by Ed Viesturs
So the three Sherpa turned back and descended to Camp VI. It is a tribute to their extraordinary devotion that they still did not give up on Dudley Wolfe. They stayed in their tent on July 30, as a minor storm blew through.
On July 31, Pasang Kikuli, Kitar, and Phinsoo started up to Camp VII once more. They again left Tsering behind to brew up tea for their return.
Tsering waited all day, a pot of tea ready, but no one came. He waited at Camp VI all the next day. Finally, on August 2, in a terrified panic, he dashed down to base camp.
We will never know what happened on July 31. It may be that the three Sherpa were avalanched off the mountain between Camps VI and VII, or that one fell and pulled the other two off. In 1939, the survivors thought it was conceivable that the Sherpa had reached Wolfe and rallied him into descending, only to have all four men meet disaster on the way down.
On August 3, with two Sherpa, Wiessner made one more attempt to ascend the route. It took him two full days to, as he put it, “drag myself” up to Camp II. He was incapable of going higher. On August 5 a full-scale storm broke, dumping more than a foot of snow and ending any further hopes of going up the mountain. Two days later what was left of the expedition team started out for Askole.
Dudley Wolfe’s body was discovered on the Godwin Austen Glacier in 2002. Curiously enough, ten years earlier we’d stumbled upon what may have been one of Wolfe’s hobnailed leather boots, near our base camp. The boot contained the remnants of ankle bones and sock material. But in the aftermath of our rescue of Gary Ball, the boot somehow got forgotten.
In 2002, two documentary filmmakers from a Spanish expedition first came across bones from a leg and a pelvis. That team was led by Araceli Segarra, who had been a key member of our IMAX team on Everest in 1996. Shortly thereafter, the Spaniards found the remains of a canvas tent, tent poles, and a cooking pot. The clincher was a mitten with Wolfe’s name written on it in capital letters. The discovery seemed to prove that sometime between 1939 and 1954, the tent at Camp VII, with Wolfe’s body in it, had been avalanched off the mountain, and that therefore the three Sherpa had never reached Camp VII on July 31 (or had reached it and had once again failed to persuade Wolfe to descend).
No trace of Pasang Kitar, Phinsoo, or Pasang Kikuli has ever been found.
On the march out to Srinagar, the rearguard party—Wiessner, Durrance, and most of the Sherpa—never caught up to the Cromwell-Cranmer-Sheldon contingent, which had joined forces at Askole. In 1984, Wiessner recalled that hike out:
We were together every day. Durrance looked after me as if I were a baby. He made pancakes for me. And every day we talked. I just couldn’t comprehend what had happened on the mountain. “I don’t understand it, Jack,” I told him, “why those sleeping bags were taken out after all our agreements.” He kept answering, “It was a matter of those Sherpas.”
I kept asking him. Finally, he stood there and shouted, “Ah, Fritz! Stop it! Stop it! We have talked about it long enough!”
In Srinagar, Wiessner and Durrance lingered while they painstakingly drafted an official account of the expedition for the American Alpine Club. There they were also interviewed by the American Consul to India, Edward Miller Groth, who, though not a mountain climber, prepared his own analysis of the expedition in a memorandum addressed not to the AAC but to the State Department in Washington, D.C.
It was not until September 20 that Wiessner and Durrance finally separated, as the former boarded a ship for New York. On that day, Durrance wrote in his diary, “Fritz & I part ways, thank God.”
Tony Cromwell had preceded Wiessner to the States. Upon disembarking in New Jersey, Cromwell publicly leveled the ridiculous charge that Wiessner had “murdered” Dudley Wolfe. Greeted in New York by reporters armed with Cromwell’s claim, Wiessner rashly told the New York Times that “on big mountains, as in war, one must expect casualties.”
Wiessner had not recovered from the ordeal of K2. In New York City he entered a hospital, where he was bedridden for six weeks, as doctors treated severe arthritic problems in his knees and chronic back pain. Durrance later came to New York, stayed in a hotel, and sent some of Wiessner’s belongings to him in the hospital, but he never paid a visit. The two men would not meet again for thirty-nine years.
