by Jeremy Scott
The Commission of Inquiry which was convened in Rome that winter examined every aspect of the Italia expedition, from its inception to its dismal finale. Its report was published the following spring. A discrete section of this is devoted to the behaviour of Zappi and Mariano. The manner in which this is written is far from straightforward and its sense is veiled by high-minded phrasing such as ‘The truth in this world has always cost something to those who spoke it’, and ‘The Polar desert produces effects of a kind inexplicable in other regions of the earth’. Its exculpatory tone can only be decoded through understanding that it was designed to answer allegations in the press that the Italian officers had eaten their companion Malgren.
The most damning evidence was that of the pilot of the plane which first sighted them, who had seen three men. Yet the Italians maintained that Malgren had died four weeks previously. Mariano explains this by saying he had laid out his trousers on the ground to dry and the pilot mistook their dark shape for a prostrate man. But might it have been Malgren’s partly devoured body which the two then disposed of before the Krassin reached them? There are other inconsistencies. One of these lies in the Swede Behounek’s letters to his fiancée and sister which Malgren was carrying. If Malgren later decided to die, would he not have passed them onto the others before he did so? And why did he not send a last note, even an oral message, to his mother?
The Inquiry’s report is much more explicit in examining other phases of the expedition. In the planning, the organisation, the flight in the Italia, the crash and its aftermath, it becomes clear early in the document who was responsible. And the culmination to this unsatisfactory commander’s failings was that he damned himself conclusively by becoming first to be rescued and deserting his men. Nobile protested that he flew out first in order to supervise rescue of those who had been swept away aboard the airship. In that case, he was asked, why had he not put himself first when he listed the order of rescue?
The Commission of Inquiry had been ordained by Mussolini. It had by now been made very clear to the world that the Italia expedition was not and never had been a Fascist venture, but the men who took part in it were members of Italy’s armed forces, brave warriors of the State. Nothing must tarnish their valorous reputation. It took four months for the Commission to produce its report – and verdict. Its members – admirals, generals and senators – knew what was expected of them and valued their jobs; all its conclusions were unanimous. Bar one, every Italian who played a part in the expedition and its rescue was commended. Umberto Nobile took the blame for everything. For the crash, the disasters that followed, for the death of eight men, for abandoning his post as leader to save his own skin. The conclusion of the Commission was: ‘This action by General Nobile [is] contrary to every tradition and law of military honour. He had no right to behave as he did.’
Nobile was crushed by the verdict. But he was allowed no propriety in his despair for it was followed by a coda which not only robbed it of all dignity but flags that strain of farce which may be detected throughout his history. Two days afterward the Italian papers ran a story saying that how he’d really broken his leg was by falling over while running with his doggie to be first to bag a seat on the rescue plane.
Nobile was stripped of his rank. Ostracised in Rome, he went into self-exile in Russia, a disgraced and broken man, accompanied by his family and Tintina.
27.
STAR TURN
On Wall Street as throughout the United States, in this summer of 1928 this is still the best of times and daily growing even better. The economy and stock market are unconstrained in their growth. Everyone is playing the market now and everyone is winning, everyone knows of someone who yesterday was nothing and now has moved to Florida a millionaire. People trade tips – in the barber’s shop, at the shoeshine stand, in the elevator; groups of strangers swap tips in the subway. The country is united in a great democracy of prosperous optimism.
