ships and submarines. In the vanguard were the big shipyards; Newport News Shipbuilding was designing an atomic aircraft carrier and an atomic cruiser. Top Navy brass began to feel that Gibbs & Cox was “trailing the field, with only a joint General Electric nuclear contract to show.”3
Commercial shipping, meanwhile, was also undergoing a revolution. Until the mid-1950s, cargo had to be offloaded from trains and trucks, hauled to the pier, and lowered into cargo holds. Shipping entrepreneur Malcom McLean’s Sea-Land company changed that by developing a logistical breakthrough called containerization. This was a method by which a sealed container could be lifted directly from trucks and trains and lowered onto a vessel’s deck, and vice versa. Containerization saved shippers a lot of time and money, in large part because it eliminated the need for armies of longshoremen. Frederic Gibbs’s idea to build fully integrated sea-land terminals—revolutionary in 1915—was becoming a reality fifty years later. Not in Montauk, but across from Manhattan on the New Jersey side of New York harbor, with its vast stretches of open land and easy access to new interstate highways.
Containerization would in time make all older cargo ships obsolete and spell the doom for old ports like New York, with their cramped finger piers and the shortage of land for trucks to park. But Gibbs & Cox was not designing container ships. Its biggest commercial clients, the United States Lines and the Grace Line, were still operating traditional cargo vessels. The rival firm of J. J. Henry & Company, also located at 21 West Street, got the Sea-Land contracts instead. Gibbs & Cox, once famous for radical ideas like high-pressure, high-temperature steam, had grown conservative.