Umberto Nobile: The Fall of a Fascist Explorer
In 1926 Umberto Nobile became a hero of Mussolini’s Italy when he piloted Roald Amundsen’s Norge over the North Pole. Two years later his reputation went down with his airship.
In the autumn of 1925 the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, the man who had beaten Robert Falcon Scott in the ill-fated race to the South Pole in 1911, asked a young Italian aeronautical engineer to build him an airship that would fly to the North Pole. Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini enthusiastically backed the project as it would demonstrate Italy's technological prowess and show the growing power of his Fascist state. The expedition would turn the engineer, Umberto Nobile, into a national hero but it was a reputation that was not to last.
Amundsen owed much to the American Lincoln Ellsworth, whose millionaire father, a coal magnate, had financed his previous attempt to reach the North Pole by plane. Together they wanted to organise a new journey, this time by airship. Nobile had built one that needed only a few modifications and he promised to have it ready by early 1926.
Mussolini was willing to sell the semi-rigid airship to the Norwegians for a good price on condition that it would fly under the Italian flag. Amundsen refused this demand. However, Italy's willingness to sell the airship and its contribution to the project were such that Il Duce's request to include Nobile in the official expedition name was granted: the venture would be called 'The Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Transpolar Flight'. The dirigible, whose original name was Nl after the engineer's initial, was named Norge (Norway).
As Nobile later wrote in his memoirs: 'Three big heads had to live under the same hat: Amundsen, Ellsworth, Nobile. None of them was easy, none was made for giving in.'
Amundsen feared the extent to which the whole team would have to rely on Nobile's skills and those of his men. He did not want his authority to be challenged by this cocksure young man in a uniform who was confident he could reach the North Pole, but did not even know how to ski. Amundsen wrote in his memoirs published in 1927:
This salaried airship commander on a Norwegian ship, which belongs to an American and myself, will not be allowed to seize any honour which is not rightly his ...
But none of Amundsen's men had the skills or know-how to skipper the airship - not even on the last leg of the trip from the northernmost Norwegian outpost, the Svalbard Islands, to Alaska.
Amundsen still considered the expedition to be 'his' but he had reckoned without public opinion and the reception that awaited them at the end of the epic flight. Both in Alaska, where the airship landed two days after crossing the Pole on May 14th, 1926, and later in Seattle, which the explorers reached after a long sea journey, people seemed to be more fascinated by the young and handsome Italian colonel than by the mature and stern-looking Norwegian, conqueror of both Poles.
In Seattle, a little girl on the pier mistakenly handed Nobile, on behalf of the municipality, the bunch of flowers that was intended for Amundsen. This might have been the last straw. The rivalry between the two men had already reached breaking point. For Amundsen, it was as if the whole adventure had been spoiled by the presence of the Italians. Those black gypsies should never have been allowed to join in,' one of his closest friends, the chemist Fritz Zapffe, wrote in a letter to him.
Back in Italy, Nobile was acclaimed as a hero. Mussolini appointed him general and sent him on a long, triumphal tour through the US, where he met thousands of Italian migrants. Wherever he went, he was met by cheering crowds.
But Nobile's moment of glory was short-lived. Two years later he became the chief protagonist in a tragic adventure that re-enacted the previous expedition, this time under his own command. On May 25th, 1928, his new airship, named Italia to leave no doubt as to which country would take credit for this new mission, crashed on the ice pack on its way back from the polar cap. Six men drifted away in what remained of the airship and would never be seen again. Another died as the vessel impacted with the ice.
The ensuing massive, international search for the survivors led to Amundsen's death, destroyed Nobile's reputation and would haunt him for the rest of his life.
There was an excruciating wait to be endured by the survivors, some of whom were injured, Nobile among them. Even though a Russian radio amateur picked up their SOS message on June 6th, it was not until June 18th that a plane from the support ship Citta di Milano located the red tent on the ice and dropped food, guns, boots and sleeping bags. Another five days would pass before Nobile was rescued by a Swedish pilot Einar Lundborg, who managed to land his Fokker plane on the ice.
Due to the dangerous conditions, and the fact that the Fokker could only carry one additional passenger, the rest of the crew remained stranded for a further 19 days. They were finally rescued by a Russian icebreaker, the Krassin, on July 12th.
The survivors' long period of isolation before Nobile's rescue had had another tragic consequence. Fearing they would never be found, three men decided to set off across the ice on foot to look for help. Nobile allowed them to leave. One of them was the Swedish meteorologist Finn Malmgren, who, according to the accounts of the other two, became too weak and ill to continue walking. Plagued by frostbite and exhaustion he reportedly asked his companions to dig a grave in the snow, take all the food and leave him to his destiny.
Ugly rumours started spreading after their rescue on July 12th by the Krassin, fanned by a few odd circumstances, such as the fact that two Italians claimed not to have eaten for 13 days, whereas at least one of them appeared well-fed. The remains of the Swede were never recovered.
