The Italia Airship — it fell on the ice, and the rescue killed more than the crash
Summary
On 25 May 1928 the Italian semi-rigid airship Italia, commanded by the engineer-general Umberto Nobile, crashed onto the Arctic pack ice roughly 120 kilometres northeast of Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, while returning from the North Pole. Of the sixteen men aboard, ten were thrown onto the ice when the control gondola struck and shattered; one of them, the mechanic Vincenzo Pomella, was killed on impact. The other six were carried away inside the still-buoyant envelope, which rose, drifted off, and was never found. The survivors on the ice — several injured, including Nobile with a broken leg and arm — salvaged a radio, a tent and some food, and waited. The rescue that followed lasted seven weeks and cost more lives than the crash itself, including that of Roald Amundsen, the most accomplished polar explorer of the age, who disappeared while flying out to search for the men he had quarrelled with two years before.
The Italia was the climax of a brief, doomed enthusiasm for reaching the poles by airship. Nobile had already flown over the North Pole in 1926 aboard the Norge, an expedition led by Amundsen on which the two men had clashed bitterly over credit. The Italia was Nobile's own command, an Italian state-backed bid to repeat and surpass that flight with scientific observations. It reached the Pole on 24 May 1928 but could not land in the wind, turned back, and was forced down by icing and a loss of control on the return leg — a triumph turned, in hours, into a survival ordeal on a drifting floe, watched by the world over the new medium of shortwave radio.
The death toll falls into two ledgers. The crash and its aftermath killed Pomella, the six men in the lost envelope, and Malmgren, who died on the ice during a desperate march for help. The rescue itself killed others: Amundsen and the five men of his French flying-boat crew vanished without trace, and further rescuers died in crashes. Eight of the original sixteen survived, lifted off by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin and by aircraft. The episode ended the age of polar airships, ruined Nobile's reputation in Fascist Italy for two decades, and became a lasting study in how a rescue, badly coordinated and driven by competing nations and egos, can multiply a disaster rather than contain it.
Timeline
A second flight to the Pole, on Nobile's own command
By 1928 the airship looked, briefly, like the instrument that would master the Arctic, covering in hours distances that had cost earlier expeditions years and lives and carrying observers over the ice instead of dragging them across it. Nobile, an aeronautical engineer and Italian Air Force officer, had built that case in 1926 aboard the Norge, the first aircraft confirmed to reach the North Pole, on an expedition financed and led by Amundsen. The flight succeeded, but the partnership did not: the two men feuded publicly over who deserved the glory, a quarrel sharpened by national pride. The Italia was Nobile's answer — an Italian expedition, under his command, with a programme of scientific observation meant to prove the airship was more than a stunt.
The ship was a semi-rigid dirigible of Nobile's own design, close kin to the Norge, with a long fabric envelope over a keel and a control gondola slung beneath. It carried sixteen men, including the Swedish meteorologist Finn Malmgren and the Czech physicist František Běhounek, on the polar flight, working from a base at Kings Bay on Spitsbergen. The plan rested on the same fragile assumption every airship venture did: that the weather would hold. An airship is a creature of fair conditions, vulnerable to wind, to the weight of accreting ice, and to the loss of lift — and the Arctic offered none of the guarantees the plan required.
On 23 May the Italia left Spitsbergen for the Pole and reached it the next day. The wind made any landing impossible, so the ceremonies were carried out from the air and the ship turned for home. It was on the return, fighting a headwind and gathering ice, that the disaster came.
The crash, the Red Tent, and the march
In the early hours of 25 May the Italia began to lose height. Ice had accumulated on the envelope and controls; the ship grew heavy and would not respond, and it struck the pack ice with the control gondola taking the impact. The gondola was torn open, throwing ten men onto the floe; the mechanic Vincenzo Pomella died there. Relieved of the gondola's weight, the envelope — now a free balloon carrying six men and much of the wreckage — rose again, drifted away to the east, and was never located. The fate of those six has never been established.