Meanwhile President Coolidge got through with work by lunchtime, then snoozed in his rocker on the porch of the White House. It was not that he did nothing. He listened to those who came to see him in the Oval Office in the course of the morning, seldom saying anything himself; he discussed that day’s menus with the White House cook and carefully went over her expenditure. At the height of the Wall Street hysteria the Federal Reserve Board begged Coolidge to put on the brakes and tighten the money supply. Instead he issued a statement that the $4 billion (equivalent to $50 billion today) currently out in brokers’ loans represented only ‘a natural expansion of business in the security market’. The afternoon that officials from the Treasury Department came to him to demand immediate and drastic controls on the market coincided with his receiving the gift of a barrel of apples from a friend in his native Vermont. Coolidge received the delegates in icy silence, waved off their proposals…and went down to the White House basement to count the number of apples in the barrel. All the while he reigned over this orgy of profligacy taking place throughout the country – during which his Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, legitimately and honestly made a personal profit of $3 billion on the market – he was diligently saving money from his presidential salary. In 1927 Coolidge looked certain to be re-elected the following year, yet inexplicably he chose to step down. He offered no reason, then or later. He dictated a ten-word message to the nation: ‘I do not choose to run for President in 1928.’ That was all, he was not a gabby man, but was it because he glimpsed a shadow of the catastrophe that lay ahead? No shadow was visible to the American people; Herbert Hoover came into office to inform them they could look forward to two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage as no more than their rightful reasonable expectation. Wall Street responded. Shares rose… and rose… and the music went on playing.
Along with cinema production, building, retail manufacture and much else, 1928 was a boom year for aerial exploration. The period saw a sort of gold rush of the air in which the aviators were hardy prospectors traversing uncharted skies to stake their claim. As we already know, the Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins and his partner, a Canadian bush pilot (both of whom had entered the race for the North Pole in 1926 but wrecked their planes before the start), succeeded in hopping their way in a single-engined Lockheed Vega around the Arctic rim from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen. Two Italian officers, Captain Ferrarin and Major del Prete, set a record for a non-stop flight of 4,466 miles from Rome to Brazil. Kingsford-Smith piloted the Southern Cross 7,300 miles (with refuelling stops) California–Australia. And while Harold Gatty and Wiley Post were setting up their flight around the world, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic, in the tri-motor aircraft which Byrd had initially ordered from Tony Fokker for his attempt on the South Pole.
The question so often asked about Arctic exploration, ‘What is it for?’, can be simply answered at this period. There was hard cash in it as well as celebrity. Newspaper rights, picture, magazine and film rights, together with product endorsements (‘as used by Commander Byrd on his flight to the North Pole’) represented big money in a new age of mass media and consumerism. Of course none of these aerial explorers could openly admit to money as a reason for their pursuit. And, though they might claim patriotism and national prestige as a motive, nor could they confess to a desire for personal glory and column inches. New lands was the high-minded explanation most Arctic flyers gave for what they were doing, the discovery of unknown territory they might claim for their country, together with the mineral wealth which lay beneath its surface.
The largest area of unknown land in the world existed in the Antarctic. Sections of its coastline had been mapped – though who knew if it was land these hardy mariners marked in upon their charts, or huge cliffs of ice? Amundsen and Scott had trudged a path to the Pole, and in the past twenty years a handful of men had explored areas near the coast, but the vast interior was terra incognita: five million square miles of empty space.
Richard Byrd’s mission to Antarctica to clai
m for America as large a slice of it as he could grab, and to fly to the South Pole to cap it, would be the largest and most expensive global expedition ever put together, before or since. It was made up of four ships, three aircraft, 150 men, ninety-four dogs, a pedigree bull, a herd of cows, two news film crews and an embedded correspondent from the New York Times. It carried 500 tons of basic supplies and was equipped to stay away for two to three years. Its scale and logistics were those of a small army – which indeed it was – with a mission to seize and occupy territory in the name of America.
Byrd and his planning team had their headquarters in the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan, and it is indicative of his highly professional approach to every aspect of the venture that this accommodation had been obtained free in return for the PR value of his tenancy. Much else was obtained free; a task force of salesmen hit on every city in the US, hustling for endorsements, peddling logos and tie-ins, and touting for subscriptions. Very successfully, Byrd was selling a patriotic and uplifting concept for cash up front. Ironically, his training for polar exploration was more relevant than that of Amundsen and other rivals in the field. They had obtained their education trekking through blizzards and deep snow, hungry, freezing cold, often near to death. Byrd’s had come from sitting behind a lobbyist’s desk in Washington, playing the web of his connections. Unlike them, he could scarcely stay upright on a pair of skis, but he was an infinitely better publicist.
