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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 13, 2019 10:44:11 GMT -8
The Sinking of the Andrea DoriaViewed on Amazon Prime Video (included with basic subscription) • or rent HD version for $2.99
Info: IMDB • WikiType: documentary (2006) • 1.78:1 aspect ratio Runtime: 45 minutes Director: Fabio Toncelli Quick Rating: An interesting and fairly succinct telling of this event. Summary: Fifty years after the disaster, the time has come to reveal the mystery behind one of the greatest marine disasters ever and to redistribute blame and praise more justly, with an absorbing documentary using incredible archive and original footage, some seen for the very first time. After fifty years, the various pieces of the puzzle can be fit together to reveal the truth behind the tragedy.
 With a guy named “Toncelli” as the director, of course the Swedes are at fault. My conclusion is that all parties are at fault. The captain of the Andrea Doria should have severely reduced speed in the fog in these sea lanes near New York which are known to be particularly crowded, although he did take other suitable precautions (fog horn, closing the watertight doors). However, he slowed his speed only by a couple knots. At the same time, I think it’s clear that the third officer in charge of the Stockholm at the time, Carstens-Johannsen, was lying about not seeing any fog. (You can see him on film and judge for yourself.) He also should have been moving slower as well as sounding the fog horns (which he wasn’t). It’s as if this captain and this third officer were both going out of their way to collide. And both had radar. But they had no means to communicate ship to ship. Whatever rules of the sea there were for passing another ship,, they both took different views of what to do. "Willy nilly" seemed the rule of the day. Imagine specifically trying to ram two ships together. It’s probably not that easy if you were intentionally trying to do so. But these two found a way. There were recriminations all over. This was a huge press event at the time. The Swedes, in particularly, went into PR overdrive while the Italians were closed-lip (and this cost them in the public PR battle). So soon after the war, sympathies generally did not lie with the Italians. Eventually Lloyds of London (insurer of both ships) stepped in for a secret out-of-court settlement. I don’t think this documentary gives stunning new evidence that solves the case. There’s just an opinion at the end by some guy who looked at the radar data and tried to reconstruct what happened. He blamed the Stockholm completely. That is obviously a dishonest conclusion, although I think it’s reasonable to say the Stockholm was slightly more at fault perhaps. Maybe. 
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Post by timothylane on Aug 13, 2019 11:21:57 GMT -8
I read that the Titanic would have survived the collision with the Stockholm -- and the Andrea Doria would have survived the collision with that iceberg. Generals are said to prepare for the last war, and perhaps ship designers have a similar problem.
An episode of Night Gallery has the Lusitania picking up one guy in a boat who says he's from the Titanic -- 3 years after it sank. He could hardly have listed on the boat that long. Soon, of course, he finds himself on the sea alone in a boat -- until he's picked up by the Andrea Doria. (Incidentally, that was also the name of an Italian battleship that served in both world wars. It was massively refitted between the wars, but was still a rather inferior ship by 1940.)
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 13, 2019 13:19:55 GMT -8
I couldn’t comment on that. But this documentary did say that the Andrea Doria had the latest safety features and was built quite well. The conclusion was that it was remarkable that it hung on so long . . . long enough to get most off. Forty-six people died, presumably most of these in the collision and immediate drowning.
One was a child whose father panicked and threw him down to a lifeboat. He missed and the child hit his head severely on the side of the lifeboat. He was later taken to a Boston hospital where they were unable to save him.
The documentary mentioned that one reason the captain of the Andrea Doria didn’t slow down was because of the pressure to keep to the schedule by one's bosses. There was apparently a lot of pressure from the passengers to do so as well.
I find this credible. “Safety first,” baloney. These are mostly pampered passengers (although they had a “tourist” class…the old third class) who expect to be where they’re supposed to be. And because amongst them are movie stars and other big-hitters, they could definitely affect the business if you got a reputation for being unreliable. Let us remember that these are big floating Utopias for the pampered set.
It’s a real shame when they showed this one family of Italian immigrants who all perished in “tourist” class on their way to America for a better life. For the upper crust who likely contributed to the ship’s captain taking risks he shouldn’t have, one can have a certain amount of contempt.
Those ships were likely filled with the same nitwits as we have today, traveling the globe in jets and telling us all how we’re all threatening the planet because of too much CO2.
