by Ed Douglas
Wilson’s fate drew no censure from the men who discovered his windblown corpse. Charles Warren recalled how after burying him in a crevasse,
We all raised our hats . . . and I think that every one was rather upset at the business. I thought I had grown immune to the sight of the dead; but somehow or other, in the circumstances, and because of the fact that he was, after all, doing much the same as ourselves, his tragedy seemed to have been brought a little too near home for us.
As fat flakes of snow fell outside the tent, Edwin Kempson, a brilliant mathematician and schoolmaster known as ‘G’, read extracts from Wilson’s diary to Shipton and Warren. Shipton said: ‘it was as if the man himself was speaking to us, revealing his secret thoughts’. He had no doubts about Wilson’s sincerity, even if ‘it was clear that he had little liking for the mountains, and he certainly claimed no spiritual uplift in their presence’. There were plenty in Britain who saw climbing Everest as some kind of metaphysical struggle or a matter of national prestige. The climbers actually on Everest in the 1930s were more sceptical, not least Raymond Greene:
I think a lot too much has been said in the past about the spiritual and mystical significance of climbing Everest and about its possible effects on British prestige. . . . we go to Everest not for those reasons at all, but either simply because it is fun or in order to satisfy some purely personal and selfish psychological urge.
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Some of the inspiration for Wilson’s daring plan to use an aircraft to reach Everest came from the dazzling and ultimately successful attempt to fly an aircraft over the summit the year before. Balloons had risen higher than Everest before the Great War and in 1919 the French fighter ace Jean Casale had flown a plane at over nine thousand metres. Using an aircraft to survey the approaches to Everest seemed plausible; the scientist Alexander Kellas had written a paper on the subject. The year before he led the Everest reconnaisance of 1921, Charles Howard-Bury, on his mission to India to acquire an Everest permit, approached the Royal Air Force in India to sound them out. While initially indifferent, an offer was eventually made of an aircraft and pilot with the necessary photographic equipment. Nothing came of it, which was probably for the best, since the aircraft in question, an Airco DH9a, had a ceiling of little more than three thousand metres. In the mid 1920s, the American ‘barnstormer’ pilot Roscoe Turner contacted the Mount Everest Committee. Turner later became famous for buying a lion cub, bred in captivity for Hollywood. He named him Gilmore, for his sponsor, and flew Gilmore around the West Coast in his Sikorsky S29A, at least until Gilmore got too big for his parachute harness. Stunts of that nature were far beneath the Mount Everest Committee’s dignity.
Unfortunately for the committee, aviation had become a lot more fashionable than mountain climbing. This was the era of world-famous pioneering aviators such as Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson. In 1931, five British Westland Wapitis had flown past Nanga Parbat shooting spectacular film footage along the way. Why shouldn’t the same be done over Everest, if the Nepali government would give permission? Stewart Blacker was a weapons designer and Great War pilot who had survived being shot down three times. He was also a descendant of Valentine Blacker, a predecessor of George Everest as surveyor general of India. In March 1932 he set up offices at the College of Aeronautical Engineering in order to prosecute this mission. Almost immediately he had the backing of the Royal Geographical Society and a host of aristocratic supporters, both Indian and British, including the novelist and politician John Buchan. Knowing precisely the sort of hero a project like this required, he sought out the dashing young pilot Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale and eldest son of the Duke of Hamilton. Aged twenty-nine, Clydesdale was the youngest squadron leader in the Royal Air Force and a member of parliament for the Scottish constituency of East Renfrewshire. When the economy worsened that summer and several backers pulled out, he approached his friend Lucy, Lady Houston, known as ‘Poppy’, once a wasp-waisted chorus girl and now the colossally wealthy widow of shipping magnate Sir Robert Houston, her third husband. She was sceptical, considering it dangerous and not wanting anything to happen to this attractive young man. ‘I told him I did not want to help him commit suicide.’ Clydesdale reassured her that flying over Everest was safer than a walk around Hampstead Heath on a foggy evening. Lady Houston wrote a cheque for £10,000 with the promise of more if required.
