In a wide bay on the other side of the Arctic Circle, a current of blue-black water slowly rocked small ice floes like lost toys. Mountain peaks bounded the horizon on the coastal side. A few huts, a couple of shacks and a radio station stood on the shore. A few hundred metres away stood a huge, empty, roofless shed and, close to it, a very tall and strong metal pole. The snow cover here, when not removed, was two metres high.
Part of the primitive harbour was also a loading quay, alongside which a small warship is now moored. A cargo ship was moored on its outside, and another, smaller ship was moored far out in the bay. The ice glistened in the sun, the smoke from the house chimneys rose vertically upwards in the cold, windless air. It was the time of polar summer, that period when the sun never disappears behind the horizon. Only a clock could tell that it was just after six o’clock in the morning.
The small harbour was in Kongsfjord on the Spitzbergs. It was 7 May 1926. Suddenly, a small dot appeared in the sky to the southwest, sometimes black and sometimes shimmering silver, depending on how the sun reflected off its metal parts. Slowly, it grew larger and moved in the air like a floating whale. Now the rumble of the engines could be heard. Men rushed out of the huts and shacks, the work in the harbour stopped, everyone shouted and waved their hands, some rushed to the empty hall and the strange mast, where a small group of people soon gathered.
The point that everyone was looking at and eagerly awaiting was the airship – the first to venture so far into the Arctic latitudes. It was a long way from sunny Rome to Nordkap. But this inhospitable port in the northernmost part of Europe was by no means the final stop of the airship’s journey, but in fact the beginning of its journey into the unknown world of the white wilderness.
Kongsfjord owes the spectacle of the Norwegian settlement to one of the most famous polar explorers, Roald Amundsen. Since 1897, the 54-year-old former seafarer has devoted himself to the icy wastes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He has led expeditions into the white wilderness on sledges pulled by polar dogs, let his research ships Gjoa and Maud become trapped by ice and towed them through polar waters.
Amundsen’s greatest triumph came on 11 December 1911, when he became the first man to set foot on the South Pole, a full month ahead of his rival Robert Scott, who died on the way back to base with his party. Before that, Amundsen had also experienced a major defeat – the North Pole. When the American Robert Peary reached the North Pole in 1909, Amundsen had to change his plans and decided to tackle the South Pole in Antarctica – and won.
Now Amundsen – a big, strong man with rugged features marked by ice and sun – was back in the Arctic, and pioneering work awaited him again. He was once again entering a race that, although it was never officially declared and no one had organised it, was there because someone else had set the same goal as him. The lively Norwegian explorer, who was in the years when many people preferred to lead a more sedate life, was suddenly seized by a passion for flying. The 1920s was a time of great aviation pioneering. Across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, around the world, ever onwards, ever higher and ever longer were to be the flights taken by adventurous husbands and wives.
When Amundsen took up aviation in his twenties, he wasn’t interested in flying across the Atlantic or setting a long-distance record – he was interested in the North Pole. Flying over this point became his goal, one could almost say his obsession. In 1897, the Swede Salomon Andreé tried to reach the North Pole in a balloon and failed. When Amundsen decided to embark on this adventure almost thirty years later, Andreé was considered a missing person. His body and those of his two companions were not found until 1930 on the small island of Vito, north of Spitzberg.
But first Amundsen had to tackle a problem that caused him more problems than fog and ice sheets. He had money problems, as he needed a large sum of money for this expedition. In those days, only America could solve such problems. And if Amundsen wanted to be the expedition leader, he had to find a financial backer. He found him in Lincoln Ellsworth.
Born in Chicago in 1880, the fair-haired, modest, amiable and youthful engineer was known for being rather impatient and vain. He was also single, just like his great idol Amundsen. Before the First World War, he worked for a Canadian railway company, but soon gave himself up to a life of adventure. In Canada, he hunted buffalo and prospected for gold in the Peace River. Peary’s polar expedition to the North Pole awakened a new yearning in him – a desire to explore the polar regions.