Imagine if the captain (both) had simply slowed their ships down to a proper speed. The documentary said the rule was to be able to stop in half the distance as your line of site. That would have meant that the Andrea Doria and (likely the Stockholm as well) would have been crawling. But then they would have been acting responsibly. So, they lose maybe an hour or two, tops? So what.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 13, 2019 13:56:06 GMT -8
Note that the Titanic was also in a hurry. In that case it was in effect a race -- ships were challenged to set record times crossing the Atlantic. Perhaps Titanic would have set a record if it hadn't run into the iceberg. Also note that the radio operators were so busy sending personal messages from first-class passengers that they didn't have time to pay close attention to the ice floe they were approaching.
Safety experts recommend keeping far enough behind the car in front of you to be able to stop -- I think the idea is to have as long as 2 seconds to traverse the distance, which can be determined when both cars pass some stationary object like a road sign. This allows for recognizing that the car in front is slowing down and then the reaction time needed before you start braking.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 13, 2019 14:11:04 GMT -8
It’s easy to lose site that the only reason these magnificent beasts were ever afloat was to service the wealthy who wanted to be pampered in luxury.
The Andrea Doria was a break-out project for the Italians, a sign that they were vital again and ready to get on with things. The ship was packed with art from the finest Italian artists of the day.
It’s probably enormously easy to get swept up in these watery Utopias and forget about such things as icebergs and other ships. I’m still working my way through the book on the Lusitania. The Germans were beasts. Anyone who has even the remotest doubt about how they were bombed in WWII should remember what a wild and nasty animal the Germans are, or could be.
But the odd thing is that they had specifically warned through published advertisements that the Lusitania would be a target. This either wasn’t noticed or was written off by most. But I was surprised to read that the general consensus was that most people on board knew there was a real danger sailing into British waters in the middle of a war. And yet still they did it, such was the draw of luxury for many. (Others, of course, might have been attending to vital business interests.)
After all, what good is it to be rich if you can’t flaunt it? That has always been the way of things. You can count on one hand the number of people who are quietly rich. There is no point in being rich unless you let the world know it. Hey, if it means getting on a big ship with a bulls-eye painted on it, that’s just the risk you take to remain amongst the elite.
I have people — almost always women — driving way too close to me. They are so close, that is why I know they are women. They could be trans-males, but then what are the odds?
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 13, 2019 14:49:58 GMT -8
As I recall, the Lusitania sank faster than it should because it was carrying munitions, which it should not have been according to rules of war which had been previously agreed on. These munitions went boom whereas normal trade goods would not have. The British government knowingly put civilian and foreign lives at risk by doing this.
That the British knew this to be the case is proven by the fact that the Admiralty denied any such munitions had been on board until the 1980s, at which time they admitted it to be the case.
I also seem to recall that had the munitions not been on board it is thought likely that the Lusitania could have reached land before sinking. They were only a few miles off-shore.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 13, 2019 15:16:10 GMT -8
That would be the Losertania. I'll let you know what I find out in the book regarding arms shipments that weren't supposed to be there.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 13, 2019 15:24:01 GMT -8
I learned as a teenager that Lusitania was the ancient area on the Iberian Peninsula once ruled by Rome. It covered most of modern-day Portugal. For some reason, I thought this was just cool.
There is also some society or association with Lusitania in its name. This has nothing to do with the ship. I recall seeing it's plaque/sign outside some colonial building in Hong Kong over thirty years ago.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 13, 2019 15:51:59 GMT -8
Another ship from the same line was the Mauretania, another Roman provincial name (in northern Algeria, as I recall). The name is also used by a West Africa desert country north of Senegal. (The name is unrelated geographically, much as Ghana has nothing to do with the medieval state of Ghana,which was the first of a series of kingdoms in the upper Niger valley. The later versions were Mali, which is the name of the country in the same area today, and Songhay. I had a short history of the 3 countries.)
That line may have had a fondness for Roman provincial names, since they liked names ending in "ia" just as White Star liked "ic" and another liked "ian". Note that 2 ships involved (or not) in the rescue of the passengers of the Titanic were the Carpathia (whose captain was the hero of the affair) and Californian (whose captain was the villain of the matter).
