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Pink dawn found the 697-ft. liner heeled well over, her wound completely hidden under water. Above the ring of rescue vessels helicopters from shore appeared at the call of Stockholm. One snatched up three injured seamen, who were hurried to shore. Another gently hoisted the youngest casualty, four-year-old Norma di Sandro, whose skull was fractured, possibly when she was dropped from Andrea Doria into a lifeboat. (She died next day at Boston's U.S. Public Service Hospital.) By 5 a.m. only Captain Calamai and a score of his crew were still aboard Andrea Doria, still trying to level her with auxiliary pumps. At 7 a.m. they admitted defeat, were taken off. Three hours later, while silent seafarers watched transfixed, Andrea Doria poised a polished fantail and motionless screws in the air, then slid down to the ocean's dark bottom. Behind her the sea bubbled and quivered a hundred hues of green. The surface shuddered, the bobbing rubble tossed on the swell until the liner was well down.
Then, to a world that had wondered about her chances, the Coast Guard cutter Evergreen flashed a death notice:
S.S. ANDREA DORIA SANK IN 225 FEET OF WATER AT 10:09 A.M.
Tears in Italy. Down with Andrea Doria went some of Italy's finest contemporary art, created especially to decorate the nation's first postwar speedship.
Down went nine automobiles, one a $100,000 sports-car prototype hand-built in Turin for the Chrysler Corp. Down went 1,764 bags of mail, together with crates of antiques and cases of vintage wines. When the writhing sea was still, the Coast Guard cutter Evergreen dropped a temporary tombstone: a yellow marker buoy.
In Italy, men who helped build Andrea Doria wept for her. At her New York pier, men and women wept for the kin they feared she had carried down. But to Manhattan at evening came Ile de France, first rescue ship to reach port. Slipping upriver to a hero's well-deserved cheers and whistles, the French liner docked, unloaded 750-odd survivors, and prepared to hurry off again that same night towards France. Some 30 of the survivors were gently carried on stretchers from the ship's infirmary down a gangway to waiting ambulances. On the fantail a weeping Andrea Doria officer called 100 men to a last muster. Commented lie de France's Captain de Beaudean: "Altogether, it was like being back in the war years." Ninety minutes later Cape Ann, no less a hero, docked at Andrea Doria's pier with 129 survivors. In Brooklyn Thomas arrived with 150-odd, Allen with 77.
Among them: Captain Calamai, his uniform grimy, his braided cap gone, his face solemn and sad. Next day Stockholm limped in at seven knots and docked with more than 500 survivors. On the pier, some families who had gone from ship to incoming ship searching for kin turned and sadly walked away.
Balancing Saga. At week's end insurance syndicates reckoned their shares of the multimillion dollar loss, radar experts considered electronic failure against human failure, architects tried to explain why the compartmented Andrea Doria sank. In the U.S. an adjourning Congress, without determining its questionable right to act. authorized an investigation of the sinking. Overseas, Italians and Swedes bitterly blamed one another for the loss. Meanwhile, grimmer figures were being figured. The weekend total: 25 dead.