Through all of the various accusations which were later leveled, what is clear from the trek out was that Fritz was in appalling condition, semi-coherent, and suffering fainting spells and fatigue so extreme that he was forced to curl up on the rocks and take naps along the way. Jack again stepped up as nursemaid, preparing him meals and often literally holding his hand lest he fall to the ground.
Interestingly, in Jack’s diary covering the twenty days from Concordia to Srinagar, he never mentions the tragedy or the men they left behind. Instead he gives great detail of every sumptuous meal he and Fritz ate, including a twelve-egg omelet (while also noting that Fritz was worried that the Sherpas, whose rations had been cut for the trek out, would complain to the Himalayan Club), the joy of smelling grass and flowers again after nearly three months on ice and rock, and the petty spats between him and Fritz.
Fritz’s diary ends on August 7, the day he called off the rescue attempt and descended to base camp for the last time. His only mention of the long trek out was years later, to interviewers and in notes to the authors of his planned, but never completed, biography. In these instances, Fritz spoke mainly of Jack and his panic, suggesting that Jack had cared for him “like a baby” because he was afraid of what Fritz would tell the world of Jack’s actions and inactions on the mountain.
They reached Shigar, the first village with a telegraph station, on August 18 and sent word to Tony Cromwell, who awaited them in Srinagar, and the American Alpine Club in New York. Dudley Wolfe and three Sherpas were dead.
As they approached Srinagar in late August, before time and circumstance had revised their stories, Fritz and Jack wrote their official expedition report for the American Alpine Club. In it they carefully detailed the weather, the team’s movement up the mountain, when and where the camps were established, the summit attempt, the descent, the discovery of the deserted Camp VII, and Fritz’s retreat down through the stripped camps to base. Of the three-and-a-half-page report, nearly two of the single-spaced, typewritten pages detail Fritz’s bid for the summit—the route, the rocks, the overhanging serac, and what he called “the greatest mistake I could have made” in turning around when Pasang refused to climb through the night; it didn’t mention any of the problems or the final tragedy. Although Jack thought Fritz had “padded the story to his own fancy,” all in all it was a very dry, very thin telling of the expedition’s two months on the mountain. Jack and Fritz worked on several revisions before they considered the account finished.
Then Tony Cromwell appeared and all hell broke loose.
When Tony and Joe Trench had left base camp on July 25 and started their long walk out, Tony was still smarting from his last encounter with Fritz and anxious about his own decision to strip Camps II and IV. He knew that it would be Fritz’s focus of attack in explaining why he had failed to make the summit, and although Tony had had nothing to do with the Sherpas’ decision to clear Camps VI and VII, the fact was he had taken it upon himself to order the lower camps stripped. When he and Joe caught up with Chap and George outside Askole on July 30, they had already rewoven their story. In their version, Fritz was blinkered by summit fever, had refused to bring a hobbled Dudley Wolfe down, and had ordered the Sherpas to rescue him, a rescue for which they were woefully untrained. Most remarkably, in Tony’s version of events, it was Jack (rather than himself) who had given the order to strip all the camps. Both George Sheldon and Chap Cranmer wrote in their journals that Tony had told them that “Jack, out of turn,” had cleared the camps. George summed up the tragedy, mincing few words: “The blame, as has been said before, lies mostly with Fritz. The great K2 expedition is over and they have lost four men. Fine work.”
Tony stayed in Srinagar a month after leaving base camp, anxious to see Fritz and find out what had happened. He learned the worst on August 19 when Fritz’s telegram arrived from Shigar: four men were dead. Reeling from the news and anxious about how they would handle the crisis, Tony all but ran to meet Fritz and Jack as they approached Srinagar on the 27th. At first relieved to finally see them, Tony then read a draft of Fritz and Jack’s expedition report and exploded, calling it a disgraceful cover-up. Further, he charged that Fritz was fully responsible for the deaths of Dudley Wolfe as well as the three Sherpas, because a rescue of that caliber, without sahibs to assist, was something for which the three Sherpas were clearly not trained.