There was a book on the sinking of the Lusitania that came out while I was in college. I never read, but I knew someone who did and mentioned a few details that the Admiralty wished no one ever heard about. Bureaucracies tend to hide embarrassing errors, as the USAAF did with the Battle of the Pribilof Islands during the World War II Aleutian campaign.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 13, 2019 16:36:20 GMT -8
It took a while for me to find it, but here is a link to that association which I was referring to.
This is a club for those of Portuguese extraction. It makes perfect sense as the Portuguese claimed Macao in the 1500's and China only took it back a couple of decades ago. While Macao was a busy trading port for several centuries, the Brits took a lot of its business with the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s. So smart Macanese moved to Hong Kong to do business.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 13, 2019 17:10:01 GMT -8
Of course, Portugal is also famous as Britain's oldest allies. It was the Royal Navy who rescued the King and took him to Brazil when General Junot took Lisbon in 1808, beginning the Peninsular Campaign. Wellesley had a sizable number of Portuguese troops, which under British training and leadership eventually became quite competent. (David Chandler in The Campaigns of Napoleon noted that Junot started on the Franco-Spanish border with 25,000 men, and only 1000 left when he reached Lisbon due to straggling on the way. That was enough to take the city virtually without resistance.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 14, 2019 8:25:37 GMT -8
I just ran into some bits in Erik Larson’s “Dead Wake” that reports on some of the military supplies carried by the Lusitania:
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Post by timothylane on Aug 14, 2019 8:51:18 GMT -8
I'm not sure what restrictions US neutrality laws made on trade during the Great War. Not only did the US arm the allies, but it extended credit for them to buy the arms. This credit was a big inducement for making sure the Allies didn't lose, which would likely make paying off the debts very problematical. Interwar US neutrality laws were much more restrictive.
FDR very cleverly started his pro-Allied effort with a "cash and carry" law (I don't know if it was an actual law or merely an executive order) that said arms could only be sold for cash and must be carried by non-American ships. Either side could make use of the law, but of course Nazi Germany was hardly capable of arranging such shipping. (There probably were Germany merchant ships in American ports, but they were stuck there until the British no longer controlled the sea lanes. That never happened.) It was very clever -- ostensibly neutral but actually favoring the Allies in the European War. (By the same token, it favored Japan in the Pacific War, though their ability to pay cash may have been less. On the other hand, the reason the Sino-Japanese struggle was called an "incident" rather than a "war" was to avoid US neutrality laws.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2019 7:36:47 GMT -8
I’m just at the point in Erik Larson’s “Dead Wake” where the Lusitania is about to catch a German torpedo.
A couple things of note:
1) It seems the British weren’t all that interested in the safety of Lusitania. There is reason do believe that part of this was because Churchill was off in France at a conference and the Admiralty was thus actively left in the hands of someone who was mentally not all there. And it was likely because there could be a big pay-off if a ship with many Americans aboard was sunk. Churchill is quoted in this book with words to that effect.
2) The belligerence and recklessness of the Germans is hard to underestimate. Even the German chancellor at the time was disturbed by the open-ended policies given to the u-boats by Kaiser Wilhelm. It was a policy guaranteed to increase Germany’s combatants.
The book itself is not one I’ll do a formal review of because it’s just not that good. So I mention a few things here.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 8:12:14 GMT -8
The weird thing is that the Germans didn't have the U-boat strength to make unrestricted submarine warfare work well enough. By 1917 they did and came close to throttling Britain until the latter started convoying, but by then the US was unwilling to tolerate this.
The Germans knew this would happen, so they decided to seek Mexican help (presumably not having noticed the events of the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa, which didn't really succeed but wasn't blocked at all by Mexican forces). It was incredibly stupid, made even worse by sending the message over a telegraph line controlled by the US.
And then, when the British intercepted, decoded, and reported the message, the Germans admitted that they had sent it instead of trying to deny it.
