Umberto Nobile And The Arctic Search For The Airship Italia

By the time it was over, eight of the crew and nine rescuers were dead and scores more had been put in harm’s way. The disappearance and search for the airship Italia was headline news, all over the world, for months after its last radio message on 25 May 1928. It had reported being to the north-east of its base at Kings Bay, on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, returning from a long flight to Greenland and the North Pole. Ships, aircraft and men from many countries converged on Kings Bay to participate in the rescue effort. The Italian airship designer and pilot Umberto Nobile had flown to the North Pole and beyond in 1926. He resolved to return to the Arctic with a new airship in 1928. The expedition had geographical and scientific aims, but the political environment was also an important motivator. Benito Mussolini and his fascist party had come to power in 1922 and a successful expedition to the Arctic would be excellent propaganda.

By the time it was over, eight of the crew and nine rescuers were dead and scores more had been put in harm’s way. The disappearance and search for the airship Italia was headline news, all over the world, for months after its last radio message on 25 May 1928. It had reported being to the north-east of its base at Kings Bay, on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, returning from a long flight to Greenland and the North Pole. Ships, aircraft and men from many countries converged on Kings Bay to participate in the rescue effort. The Italian airship designer and pilot Umberto Nobile had flown to the North Pole and beyond in 1926. He resolved to return to the Arctic with a new airship in 1928. The expedition had geographical and scientific aims, but the political environment was also an important motivator. Benito Mussolini and his fascist party had come to power in 1922 and a successful expedition to the Arctic would be excellent propaganda.

In 1926, General Umberto Nobile gained acclaim by crossing the Pole in a dirigible, and in 1926 took a dirigible to the North Pole to land a scientific research team. The ship crashed on the return flight, hundreds of miles from help. This account tells of the crash and the international efforts to rescue the explorers, bringing to life the struggles of the survivors, the heroism and tragedy of rescuers, and political intrigue surrounding the adventure. Cross, a former editor at Life, runs an editorial consulting and writing firm. The book is not indexed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

"GRIPPING. ... One of the greatest polar rescue efforts ever mounted." —Wall Street Journal The riveting true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history: the desperate race to find the survivors of the glamorous Arctic airship Italia, which crashed near the North Pole in 1928. Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries . . . During the Roaring Twenties, zeppelin travel embodied the exuberant spirit of the age. Germany’s luxurious Graf Zeppelin would run passenger service from Germany to Brazil; Britain’s Imperial Airship was launched to connect an empire; in America, the iconic spire of the rising Empire State Building was designed as a docking tower for airships. But the novel mode of transport offered something else, too: a new frontier of exploration. Whereas previous Arctic and Antarctic explorers had subjected themselves to horrific—often deadly—conditions in their attempts to reach uncharted lands, airships held out the possibility of speedily soaring over the hazards. In 1926, the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—the first man to reach the South Pole—partnered with the Italian airship designer General Umberto Nobile to pioneer flight over the North Pole. As Mark Piesing uncovers in this masterful account, while that mission was thought of as a great success, it was in fact riddled with near disasters and political pitfalls. In May 1928, his relationship with Amundsen corroded beyond the point of collaboration, Nobile, his dog, and a crew of fourteen Italians, one Swede, and one Czech, set off on their own in the airship Italia to discover new lands in the Arctic Circle and to become the first airship to land men on the pole. But near the North Pole they hit a terrible storm and crashed onto the ice. Six crew members were never seen again; the injured (including Nobile) took refuge on ice flows,unprepared for the wretched conditions and with little hope for survival. Coincidentally, in Oslo a gathering of famous Arctic explorers had assembled for a celebration of the first successful flight from Alaska to Norway. Hearing of the accident, Amundsen set off on his own desperate attempt to find Nobile and his men. As the weeks passed and the largest international polar rescue expedition mobilized, the survivors engaged in a last-ditch struggle against weather, polar bears, and despair. When they were spotted at last, the search plane landed—but the pilot announced that there was room for only one passenger. . . . Braiding together the gripping accounts of the survivors and their heroic rescuers, N-4 Down tells the unforgettable true story of what happened when the glamour and restless daring of the zeppelin age collided with the harsh reality of earth’s extremes.

The semi-rigid airship, Italia, crashed on the North Pole ice on 25 May 1928. This is the first person account as told by designer and pilot of the dirigible.

In 1928, defying Italy's Mussolini and the entire fascist party, aviator Umberto Nobile, undertook a daring expedition to the North Pole in Italia, one of several successful airships he had designed. The tragic crash of the airship on the ice and search for survivors was the most extensive in Arctic history, involving seven nations. Although Nobile and eight crew members survived, those lost included not only their tragic companions but searchers, including the famous explorer, Roald Amundsen. The Italia tragedy was described by The New York Times as "one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of aviation."

Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments. Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between 1880 – 1960, contributors to this volume show how environmental marginalisation has been discursively implemented and materially generated by foreign and local actors. It examines to what extent the status and identity of extreme environments has changed during modern times, moving them from periphery to the centre and discarding their marginality. The first section looks at ways in which societies have framed remoteness, through the lens of commercialization, colonialism, knowledge production and sport, while the second examines the reverse transfer, focusing on how extreme nature has influenced societies, through international network creation, political consensus and identity building. This collection enriches the historical understanding of exploration by adopting a critical approach and offering multidimensional and multi-gaze reconstructions. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in environmental history, geography, colonial studies and the environmental humanities.