In the last twenty years, he tried to join two Scandinavian polar expeditions led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Roald Amundsen, but was turned down both times because of his lack of experience as a seafarer and aviator in the polar regions. In 1924, he contacted Amundsen again, and this time he brought with him something worth more than his polar experience – money in green dollar bills. His businessman father was prepared to finance the expedition with $85,000. This bought Ellsworth junior a ticket to join the expedition.
Roald Amundsen decided the airship will be Italian
With this money, Amundsen and his friend equipped and chartered two seaplanes and set off on their first attempt to reach the North Pole on 21 May 1925. There were three men in each plane. Seven hours later, at an altitude of 88 degrees, Amundsen’s plane had technical problems. Both pilots risked an emergency landing on the water between the ice floes, and Ellsworth’s plane crashed. The six men had to endure the icy cold for two whole weeks before they managed to repair it by primitive means.
They all piled in and the take-off was a success, the plane stayed in the air for a full six hours, then started to run out of fuel just before Spitzbergi. They were lucky this time too, because the water landing was successful and they were picked up by a small seal-hunting boat that happened to be in the vicinity.
At this dramatic time, Ellsworth’s father died, he became a very rich heir and decided to try his luck with Amundsen again. But the seaplane crash had worn him out and he was no longer interested in aeroplanes, but in aircraft. For them, an engine accident did not mean an automatic crash or a forced landing. What is more, it was possible to repair the aircraft while it was in motion and, if that was not possible, to keep it flying, at least slowly, because of the air currents. Where to, of course, was another question. So the Norwegian researcher had to look around a bit to see where a useful and sturdy aircraft could be obtained. The choice was not overwhelming.
The famous German zeppelins were of an ornate construction, with a canvas-covered frame in the characteristic cigar shape and large gas balloons inside. Underneath them was a large cabin and four to six powerful engines. But Amundsen had no faith in the capability of the zeppelins, nor in the technical solutions of their similarly built British competitors – they seemed too expensive. His airship had to be smaller and, above all, cheap. And he found all this in Italy.
In Italy, aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile has been building his own airships for ten years. His cylindrical gas balloons were protected only by a steel structure on the beak, with a steel keel attached to the underside of the beak, on which the cabin with the engines was suspended. His airships were much smaller and lighter than the German zeppelins, and were considered by experts to be less robust, but were therefore also much cheaper. Meanwhile, Amundsen had already secured technical and logistical support from the Norwegian army and the Norwegian Aero Club.
The Italians were also enthusiastic about Amundsen’s idea. Mussolini quickly realised the propaganda potential of the project and the Italian government, which owned the N-1, sold it to Amundsen, who christened it the Norge.
A mixed Italian-Norwegian crew is to operate the ship, which has rapidly undergone refit work to make it suitable for Arctic flights. The Italians also began attending theoretical and practical lectures to simulate the circumstances that might be encountered in the Arctic, and some Norwegians were trained in the handling of Italian airships.
The first vague ideas of a new venture began to form in Amundsen’s mind in the early summer of 1925, just a short time before his first flight with Ellsworth, and just six months later he had a fully manned airship, two transport ships to take equipment to the Spitzbergs, and a dozen assistants.
It was Ellsworth who made such rapid progress possible, taking on a third of the total cost of $125,000. This was a very hefty sum at the time. The rest of the money needed was provided by Amundsen through royalties and contracts with international media. It was a double-edged sword that cost him a lot of sympathy. For example, the respected Frankfurter Zeitung wrote that his project would have received much greater international recognition if he had not blown the publicity trumpet so hard. Many companies, from coal mines to chocolate factories, have come on board as sponsors and some of the collaborators have even forgone payment for their work.
But they only started working on the project full steam when Ellsworth paid his share. This gave the adventurous heir to his father’s millions a ticket on an airship. It was the most expensive ticket anyone had ever paid for.
The first volunteer helpers arrived at Spitzberge on 17 October 1925 and quickly set off to find a suitable place for the airship to land before the polar night officially began on 26 October. But time to work in the light was scarce and the 32 men had to work hard throughout the dark winter. The shed in which the airship was to spend the winter was finally built, 110 metres long, 34 metres wide and 30 metres high, and open at the top – a kind of garage to protect the ship from the polar winter. The steel beams of the garage were so cold that an unprotected hand would have been stuck to them.