Incidentally, when Admiral Nimitz took over as CINCPAC, he admittedly ordered unrestricted submarine warfare by his own ships. Karl Doenitz's lawyer made use of that at Nuremberg. (The argument of tu quoque wasn't allowed at Nuremberg, a necessity given the Soviet presence. But Kranzbuehler, the lawyer, argued that this showed that USW had become acceptable practice. It didn't entirely work, and Doenitz was convicted anyway, though he had the shortest sentence of the guilty -- ten years. Admiral Raeder got life.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2019 9:08:56 GMT -8
We all here know that the blurring between differentiating between military and civilian targets was taken to a new level in WWII. But hadn’t it always been customary for the victors to sacks cities, loop, rape, burn, and pillage as the supposed just spoils of war?
In this specific case, with the Lusitania carrying so much war materiel, their careless belligerence might be legally justifiable. But militarily it was a disaster for Germany.
In the case of Nimitz, I don’t know the details. But given that we were attacked first, and that Japan was a mad dog in Manchuria and other places, there was sufficient reason for the gloves to come off.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 16, 2019 10:11:31 GMT -8
It certainly wasn't unusual. Prior to the modern era, the resulting loot from the sacking of cities was considered as pay or a bonus. There was of course the matter of blood lust as well. It is hard to control an army at the best of times, but if it has been suffering for months outside the walls of a city which resisted, the soldiers often went berserk.
The Mongols used the sacking of cities as a means to terrorize their enemies. Apparently, it was fairly standard for them to tell the city under siege that if it would surrender and submit to Mongol rule everyone would be spared. If it didn't surrender and was conquered everyone, including women, children, dogs and cats would be slaughtered. After a few such sieges, people thought better of resisting the Mongols.
One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was so vicious was that in early campaigns like Guadalcanal, some Japanese would pretend to be surrendering by partially raising their hands. Once American Marines or soldiers go close enough, the Japanese would then lift up their arms all the way and grenades which they had been holding in their armpits would drop and explode. After a few of these instances, Americans were less inclined to take prisoners.
Even today, some Japanese deny the Rape of Nanking actually happened.
Another thing which many do not know is that many of the guards in Japanese POW camps were Koreans. They had a very bad reputation for mistreating Allied POWS.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 10:13:35 GMT -8
The Germans simply had no concept of the importance of PR, I suspect because democracy (despite their universal manhood suffrage, which even Britain and the US didn't have) was so weak there. (They elected the members of the Reichstag, but the chancellor and his cabinet were imperial appointees not subject to legislative approval or disapproval.) So when they executed British nurse Edith Cavell for spying (which she was guilty of), the Allies squawked about executing a women. When the French executed women such as Mata Hari, the Germans didn't squawk because the French had every right to do so -- even though the Cavell incident had already happened.
They were politically stupid. Hitler and Goebbels actually showed more sense during World War II because they had to use political propaganda to win and so were used to it.
I suspect Nimitz went on the assumption that everyone was doing it. He probably couldn't imagine that the Japanese weren't doing it, and they probably were. They certainly did occasionally send I-boats to sink merchant ships -- but not often. Japan's peculiar form of bushido had many disadvantages, not least their failure to see the importance of economic factors. When their subs did attack merchant ships, they would only use a single torpedo to sink it, trying to reserve as many as possible for navy ships. If one wasn't enough, oh well, it was only a civilian ship anyway.
They did sink a lot of Allied ships with their subs. But then, so did the Germans, and even the Italians. And so did the Allies, including 2 of the 3 Japanese carriers sunk in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot (Taiho by Albacore and Pearl Harbor veteran Shokaku by Cavallo). One of the highest totals of tonnage sunk by a US submarine was by Archerfish, which only sank 2 vessels, one a small coastal ship -- and the other the carrier Shinano, initially a sister to Yamato and Musashi and the world's third largest warship ever at the time.
I once saw a TV promo for a movie about going after the Shinano, but didn't see the movie and don't know the title.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 10:17:09 GMT -8
Generally, the commanders made no attempt to stop the sacking of a besieged city. It was a legal privilege to do so if it refused to surrender after the siege lines got close enough (completion of the second or third parallel, I can't remember which). The troops would have ignored any order not to sack it at that point, and it's militarily unwise to issue orders that won't be obeyed because it sets a precedent for disobedience.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2019 14:37:49 GMT -8
You misspelled it. I spell it “loop” and I’m right and your wrong. Bah wa wa wa. (Bleeding over from a Selwyn thread.)
“He looped and pillaged.” You say what?
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