Jack, always hoping to avoid a confrontation, tried to calm the two warring men, but Tony would not be mollified. He turned on his heel and stormed ahead into Srinagar. Once there, he sat down to write his version of the tragedy to Joel Fisher at the American Alpine Club in New York. Like Fritz and Jack’s report, Tony’s quickly detailed the weather and camps, but unlike what he told Chap and George, his written report offered no blame or speculation about the leadership or the stripped camps. Tony’s report also stated that Fritz, Dudley, and Pasang’s near-fatal fall occurred on July 17 during ascent, not on July 22 during descent, and that, after the fall, Dudley was too ill to leave the tents at Camp VIII during the week that Fritz and Pasang went for the summit.
Presumably gleaned from Pasang Lama, Tony’s timeline of the accident and Dudley’s subsequent illness offer a glimpse into an alternative scenario. Perhaps the fall had happened before Fritz went for the summit, not after he descended, and Dudley was left in Camp VIII because he was incapacitated. If true, Fritz’s decision to leave Dudley sick, possibly injured, and alone while he went for the summit was certainly one he would have had a difficult time defending. It’s interesting to note that in two major accounts in which Fritz detailed the expedition, he never mentioned the fall. The first was his own original report written with Jack in Srinagar;* the second was a 1969 interview for Ascent. Additionally, when Fritz later read Tony’s report in New York, he made angry notes in the margin objecting to and correcting many of Tony’s assertions, but he made no notes next to Tony’s statement that the fall occurred on July 17, versus July 22, his own claimed date. The fact that there are two different timelines for the fall indicates, more than anything, that Fritz’s memory of what and exactly when things occurred was severely compromised during his final days on the mountain.
Tony didn’t stop with his formal report. He wrote a letter to Fisher with his more personal assessment of the failed expedition, and urged Joe Trench, who was still in Srinagar, to do the same. While Trench’s letter was detailed and without any overt accusation, he did cite three failures by Wiessner which he felt contributed to the eventual tragedy. First, because Wiessner was “not very coherent” when he reached base camp on July 24 and as “he kept no diary,”† those in base camp were unclear as to where and when Dudley had been left and in what condition. Second, Wiessner’s order to send up three Sherpas to “fetch Wolfe” was “hardly right” because the Sherpas were only high-altitude porters and not trained guides prepared for such a difficult mission. Finally, Trench wrote that if Wiessner had deferred his summit attempt until Camp VIII was fully stocked, “the lives of four first class fellows would not have been needlessly wasted.”
Without explaining why, the American consul in Calcutta, Edward Groth, dismissed Trench’s report out of hand, deeming it “superficial” to the point of having no credibility. Meanwhile, Tony Cromwell’s letter was a scathing, if not libelous, attack in which he accused Fritz of murder. The letter was evidently so incendiary and vindictive that Groth and the British Resident in Kashmir, Lt. Col. D. M. S. Fraser, questioned Cromwell’s motives more than the actions of the accused team leader.*
Finally, Lt. Gen. Sir Roger C. Wilson, the president of the Himalayan Club in Srinagar, wrote his own summary, stating that the expedition was “remarkable for the antagonism which developed between the members. Squabbles within parties are not unknown, indeed they are incidental to a prolonged stay at high altitudes, but nothing approaching this one in intensity has ever come to notice. It divided the expedition into hostile factions and even endured after the tragedy, for which, incidentally, it was mainly r
esponsible.” Wilson’s report was sent to the secretary of state in Washington DC and was filed in the National Archives, but like so many other potentially damaging documents, it disappeared from the American Alpine Club archives.
Whichever account was closest to the truth, the argument was lost in the firestorm that followed; the war had begun, both between the expedition members and out in the world. On September 1, Germany’s Blitzkrieg against Poland began and on September 3, after Hitler ignored an ultimatum to remove his forces, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
While the European powers readied for World War II, the remnants of the 1939 expedition found themselves adrift halfway around the world.