But the men, who were convinced that a temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius was nothing special, worked without a break, even at minus 35 degrees Celsius in storms and snow, the darkness illuminated by headlights and the magnificent aurora borealis. The hall was not finished until Christmas, and in February 1926, it was the scene of a celebration.
On 21 April 1926, Amundsen and Ellsworth arrived at Spitzberge with cargo ships, and on 26 April the landing mast was finally erected. Nine hundred 160-kilogram hydrogen-filled steel cylinders were also ready, along with a ton of spare parts, radio and navigation equipment and other accessories, which were brought along with the ship.
Despite this crazy pace of work, the men were not satisfied, as all the work was supposed to have been done two weeks ago. They were delayed because much of the equipment had to arrive by sea from Italy and the ships were delayed for various reasons. The Norwegians laughed at the perfectionism of the Italians. They had brought with them almost a tonne of lighting equipment, as if they did not know that the sun was shining again at midnight over Kongsfjord.
Amundsen wanted to set out at the end of April 1926. It was not practical to set out before then because of the darkness and cold, and it was too foggy in the short Arctic summer from June to August. This meant that the best date was missed, and with each day of delay there was a greater risk that the airship would be lost in the fog on its way from Italy.
The Norge was prepared for six months in Ciampino, Italy, under Amundsen’s instructions, for operation in snow and ice, including the installation of larger petrol tanks, while an Italian-Norwegian team was also trained. There were a whole lot of problems, because no one understood the other’s language. They just helped each other with their hands. The Norwegians, in particular, felt left out under the warm Italian sun, but they shared a common enthusiasm for this unusual project.
On 10 April, the Norge finally left the vicinity of Rome and flew through France, the English Channel and landed in England. From there she flew on to Oslo and on to Gatchina near what was then Leningrad. The goodwill of Bolshevik Russia was very important to Amundsen, who depended on the weather reports from their radio stations in the North Sea, as the Norwegian and American weather stations did not go that far with their weather reports.
Moreover, no one could rule out the possibility that Norge might encounter bad weather and other problems on the flight from Norway to Alaska, and that it might not drift towards Siberia. Therefore, as a sign of goodwill, Norge visited the Soviet Union from 15 April to 5 May and flew from there to Kongsfjord.
This zigzag ride across Europe was actually an adventure of its kind. Two of the three engines caused constant problems, the reversing engine failed completely and had to be replaced in Kongsfjord, navigation in bad weather and at night was problematic, and during the day the Norge sometimes got so low that the crew could read the names of the individual railway stations.
However, it got lost on the way from Oslo to Leningrad, and while the navigators were convinced that they were flying from northern Finland into Soviet territory, they were actually in southern Finland, overflying the airspace of the Republic of Estonia. They did not realise their mistake until several hours later. Finally, Norge landed in Kongsfjord.
Norge turns north
Now the real work was just beginning, as Norge had to be tested on site. Finally, on 7 May 1926, Norge took off in a test flight and hovered over the bay. People on the ground could see the flying cigar very clearly; it was 106 metres long and 20 metres wide, and its N-1 recognition mark was clearly visible on the fuselage, as well as the Norge inscription. The small crew nacelle under the front of the fuselage, with its round windows, resembled a punctured sardine tin. Three engines hummed underneath, the elevator and rudder, which looked like oversized stabilisers, were sticking out of the pointy end of the airship, and the Norwegian flag was flying on a rope at the very end.
Colonel Umberto Nobile was standing at the front of the gondola. Forty-one years old and bespectacled, skinny, confident and introverted, he looked like an apparition from another dream world in his elegant coat and with a small dog in his arms. And yet this untried Italian from the south of his country was perhaps the most important member of the expedition. As captain of the airship Norge, he and his Italian crew were responsible for safe flying; for take-off, landing, engine maintenance, control of the valves and all the other important things. The Norwegians took over navigation, radio communications and the assessment of weather conditions.
