Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  Nobile overhead Mariano and Malgren discussing the possibility of walking there. Malgren indicated Nobile and Cecioni. ‘With them?’ he asked. Mariano nodded and he said, ‘No! That’s impossible!’ Later that day Mariano, Zappi and Malgren came to Nobile with a revised plan. They, the fittest of the party, should try to reach the island before it was too late. One can imagine how Amundsen or Byrd would have dealt with such a proposal from a faction within his own expedition. But, instead of issuing a decisive order, Nobile suggested the whole party get together in the tent to discuss what they should do. The group was assembled, and Cecioni became so overwrought at the idea of being abandoned he began to cry like a child.

  All nine men crammed into the tent and debated the plan at length. Should the three fittest go? Should they all try to reach the island, dragging the injured men on improvised sledges? Should the two casualties remain on the ice with Biagi and the radio while the rest went? Nothing was decided. They settled down for the night. Nobile, cuddling Tintina in the bag he shared with Cecioni, found it hard to get to sleep. The others were so eager to be off, he felt estranged from his men. They didn’t even look the same, ‘dirty, with beards already sprouting and fur caps on their heads’. Nothing in them recalled the elegant youths he had known in Rome.

  The night was not dark, for this was 24-hour daylight, but somewhere in the course of it the sun broke through the clouds and Zappi extricated himself from the pile of bodies to go outside to take a fix on it so as to calculate their drift. He burst back into the tent at once saying in a loud awed whisper, ‘There’s a bear!’

  Malgren – who’d by now established that his shoulder was not broken as he’d thought, and had recovered from his earlier despair – was the first to respond. ‘Give me the pistol.’ Taking it, he went outside, ordering them to stay quiet. They crept out the tent after him to watch. The polar bear stood seven or eight feet tall on the other side of the tent, looking at them with small black eyes. Notoriously ferocious animals, when they charge it is with the locomotive power of a train; it requires a large-calibre rifle and a well-aimed shot to stop them. Yet with a single shot from a revolver Malgren hit the bear in the heart and dropped him dead.

  The drama was over in a moment. Lucky shot or not, the kill was immediate and the huge beast lay dead before them. By that act the party of castaways acquired 400 pounds of fresh meat – and Malgren became de facto leader of the tribe. There was no debate, his kingship was recognised at once. Something elementally symbolic had taken place and, without even being conscious of it, the group of young twentieth-century Italians had retrogressed in an instant to become a primeval tribe. Malgren informed Nobile that the fittest men would leave at once to try to reach the island. It was vital the party should be led by someone who knew the Arctic – and he was the only man who did. He, Zappi and Mariano would go to look for help, the rest remain.

  While the three prepared for their journey Nobile and the others wrote letters to their wives and families for them to carry.

  The stuffy tent was suddenly filled with memories of our dear ones far away; in the silence that settled on us one heard the scratching of pencils on paper … Then I looked at Cecioni. The poor man had put down a few lines then been too upset to go on. I glanced at what he had written; it revealed all his despair, his anguish … ‘No, it isn’t certain we shall die here,’ I said. ‘You must write differently. Hand it over, I will write and you shall copy it out.’

  That done, Nobile then scribbled seven pages to his own wife, including a few lines to Maria: ‘You must keep Mummy from crying if I don’t come back again…’ The letters were given to those leaving. The three men said goodbye in an emotional farewell, shouldered their bundles and started on their march.

  At the official enquiry in Rome which followed these events ten months afterwards, importance was attached to the fact that, while in the tent, the Swedish scientist Behounek had entrusted letters to Malgren to take home, but it appears that neither Zappi nor Mariano was aware that Malgren was carrying these on him. In view of what will occur later between Malgren and the two Italians, the reader also may find the fact significant.

  For twelve days Biagi continued to send out SOS calls but no one heard them. Yet the wireless was working perfectly. The six men remaining on the ice could hear the near-continuous transmissions from the Città di Milano, and by turning to national radio in Rome they could catch news reports on the disaster – which grew fewer as the days passed. At the start of June they listened to the President of the Italian Senate announce that they had sacrificed their lives for Italy in the name of science. They had been given up for dead.

