by Ed Viesturs
The 1939 team faced the same 360-mile hike to base camp from Srinagar that Houston’s party had performed. But before the Americans even left the Vale of Kashmir, Wiessner arranged for eight days of acclimatization, during which the members practiced skiing on the nearby hills, combined with cushy living in houseboats in that colonial paradise. It was an ideal warm-up for the expedition. Describing the outing in a letter to the AAC treasurer, Wiessner was full of enthusiasm:
Our party is really exceptionally congenial. We have lots of fun. I am terribly pleased with it. Today’s ski ascent seemed exceptionally easy to everybody, and it makes me very happy and hopeful to see that the physical condition of the party is so good.
On May 2, the team left Srinagar. The overland journey proceeded smoothly, as the caravan averaged fifteen miles a day. The climbers’ letters home (many of which are quoted in Kauffman and Putnam’s K2: The 1939 Tragedy) report continuously high spirits. The members’ sense of participating in an extended lark matched that of their predecessors the year before. On May 6, George Sheldon wrote,
You probably want to know how we individually are getting along. Fritz, despite an enormous amount of work, is doing nicely. We have named him Baby Face Sahib. Chap, wise and silent as the owl, is brown as a berry. Jack and his lusty sense of humor, which once in a while draws howls of disapproval, is the acting doctor because he is considering the medical profession. Tony, or Pop Sahib, is the Voice of Experience and doing very well at it. He came out with this amazing statement today; “Climbing is fun.”
Two days later, Wiessner wrote to the AAC executive:
The boys are such a nice lot, taking everything from the easy side and hitting hard when necessary, it is fun to be a member of such a congenial group. Sometimes they may be a little too carefree but one word suffices to make them do their duty and work hard. I feel quite certain they will do well on the mountain.
Without mishap, the team reached Askole on May 21. From that last village, having hired 123 porters—forty-eight more than the 1938 team had employed—the expedition marched eastward, camping at Paiju and Urdukas, then on the Baltoro Glacier. Even before reaching the glacier, Pemba Kitar came down with a mysterious and persistent illness and had to be sent all the way back to Skardu to see a doctor. Though he would rejoin the team, the Sherpa who had played a critical role in 1938 would play none in 1939.
A pair of short-lived porter strikes (the second caused by a shortage of snow goggles) delayed the team slightly, but by May 31 they were installed at base camp. In terms of schedule, they were two weeks ahead of the 1938 expedition.
The agreement crafted with the porters as they were paid off and sent back to Askole would turn out to play a vital part in what went wrong on the expedition. Kauffman and Putnam summarize the exchange:
Absent new instructions, [the porters] were to return on July 23 for the homeward journey. This gave the team fifty-three days in which to ascend the mountain, ample time Fritz believed; by then someone would have reached the top or the attempt would have been abandoned.
So far on the expedition, nearly everything had gone well. But no sooner had the team settled in to base camp than Chappell Cranmer came down with a serious illness. His temperature rose to 102 degrees, and, as Durrance wrote in his diary, “He coughed profusely and expectorated quantities of phlegm & slime.” Durrance gave the young man various medications, but his condition only worsened. By 6:00 P.M. on June 1, Cranmer had severe diarrhea and was still spewing mucus. Durrance was so alarmed that he gave his patient artificial respiration for two hours.
The symptoms sound like those of pulmonary edema, but they could also fit any number of other illnesses with pulmonary symptoms. If you combine traveling through a third-world country with the plagues of high altitude, you can come down with all sorts of maladies that people have rarely heard of. I’ve had to deal with teammates who were suddenly afflicted with pulmonary edema, though usually at much higher altitudes—Gary Ball at 26,000 feet on K2, for instance. Cranmer had succumbed at an altitude of only 16,500 feet. On the other hand, pulmonary edema has been known to strike victims at altitudes as low as 10,000 feet. The odd thing about the condition is that it can happen to anyone—previous experience on high mountains seems irrelevant. So does the kind of shape you’re in. J.-C. Lafaille got it in 2003 as we summited on Broad Peak and had a really hard time getting down the mountain. Only two weeks before, we had climbed Nanga Parbat together, and J.-C. had also reached the summit of Dhaulagiri just before that. I thought that on Broad Peak he would have been so well acclimatized as to be basically immune to altitude-related illness, but that’s not how it works. I’m just lucky that neither pulmonary nor cerebral edema has ever laid me low.
In 1939, pulmonary edema was virtually unknown. Durrance diagnosed Cranmer’s malady as either pneumonia or “cardiac decompensation.” There was little he could do for his patient except hold his head, keep him warm, try to clean him up, and give him such medicines as phenobarbitol, a sedative. We know today (as Durrance could not) that the most important thing to do to save the life of a victim of either kind of edema is to get him at once to a lower altitude. If that’s not possible, all you can do is put the victim on supplemental oxygen. Even if the 1939 party had known about the importance of getting to a lower altitude at once, it would not have been an easy task. Descending the glacier, they would have lost altitude only very gradually. Cranmer could not walk, so the men would have had to improvise a litter.