Norge slowly made a circle over the bay. Before heading for the North Pole, Nobile wanted to check all the details of the landing site to which he would have to return before deciding whether to fly into the grey of the sea. The take-off and landing seemed to him to be the most important part of the whole thing, and at the same time a threat to the surrounding area.
He knew that when a gust of wind hit the great side of an airship at such a moment, it could knock it to the ground and bury all the men, equipment and halyard beneath it. That is why the metal mast that allowed the ship to land safely was so high. The airship would be tied to it with its beak and could then move freely even in windy weather, while the men on the ground slowly pulled it towards the ground. But that day the bay was calm, there was no wind and Nobile had to abandon his experiment.
Amundsen always remembered well the moment when Norge first landed in Kongsfjord. At that moment, a thick rope was dropped from the airship, the men on the ground grabbed it and pulled the airship down. Men climbed down the stairs, which looked like silk threads from the ground, from the hull of the ship to the engine nacelle and switched off the engines. The noise was gone and the Norge was slowly lowered to the ground before being pulled into the halo with ropes, tied down and secured. This was the first time an airship had landed on the Spitzbergs. But that was then, and now the airship Norge was preparing for a voyage into the unknown wilderness, and no one knew what awaited them there.
Despite navigational problems during the flight from Italy in relatively good weather and through familiar European countries, the Norwegians and Italians did not even think that they could get stuck in unfamiliar polar places. They were worried about something else. They might not be the first to make an Arctic flight to the North Pole and Amundsen was in danger of losing the race, or rather the fight for the championship over the North Pole. He had to watch with mixed feelings as another polar expedition prepared to fly to the North Pole in the neighbourhood.
On his last trip to America, Amundsen met Captain Richard E. Byrd, an American officer in the Aviation Service, and Floyd Bennett, a pilot, who also wanted to fly to the North Pole, but not by airship, but by plane. The Americans also chose Kongsfjord as their base, on Amundsen’s recommendation. On 25 April, their ship and its equipment were already in the bay.
While Amundsen and Byrd visited each other out of mutual respect, they both kept a close eye on what the other was doing and how the preparations were going. On the morning of 9 May, Amundsen and his men were startled by the noise of the aircraft engines. Byrd and Bennett flew towards the North Pole. It had been a long day and Amundsen, as an experienced polar explorer, was crossing his fingers that the Americans would succeed, knowing what a risky adventure they were embarking on, even if their success would have put his airship flight on the back burner.
Fifteen and a half hours later, the American Fokker aircraft came down again in Kongsfjord. Byrd and Bennett succeeded and were the first to reach the North Pole. They were greeted enthusiastically by everyone, including Amundsen. The first flight to the North Pole with a Norwegian-Italian crew was therefore no longer possible, but the first flight across the Arctic from one continent to another was still possible. Amundsen missed his first goal by only a few days, but he had already set himself a new one – to reach Alaska from the Spitzbergs.
The repair of the engines and the refuelling and gassing of Norge was completed on 10 May and the launch was scheduled for 11 May at 1 am. However, shortly before midnight, strong winds started to blow, making it impossible to get the airship safely out of the shed. The crew went to rest for a few more hours but slept very poorly. She was called to leave twice and then sent back twice.
The wind didn’t calm down until 7am and everything was ready for take-off. The ground crew slowly pulled Norge out of the hall. It was almost windless and the crew climbed into Norge. The men in the thick suits looked as heavy and helpless as bears, so thick were their flight suits and fur coats. Because of the tight space and the certain weight of the gondola, nobody was allowed to carry any luggage, only Nobile refused to part with his lady dog. Washing and sleeping had to be forgone by everyone on board.
The additional equipment, without which it was impossible to survive in the wilderness, weighed as much as 12 tonnes. Skis, weapons, sleeping bags, four tents, food for two months – just in case we had to make an emergency landing on the ice and wait weeks or months for help.
There were 16 people on board. Amundsen chose eight of them himself, including seven Norwegians and a Swedish meteorologist. Nobile was accompanied by five Italian officers and non-commissioned officers, and Ellsworth was the only American on board. At 8.55, the order to Untie came, the Norwegian brass band on the ground played the national anthem, the crew in the ship loosened the last of the ropes connecting the ship to the ground, and the Norge rose slowly, like a giant cigar, into the cold air.