  The group passed all their time trying to stay warm in the crowded tent. They ate bear meat, which they cooked after a fashion on a gasoline fire. They talked a lot – of home, of the past, of the crash and the fate of their companions who had drifted off in the wrecked airship. All the Italians except for Nobile were sunk in gloom, particularly Trojani, who was so stunned by melancholy he could barely speak. Nobile tried to encourage them. ‘I believed in prayer … We can die quite tranquilly … We have done our duty … we have fulfilled the mission confided to us by the Pope, and Italy knows this. The Cross and our national flag have descended upon the Pole…’ The group’s response to this was less than wholehearted. Poor Cecioni was so anguished by the idea of abandonment that he spent his days sitting in the snow trying to build a sledge from the twisted scraps of metal fallen from the Italia. A hopeless task, which made him weep with frustration.

  On Nobile’s suggestion Biagi was now transmitting an SOS from 8–9 p.m, as well as just before each hour. He was a nervy irritable man and no one interrupted him at these times; he was left alone to continue at his thankless task. But on the evening of 6 June suddenly he shouted, ‘They’ve heard us!’ Nobile crawled over to read the message as he wrote it down: The Soviet Embassy has informed the Italian Government that…

  By some quirk of the airwaves a Russian ham operator had picked up a faint fragment of morse from one of his transmissions. It took a while to convince the Russian authorities of the authenticity of what he’d heard, still longer to interpret the text: SOS FOYNCIRCA. Did it mean Franz Josef Land?

  But next day the Città di Milano was in touch with them directly. The Court of Inquiry held later in Rome – having listened to the evidence but expediently pre-decided where blame for the disaster must fall – concluded that the base ship had been unable to hear them before because of interference from the Kings Bay transmitter, but the shameful truth was otherwise. They’d been too busy chatting with the world to maintain a radio watch. So gloomy before, the party on the ice became manic with anticipation. ‘How splendid it was to see my men laughing again – dirty, grimy, ragged as they were!’ They celebrated with a sumptuous meal. ‘But it’s not over yet,’ Noble warned them.

  It wasn’t, though many efforts were in hand to reach them. The Russian ice-breaker Krussin was trying to smash a path through to them from the east; the Hobby (Amundsen’s earlier base ship) was steaming through the broken ice with two small aeroplanes on deck; a Captain Maddalena was on his way from Italy with a flying boat; Amundsen was preparing to come to their rescue with a French amphibian…

  Nobile drafted long messages of advice and requests for his party’s needs. He had nothing else to do, and these became so detailed that Captain Romagna – not by nature the most sympathetic and caring of men – told him to shut up and conserve his batteries. In the rush of excitement at making contact with the world the Italians had dyed their tent scarlet to make it easier to spot – with the shot bear’s blood, the press reported. For the first time they went to look for a level area where an aeroplane might land. They built a bonfire, kept the signal pistol to hand, and maintained a look-out, but no plane came. As the days passed, the men on the ice suffered the anguish of hope deferred…

  25.

  EXIT OLD STAGER

  Outside the protection of Tromsö’s harbour the sea is chopp
y, and the big Latham amphibian wallows in the waves as it taxis into position for take-off. Seated by the pilot at the front of the open cabin, Amundsen straps on his seatbelt…

  Only days before in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel and the company of eminent guests he had received a message from his government appealing to him to go to the rescue of General Nobile. The request was flattering, for the world thought of Amundsen – if it thought at all – as a has-been. He’d answered the call, accepting the assignment. But no funds to pay for the attempt were immediately forthcoming; he’d had to beg what he needed on credit. To put together this rescue flight had proved a weary task, he’d paid a price in nerves and patience. There were men ready to accompany him on the mission – there were men who’d follow him to the end of the earth – but the prime requirement was a plane. He located several but inevitably came the question: ‘Who is to pay for this?’ The Norwegian government. ‘Yes, but…’ Once again he felt the humiliation which came from recognising that his own word was no longer good. He was tainted by bankruptcy, poverty and suspicion of fraud as he had been for years; in his one chance of breaking free to restore his fortune he’d been beaten to the goal by Byrd.

