Show Me a Hero

by Jeremy Scott

  In the previous two weeks Nobile had stood in the presence of his idol Mussolini, been charged with a mission, appointed an emissary for Italy, effected a major sale, chiselled himself a fat fee, and landed the job of piloting an airship to the North Pole. For a man who was a skilled designer of dirigibles but had no experience of commanding men, none of the Arctic, and didn’t even possess a full flying licence it had been a remarkable ten days’ work. And this was just the prologue to the drama in which fate so unexpectedly had cast him. The show itself hadn’t even started yet.

  The ceremony of handing over the Italian airship to the Amundsen–Ellsworth expedition and renaming her the Norge was to be attended by Mussolini and scheduled to be a national event. Amundsen and Ellsworth arrived in Rome three days before, travelling from Oslo via Berlin, where they had only thirteen minutes to change trains. While hurrying from one platform to another, Ellsworth was handed a cable from the Norwegian Aero Club informing him that, unless $25,000 required to insure the airship was immediately available, the Italians were not prepared to transfer its ownership. Without the money no handover could take place.

  Thommessen, president of the Club, was already in Rome, staying at the same hotel where they were booked. As soon as they had checked in, he met with them in Amundsen’s room. He was as appalled by the unexpected demand as they, and had a concern of his own to impart. Accompanied by Nobile, he had already met Mussolini and agreed with his request that one-third of the airship’s crew should be Italian. Thommesen went on to explain Italian national pride was involved in the venture and that it would be expedient ‘for political reasons’ if Nobile’s name featured with their own in the title of the expedition. Only in Italy, he hastened to add, and of course it would in no way affect the command structure; Amundsen was the leader and in full control of the party.

  Amundsen listened to what Thommessen was saying with growing displeasure. He himself was bankrupt, he felt bad that Ellsworth would have to be the one who came up with the money required. And then there was the question of renaming the flight the Amundsen–Ellsworth–Nobile expedition, even if it was only for local consumption. He turned in his chair to face Ellsworth. ‘You must decide,’ he told him, ‘For myself I don’t care.’

  Rather reluctantly Ellsworth agreed. Amundsen shared his irritation. With Thommessen for his weakness in dealing with the Italians, and with Nobile for his brazen chutzpah in upping his own fee. Yet he knew it was not the fellow’s tiresome character they were buying but his expertise and professional skills. That he was Italy’s top airship specialist was sure, but about his piloting ability Amundsen had for a brief while been less certain.

  On an earlier visit to Rome, Nobile had taken him and Riiser-Larsen on a trip to the coast in his car. Amundsen describes it in his biography:

  Nobile proved to be a most eccentric chauffeur. So long as we were proceeding on a straight highway he drove steadily at a rational speed. The moment, however, we approached a curve … he would press the accelerator down to the floor, and we would take the blind curve at terrific speed. Halfway round, as I was convulsively tightening my grip on the seat … and shuddering with fear of disaster [he] would seem to realise the danger, and frantically jam his brakes on with all his strength, which, of course … threatened to topple us over. To prevent this, he would then start zigzagging with the front wheels … His whole performance was evidence of his extreme nervousness, erratic nature, and lack of balanced judgement. When Riiser-Larsen and I were alone, I expressed the gravest apprehensions. If, I exclaimed, this is a sample of his disposition on firm ground, it would be madness for us to trust ourselves with him in the air.

  Riiser-Larsen’s reply astonished me. ‘No,’ he said, ‘That does not follow. Some of the steadiest, coolest aviators I know have exactly this fellow’s nervous characteristics. In ordinary life, they strike you as excitable and erratic. But the moment they take to the air – it may be the steadying effect of the stimulation of danger – they are as cool in an emergency as anyone you could imagine.’ Riiser-Larsen’s explanation seemed plausible, and I accepted his reassurances … Surely, I thought, if he can believe in this man’s capacity in the air after this experience, I need not have doubts about it…

  Following the meeting with Thommessen in Amundsen’s hotel room, Ellsworth sent a cable to his bank in New York ordering the transfer of $25,000 to the Aero Club to settle the insurance problem. The handover ceremony at Ciampino three days later was splendid. The great white dirigible, 106 metres in length, had been manoeuvred out of its hangar and tied down on the launch pad. It’s new name, NORGE, had already been painted on its side; now the Italian flag flying from its stern was hauled down and replaced by that of Norway. A huge crowd attended the event. There was a thumping band, the media with flash and movie cameras, and Mussolini accompanied by a large entourage composed of dark-suited men in bowler hats and military officers in dress uniform of breeches, swagger boots and peaked caps larded with gold braid.