When it was high enough, three Maybach engines roared to life, each with 260 horsepower. Slowly gaining altitude, Norge left the bay in a westerly direction and then headed north. The men on the ground watched her until she disappeared from sight at 09.50.
Complex work on an airship
On board, the daily work began. There were two helmsmen in the forward wheelhouse. One controlled the side rudders to keep the ship on course, the other took care of the elevator and also controlled the gas pressure in the balloons. Both were constantly monitoring the compass and looking around. Are we perhaps going too far to port? Are we maybe too high? It was possible to open the valves and close them again with a string to regulate the ride, but this way of riding made the ride over the endless ice floes and the sea very imprecise, even in good weather conditions.
Amundsen and Nobile were standing next to the pilots. The Norwegian had his eyes mainly downwards, looking at the ice, assessing possible hazards and looking for islands or any other sign that there was an undiscovered patch of land. At the beginning, he could still see polar bears running scared from the big monster in the sky. But after 82.3 degrees north latitude, even the polar bears were gone. Nobile was busy steering the voyage and giving orders to the two helmsmen.
There was a small navigation area behind the command area. Here, two men watched the course and weather, reported the data to the command area using radio weather reports from various polar stations, and compared the data with the ancient method of determining the course of navigation, the sextant. The bottomless Ellsworth was loitering beside them, trying to be useful by reading the data from some of the other instruments or chronometers.
In the navigation compartment, two men sat in a radio cabin two metres long and one metre wide. It was the most dangerous room on board. A generator produced electricity to run the Marconi radio station, using an external propeller. Therefore, there were electrical cables everywhere in the cabin, which were not to be touched. Already during the journey from Leningrad to Spitzberg, one of the radiotelegraph operators touched one of the cables and was knocked unconscious by the electric shock. There was a serious danger that he would collapse unconscious on the ground, puncture them and fall into the depths. The gondola was a structure made of thin steel beams, sheet metal, wood and fabric. The windows were made of transparent celluloid.
At the very end of the Norge was a small toilet on a stub. There was no toilet bowl, just what looked like a bottomless kettle. There was no heating either and the temperature soon dropped from minus 8 degrees Celsius at the start to minus 13 degrees. If the navigator or radiotelegrapher wanted to say anything to Nobile or Amundsen, he had to sneak past his comrades. But he could only do so in an emergency, otherwise he had to sit in his seat, as there was not enough space to move around unhindered. It was possible to climb down a narrow ladder into the hold at the bottom of the hull, which was the lowest part of the cigar-lined hold.
While the gondola was worked almost exclusively by Norwegians, this part belonged to the Italians, with only one Norwegian mechanic. The interior of the storage area was similar to a ship’s hull. Most of this space was taken up by large gas balloons filled with lighter-than-air hydrogen gas, which served as the Norge’s means of propulsion. This gas was easy and cheap to obtain. But when it combines with air, it produces a highly explosive mixture of cupping gas.
Only a wide layer of felt was stretched between the room where the gas balloons were located and the radio cabin, where the high-voltage instruments were operating. Smoking was therefore strictly forbidden everywhere on board, yet all the men carried large supplies of tobacco. If they had to make an emergency stop somewhere, they would certainly have enough tobacco to calm their nerves. Occasionally one of the Italians had to climb up the ladder to the top of the gas cylinders to check the valves. This was a life-threatening job; one false step and he would fall through the thin hull plating into the depths and be blown off the ship.
The work of mechanics was also dangerous. The engines were suspended from strong steel cables and every time they were changed, repaired, started, switched off or checked for oil, someone had to climb up and swing on a narrow steel footbridge, holding the pole firmly with his hands. Normally, Nobile ordered only two of the three big engines to be started at 1200 revs, which was only 200 revs short of their maximum. At the same time, the Norge was able to navigate through the air in good weather conditions at 80 km/h. The third engine was not running at the time and was only run when needed.