The survivors were battered. Nobile had a broken leg and arm; others were injured. But chance had thrown clear of the wreck a quantity of food, a tent, and — decisively — an emergency radio. The men pitched the tent and coloured it red with marker dye so that it might be seen against the white, and the wireless operator Giuseppe Biagi began tapping out distress calls into a silence that lasted days. The world knew only that the Italia was overdue and presumed lost. Not until 3 June did a Soviet amateur, Nikolai Schmidt, listening on a homemade set far from the Arctic, catch the faint SOS and pass it on, and only then did the position of the Red Tent become known.
Before that signal was heard, three men had decided not to wait. Malmgren, the Swede, with two Italian officers, set off across the broken ice to reach land and bring help. The march was brutal — pressure ridges, leads of open water, exhaustion and cold. Malmgren, weakening, could not continue and died on the ice; the two Italians struggled on and were eventually found by the rescue. His death was the first of several the rescue effort, not the crash, would claim.
The reckoning: a rescue that killed its rescuers
Once the survivors' position was known, a vast and chaotic international rescue assembled — ships and aircraft from Italy, Sweden, Norway, the Soviet Union and others, with hundreds of personnel. The scale was unprecedented; so was the cost. Roald Amundsen, who had not spoken well of Nobile since 1926, set aside the feud and flew north to help. On 18 June his French flying boat, the Latham 47, left Tromsø with six men aboard and disappeared over the Barents Sea; no trace of the aircraft or its crew was ever conclusively found. The greatest polar explorer of his generation died searching for the rival he had quarrelled with.
The rescue's other great controversy was Nobile himself. When the Swedish pilot Einar Lundborg landed a small ski-plane beside the Red Tent on 23 June, he insisted on flying out the injured commander first. Nobile, by his own later account, protested but was overruled, and he left his men on the ice ahead of them. The optics were ruinous: the leader saved before his crew. Lundborg crashed on a second flight and himself had to be rescued. Not until 12 July did the Soviet icebreaker Krasin — which had also, en route, rescued the two surviving members of the Malmgren march — break through to lift off the remaining men of the Red Tent. Eight of the sixteen who flew from Spitsbergen survived. Counting the crash victims, the lost envelope crew, Malmgren, Amundsen's party and other rescuers killed in crashes, the disaster's full toll came to seventeen dead.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
The Italia disaster effectively ended the use of airships for polar exploration. The aircraft and the icebreaker — not the dirigible — would carry the Arctic future, and the lesson that a lighter-than-air ship cannot be trusted against polar weather was paid for in lives. The Soviet Krasin's role made it a symbol of Soviet capability and Arctic ambition for decades.
Nobile bore the heaviest reckoning among the survivors. An Italian commission of inquiry, operating within a Fascist state eager for a scapegoat, blamed him for the crash and for being flown out first; he resigned his rank in disgrace and spent years abroad, his rehabilitation coming only long after the war. The greatest loss was Amundsen's: the conqueror of the South Pole and the Northwest Passage vanished into the Barents Sea and was never found, a death that turned a rival's rescue into his own memorial. Of the men carried off in the drifting envelope, nothing is known to this day. The Red Tent, dyed red against the ice so that the living might be seen, became the disaster's enduring image — and the title, decades later, of a film that fixed the episode in popular memory.
Lessons
- Match the vehicle to the worst the terrain can do: a craft that depends on fair weather has no business where the weather is the chief hazard.
- Interrogate the motive behind a venture; a project driven by pride or the need to settle a score will quietly tolerate risks the stated goal never required.
- Do not let the entire chain of rescue hang on a single radio and the luck of a distant listener — build redundant, scheduled means of being found before departure.
- Coordinate a rescue under one command; a flood of uncoordinated ships, aircraft and nations can kill more rescuers than it saves.
- Hold the survival order above rank and reputation: who is saved, and when, must follow need and not the standing of the leader.
References
- Italia (airship) WIKIPEDIA
- Umberto Nobile WIKIPEDIA
- The loss of the airship Italia: the final curtain call of polar airship exploration OCEANWIDE EXPEDITIONS
- Italia Crashes in the Arctic AMERICAN HERITAGE