In his bed, Wiessner brooded about the stripped camps. He had come to accept that the removal of sleeping bags from Camps VI and VII was due to Tendrup’s false report that the three men above must have died in an avalanche. But what explained the stripping of the vital supplies—including thirteen sleeping bags—from Camps II and IV? Had Wiessner found everything in place at Camp IV, he believed, he could still have gone back up the mountain and made a third attempt on the summit. And Dudley Wolfe would not have died—which would have meant that the three Sherpa also would not have died.
As he lay in his hospital bed, rummaging through his personal papers, Wiessner later reported, he came across a handwritten note that he had earlier overlooked. It had been left for him by Durrance at Camp II on July 19. The note, as Wiessner recalled, congratulated him and Wolfe for making the summit, then explained that he, Durrance, had ordered the recovery of the sleeping bags, in anticipation of the expedition’s departure and to save valuable equipment. The implication was that Durrance assumed that Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama would be bringing their own bags down all the way from Camp IX. When Wiessner had found this note at Camp II on July 23, he had been too exhausted and upset to make sense of it. Now, in the hospital, it seemed to supply the missing piece to the puzzle.
Wiessner later wrote that he deposited this all-important note in the files of the American Alpine Club. When he subsequently tried to relocate the note, it was gone.
In K2: The 1939 Tragedy, Kauffman and Putnam devote several pages to what they call the “phantom note.” Phantom, because no one else ever went on record as having seen the note. They entertain three hypotheses. The first is that Durrance did indeed write the note, and that it was later lost or destroyed by someone in the AAC. The second is that Wiessner lied, inventing the story of the note. But the third goes a long way toward clearing up the mystery.
The single most important discovery of new evidence made by Kauffman and Putnam comes in an entry from Durrance’s diary, written at Camp II on July 18: “Dawa danced up here yesterday aft. with notes from Toni [sic] and Chap: ‘Salvage all the tents & sleeping bags you can, we have ample food.’ Easier said than done!” Nonetheless, Durrance carried out the command, which surely had come from Cromwell and not from Cranmer (who had played no part in the assault since his early collapse at base camp). The same entry continues,
Dawa & Pasang [Kikuli] must go aloft and return rather heavily loaded—meanwhile … I must pack down 55 lbs. of equipment to [Camp] I and return to-night. The boys are more than willing—so that is precisely what we did. I had some time with my bulky load alone over several icy places and dodging stones in the large couloir…. Dawa brought down 65 lbs. and Pasang 75 lbs. from above!! We arrived simultaneously. Big feed!
So the lower camps were indeed stripped on orders from a “sahib”—but that man was Cromwell rather than Durrance. The note Wiessner claimed to have found at Camp II may well have existed and later been lost in the AAC files, but if so, on reading it in his frazzled state, Wiessner had mistaken Cromwell’s hand for Durrance’s.
The revelation of Durrance’s diary entry still leaves questions unanswered. Did no one realize that removing all those sleeping bags and air mattresses, on which the climbers up high completely depended, amounted to (as Wiessner had wondered in his diary) “sabotage”? Cromwell may well have been so witless and so eager to head home that he could issue such a ruthless demand. But why did Durrance and Pasang Kikuli obey it? Surely Kikuli, among all the men on the mountain except Wiessner, best understood the vital importance of that chain of camps so well supplied over the weeks, at the cost of so much labor and risk. Perhaps, despite the note Durrance left for Wiessner, by July 18 all three men had already dec
ided that Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama must be dead—though the hastiness of such a conclusion defies credibility.
Kauffman and Putnam argue convincingly that for the rest of his life, Wiessner, whose tensions with Durrance had sprung from the moment they first met in Genoa, blamed the wrong man for the 1939 tragedy. This itself is curious, since it was Cromwell who, as soon as he arrived in the United States, went on the attack and accused the expedition leader of murdering Dudley Wolfe.