32 steel tanks were also mounted on the beam. The front and rear tanks were filled with ballast water, all the others with aviation petrol. The Norge thus carried seven tonnes of petrol and oil, enough for 6,400 kilometres of driving, far too much for the 3,700-kilometre journey between Kongsfjord and its final destination in Nome, Alaska. In the storage area, there were spare parts and tools, buckets of lubricant and four rolls of landing rope.
As on any ship sailing the seas, the Norge has experienced the effects of the waves. Observers on the ground saw the airship sailing perfectly calmly through the air, but it was never at rest. Sometimes she was rocked from side to side, other times the wind pushed her nose down, forcing the helmsmen to right her course and the cigar to rise too high with her nose in the sky. Immediately after take-off, Norge began to rock so hard that the shortwave transmitter fell out of its berth.
Nevertheless, Amundsen and Nobile experienced the first ten hours of the flight as a comfortable mini-cruise on the Nile. A light tailwind propelled the Norge over endless ice fields and at 10.30 she broke the ice edge. Here and there a thin and long ice break could be seen on the white surface, but otherwise the ice kept forming the strangest shapes. No one has ever been so comfortable approaching the North Pole.
Norge started at 200 metres and then climbed to 530 metres because the wind was more favourable there. The navigator navigated on the ice using a sextant and signals from Norwegian radio stations. However, already in the evening the first problems appeared. At 18.40, the starboard engine had to be stopped because condensation water had seeped into it and frozen the petrol supply. The fault was soon rectified, but an hour later the engine started to stumble again for the same reason. The mechanic had to climb up to it again and remove the ice.
During these repairs, the airship’s speed was reduced to just 55 km/h. At 19:30, the weather deteriorated and Norge was flying in dense fog at 1000 metres but failed to rise above the fog. In such fog, the navigator decided to keep the ship on a straight course and only straighten out later.
Then the wind turned and started blowing Norge from the front. With the help of radio signals picked up by Norwegian stations, the crew managed to determine the approximate right course and steer the ship northwards, despite the fog. There were still problems with the same engine, so the ship’s speed was much lower than planned.
Here is the North Pole
The biggest problem for the crew was the fog. Not because it was impossible to navigate in, but because they were afraid that in the dense fog they would reach the North Pole and not even notice this magic point during the flyby. Ellsworth’s 46th birthday was briefly celebrated around midnight. The American received congratulations from the crew and telegrams from his homeland. Captain Nobile had conjured up a bottle of eggnog from somewhere for the Norge’s Polar Birthday celebrations.
Shortly afterwards, the mood on board changed dramatically, as the North Pole was no longer far away, and it cleared up at exactly 01.00 at night. At 1.15 the navigator dropped his sextant and shouted, “We’re close now!”
It was 12 May 1926 at 0125 hours when Norge arrived over the North Pole. The temperature was a pleasant minus two degrees Celsius. The men cheered as Umberto Nobile, in an airship at an altitude of 200 metres, circled the North Pole, the northernmost point of the earth, several times with the engines half-lit.
A few thousand kilometres to the south, the euphoria at that moment was just as great as on Norge, because among the crew of the airship was the journalist Fredrik Ramm, a skinny Norwegian working for the New York Times. From the start of the journey, he wrote his report, then worked his way up to the men in the small radio cabin and sent shortwave messages to Manhattan. He used a special code that had been agreed with the newspaper’s editorial staff so that no one else could understand what he was writing. If he had written the word “drops” in the message, it would have meant “send us a rescue team”.
Shortly after 3am local time in New York, they received his message and were delighted. It was soon printed on the front page of the newspaper and began “North Pole, Wednesday, 12 May at 1.00 a.m., from the deck of the airship Norge”. In his next message, Ramms had already written: “After the North Pole we continue our journey.” Thereafter, he did not make any further contact, although the newsroom waited several hours for his messages. The tension grew, as they no longer knew how to address the next newspaper story. Success, failure? In New York, they began to worry that Norge was in trouble.