  A photograph commemorates the occasion. Mussolini standing stage right displays his famous profile looking full left at Amundsen, spruce in a high-buttoned suit, who returns his regard with a smile, clearly pleased at what has been effected. But Nobile has upstaged both of them. Though short in stature, by thrusting himself forward he appears tall as they. Hat pushed back on his head, staring full into camera, a bemused grin is pasted across his face.

  The Norge was scheduled to take off on 3 April to join Amundsen and Ellsworth in Spitsbergen. ‘You will succeed,’ Mussolini told him. ‘I am sure of it. You will go – and come back victorious!’ Nobile was thrilled to hear the words.

  He was obliged to remain at home in Rome for a further week before the weather became sufficiently settled for the Norge to start upon her scheduled voyage: Pulham, England – Oslo – Stockholm – Helsinki – Leningrad – Spitsbergen. One of Nobile’s brothers and his family were staying in the apartment; the place was crowded and turbulent as ever but running a higher emotional temperature than usual because of his imminent departure. When Maria, his eight-year-old daughter, learned where he was going she made him show it to her on a map. She jabbed a small finger on Spitsbergen. ‘There, there’s nothing in that! You’ll get there in a moment,’ she told him.

  His wife Carlotta was desperately anxious, she could not sleep at night. Two of Nobile’s brothers had come to her, pleading that she dissuade him from the venture. ‘She had no illusions about the risks I was running,’ Nobile writes, ‘She knew them all, because I had told her myself … Yet her self-control was so great that she was able, without getting upset, to listen to the advice I gave her about bringing up our daughter in case I did not come back.’

  Carlotta and Maria came to Ciampino on the 10th to see him off, and so did his brothers. It was a deeply felt emotionally expressed goodbye. At 9.30 Nobile went on board the Norge wearing uniform and carrying Tintina, the little dog warmly dressed in a specially made woollen waistcoat. Two minutes later he gave the signal to start, ‘Andiamo!’ The crowd of men surrounding the craft let go the mooring ropes and amid the clamour of farewells the airship rose slowly, solemnly into a warm blue sky.

  Nobile was on his way. But during the night before his wife had been unable to contain her distress. Impulsively she’d turned on him to cry, ‘I won’t let you go!’

  He must, he told her. It is for Italy!

  11.

  NEW SHOW OPENS TO ACCLAIM

  Ever since his return to America aboard the Peary, frustrated, angry and humiliated by McDonald, Richard Byrd has utilised his energy, contacts, lobbying skill and considerable organising powers to put together a new attempt upon the Pole. In February 1926 he announces his intention at a press conference. There is no cover story of ‘new lands’ now, his purpose is overt. His hat is in the ring.

  He is working under intense pressure, he knows he has to shift if he is to get there first. Amundsen and Ellsworth are preparing to try for it in an airship, but by now two other competitors h
ave also entered the race for the Pole. The German Professor Hugo Eckener, who has developed and built airships with Count Zeppelin – successfully flying one across the Atlantic only eighteen months ago – is planning an attempt in a giant rigid Zeppelin, seven times larger than the Norge. And Hubert Wilkins, an Australian explorer who was with Shackleton in the Antarctic, is currently on his way to Alaska with two single-engined Fokkers and the intention of flying Point Barrow – North Pole – Spitsbergen, the same transcontinental route as Amundsen is projecting but in the other direction.