It wasn’t just Clydesdale’s aristocratic charm that persuaded her. The year before, Houston had given ten times that amount to the aircraft manufacturer Supermarine Aviation where the engineer Reginald Mitchell was developing what would become the Spitfire, after Ramsay MacDonald’s national government had cut funding to the project. This cash allowed the company to continue competing in aviation’s Schneider Trophy, established to boost aircraft innovation, and was part of a determined publicity campaign against MacDonald, whom she regarded as a traitor for leaving the skies above London defenceless. A suffragist in her salad days, Poppy had since galloped to the right and was now a supporter of the fascist Oswald Mosley. Flying over Everest would be another opportunity to advertise British prestige and remind Indians what the mother country could still accomplish. Not surprisingly, the Indian National Congress thought the project an outrage. Along with Lady Houston’s support came new and highly effective management in the form of Air Commodore Peregrine Fellowes whose expert military planning saw the project delivered on time. Clydesdale flew the prototype Westland Wallace with its supercharged Bristol Pegasus engine over the summit on 3 April 1933 with Blacker as observer, craning his neck for any sign of Mallory and Irvine. David McIntyre, an impossibly handsome Scot who later founded Prestwick Airport, piloted a second aircraft with a Gaumont British Films cameraman on board who filmed dramatic footage of the mountains before collapsing when his oxygen tube fractured in the cold. A handkerchief fixed that. The Times celebrated the breathtaking achievement on its front page, illustrating the story with a picture, taken from the cockpit, of Makalu: the wrong mountain.
That such an exciting feat had been managed in so short a time made the Mount Everest Committee look rather threadbare. Peregrine Fellowes had a genius for planning and achieved in a few months what had taken the committee a decade. The film of this adventure was another matter. Wings over Everest was co-directed by Ivor Montagu, a Jewish communist, Russian intelligence asset and ping-pong champion. (His brother Ewen worked for MI6 during the war, devising Operation Mincemeat ahead of the invasion of Sicily in 1943.) Montagu’s political affiliations can be seen in the cutaway shots of impoverished Indian farm boys looking up from their paddy fields as the gleaming British machines fly overhead on another spurious imperial adventure. With only a very few minutes of footage from the mountains, the film certainly needed padding out. The vituperative Strutt wrote an acid review for the Alpine Journal, barely hiding his resentment that so much attention had been paid to a public-relations stunt, once more missing the point that the public didn’t care about fine detail, just glorious headlines. ‘The films,’ he wrote,
give mostly the appearance of having been taken through a keyhole covered with sheep netting. For this the hopeless construction of the otherwise excellent machines seems responsible. With few exceptions, the successful shots are ruined by wing and stay obstruction.
None of this bothered the Academy of Motion Pictures, which gave Wings over Everest an Oscar in March 1936. That summer, Lord Clydesdale flew his own private aircraft to Berlin, joining a parliamentary group invited by the Third Reich to attend the Olympics.
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Less than a century before the Berlin Olympics, Joseph Hooker had sketched the first image of Everest by a European. In Hooker’s world, the European imagination conceived mountains either in the Romantic context of the sublime, or else as somewhere to explore the scientific values of the Enlightenment, as Humboldt had done. With the advent of photography, especially the development just before and after the Great War of lighter, portable camer
as, like the Vest Pocket Kodak carried by the British on Everest in the 1920s, the thrilling nature of extreme mountain landscapes was suddenly available to the public in a way it had never been before. This radical new mountain imagery shifted perspectives in a way that photos of the Moon landings would half a century later. Moving pictures only emphasised this impression. Creative artists and thinkers drew on this dramatic new palette to pursue philosophical ends very different to those of Hooker’s era.