If Wiessner had fingered the wrong man, which he did explicitly in his 1956 article in Appalachia, why did Durrance not spring to his own defense? A published photocopy of his July 18 diary entry could have solved the question for good. Kauffman and Putnam argue that Durrance was in essence a private person, and that after the expedition he was so soured by its antagonisms that he preferred simply to ignore the controversy. In any event, Cromwell lived for forty-eight years after the expedition, Durrance for fifty-two, without ever committing to print a single line about what happened in 1939.
The ill-starred expedition led by Wiessner had seen the first fatalities ever to take place on K2. In addition, Wolfe’s death was the first incurred on any American expedition to the Himalaya or the Karakoram. Tragic those losses certainly were—but the controversy surrounding them would have quickly faded, had it not been for the political climate of the day.
Wiessner was still in Srinagar when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, and when Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Within climbing circles, the conservative American and British disapproval of the great breakthroughs German and Austrian climbers were making in the Alps, not only with their “ironmongery” but with their apparent willingness to risk all for glory, had been simmering for most of the decade.
On October 27, shortly after Wiessner had returned from India, the AAC launched an official investigation of the expedition. The club had never done such a thing before; nor was it at all a normal procedure. In 1922, seven Sherpa had been killed in an avalanche on Everest, in an accident that arguably involved real negligence on the part of Mallory and his fellow climbers; but the Alpine Club of London had never considered launching an inquiry. Cynical observers would later suggest that had only Sherpa been killed on K2 in 1939, the AAC wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow. But Dudley Wolfe was a Boston Brahmin, a blue blood from New England—as were many of the AAC’s luminaries and officers. And Fritz Wiessner was a German-American, at perhaps the worst time in the twentieth century to be one.
The AAC investigation took months to complete, since the members of the committee had such differing views about assigning blame for the tragedy. The final draft claimed a disinterested motive: to “point the way towards a greater control of the risks undertaken in climbing great mountains.” But the report came to some patronizing conclusions. It claimed that the expedition’s “human administration seems to have been weak;” that there was “no clear understanding” of plans between Durrance and Wiessner when they parted; that it was an “error in judgment” to leave Sherpa alone in the middle camps; and that an ill climber (Wolfe, who was not in fact ill) should not have been left alone to make his own decisions. The brunt of all these criticisms fell on Wiessner. The committee gave the actions of Durrance and Cromwell an implicit but total whitewash.
A summary of the report was sent to all AAC members. In the accompanying letter, the committee congratulated itself for its “valuable contribution” in the way of guidance “if Himalayan expeditions are undertaken again.”
Charlie Houston had declined to serve on the committee. But there was no doubt about his views. On September 28, 1939, he wrote his old Harvard friend and Alaskan teammate Bradford Washburn a letter about the expedition:
I feel as you do about K-2. The report makes it clear that the party was driven beyond their powers, extended much to[o] far along their line of attack, and very poorly prepared for the very bad luck which they kept enduring. There is no doubt that bad luck is far worse when you aren’t prepared to cope with it.
Wiessner is to blame for most if not all of the mishap, and I don’t believe I can ever forgive him. I didn’t know Wolfe, but I knew and dearly loved Pasang [Kikuli] and P[h]insoo, and what they so gallantly did, alone, I can’t forget.
Two members of the AAC committee strenuously disagreed with the report and wrote dissenting views. One was Al Lindley, the strong mountaineer who had made the second ascent of Mount McKinley and who had been on board for the 1939 expedition until, at the last minute, he’d had to back out. Lindley argued that Wiessner was being dealt a serious injustice by the report, for the simple reason that “the action of the Sherpas and Durrance in evacuating these camps was so much the major cause of the accident that the others are insignificant.” The other dissent came from Robert Underhill, who, though a New England blue blood himself, had applied techniques he had learned in the Alps to bold first ascents in America. Underhill’s long rebuttal came to a stirring conclusion:
What impresses me most is the fact that thruout all the bad weather, the killing labor and grievous disappointments, [Wiessner] still kept up his fighting spirit. Except Wolfe, the rest of the party were excusably enough, finished and thru—quite downed by the circumstances; toward the end they wanted only to get out and go home. Wiessner, with Wolfe behind him, was the only one who still wanted to climb the mountain. Far be it from me to blame the others; I know well that if I had been there myself I should have come to feel exactly the same way, and probably much sooner. But this leads me to appreciate Wiessner the more. He had the guts—and there is no single thing finer in a climber, or in a man.