  The race, for this was how it was portrayed by the media and seen by the public, appealed to the popular imagination. The public loved stunts. Pole-sitting, escaping from chains or a straightjacket underwater, crossing Niagara Falls on a wire, going over in a barrel… such exploits shared a brash look-at-me exhibitionism and formed the lurid entertainment people enjoyed. But a flight to the North Pole held a further epic quality, it was a voyage into the great unknown. The aeroplane possessed an allure that bewitched almost everyone at that time. Radios, movies, gramophones, electrical devices, cars… in a few years these inventions had revolutionised the way people conducted their lives. Faith in technology came close to religious veneration in the US; there was a belief ‘the machine’ could accomplish literally anything.

  But flight provided an additional vicarious thrill – danger. The first US postal air service had started in 1919 and the image of the lone flyer battling his way through the storm with the federal bags chimed with the American collective mind. Aviators were pioneering the skies. Now, barely seven years later, only ten of the mail service’s original forty pilots were still alive. They were known as the Suicide Club. Air races, exhibitions and displays of stunt flying had continued to grow increasingly popular throughout the country, though one newspaper attributed this only to the crowd’s ‘savage desire to look upon mangled bodies and hear the sob of expiring life’.

  The concept of a race to the Pole was custom-made for the media. The heroic scale of the venture… a cast of rivals with conflicting personalities… the images of the latest planes and airships… the tension of competition which could be counted on to build over weeks toward a dramatic climax… this story would run, it had legs. With due regard for PR Byrd worked the telephone and connections in Washington. By February 1926 he had more than half of the $140,000 he estimated he needed from Edsel Ford, Vincent Astor and Rockefeller, he had product endorsement deals, newspaper, magazine and radio contracts lined up. By March he was sufficiently confident of his funding to ask for official leave of absence from the Navy Secretary. The request was a formality; he enjoyed an excellent relationship with Secretary Wilbur, who had been consistently helpful in assembling the expedition – unlike the service top brass who had scuppered his application for Naval support and done all they could to undermine him.

  Byrd had also chosen the two aircraft he wanted. The Ford Motor Company was now involved in aeroplane manufacture and had a suitable tri-motor in preparation, but it wasn’t ready yet and he could not wait. Instead he had selected a Curtiss Oriole, named Richard the Third after his son Richard Evelyn Byrd III, which would be employed locally in Spitsbergen to scout for landing and take-off sites. His other plane, a big Fokker tri-motor which was the prototype of a new design, would fly to the Pole. It was named the Jo Ford after Edsel’s daughter.

  He had a ship lined up, the steamer Chantier, which he’d obtained by pulling strings at the Federal War Shipping Board, who were letting him charter the vessel for a nominal $1 for the year. And meanwhile he had selected his crew and assembled a large support team of eager volunteers who were standing by and raring to go.

  On the date the Chantier sailed for the Arctic on 5 April money remained a worry, for he was still short of what he needed by more than $20,000, but he had contracts with newspapers and movie rights. If he won the race to the Pole he could earn that much and more – indeed everything his heart desired.

  12.

  BACKING LOOKS SHAKY

  This is the spring of 1926. A deep carpet of snow covers the landscape and the mountains stand as they have ever stood, yet the squalid little mining village of Kings Bay today looks very different to when Ellsworth was last here the year before. A huge hangar and a 130-foot mooring mast now dominate the settlement.

  For the last six months a team of thirty Norwegians has been living and working here to construct these. During the winter the expedition’s support ship, the Heimdal, and another steamer have unloaded 600 cubic metres of timber, 50 tons of metal, and enough cement to provide 200 cubic metres of concrete foundation to anchor hangar and mast against the gales: in all some 2,000 tons of cargo, plus 4,800 hydrogen cylinders weighing a further 800 tons. To move this mass of materiel up the snow-covered slope to the settlement it has been necessary to build a single-track railway.

  Apart from the appearance of the place, on arriving here with Amundsen five days ago Ellsworth had received a surprise, or rather two. The first was to come upon a granite monolith erected by the people of Spitsbergen – few and scattered though they were – commemorating their flight of 1925; the second, to learn that a local mountain is now named after him. This is his first public recognition as an explorer and, although too embarrassed to show to Amundsen the degree of his pleasure, it is nevertheless deeply gratifying.

