Collision Course: The Classic Story of the Collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm

by Alvin Moscow

In another remarkable first, in heavy seas in the dead of night off the southern tip of Japan, the most technologically advanced and sophisticated of ships, the U.S. nuclear submarine George Washington, traveling beneath the surface, rammed into a small Japanese freighter, the Nissho Maru, and sent her to the bottom of the Japan Sea. The captain and the first mate were lost at sea. No one aboard the Nissho Maru had the slightest warning of the approach of a submarine. The collision became an international incident when it was reported that the George Washington “hit and ran.” The U. S. Navy did not acknowledge its submarine’s involvement in the sinking for a full thirty-six hours after the collision. It also touched off an international politically embarrassing question as to what a nuclear-armed American submarine was doing in Japanese waters.