Bitterly stung by the report, Wiessner resigned from the AAC. The most chilling (and, in retrospect, comically absurd) episode in the backlash against Wiessner came only a few months after he was released from the hospital. Wiessner never publicly spoke about this confrontation until 1984, when he told a writer about it.
One day [in early 1940] my secretary in my New York office told me that two men from the FBI had come by. I went down to the FBI office and met two very nice young chaps—they were both Yale graduates. We sat down and talked. They wanted to know my whole history, and they had the funniest questions. Such as, “You go skiing often in Stowe in the winter, do you not? That’s very near Canada, isn’t it? Can you get easily over the border?” I said, “Yes. It’s quite a distance to walk, but I’m in Canada very often anyway because I have a business in Toronto.” And they laughed.
I wasn’t very keen on Roosevelt then. And so they said, “You don’t like the president? You made some remarks about him.” I said, “Well, I wasn’t the only one. There are very many people who feel that way!” They laughed again.
They asked about some of my friends. We sat there half an hour, then we just talked pleasantly. On the way out I said, “Now look, fellows, I was pretty open to you. I have my definite suspicions. Would you tell me the names of the men who put you up to this?” They said, “Naturally we can’t do that.” So I said, “Let me ask this question: was it some climbers from the AAC?” They nodded. They said, “Don’t worry about it. You know who we had here yesterday? We had Ezio Pinza, the famous opera singer. It was the same thing, a little jealousy from his competitors. They complained that he was a Mussolini follower.”
If Wiessner’s story is true—and it seems too bizarre for him to have made it up—it leaves ambiguous the question of whether his AAC detractors simply wanted to harass him or genuinely believed he was a Nazi spy.
Sadly, the criticisms leveled in the AAC report, full of innuendos attributing Wiessner’s “mistakes” to his “Teutonic” style of climbing and leadership, became the received wisdom about the 1939 expedition. Kauffman and Putnam rescued from oblivion the memorandum Edward Groth, the American consul in India, had sent to the State Department. It is full of aspersions based on ethnic prejudices. For instance:
With his German background, also owing to the fact that he possesses a large share of German bluntness … it is not rema
rkable that there should have been a clash of temperaments. Wiessner is undoubtedly an excellent climber and a good leader, but 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 have a different attitude and outlook in matters of this sort.
At its worst, the second-guessing took the form of outright condemnation. In Abode of Snow, a widely read history of Himalayan climbing, the British writer Kenneth Mason gave an utterly garbled summary of the events on K2 in 1939, concluding, “It is difficult to record in temperate language the folly of this enterprise.”
For the most part, Wiessner ignored these criticisms and got on with his life. In 1955, however, he published a very small book about the expedition in German, titled K2: Tragödien und Sieg am Zweithöchsten Berg der Erde (K2: Tragedy and Victory on the Second-Highest Mountain in the World). Miriam Underhill, Robert Underhill’s wife, the finest American woman climber of her day and the editor of Appalachia, persuaded Wiessner to allow the publication of an English translation of the part of the text that covered events on the mountain between July 9 and August 7. Underhill’s introduction ended with a challenge: “If any other member of the expedition disagrees with Mr. Wiessner in any respect, and will send us his version of the matter, we should be very glad to print it.” No one responded.
That text for the first time lays out Wiessner’s version of the stripping of the camps and makes it clear that this dismantling was what wrecked the expedition and led indirectly to the deaths of Wolfe and the three Sherpa. In a single sentence, Wiessner summed up the personal impact of the tragedy. Had he and Pasang Lama found sleeping bags at Camp IV, he insists, he and Wolfe might have been able “to resume our final attack on the summit of which I felt so confident.” Instead, “a cruel fate determined otherwise, and therewith ended the hardest fight, the greatest hope, and at the same time the greatest disappointment of my climbing career.”