  At length Amundsen obtained a plane. He’d extracted this Latham twin-engined seaplane from the French government, together with an equipe of three. The men were unknown to him, but when the plane arrived in Oslo he’d added Dietrichson to the crew (who had been with him and Ellsworth in 1925, and who was Bernt Balchen’s cousin). Dietrichson is at the controls in the pilot’s seat beside him now. The French airmen are still muttering in affront but Amundsen fixes them with a stare. Do they know ice?

  The Latham pitches in the broken sea beyond the shelter of the harbour. As the plane turns across the wind waves slap against its floats and a splash of salty spray splatters the windscreen; the cross-breeze carries the whiff of aviation fuel from the port engine. At the controls Dietrichson lines up for take-off. He turns his head to check the interior of the aircraft, then glances at Amundsen whose craggy profile is etched against a background of moving cloud. Imperceptively the old man nods and the pilot pushes the twin throttles to full power. Engine noise rises to a howl and the amphibian surges forward to bang across the crests, casting spray. It skims and lifts off, the banging ceases and becomes a persistent roar. At 500 feet the pilot banks the aircraft to take the course he has been given… and Amundsen leaves the stage for the last time.

  His plane becomes tiny in the distance and is lost behind the scudding clouds. There is no glory in his departure, no one was there to see him off. Appropriately so, for he’s always loathed publicity and distrusted the press, who once idolised him then turned when he fell from grace. Yet he has never complained; he’s stayed faithful to his code, maintained his troth. Indeed, it is his code that has brought him to this point. He has nothing but contempt for Nobile and the man’s vanity, which has caused his predicament. But Amundsen sees it as his duty to attempt to rescue him… and so meet his own end somewhere on that vast expanse of ice.

  26.

  EXIT FOOL PURSUED BY JEERS

  From their improvised camp on the pack ice, Nobile and his party see planes searching for them during three days. They shoot off flares, they light the bonfire, but not until 20 June does one locate them. Appropriately it is the Italian, Captain Maddalena. He drops them food, clothes and radio batteries. Next day come two Italian flying boats, one of which drops more supplies. The other carries a movie newsman hanging from the window cranking his camera. On its final pass it swoops low; the pilot leans out the cockpit to give a theatrical wave and shout, ‘Arrivederci!’, then zooms away.

  In fact it wasn’t ‘arrivederci’ but ‘goodbye’, for Italy took no more effective part in the rescue. Later, Nobile was bitterly disappointed by the way Mussolini and his country washed their hands of him. But if Il Duce was associated with an undertaking it had to be successful. Failures did not exist. Mussolini denied Nobile; the Italia flight was not a Fascist venture and he became an unperson. Air Minister Balbo’s reaction was more up-front. He received the news of Nobile’s crash while in Spain finalising the details of his own spectacular flight along the Mediterranean coast from Rome, with sixty aircraft flying low, wing to wing in close formation to demonstrate Italy’s air power. ‘Serves him right!’ he told the press.

  On the ice, while waiting for a plane to come and lift them out, Nobile worked out the order in which his men would leave. At the top of the list he put Cecioni, last himself. On 24 June their rescuers came in sight, a seaplane accompanied by a Fokker fitted with skis. There was no open water available for the amphibian; it circled while the Fokker put down on the ice 150 yards from the tent. The pilot Lundborg got out, leaving the motor running. He was taken to Nobile, and said, ‘General, I have come to fetch you all. You must come first!’

  ‘Impossible,’ Nobile replied, and pointed to Cecioni. ‘Take him first.’

  ‘No! I have orders to bring you first, because we need your instructions to start looking for the others,’ Lundborg told him.

