Mardi Gras. Marty’s sick but of course has back to back gigs this week, had a Mardi Gras gig tonight and is still a couple of hours out, heading home. He called and spoke through sniffles. It’s a slow-burning cold and H.o.p., after trailing Kleenex for a couple of days, insisting it was allergies (did not want a cold) finally got the fever today. “I’ve got boogers coming out my nose!” But he’s not absolutely miserable. “It’s allergies,” he still insisted with the fever, slept and laid around and I would go in to sit with him when he woke up and we ended up watching PBS’s show on the Franklin northwest passage expedition, turned tragedy by botulism and lead poisoning, which was pretty depressing, but we sat there stupefied by congestion and stared at the ice, going through tissues, H.o.p. with tissue hanging out each nostril, and every time I sneezed H.o.p. would laugh.
I was reminded of the haunting movie, “The Red Tent” (Krasnaya palatka), directed by Mikheil Mikheil Kalatozishvili, Sean Connery playing Roald Amundsen, an explorer who died in the effort to rescue the crew of Umberto Nobile’s ill-fated polar flight.
Umberto Nobile decides he wants to fly over the North Pole in a blimp. His crew is composed of scientists and journalists. Winds tear the blimp apart. The surviving crew sets up a salvaged tent, paints it red and waits for help. A month passes before the world realizes they’re alive with an amateur radio operator picking up a transmission. Nobile is for some reason airlifted out first. He protests. The sick should go first. But the pilot insists he can only airlift Nobile (also injured) this time around. Then, returning, the rescue pilot crashes. The explorer, Amundsen, also dies during a rescue attempt.
Peter Finch plays Nobile, reflecting on all this as an old man, being judged in his imagination by the dead and survivors of his crew. But I scarcely recollect him in the film. It’s instead the red tent I remember. The red tent. And Connery. It has been years since I’ve seen the film, and I recollect only a little of this trial by imagination. What I instead remember is the red tent and the waiting. The questions of courage or vanity. Nobile in a warm place, years distant, meeting again the ice, in what is successfully a story about each of the individuals.
Wikipedia gives the following:
After two preliminary flights from Ny-Ã…lesund (Kings Bay), the flight to the North Pole began on May 23, 1928, but ended in a crash on the ice on May 25, close to 81° 14′ latitude north, 28° 14′ longitude east. The crew managed to salvage several items from the crashed airship, including food, a radio transmitter and, famously, a red tent. The drifting sea ice later took the survivors towards Foyn and Broch islands. Incompetence on the part of Captain Romagna meant that the survivors’ distress signals were not picked up for several weeks, and despite the presence of Italian ski-troops on board in case of just such an emergency, no effort was made by the Italian authorities to mount a search, let alone a rescue effort.
Thus it was left to the international community, and in particular Norway, Sweden and Finland to begin the first polar air rescue effort. Several privately owned ships which had been chartered by polar scientists and explorers also participated. Even Amundsen forgot his past differences, but went missing when his overloaded seaplane disappeared en route to the search headquarters. His body was never found. After a month of privation, the first rescue plane, a Swedish airforce Fokker ski plane, piloted by Lieutenant Einar Lundborg landed near the crash site. Nobile had prepared a detailed evacuation plan, with the most seriously wounded men at the top of the list. However Lundborg, possibly on orders from his superiors, but also possibly on orders from the Italian government, refused to take anyone but Nobile, arguing that he was desperately needed to co-ordinate the rescue operations. Nobile was reluctantly airlifted to Ryss Island, base camp of Swedish and Finnish air rescue efforts. However, when Lundborg returned to pick up a second survivor he crashed his plane on landing and became trapped with the others. Eventually, Nobile reached the Città di Milano where he was dismayed at the incompetence he found. His attempts to co-ordinate the international rescue effort were blocked, and when he threatened to leave he was placed under virtual arrest by Captain Romagna. His telegrams to the survivors still on the ice, as well as to various people involved in the rescue, were heavily censored, and he was forced to sign a communique implying cowardice for being the first to be evacuated. Eventually the rest of his crew were rescued by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin. Nobile wanted to continue the search for six crew who were swept away in the envelope of the airship when it crashed, but he was ordered back to Rome with the others, in a locked train.
I remember that horrifying scene of the dirigible tearing apart and one half sailing on. Captured well a moment when human companions cease to be ordinary and enter into the territory of mythic giants repeating over and over the same actions, resolution lost forever, Sisyphus doomed never to complete his travail.
Some websites give a 15 man crew with 6 flying off in the remnant of the dirigible and 8 of 9 surviving the crash. Fiddlersgreen (below) states that there was a crew of 17, including Nobile. That 7 were blown away in the remnant of the ship, and a mechanic died in the crash. 2 Italian naval officers and a scientist composed the party that set out on foot for help, and of those three the naval officers survived.
It was now six weeks since the original crash and more than a month since three of the crew had set out across the ice to find help. As the weather worsened, making it impossible for other planes to locate or approach the camp, the situation looked increasingly bleak. Yet, unknown to the small group waiting patiently on the ice, the Russian icebreakers Krassin and Malygin were steaming through the fog toward them. During one break in the clouds, Krassin had been able to launch its spotter plane, which had detected the two naval officers walking across the ice, and the ship had picked them up. Dr Malmgren had had to be left behind on their journey, close to death, and his body was never found. The very next day, Krassin arrived at the camp, and the five remaining survivors were safe at last. It had been a tragic and disappointing follow-up to the success of the Norge expedition, and the death toll was still rising. Apart from the four mechanics, the two journalists, and the scientist who had disappeared with the remains of the airship, another mechanic had been killed in the crash and Dr Malmgren had died on the trek across the ice. There was still worse to come. In the search for the survivors, a Russian plane from the icebreaker Malygin vanished with all its crew, as did a French flying boat carrying three Frenchmen and two Norwegians, Lief Dietrichsen and Nobile’s arch-rival, Roald Amundsen.
Human endeavor is mysterious, what compels to continue when faced with a horizon of ice, whether intellectual or spiritual resolution or force of life, or force of life influencing the former. To rise daily to that monotonous white and no surety of rescue, blanketed with cold. And remarkable also the compulsion to rescue, which “The Red Tent” well captured, the international effort to recover the crew, even at the expense of more life. The excitement of picking up the transmission from the crew members. The desperate determination to reach them in time.
Odd, humankind. A grand sort of nobility with tales of rescues such as with the Italia. But then thinks little of sacrificing the lives of thousands, even millions, to war and economic and social injustices. Just as stories of a ship captain’s loyalty to crew or abandonment of them captures the imagination, the actions of those captains scrutinized as the epitome of character-defining responsibility or lack thereof, all secure in the knowledge that a captain should never abandon those who depend on his or her judgment. And yet heads of countries seem to not face the same scrutiny, as if moral decreptitude is expected in the drawing room where leaders gather and discuss the business of millions.
Odd, humankind.
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