At 8.30 a.m., south of 86 degrees latitude, it went into fog. Positioning the airship with a sextant and a solar compass was becoming increasingly difficult and was only possible when the foggy clouds briefly cleared and a patch of sky could be seen. But the biggest danger for them was ice. The fog enveloped the gondola, the engines and all the external instruments and wires, and the ice pushed it down like a white death, weighing about a tonne.
As the ice was mainly on the forward part of the ship, the airship slowly became out of balance, and in order to rebalance it, Nobile ordered that the fuel for the engines should only be taken from the forward tanks, while the rear tanks should remain filled and allow the balance to build up against the weight of the ice. It was not only the frame, which was impregnated with a rubber solution, that had accumulated ice. But small pieces of ice still entered the propellers’ airstream, which were then thrown into the hold as small projectiles to make holes in the airship’s skin.
The Italians, equipped with special glue and sailcloth, had to glue the ship’s frame from the inside, time and again in daring actions. Atmospheric disturbances and a frozen antenna surrounded by a crust of ice, as well as blocked propeller generators, made it impossible to establish radio communication. This was also the reason why no new reports of what was happening to Norge were received in New York, and Norge was no longer receiving any messages from Norwegian radio stations.
Norge was flying at 600 metres when it went into fog. Nobile immediately raised it to 1100 metres and then lowered it almost to the ground, hoping to get out of the fog and ice build-up. In vain. He failed to rise above the fog or descend below it. The crew frantically raised and lowered the ship, looking for a hole in the fog where the least ice would form. The Norge was covered in ice armour.
Then, at around 10:45, the side engine fan spring broke. The spare engine was immediately switched on until the technicians were able to restart the broken engine. As a result of such stunts, the speed of the airship was very unstable and the crew slowly began to lose their orientation. Then a large chunk of ice made a big hole in the ice and Nobile had to reduce speed even further, as Norge could hardly be steered. The worried crew could see through the hole to the ice floes just a few metres below them. Alaska was still hundreds of kilometres away.
At 17.19, the vague outline of something could be seen to the west. Is it a mountain range or an undiscovered land? The tension grew and the crew briefly forgot about the problem. Disappointment soon followed. It was just a ghost in the mist. But after half an hour, relief followed, the fog was no longer so thick and Norge seemed to be saved.
A polar day is dark, with only fog and clouds to obstruct the view. So the navigator and the sextant somehow managed to determine Norge’s course and steer her towards Alaska. Amundsen had very accurate charts for her, and he believed that he could orient himself from the contours of the land, the rivers and the Eskimo villages, and then sail along the coast until he reached Nome, where 150 volunteers were already waiting to help him land.
Alaska – target achieved
At around 6.30, the navigator thought he saw dark shadows in the distance, but did not inform anyone, fearing the ridicule he would receive if he thought he had seen land. But the shadows did not grow fainter, but took concrete form, and he cried out, “Land in sight!” The ship erupted in excitement, the men clapped each other on the shoulders, Nobile pulled another bottle of eggnog from somewhere, and everyone toasted.
At 7.25 Norge flew over the firm coastal land of Alaska. They made it across the Arctic after 46 and a half hours of driving.
But the joy was soon over when they realised that the hardest part of the journey was not yet behind them. The fog was getting very thick again and the exhausted Norge had to resort to risky manoeuvres. The men were very tired and hungry, having been in the air for 48 hours, and many of them had not closed their eyes the night before the start of the flight. Coffee and hot soup from insulated bottles had long since been drunk, and sandwiches and steaks were so frozen that they had to be thawed under their uniforms.
Norge was zigzagging across the Bering Sea, only to emerge from the fog again at 17.45, and the men breathed a sigh of relief as the ice field stretched out below them, free of dangerous mountains. The airship was like a shot duck just a few metres above the ice sheet.
Nobile went around the ship to see what her condition was and came back worried. During the last hours of the journey through the fog, the ship had again accumulated a lot of new ice and again pieces of ice were being thrown from the propeller into the shroud, making holes, and the sail material to cover the holes had run out, so the holes were getting bigger and bigger. Nobile knew that Norge had to land immediately, no matter where she was.