  This is how Nobile described their exchange to the Commission of Inquiry. He says he took ‘the others’ to mean those carried away in the airship and understood the logic of wanting him to direct their rescue, but again he insisted Cecioni leave first. Lundborg became impatient; Cecioni was too heavy, he’d have to leave his co-pilot behind and that was impossible. ‘Please hurry,’ he urged. Nobile asked the rest what they thought. He says they all insisted he go first. ‘I hesitated … Then I made up my mind … It needed far more courage to go than to stay.’

  He allowed himself to be carried to the aircraft and flew off, clutching Tintina. An hour later he was in Spitsbergen. He did not realise the significance of his action, but he was made sharply aware of it next day when Captain Romagna came to his cabin on the Città di Milano and said, ‘People might criticise you for coming first, General. It would be as well to give some explanation.’ He was completely taken aback. He had already drafted a long wireless message to the Naval Secretary: ‘I have come to take up my post of command…’ Captain Romagna did not bother to transmit it. It was particularly unfortunate for Nobile that the men he had left behind could not be lifted out. On returning there, Lundborg’s plane had crashed and somersaulted. Its pilot was unhurt and moved in with the others waiting for rescue in the red tent. After that the snow became too soft for a ski-plane to land. Responsibility for the men’s rescue was delegated to the Krassin, still crunching its way toward them through the pack ice.

  Meanwhile Nobile was left to himself, cuddling Tintina in his bunk aboard the base ship. His request to join the Krassin was refused and the cables he drafted were ignored. No one came to visit him or spoke to him. At a banquet in Rome Balbo raised his glass to the room and toasted the disappearance of the Italia, while, lying with a broken leg in his small cabin on the Città di Milano, Umberto Nobile was left alone to suffer what he describes as ‘thirty-two interminable days of indescribable torment’.

  There had been no news of the party which had left the red tent on 30 May to seek help, but on 10 July a search plane from the Krassin sighted three men only a few miles ahead of the spot the ship had reached. A couple of days later the vessel arrived at the location to find only Mariano and Zappi. There was no sign of Malgren, whom they claimed had died five weeks earlier.

  Neither man left an account of that terrible five-week trek, which in all that time covered only about fourteen miles. The story has to be reconstructed from the evidence given at the Commission of Inquiry, which describes it as ‘one of the most tragic episodes told in Polar history’. The report is striking because of the lack of clarity. The facts are few and can be succinctly summarised. The first day’s march the party travelled only one or two miles. The second day was worse. By the end of it Malgren was trembling and hysterical, the others could not understand what he was saying. Over the next ten days his condition deteriorated further. They were wet and cold, had no tent, and possessed only
one blanket which they shared. On the twelfth day Malgren threw himself down and said he could go no further. He asked his companions to cover his eyes with a jacket and hit him on the head with an axe.

  In their testimony Mariano and Zappi state that they naturally refused. They say he gave them his compass to pass on to his mother, but turned down their suggestion to leave him any food, which would only prolong his suffering. The two Italians dug a shallow trench to protect him from the wind, put him in it, and camped one hundred yards away. Several hours later Malgren heaved himself above the level of his grave to shout that they must press on. He collapsed back into the trench so abruptly Zappi thought he must have committed ‘some desperate act’. He did not go back to check.

  The two Italians continued their journey. Three weeks after setting out they were still a half-mile from Foyn Island. They had seen several aircraft but had lost all idea of time in the endless daylight. They built an improvised shelter out of snow and settled down to wait for rescue or for death. Fifteen days later they were found by the Krassin. Mariano had to be carried aboard the ship on a stretcher and could not speak. His foot was badly frostbitten and had to be amputated; he died a few months later. But Zappi walked unassisted up the steep gangway. He was in a highly excited state and unable to stop talking, though he avoided all questions about Malgren. He said they had had no food for twelve days.

  With the two aboard, the Krassin continued the few miles through the ice to rescue the five men still waiting at the red tent. No further search was made for the wreck of the Italia. The Krassin transported the survivors to Kings Bay where Nobile was struck by Zappi’s overstrung state of mind and remarkable physical fitness. When asked to recommend him and Mariano for the Italian gold medal for valour, he politely refused.