July 25th, 1956, 11.10 PM – With a deafening bang, the reinforced bow of MS Stockholm slams into the side of Andrea Doria directly below her bridge, forcing its way through cabin walls, corridors, and steel bulkheads and penetrating more than a third of the way into the interior of the ship. All the fixtures, fittings, and trappings of daily life aboard the liner now mix together in a crush of steel, glass, wood, foam, oil, and the people themselves within their cabins, the mass of wreckage then raining down over the surface of the sea and beginning to spread away from the collision area.

As the impact occurs, nearly forty of those aboard are killed instantly, all of them passengers. Those not annihilated completely by the force of the collision are quickly drowned as thousands of tons of seawater pour into the liner’s breached oil tanks and pull the ruined staterooms beneath the surface. Smoldering fires are begun within the ship’s walls, which though protected by fireproofing still pour acrid smoke into staterooms and corridors, setting off the liner’s sprinkler systems and causing further flooding in otherwise undamaged areas. Still coursing onward at nearly 22 knots, the Andrea Doria then drags Stockholm along briefly by its shattered prow, spinning the Swedish liner partially sideways with its forward motion before the two vessels separate a few moments later. Following this, Stockholm’s torn hull then scrapes along the length of the larger ship, scattering broken wreckage and pouring cascading showers of sparks down her starboard side before finally drifting off silently into the night and disappearing into the thick fog just as quickly as she had appeared.

Shuddering to a gradual stop as her starboard engines fail, Andrea Doria now rolls into a sickening list from which she does not recover, and within a minute or two is leaning over at a dizzying angle of fifteen degrees, then eighteen, then twenty. Shocked initially by the sudden appearance of Stockholm and the devastating collision, the Italian liner’s officers now face the horrifying reality that their ship may now capsize and founder at any minute.