BACK IN NEW YORK, from the moment the American Alpine Club received word that four men on the team had perished, one of them Dudley Wolfe, club officials began circling the wagons; they knew they had a crisis of potentially devastating proportions on their hands. Not only had America suffered its second death in the Himalayas in only ten years,* but the fatality was a man from one of the country’s oldest and wealthiest families, a family that would certainly demand answers. Further, the expedition had been led by a man whom many of the club’s most august members had refused to join, reportedly because of his volatile temper and autocratic leadership style.
Having received Tony Cromwell’s report in late August, and not knowing of the internecine battles brewing on the expedition, the club decided to distribute the account to its membership. Fritz was still in India but he was already under attack.
ON SEPTEMBER 4, Groth, the US consul, traveled to Srinagar to interview Fritz Wiessner and Jack Durrance. For seven hours he spoke to the men separately and together about what had happened on the expedition. While Tony and Joe were blaming Fritz and Jack, and Fritz and Jack had obliquely accused Tendrup for starting the rumor that the summit team was dead, once they were faced with Groth’s questions about what went wrong, Dudley Wolfe was suddenly no longer the victim. He became their culprit.
In Groth’s report, perhaps one of the least self-serving (if a bit xenophobic) of the many reports to follow, he firmly attributed the expedition’s overall failure to a “clash of temperaments” due in large part to Fritz’s “German bluntness…like every German, he is very forceful in giving commands and totally unaware that the abrupt, blunt manner in which the order may have been given might have wounded the feelings of his associates, who in this instance, being Americans, naturally had a different attitude and outlook in matters of this sort.” He also examined the financial inequity as a source of conflict: “the general feeling of several of the expedition members was that, as they had borne their share of the expenses and had contributed liberally to the expenses of one or two members unable to pay the entire cost out of their own pockets, they were entitled to have just as much to say about the running of the expedition as the leader.” As Jack was the only one who joined at a discounted rate, it would seem that this came from Fritz and was a direct criticism of Dudley Wolfe, a man he called his “brave comrade.” Or perhaps it did come from Jack, and was an indication of his resentment and guilt at having been financially sponsored by a man he had then been unwilling or unable to rescue.
In telling Groth of Wolfe’s fateful decision to remain at Camp VII while Fritz and Pasang descended, Fritz insinuated that a sluggish ineptitude was the root of the problem. Groth wrote:
It appears that Wolfe…was not as sure of himself as might have been expected. It also appears that he had a definite tendency to be lazy…As the time of the crisis approached, Wolfe, either as a result of the debilitating effect of the altitude, or through sheer laziness, expressed a desire to rest a few days at Camp VII.
The degree to which Jack and Fritz criticized Dudley’s “sheer laziness” was interesting, given that while climbing the mountain it was his slow pace and clumsiness mostly on the steeper sections that troubled the men. In fact, in listing what each team member would carry from day to day, Fritz had assigned equal loads to Dudley and Jack.* Further, Jack had only witnessed Dudley’s climbing and carrying of loads in the earliest days when the team was still low on the mountain, and then once between Camps V and VI when he himself collapsed. Other than that, Jack and Dudley spent no time together on the mountain.
By the time Groth wrote his report, Tony Cromwell had discredited himself, not only by writing and sending the inflammatory letter to the AAC, but in having left base camp with Wolfe still on the mountain. In fact, Groth seemed to be the only evaluator of the tragedy who publicly narrowed the focus to Cromwell, questioning why he ordered the lower camps stripped and then why he and Jack Durrance did nothing days later when the Sherpas descended with all of the high camps’ gear. These actions, Groth felt, were the final and most devastating blows to the expedition.