Ever since his return from Paris with Balchen, Byrd had devoted himself to the project with single-minded concentration. The magnet for attention and funding was himself, his charisma and what he represented. Celebrities are now so numerous and the commodity itself so debased in significance, it is hard to comprehend their emotional effect upon an uncynical public when stars were few. And Byrd was famous not just in the US, where a postage stamp had been issued to commemorate his polar flight, but throughout the world. His seed money came once again from his faithful patrons Edsel Ford and John D. Rockefeller Jnr, and his advisory committee incorporated the Secretaries of Commerce, Navy and War. The government, big business and the armed forces were behind him.
This exploratory crusade, equipped with the very latest in American technology and launched with the blessing of the President and a splurge of media hype, set off for the Antarctic in August–September 1928. Yet despite its heavyweight support and substantial funding, Byrd’s business manager informed him when two of the expedition’s ships were already at sea that there was a deficit of $300,000 in the accounts. Byrd longed to visit his family in Boston before leaving. Instead, he remained in the Biltmore, working the telephone in a final hunt for funds to plug the hole. His dedication pulled in over $100,000, but when he sailed in mid-October he still owed $184,000. The expedition was as well prepared as it could be. The unknowable factor now lay in nature. Success and failure are not nearly so far apart as most people think, he noted in his diary. Just one thing entirely outside human control can bring disaster, bankruptcy and ruin. The entire enterprise can turn upon a dime.
Byrd’s main ship had been bought sight unseen on Amundsen’s suggestion. The City of New York was a 46-year-old square-rigged sailing vessel, built to resist ice. The second ship he acquired was an 800-ton steel freighter, which he rechristened the Eleanor Bolling after his mother. He bought her despite advice that a metal-hulled vessel would be crushed if trapped by the ice. In addition to these he chartered two whaling ships – one of them the 17,000 – ton Larsen, whose flensing and butchery decks were each the size of a football field – to transport personnel, supplies and three aircraft to New Zealand.
The principal aeroplane, which would be used for the attempt on the South Pole, was the same tri-motor Ford Balchen and Bennett had flight-tested in Canada, but with more powerful motors. The Larsen also carried two further aircraft, a single-engined Fokker and a folding-wing Fairchild, for use as back-up and in the scientific work the party planned in the Antarctic.
More than 1,500 men had applied to join the expedition. Byrd selected from them for stamina, particular competence, level-headedness and mental balance. In Antarctica they would be shut up together in close confinement for many months, much of that time in darkness. It was vital they should be compatible but, beyond this, they should share the same values and attitudes to life.
The Larsen, with Byrd and Bernt Balchen among the others on board, was the last of the flotilla’s ships to arrive in New Zealand. The three aeroplanes, fuel, stores and livestock were unloaded onto the quay at Wellington, then it and the other whaling vessel steamed on toward their hunting grounds. The City of New York was loaded with stores, gasoline, coal, the Fairchild, ninety-four dogs and fifty-four men (plus crew). The rest of the party and further supplies followed in the Bolling.
Nine days out of New Zealand they met the first icebergs. On 10 December they reached the edge of the pack ice. At first sight it appeared static, a white frozen desert, but on looking longer it was seen to be moving, the vast expanse the size of a country was undulating very slowly in the swell of the ocean deep beneath. The dead world seemed to breathe. The air coming off it was immensely chill; the huskies on deck scented it, raised their muzzles, and began to howl together as a pack.