  For Ellsworth it is, as the year before, a big relief to have reached this dismal hamlet, where he is helping complete the base to receive the Norge. The recent months have been fraught with anxiety, several times the expedition looked like collapsing. In September, Thommessen (its treasurer, president of the Aero Club and newspaper proprietor) released a press statement about the expedition naming Ellsworth as navigator together with Dietrichson (his pilot of the year before). Shortly after this Ellsworth began to suspect something was amiss from the way Amundsen and Thommessen were acting, but he’d only found out afterward that Dietrichson had announced that he wasn’t coming if Ellsworth were so titled. The arrangement was ‘humbug’, he said, Ellsworth couldn’t navigate his way out of a wet paper bag. Rather than offend their prime sponsor, Dietrichson had been quietly requested to withdraw from the party.

  In December, Thommessen had assured Ellsworth that the Aero Club’s statements to the media would specify that the expedition’s leaders were Amundsen and Ellsworth, with Riiser- Larson as second-in-command, and Colonel Nobile commander of the airship. The Club also agreed that the two leaders would provide the newspaper and book accounts of the expedition, yet in January they signed a contract with Nobile authorising him to write the technical aeronautical section of the book. Amundsen – who was in America throughout that winter lecturing to raise money for the flight – was outraged when Ellsworth called to tell him this. It was a piece of brazen effrontery, he said. He was already furious about news relayed to him by Riiser-Larson, who had remained in Rome with Nobile to prepare the Norge. It seemed that Nobile had demanded that the crew of the airship, Norwegian as well as Italian, swear a personal oath of allegiance to him as commander. The Norwegians were up in arms at the suggestion and said they were not going unless it was withdrawn. Amundsen explains in his memoirs how he dealt with the matter: ‘I rejected this insolent suggestion with indignation and emphatically pointed out to Nobile in plain terms that he was nothing but a hired pilot.’

  Interpersonal and other problems had not ceased, even now in Spitsbergen. Shortly after their arrival the Aero Club had cabled to say they urgently required a further $10,000 to cover salaries and bills for materiel. Ellsworth (and Amundsen) was so disgusted by this latest evidence of the Club’s mismanagement that he’d considered throwing up the whole expedition and going home. Only the thought that someone else might copy their plans and reach the Pole before they had time to organise another attempt prevented him.

  The cost of the venture was escalating out of control and becoming a nightmare: by the end it would total over $500,000 (equivalent to $6 million today). And it was ironic, Ellsworth ref
lected, that apart from Amundsen’s meagre lecture fees, the only income the expedition had generated had come through him. Doubtful of Thommesssen’s competence, he had himself taken charge of the US story and picture rights, and sold an exclusive to the New York Times for an agreed $55,000. The paper had paid the first instalment of the money on signature, but that was long down the hole. The next pressingly needed tranche of $18,000 was due on the Norge’s arrival in Leningrad…

  13.

  CHARADE

  The spectacle is one of carnival, centred around a crowded open-air stage. A military band is playing con brio and the Norge is surrounded by an exultant mob of people.

  Resplendent in dress uniform and braided cap, Colonel Umberto Nobile, commander of the airship, gives the order to cast off at the start of his flight to Leningrad on the morning of 10 April 1926.

  The crew on board is made up of five Italians and five Norwegians, but the airship also carries two journalists, an English officer present to facilitate the dirigible’s landing in England, and a lieutenant from the French Air Ministry in case it is forced by weather to put down while crossing France. Nobile writes in his account of the voyage:

  The Norwegians knew nothing about dirigibles … So I had to instruct and train them. Many thought it dangerous for me to set out without having on board an Italian officer who was used to our dirigibles. Certainly the presence of another expert pilot would have enabled me to rest from time to time … but I do not regret it. When responsibility is concentrated in a single person … his attention is sharpened, his decisions are made swiftly and swiftly carried into effect … There were moments when a single instant of indecision would have been fatal.