After his day-long discussion with Groth, Fritz sat down and wrote Alice Wolfe a lengthy letter expressing his regret and sorrow. While it spoke of the “dreadful disaster” and how “depressed” he was about not being able to have had a “more active hand in the rescue attempts” of Dudley, his first and foremost regret was in not achieving the summit: “I have never been hit so hard in my life, first to lose the summit which seemed in my hands, and then the terrible realisation of Dudley’s and the Sherpas death, and now a war.”
Then he began the unhappy work of gathering Dudley’s belongings and sending them to the American consulate in Karachi, from which they would be shipped to America. In addition to two locked suitcases full of items Dudley hadn’t needed on the mountain (presumably including the tuxedo and gold cufflinks) which he had left in Srinagar, Fritz detailed what he had packed up from Dudley’s tent at base camp. Curiously, the list he compiled on September 11, 1939, included a diary, but by the time Dudley’s effects were catalogued by the US consul general several months later, the diary was not listed. Given Fritz’s earlier curiosity about Jack’s diary and his reported breaking into Jack’s base camp tent to read it, perhaps Dudley’s created just too much temptation for him. Or maybe it simply got lost in the long transit home. Also missing from the final shipment home to Maine were Dudley’s movie camera and his final rolls of film from high on the mountain. They were never officially accounted for.
AFTER SOME WORRY that transatlantic travel would be curtailed for months because of the war, commerce began to move again by mid-September and Tony Cromwell finally managed to book passage on the USS Harrison out of Bombay on September 24. Meanwhile, Fritz was still managing the expedition’s last diplomatic affairs and getting Dudley’s effects sent home to Boston. Unable to leave as scheduled on the Harrison, he flew on a noisy DC-3 to Alexandria the following week, caught up with the boat on October 6, and sailed home from there. One can only imagine the look on Tony’s face when he saw Fritz, whom he thought he’d seen the last of in Srinagar, embark in Egypt. It is unknown if the two ever spoke on the boat, although it’s possible. Shortly into the weeks-long passage, Fritz was thrown out of bed in rough seas and badly wrenched his back. He spent the rest of the trip in his cabin.
Jack also had been eager to part company with Fritz, but he was evidently not anxious to get home. He lingered for two more months in India and then Europe before finally boarding a ship out of Naples headed for New York on November 26. An interesting and unanswered question is: how did the penurious student pay for it?
IN ST. ANTON, Austria, Alice sat in her small living room and wept rare tears for the man she loved. In her hand she held Fritz’s telegram: DUDLEY WITH THREE SHERPAS LOST VICINITY CAMP SEVEN ACCIDENT CAUSE UNKNOWN AS SEVERE CONDITIONS PREVENTED THEIR RECOVERY THIS SEASON STOP DEEPEST SORROW FELT BY ALL STOP.
As she struggled with her warring emotions, she had a small sense of comfort in knowing that at least Dudley would have been proud to die on the mountain. He had been so adamant about going, so sure that this expedition was his destiny, she had felt powerless to even try to talk him out of it. So perhaps it was his destiny and perhaps he was at peace.
He had been such a rare
presence in her life, a man who kept her guessing. Yes, he had been reserved, withdrawn even, but always gentle and charming, generous and kind, to her and to everyone who crossed their threshold. Unlike his staid family in Maine, he had relished people with exotic last names and foreign accents, interesting people with stories to tell. He had loved finding his Jewish uncle and cousins in London and sharing their life, so different from his own, so full of music and laughter and lively debate around the dinner table. The Wolfs, as well as his own experiences on the ocean and on the front lines, had opened him to worlds beyond the gated stone walls of Warrenton Park in Maine, and perhaps, she thought, he’s happier there, high on that mountain.
That afternoon she sorted through Dudley’s letters and postcards, putting them into two piles, one containing more of their personal history than she cared to share, and the other with his more newsy, impersonal letters from the expedition. With tears streaming down her face, she walked to the small stove in the corner of her living room and burned the first stack. She tied the second stack into a bundle and tucked it into her suitcase. She would deliver it to Clifford, Dudley’s brother, when she returned to America next month, if she could ever make it out of Austria.
The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 Page 21