In her documentary Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl and her cameraman Hans Ertl applied lessons they had learned making Bergfilme, ‘mountain films’: Germany’s version of the Western. Her vision of alpinism offered a useful metaphor for Nazi propaganda. The opportunity to capture images of powerful young Aryans conquering nature’s harshest challenges was intoxicating. Climbing itself was drawn inside this philosophy, nowhere better illustrated than attempts by Germans and Austrians to climb Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth highest mountain, where Fred Mummery had met his end in 1895. As the British struggled on Everest, the Germans mounted five expeditions to Nanga Parbat during the 1930s, a sustained campaign that caused the deaths of twenty-six climbers and Sherpas through a combination of personal arrogance and political ideology. It also tore apart Germany’s sizable mountaineering community as the Nazis fought to take control of a powerful sporting lobby, part of Hitler’s grand strategy of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, the Nazification of every aspect of German life. That struggle would put the very ethos of mountaineering under the microscope.
The Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein, the German and Austrian Alpine Club, had its origins in the 1860s, when the first Austrian section was set up in imitation of the original Alpine Club in London. Unlike the Alpine Club, which was limited to dedicated alpinists and socially elitist, the German and Austrian version was open to all, regardless of ability or class. As a consequence, by the early 1930s the Alpenverein had a membership of 240,000 compared to several hundred in the Alpine Club. Divisions within the German and Austrian club predated the rise of Hitler but shared common themes. A number of Austrian sections banned Jews in the early 1920s, to the disgust of the Munich-based Neue Deutsche Alpenzeitung.
You search for heritage and the shape of a skull and overlook the beating of the heart and the sound of the soul. What is the point and how will things end?
Not all Munich climbers felt the same way, including the lawyer Paul Bauer, who would direct Hitler’s process of Gleichschaltung in German mountaineering and extend those fractures into the Himalaya, with deadly consequences. Bauer had joined the German army at the outbreak of the Great War and been captured by the British in 1917. After the war, bitter at what he perceived as the betrayal of ordinary fighting men, he joined the Freikorps and latched onto the idea that climbing could help restore German pride. ‘When the rifle was taken from us,’ he once said, ‘our orphaned hands reached for an ice axe.’ Such revisionist nationalistic rhetoric had inevitable consequences as the fatality rate among the self-styled Bergkamaraden, ‘mountain-comrades’, spiralled on challenges like the north face of the Eiger. Bauer despised the woolly internationalist values of Günter Dyhrenfurth, who invited foreign climbers, including Frank Smythe, on his expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1930. Bauer too was obsessed with Kangchenjunga but his teams would be German only. For Bauer, the team, the Mannschaft, was everything. The Akademischer Alpenverein München, the student club in Munich, had for Bauer been a focus of sanity in the chaos and confusion of post-war Munich, when the things Bauer held most dear were ridiculed. Climbing for Bauer was a way to return to the comradeship of war and
test those qualities which had become superfluous in everyday life but which to us were still the highest qualities in the world: unshakeable courage, comradeship and self-sacrifice.
Although he was a nationalist, Bauer was also an Anglophile who had joined the Alpine Club. ‘One effect of the geographical situation of the Himalaya,’ he wrote in the Himalayan Journal,
is that it brings us into contact with English mountaineers and other people of England and the British Empire; and we thus come, again and again, to enjoy their help and hospitality.
In 1931, Bauer tangled with the rising star of German alpinism Willo Welzenbach over their competing interests in the Himalaya. Bauer wanted the British to give him permission for Kangchenjunga, which lay within their imperial Indian borders. Welzenbach thought Bauer’s plans on the world’s third highest mountain were a pipe dream, and decided to lead his own expedition to Nanga Parbat, where he felt there was a better chance of success, much to Bauer’s fury. But Bauer knew how to handle the British and it was he, with his superior contacts in India, who got permission for that year. In 1932, the International Olympic Committee gave Bauer’s published account of his expedition to Kangchenjunga a medal and after Hitler’s rise to power his position within the German mountaineering establishment grew ever stronger. The Nazi sports minister Hans von Tschammer und Osten wanted the Alpenverein to ban Jews, and he set up a rival organisation with Bauer in charge. German mountaineers wanting to visit the Himalaya now had to accede to the prevailing political climate. Dyhrenfurth left for Switzerland with his wife Hettie because, as the liberal Austrian climber Erwin Schneider put it, ‘the accident of his birth means he will no longer be able to win a flower pot in the Third Reich’.
