At the pier the American Red Cross, the Travelers Aid Society and representatives of the Welfare Department were on hand in force. The telephone company rigged up twenty extra telephones at Pier 88, which were addition to the seventeen permanently on the Pier. Capt.  William V. Bradley, president of the International Longshoremen's Association was present when the Ile de France arrived and said that he had 500 longshoremen standing by.  He said they would render free any service for which they were needed. The Italian line said It would pay all bills, including hotel expenses, of the survivors, and also promised to reimburse the Red Cross and the Welfare Department for their expenses.

The survivors were disembarked on the pier's upper level. Slowly they descended, singly or two or three at a time. Cleared through a Red Cross enclosure, they went forth into a battery of floodlights and a wall of newsmen and photographers. Laughter blended with tears on the faces over 700 Andrea Doria survivors when they arrived aboard the Ile de France to join friends and relatives they thought they may never see. It was a moment when emotion, created by many hours of anxiety, burst forth like a flood.

"My baby! My baby!" a mother screamed when she spied her young daughter walking unaided off the ship. Mother and daughter embraced and cried uncontrollably. The scene was repeated a hundred times as wives were joined with husbands, parents with children, brother with sister.

Mrs. Angelina Guarnieri rushed forward to clasp her sister, Mrs. Benedetta De Michele, who came to the US to live with her sister. This reaction was typical of the first survivors to reach land safely. For most, the disaster was the high moment of their lives.

As they left the rescue ships, many clad in bathrobes and pajamas, some with bandages, hundreds of anxious spectators pressed forward watching for a familiar face. "My husband. He's safe!" a young woman shouted, breaking through police to reach her loved one.

Priests and nuns stood by reciting silent prayers as they awaited friends returning from religious pilgrimages in Rome. One nun began to bite her nails as she waited the first of more than 20  stretcher cases lifted from the Ile de France.

It was 6 p.m. when the first casualty was treated.  She was Mrs. Viola Gentle, seventy-five, of San Francisco.  Dr. Fernando Vescia, of the Bellevue Unit, helped her to a cot, exchanged pleasantries with her in Italian.  He administered a sedative noting that the elderly woman was suffering from shock. "You have money?" a nurse from Bellevue asked Mrs. Gentle. Mrs. Gentle pointed to her bosom and whispered  yes. She got into a taxi and said she was going to a hotel.

A moment after Mrs. Gentile was released, the first of about twenty stretcher cases started to be brought down the gangplank. By 6:30 p.m. twenty-one stretcher cases, sixteen women and five men-had been carried off the Ile and whisked away in ambulances to Roosevelt, St. Clare's and St. Vincent's Hospital.  

Several of them had legs or arms in casts. One woman was heavily bandaged about the head. Another injured woman was pregnant. She was accompanied by her husband, and four-year-old daughter.  One injured man was in his bare feet.

A Roosevelt Hospital ambulance took an entire family to the hospital: Giuseppe Napoli, his wife Rosa, and their daughter Angela,4. Giuseppe and Angela were not injured but Rosa was expecting a baby and she  was suffering from shock. They would not leave her.

Many of the first survivors were Italian immigrants seeing this country for the first time. Their faces showed stark fear as they stepped on the foreign soil they hope some day to call home. Unable to speak English, they gestured wildly trying to give police and first aid units personal information so desperately needed. But the Red Cross solved this by having on hand a delegation of Italian-speaking aids.

Red Cross, Salvation Army and other welfare groups started the almost impossible task of locating missing relatives and outfitting those left virtually without clothes.

Nicandro Caranci came here to live with a brother he has never seen. He planned to find him among the throng on a New York pier by the simple expedient of shouting the family name at the top of his lungs. But he came down the gangplank of the Ile de France to a wild, noisy scene of shipwrecked survivors instead of home coming passengers, and his simple plan failed. Italian speaking officials turned him over to the Traveler's Aid Society. Miss Eileen Sweeney checked Nicandro in a room at the Roosevelt Hotel and began a long distance hunt for Nicandro's brother. Speaking no Italian and only armed with a  name and address she called three states before finding Antonio Caranci who then came to pick his brother up.

"My son, he's where?" an Italian woman asked a pier official. She was quickly turned over to one of several Italian speaking police officers called in to ease the language barrier. Margherita Prata had no idea where her son was. They were separated when she gave Enrico to a priest on the Andrea Doria but could not keep up with them while fighting the crowds on the deck. 
His name was not on any of the lists that were available and it took a frantic search by a news paper reporter to find him on a list of Stockholm survivors. It appeared that Enrico's name was left off an earlier list.

Among survivors who had managed to stay together during the rescue were John Dazzo and his bride Carmella. Laughter and tears blended as they told how their wedding trip to a home in the US had been a nightmare but "we thank God we're here at last".

Mrs. Anna Coppola arrived on the Ile de France with her sons, Francesco and Fillipo. Her infant son Luigi was missing, the child was placed in another lifeboat when they left the Andrea Doria.

One of the largest families to arrive was Mr. and Mrs. Ellis D. Hill and their five children including their 2 month old twins.

The Paladino family was sick with worry, they did not find their four year old daughter Maria on the Ile de France and now they were in New York. They were advised to go to Pier 84 where the Cape Ann would arrive at 7:30pm. 

Dr. Thure Peterson reported the death of Camille Cianfarra and his two children and then sadly added that his own wife was crushed in the wreckage, died in his arms and went down with the ship.

After the Pvt. William H. Thomas docked she watched each emerging passenger until she saw Mary Green, a nurse, carrying a bundled-up baby in her arms. Only his blonde hair showed, but that was enough for Mrs. Coppola.

"My baby, give me my baby", she screamed in hysterical relief, as she rushed forward to embrace her child.