Cranmer slowly recovered, but he was essentially out of action as the team started up the Abruzzi Ridge. Meanwhile, the five healthy climbers and the strongest Sherpa began to build a logistical pyramid of well-stocked camps. By June 21, the team had established its Camp IV just beneath House’s Chimney. Learning from their predecessors’ frightening experience, Wiessner’s crew avoided camping on the 20,700-foot platform where the 1938 party’s tents had been bombarded by rocks kicked loose from above. Instead, the 1939 team used that nook only as a supply depot.
Wiessner always claimed that he had made a real effort to get along with Durrance from the start. In 1984, he told a writer:
I knew Jack as a great sportsman, and I knew he was strong. He’d done some climbing in Munich when he lived there, and he had good climbs in the Tetons. But I also knew he was very competitive, which might cause troubles. Actually, at that time I liked Durrance, and hoped he could do well.
But tensions between the two men began to spark only a day or two after the team reached base camp. To the same writer, Wiessner recounted an unhappy conflict:
On our first trip up the glacier, I wanted to check a little bit on safety and roping. We had two ropes. Soon Jack’s rope started to put up speed, trying to go faster than the others. Cromwell and Wolfe said to me, “What’s up? Do we have to do this running?” When we got back to base camp, I gave a long talk. I said, “Look, fellows, I can tell you right now, we will never climb this mountain if there’s competition between the members. Get it out of your head. We have to work really hard and work together.” Jack didn’t say anything, but seemed to agree.
After the expedition, and ever since, Wiessner was criticized for his style of leadership. Certainly his notion of his role as leader differed from Houston’s. In 1938, nearly all the decisions were made by consensus; though officially the leader, Houston was uncomfortable with that very label, referring to himself instead as the team’s “organizer.”
Wiessner was far more dictatorial, and sometimes condescending, as in the letter quoted above in which he referred to the other climbers as “the boys” (even though Cromwell and Wolfe were older than he was) and praised them when they were able to “do their duty and work hard.” But it’s here that the politics of the day—both climbing politics and the international antagonisms that were about to explode in World War II—get all tangled up with what happened on K2 in 1939.
Because he was German-born, Wiessner was all too easily stereotyped as having a “Teutonic” character and st
yle of leadership. Writing as late as 1992, Kauffman and Putnam lapse again and again into that kind of ethnic caricature. According to them, Wiessner had a “heavy personality.” He was “hard in body, Spartan (but not invariably), stoic in outlook, ready for sacrifice, and dedicated to the achievement of what became his life’s ambition.” Even more explicitly,
German by birth and upbringing, Fritz had been reared in the school of absolute obedience to authority that characterizes much of the Teutonic ethos: the leader leads, and the troops obey, whatever the situation. He may have been ideally suited to command a German venture, but his background did not lend it-self to directing Americans….
Fritz was no humanist. Rather he preached Darwinian naturalism with its emphasis on survival of the fittest. The weak must perish so the strong may live—such was his philosophy….
To my mind, this stereotyping is completely unfair, and the qualities that Kauffman and Putnam ascribe to Wiessner had nothing to do with what happened in 1939. In K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain, the English historian Jim Curran offers an eloquent rebuttal:
It is … all too easy to fall into the trap of racial stereotyping. Undoubtedly Wiessner was a rigid, single-minded, humourless and authoritarian figure. But these are by no means exclusively Teutonic characteristics—it is not hard to think of British, French and Italian climbers who have over the years displayed the same qualities and earned themselves huge accolades in the process.
To understand the climbing politics of the 1930s, one needs a bit of background. Mountaineering was essentially invented in the Alps at the end of the eighteenth century. The first great deed was the ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786. Throughout the nineteenth century, British climbers were in the forefront of the game; Americans didn’t really take it up until the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, both Brits and Americans had adopted a conservative, rearguard approach to the pastime. The debate over “ironmongery”—the use of pitons, carabiners, and other metal devices—was a hot issue of the day. In disdaining those aids in 1938, Charlie Houston was subscribing to the Anglo-American view, while Paul Petzoldt had a more European outlook.
In the 1930s, the most technically advanced climbers in the world were Germans, Austrians, Italians, and French. The debate crystallized dramatically around attempts to climb the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland—the “last great problem” of the Alps, as many called it. The leading contenders were Germans and Austrians, and the face was so dangerous that eight out of the first ten men who tried it died in the effort.
The campaign on the Eiger provoked a virulent reaction in England and America. In 1937 Colonel E. L. Strutt, president of the Alpine Club, called the Eiger climbers “mentally deranged,” adding, “He who succeeds first may rest assured that he has accomplished the most imbecile variant since mountaineering began.” In the United States, the writer and mountaineer James Ramsey Ullman deplored how “perverted nationalism can infect even the most unpolitical of human activities.”