Though the surviving crew members were finally rescued, crucial questions remained regarding the safety operation. For weeks, the men on the ice had been aware of how the Citta di Milano had been sending telegrams to the press back in Italy, seemingly neglecting the search for them. It was as though the Italian authorities no longer believed anybody was still alive after Nobile's rescue. Had it been incompetence or deliberate neglect after the most precious 'trophy' of the international rescue expedition, Nobile, had been spirited to safety? But Nobile's reputation suffered with every day his men had to spend on the ice without him. How could he, the captain, justify having left his crew behind?
For his part, by the time the Krassin reached the Citta di Milano, Nobile could no longer conceal his anger and frustration at the Italian navy's role in the rescue operation. He accused the captain of the Citta di Milano of negligence in failing to pick up the radio signals the survivors had been sending out at regular intervals since the disaster. How could it have taken so long to locate them? Faced with Nobile's accusations, the Fascist leadership in Rome had to take sides in the dispute.
The Norwegian historian and Nobile biographer Steinar Aas takes the view that:
At that point, it was decided to put the blame on Nobile rather than on the badly coordinated, embarrassing rescue mission.
Oddly, Nobile's version of events - namely that the Italian authorities had not done enough in their efforts to rescue his team and that it had not been his decision to leave first on Lundborg's plane (later confirmed by the Swede) was not passed on to the Norwegian public, nor to his fellow countrymen.
Nobile was subsequently photographed disembarking from the Citta di Milano in the town of Narvik on the Norwegian mainland. The general looks a broken man, fragile and convalescent, staring down as he takes his first steps towards an uncertain future. A hostile crowd is waiting for him and a wooden gangway has been built that leads from the pier directly to the train he is about to embark upon, ensuring that the man described by a local paper as 'cardboard hearted and cork-legged' will not pollute the Norwegian soil. Back in Italy, an equally cold reception awaited.
The largest stain on Nobile's reputation was his solitary rescue from the ice pack by the Swedish pilot, leaving his crew behind. But in Norway, he swiftly became a hate figure for another tragic reason. The search operation for the Italia involved eight countries. In the midst of the rescue attempt Amundsen had joined one of the search missions on board a French plane, the Latham, which had vanished along with him and four Frenchmen. In the eyes of the Norwegians, Nobile was the lacklustre coward for whom Amundsen, their great hero, had sacrificed his life.
Mussolini had strongly supported Nobile's project and hoped that the new airship expedition (with a crew of 16, all-Italian except the meteorologist Malmgren and the Czech radiologist Franticek Bêhounek) would prove Italy's technological and scientific achievements to the world. But on Nobile's return to Rome the Fascist leader ordered an inquiry into the failed expedition which found Nobile guilty of fatal mistakes in manoeuvring the airship and also criticised him for abandoning his men on the ice. According to Aas:
The result of the inquiry was somehow supported by the negative portrait that Amundsen had already drawn of Nobile, namely that he was a show-off, a cowardly general who lacked leadership skills.
Nobile's name became synonymous with cowardice. In Italy jokes about him started circulating - anecdotes of how he would always be the first to leave whenever he smelled danger. In 1929, he was forced to leave the Air Force. Two years later he was offered the chance to continue his airship construction work in the Soviet Union; Mussolini granted him permission to go. The Russians still believed it was worth developing an airship programme, though by then the Italians had completely abandoned the airship in favour of the aeroplane.
People had lost respect for Nobile in his own country, where his reputation remains tarnished to this day. In the words of the Italian historian Luciano Zani:
[Nobile] was a real man of his time: he liked to receive honours and awards, and identified with his role of fascist hero. But this did not prevent him from moving to Russia and becoming a champion of the Soviet airship industry. The personality cult and the 'strong-man' cult applied to both totalitarian regimes in those years: Soviets and Fascists alike.
However, Nobile was keen to return to the site of the crash, and the Russians had lured him partly with the prospect of taking him back there. This they did on board the ice-breaker Malyghin three years after the disaster in 1931. The Italian engineer had become obsessed with the arctic silence and the expanse of ice: 'that immense solitude where every person feels like he is king of himself; all this, once experienced, cannot be forgotten, and holds a lure that is impossible to resist' (he wrote in his memoirs published in 1945). He was also hoping to recover the bodies of the six crew members who had disappeared, dragged away by the airship after it hit the ice pack. Perhaps he thought that finding the remains of the airship might shed light on the disaster and enable him to clear his name.
But the Malyghin never reached its destination and had to turn back. Nobile was told this was due to the thickness of the ice and insufficient coal supplies. In any case the Russians had succeeded in persuading him to take up the management of the Soviet airship construction programme, which had been the purpose of offering the trip. He had resumed building airships away from his hostile homeland with Mussolini's tacit approval.
Nobile returned to Italy in 1936, two years after the death of his wife who had remained in Italy and whom he had neglected while trying to rebuild his professional life and his reputation abroad. After the war, in 1946, he ran as an independent candidate within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the election for Italy's Constituent Assembly. He was elected and served for two years, but the life of a politician did not suit him.