They reached the Barrier on Christmas night. Silent on deck, the explorers stared in awe at a vertical 300-foot precipice of ice rising sheer out of the sea ahead. The Barrier was the frontier of an uninhabited continent twice the size of Europe, and for days they cruised beneath its forbidding ramparts searching for a place to land. On 30 December they located an inlet off the Bay of Whales, close to where Amundsen had made his base sixteen years before, which provided a gradual ascent onto the plateau. Byrd and Balchen took two dog teams and drivers and went ashore. A few miles inland they found a level area exactly suitable for a base, which Byrd named Little America. The men aboard the City clambered ashore to stretch their legs, to be met by a crowd of penguins who rushed slithering down the slopes to greet them, pedalling along with their little wings, wholly unafraid and playful as frisky pets.
During the next six weeks teams hauled sledge-loads of materiel and supplies to Little America. There, Dr Lawrence Gould, second-in-command of the expedition, directed the construction of an extensive, carefully planned prefabricated town which they had brought with them.
After the Bolling arrived from New Zealand it took almost two months to complete unloading the two ships and haul their tons of cargo up the track to Little America. The days were shorter now and the temperature had dropped. Before the end of February the Bolling and City sailed for New Zealand, before they were trapped. On 17 April the sun appeared for the last time as a bright crescent flaring above the northern horizon, to set only minutes after it had risen. The forty men at Little America would not see it again until the end of August. They settled down to their troglodytic existence in the city beneath the snow.
The group of men inhabiting this subterranean township had worked immensely hard ever since their ships had reached New Zealand five months ago. Now there was little for most of them to do. Young, healthy, in the peak of physical condition, they were abruptly deprived of exercise. And closely confined. They lived like moles in warm humid burrows, scurrying at a crouch down long tunnels between the lairs. The entrenched correspondent Russell Owen describes how it was for them: ‘We became critical, introspective, morbid, or indifferent … With the sudden contraction of our orbits … men stumbled over each other in weariness and vexation … with the shaking down of our group came a conflict of divergent thoughts…’
The men passed their days playing cribbage, poker or chess, and popping corn over the stoves in their barracks. But idleness, boredom and close proximity worked their insidious effect upon the group, along with the cold and the dark. ‘Our life at this time began to be disturbed by an atmosphere of uneasiness,’ Owen writes. ‘Things happened which should not have happened … Our situation was much that of people living in a community where free speech is denied, where mutterings and
rumours and suspicion flourish.’ There was gossip, and there were insults, arguments, ganging-up and fights. Byrd was the only man on the base who had his own room. This caused resentment in a society where privacy was non-existent. He saw it as necessary to his authority to remain somewhat remote. ‘The Commander’ was how the men referred to him.
Leadership has been a prized quality throughout recorded history until fairly recently, when it became tainted with political incorrectness, to be replaced in popular esteem by consensus of opinion. Leadership was taught in school until the middle of the last century in the same way as, slightly earlier, rhetoric had featured in the curriculum. The virtues of leadership had been drummed into young Byrd from an early age; he had studied it as a specific skill at Annapolis. What he had learned was Naval, which like military discipline is absolute. Every order must be obeyed, no order may be questioned. In times of war or crisis consensus of opinion is ineffective, a dictator is required. But in periods of idleness, boredom, inactivity and sexual frustration, absolute rule can give rise to tension.
The explorers Peary, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen had all contended with the problem of managing a group of men through the long night of Arctic winter. Byrd’s party of forty was much larger than any of theirs and – human nature being what it is – consequently formed factions. Boredom and morale were the principal problems, but there was a crucial difference in situation between earlier expeditions and this one – Byrd and his men had radio. One result was that he was daily reminded of problems with both his ships and supply system in New Zealand. The Bolling developed a leak; the City was hit by a hurricane; his business manager in New Zealand had a nervous breakdown and quit. Buried in the dark, there was little Byrd could do to help, and perhaps these anxieties fuelled a deeper fear which long had lain within him. He became withdrawn, at moments burst with irritation. A demon was troubling him in this long night and the effect was visible at times.