The Eiger Nordwand was finally climbed in the summer of 1938 by two Austrians who teamed up with two Germans. Although the climbers themselves insisted that their passion had nothing to do with politics, Hitler gave them medals in a public ceremony before a cheering throng. This only reinforced the Anglo-American conviction that the best climbers in the Alps were Fascist maniacs throwing away their lives for Führer and Vaterland.
Although Fritz Wiessner had immigrated to the States in 1929 partly to escape looming Fascism and had become an American citizen six years later, he was regarded by some of the more conservative higher-ups in the AAC with the kind of suspicion that had attached itself to the German and Austrian Eiger climbers. And that suspicion deepened after the 1939 tragedy on K2.
Through the first three weeks of June, various members, including the Sherpa, carried loads up to Camps II, III, and IV (Camp III being the supply depot exposed to rockfall). But only Wiessner seemed capable of leading. With the exception of a few hundred feet of steps chopped in snow and ice above Camp II by Pasang Kikuli, Wiessner led every pitch from base camp to House’s Chimney. That inequality would persist through the rest of the expedition: from Camp IV through Camp IX and even higher, Wiessner led every single foot of new ground.
Just how incredible a performance that was is hard to grasp. When I’ve been at my fittest, I’ve been on expeditions where I did a lot of the leading. But never anything like every foot of the route—except for my solo attempt on the north side of Everest in 1993, when I reached 25,000 feet. Breaking trail in deep snow is one of the most exhausting chores in mountaineering, even on Mount Rainier, let alone on an 8,000er. Normally you’re only too glad to turn the job over to a teammate after you’ve plowed a few hundred feet upward. From the Bottleneck to the summit of K2 in 1992, Scott, Charley, and I regularly swapped leads because of the exhausting snow conditions.
In 1939, Wiessner didn’t take the lead time and again out of some egomaniacal need to be in the vanguard. The problem was simply that nobody else was up to the job. Yet in K2: The 1939 Tragedy, Kauffman and Putnam take Wiessner to task for being out front all the time. Their criticism is founded on an expedition theory that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. As they explain it,
Until recent times … virtually all large expeditions had an official leader whose task consisted of coordinating and supervising major activities from before departure until return. On any such expedition, in modern times or earlier, the leader has by far the most important duties. But these are usually thankless ones involving drudgery, hard work, dedication, and constant attention to detail….
In addition, someone, usually the fittest and most experienced member of the climbing team, is selected point man (the military term), or lead dog (the Eskimo term). This is the person who takes care of the actual climbing problems on the mountain. The expedition leader and deputy cannot be expected to take over the role of point without seriously endangering the flow of supplies and support.
Basically, Kauffman and Putnam argue that the lead climber cannot also be the leader of the expedition. And so, armed with a theory whose rationale they never justify, they insist that in doing exactly that, Wiessner endangered the whole expedition:
But Fritz failed to select anyone to serve as point, and at Base Camp it became increasingly clear that he was reserving that position for himself, either because he didn’t trust his companions’ abilities, or because he had always been in the habit of going first….
In short, it was Fritz who had to go first. And with his heavy personality it was natural that he would want to be in the position of making all decisions. Fritz was also brought up in a culture in which no one ever questioned the orders of a higher authority—a far different environment from that of the New England town meeting.
Well, I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t cut it for me—even if I ignore that last sneer about Teutonic culture. There have indeed been expeditions on which the leader never intended to go to the summit, choosing instead to stay in the middle of the pack and organize logistics. A good example is the 1953 Everest expedition, whose leader was John Hunt. Hunt designated four other climbers to try for the top—Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans on the first attempt, Tenzing and Hillary three days later on the second. (On the other hand, by his own admission, Hunt wasn’t in the same league with those four as a technical climber.)
But on some of the expeditions I most admire, the man officially in charge of the assault led from the front all the way. In 1950 on Annapurna, Maurice Herzog was always out in front, and in some ways he was also the strongest climber on the French team. In 1938, Charlie Houston led from the front all the way to 26,000 feet on the Abruzzi.
For that matter, David Breashears, the leader of our 1996 IMAX expedition to Everest, had a reputation for being a dictatorial leader. Some people actually said to me beforehand, “How can you work with that guy?” But David was always out front, and he worked harder than anyone else. I knew when he hired me that he expected a lo
t from me. But if you did your job, you never heard any criticism from David. That’s leadership: lead by example, lead from the front, inspire people to follow your lead. That’s why, despite the difficulties of our own mission to get the IMAX camera to the top of Everest while filming ourselves, and despite getting caught up in the tragedy that unfolded that May, our expedition was a success. That’s why David’s Everest is still the highest-grossing IMAX film ever made.
In my opinion, a much worse situation develops when the official leader attempts to lead from the rear, watching the climbers through binoculars and ordering their movements over the radio. It’s all too easy to sit on your duff at base camp and tell people up high what they should be doing. The one time I had to put up with that sort of nonsense, I felt like radioing back to the leader, “Hey, dude, why don’t you get your ass up here and try it yourself?”