Visibility was only a few metres. A long wire with a weight attached to the end was hanging below the airship, and suddenly it hit the ground and broke off. From the ship the crew could see a few isolated huts and some Eskimos shouting something. In such weather conditions, landing was very risky, so the ship rose again to 1000 metres.
At 1.30 the radiotelegraph operator received the first signal from the station in Nome, fifteen minutes later they spotted a small river and they knew where they were because they could see high mountains behind the shoreline. The storm was still raging and Norge was crawling along the shore like a crab. At these crucial moments, the rear engine started to cough restlessly and Nobile wanted to switch it off and switch on the other one. He gave the order to the mechanic, but nothing happened. He gave the order again and again nothing happened. The mechanic was so tired that he was working as if in a trance, and although he accepted the commands, he was unable to carry them out. The situation was very dangerous for Norge, as it was threatening to become unmanageable. The second mechanic was in better condition and had engaged the spare engine.
Half an hour later, the presumed defective engine suddenly started working for some unknown reason, and then soon broke down again. At 07.00 Amundsen sighted an island which he mistook for Sledge Island and believed to be near Nome.
It was now clear that the Norge was badly damaged and the crew at the end of their strength, some of them began to hallucinate, and the navigator even spotted a detachment of cavalry on the ground with flags unfurled to await them in solemn anticipation. Then suddenly the storm abated, so that the Nobile dared to land, although there was no landing circle, no halyard, no trained team to help them land. Only a few mountaineers and Eskimos were present, they grabbed the rope that the crew had thrown them from the airship and the Norge, from which 16 deathly tired people had climbed out, was slowly grounded.
“Where are we?” asked Amundsen, and they were immediately told that they were in Teller, a village of 200 inhabitants 125 kilometres from Nome. It had been 71 hours since they had flown from Spitzberg.
Immediately after landing, Nobile sent a telegram from the village radio station to his wife in Italy: ‘Happy landing in Teller, Alaska. It was a dream trip. Nobile.”
After a short stopover, they set off along the coast to the town of Nome, where they had to wait for a month for a ship to come looking for them. Amundsen was discouraged by the lukewarm reception in Nome, and it was only when they all arrived in Seattle that their journey to glory began. Banquets were given all over America, brass bands played in their honour and flags were flown.
Amundsen felt uncomfortable again. After a tiring flight and four weeks of rest in Nome, he and his Norwegian crew were wearing nothing but simple faded clothes and somehow did not belong at a gala reception. Nobile and his officers appeared everywhere in their parade uniforms, which they had hidden on Norge. The crew travelled all over America by train for five days, and then the Italians and Norwegians parted ways in New York.
On 12 July 1926, Amundsen and his crew arrived in Bergen. They were welcomed as heroes by all of Norway.
But what did this expedition actually achieve? Meteorological observations and confirmation that there is no more undiscovered country in the far north are zero, the German Frankfurter Zeitung wrote maliciously back in May, despite Amundsen and Nobile insisting otherwise. Nor has this journey succeeded in demonstrating any great advantage of aircraft travel in extreme conditions compared with air travel. Their meteorologist even claimed after the trip that such journeys would in future be better carried out by large aircraft.
What was left was a prestige contest; this was enough for Norway, which finally gained its independence in 1905 after centuries of subservience to both Denmark and Sweden. Italy, too, celebrated its men, with Mussolini showering honours on Umberto Nobile, making him a general and a university professor. Ellsworth continued to fund various expeditions and died in 1951 a highly respected man.
In the years that followed, Nobile and Amundsen got into a heated argument about who deserved more glory for the Norge voyage. Two years later, Nobile and his partner airship Italia again set off on several scientific expeditions to the Arctic. But on the third in 1928, he met with disaster when his airship crashed into the permafrost. Nobile and his seven companions were thrown from the ship. They were only rescued thanks to an international rescue operation, which included Amundsen, who flew into the permafrost in an aeroplane and never returned.
Nobile and his companions were rescued, but on their return he was attacked for wrong decisions. He had to resign from the army and also from university circles. He was only rehabilitated in 1945 and died at the age of 93.