Zani believes the failure of Nobile's 1928 mission was mostly used as a pretext to destroy his reputation for political reasons that had little to do with the tragedy itself:
One peculiarity of Nobile's life is that within a very short time-span, he was first put on a pedestal and then pulled down into the mud ... In reality, a bitter feud over the future of aviation had erupted within the Fascist regime's higher echelons. On the one hand there were Nobile's supporters, who wanted to boost the airship industry. On the other there was the powerful and influential Italo Balbo, State Secretary for Aviation - a strong supporter of the superiority of airplanes over airships and himself an aviator, who a few years later would lead two successful transatlantic flights. In hindsight, we know Balbo was right.
But there is also another, purely political, motive for the attacks on Nobile. 'We should not forget that Nobile had never been a Fascist - he became an honorary party member first after the successful transpolar flight on board the Norge,' says Zani. 'As soon as he failed the new mission and became vulnerable, his enemies hit hard and left him no way out.'
Nobile's ambivalent attitude towards Italy's regime, despite his friendly relationship with Mussolini, is confirmed by Lise Lindbaek, a Danish-Norwegian woman who lived in Rome and had been chosen by the engineer to act as an interpreter with his Norwegian counterparts. 'We all knew that Nobile was no Fascist, and that he had many enemies in the Air Force Ministry,' she has commented.
After the Second World War and the fall of Fascism, Nobile could resume a normal life in Italy. A new inquiry in 1945 had cleared him of the accusations that had cost him his job and his title of general was restored. But in spite of this, in the eyes of his countrymen, his reputation remained tarnished. Throughout his life, Nobile continued to be haunted by his perceived failings in the Italia disaster. Today, the explorer's life and achievements are largely ignored even in Italian school history books.
Surprisingly, perhaps, in recent years it is Norway rather than Italy that has begun to reassess Nobile. Steiner Aas believes that the Norwegian people's prejudices towards the Italian engineer were mostly based on rumours and misinformation, fomented by Amundsen's hostile remarks about his rival.
Nobile was the opposite of the Scandinavian image of a polar explorer. He was seen as an intellectual rather than an action man, unfit to fend for himself in the extreme Arctic environment. Aas argues, however, that Amundsen would never have reached the North Pole had it not been for Nobile and his airship:
Amundsen was saddled with debts, his resources were very limited ... Italian airships were relatively cheap - without them, he would never have been able to organise this journey. On top of that, Nobile played a crucial role in the planning and logistics of the expedition, and took with him a bunch of highly skilled crew members.
As to Nobile's damaging rescue, Aas pleads the general's case. According to the accounts of Lundborg, the Swedish pilot, corroborated by one of the survivors, the Czech scientist Behounek, Nobile was never really given an option: the Swede had been instructed to lift him out first. Aas explains:
Nobile and the other survivors had devised a rescue plan according to which the general should have been the last one to leave, but the pilot insisted he had to follow the orders and take Nobile first ... In order to persuade him, the Swede argued his presence was needed on board the Citta di Mifono to lead the rescue operation. He was also injured, and therefore a burden to his companions. But these are things that did not emerge back then.
Aas believes Nobile's main flaw was his single-mindedness:
Nobile was extremely ambitious with regard to his career. He was so politically naïve that he embarked on the polar expeditions without realising the possible repercussions of a failure on the Fascist regime back home. His greatest mistake was not to die on the pack ice. Had he died, he would have become a hero.
Zani, too, insists that despite his many faults, Nobile was a capable and courageous commander:
He was an ebullient man with a penchant for women, but not in the least was he a coward. And of course, he was a first-class aeronautic engineer, or else the Soviets would not have recruited him. 1 think that the mud-slinging and accusations of cowardice and technical inexperience were a heap of lies used to launch an attack against him.
Nobile died in 1978 aged 93. Amundsen's body was never found. An inquiry was launched into the disappearance of the French rescue plane carrying him after a float belonging to the aircraft was discovered. It found that bad weather and fog had been the cause of the accident. Having lost his life while trying to rescue another human who also happened to be his bitter rival, Amundsen won the world's admiration.
For many decades, details of Nobile's rescue, Amundsen's disappearance and the allegations of cannibalism directed at crew members of the Italia remained cloudy, partly because the documents relating to expedition, and the people who participated, were scattered across Europe, Russia and the US.
Many of those mysteries might never have been resolved, but in November 2008 the Spitsbergen Airship Museum opened in the capital of the Svalbard islands, Longyearbyen, dedicated to telling the story of the Italia and to filling in the gaps.
The man behind the project, Stefano Poli, a 40-year-old from Milan, has spent two years piecing together testimonies of some of the 1,500 people who took part in the rescue operation - often through the intermediaries of their children and grandchildren. Poli says:
All this was unthinkable in the decades that followed those events. first the Second World War, then the Cold War with its cultural and political barriers hampered all sorts of communication between those who could have told the real story. In conceiving and setting up this museum I have tried to be as impartial as possible, because I think that the conflict between Amundsen and Nobile was fanned by the press of the time and blown out of proportion.