There were a very few exceptions. In 1934 another expedition to Nanga Parbat was planned and alongside the climbers a scientific team was brought together to study the mountain’s geology. Hans Peter Misch, a major figure in the discovery of how granite is formed, was among them. Born in Berlin, Misch was the grandson of the influential philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and had just earned his doctorate studying the petrology of the central Pyrenees. Yet his father had been born Jewish, which disqualified Misch from the expedition, under the antisemitic Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. The leader of the expedition’s scientific team, Richard Finsterwalder, appealed against Misch’s exclusion all the way up to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, arguing that ‘an otherwise healthy law had here been applied to a guiltless man’. Misch was allowed to go. Finsterwalder and his team did useful work, and achieved an impressive circumnavigation of the mountain, producing a highly accurate and detailed topographic map. The climbing itself was a disaster. The route selected on Nanga Parbat was not up the Rupal or Diamir faces Mummery had explored but on the vast, sprawling northern slopes of the peak, the Rakhiot face. The climbing wasn’t difficult but the risks were great. In early June, the climber Alfred Drexler died quite suddenly, probably of high-altitude pulmonary oedema. Expedition leader Willy Merkl took photographs and footage of Drexler’s corpse wrapped in a giant swastika, being dragged down the mountain, photographs that were printed in newspapers at home. The Nazi symbolism enraged Erwin Schneider, who was part of the team, but in response to his objections, Merkl threatened to ban him from climbing. Willo Welzenbach wrote of his fears about Merkl’s leadership.
Merkl increasingly acts like a dictator who allows no criticism. He appears to really believe that a stern and uncompromising demeanour serves to establish his authority.
It wasn’t the best atmosphere in which to attempt such an immense enterprise.
In early July an unwieldy group of sixteen climbers and Sherpas from Merkl’s expedition were caught in a savage storm at an exposed camp, the eighth above base and located just below the summit. That so many were so high was part of Merkl’s plan: the sanctity of the group. Nine of the sixteen would perish in the maelstrom while attempting to descend in what was the worst Himalayan climbing tragedy thus far. The frozen bodies of Merkl and the Sherpa Gaylay who had loyally remained with him were found four years later. Von Tschammer und Osten had told Merkl when he left, ‘The conquest of the peak is expected for the glory of Germany.’ But with the high death toll and expense, with little to show for it that would thrill ordinary Germans, the expedition had become an embarrassment, especially when the traitor Dyhrenfurth was awarded a gold med
al at the Berlin Olympics. Bauer distanced himself from the enterprise, accusing Schneider and his fellow Austrian Peter Aschenbrenner of abandoning Sherpas; they were made the subject of a spurious enquiry. He even criticised Willo Welzenbach, one of the ‘fallen’, as someone interested only in personal glory, unlike Bauer, who was an ‘old soldier’, a favoured term among early Nazis. Bauer told von Tschammer und Osten: ‘For us, Adolf Hitler was already, in 1923, a man we would not impugn.’ Nazi officials ordered the racially suspect Peter Misch, who had acted bravely in desperate rescue attempts, to hand over his research material. Misch refused and fled the country, teaching first in China before war with Japan forced him to emigrate once more. He settled finally in Seattle at the University of Washington where he enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career. Erwin Schneider didn’t return to the Himalaya until after the war, when this brilliant cartographer drew the first maps of Nepal’s mountains, including Everest.
In 1936, a new Nazi-backed Himalayan exploratory organisation, the Deutsche Himalaja-Stiftung, was founded, with Bauer pulling its strings. That year he led an expedition to Sikkim, where his team made the first ascent of a peak called Siniolchu. One of the successful pair to reach the top was his trusted lieutenant Karl Wien, who was given the task of leading another expedition to Nanga Parbat the following year. But on 15 June 1937 a cornice broke off above Wien’s camp, triggering a massive avalanche that dumped snow ten feet thick on their tents. Seven climbers and nine Sherpas were killed. Bauer rushed to Nanga Parbat from Germany and despite contracting malaria managed to reach the site of the tragedy a month later. When they dug the bodies out, they found the wristwatches the men were wearing had stopped at 12.10 a.m.