Disaster at the Pole: The Tragedy of the Airship Italia and the 1921 Nobile Expedition to the North Pole

Shackleton. Scott. Amundsen. The great twentieth-century polar explorers. But others, too, were engaged in scrambles to the poles. One of the most bizarre and tragic took place in 1928.Against the backdrop of Mussolini's rising power, one of Italy's premier aeronautical engineers, Umberto Nobile, gained acclaim by crossing the North Pole in a dirigible. With this success under his belt, Nobile decided in 1928 to raise the ante and take his newly designed airship to the North Pole, land it and then return to base. But what started in glory turned into a tale of disaster when the airship crashed some three hundred miles from civilization.With over thirty years of research and interviews with surviving participants, Wilbur Cross presents this terrifying tale of tragedy and survival. Here is the story of the airship's survivors stranded on an ice floe that begins to break apart into sea. It's about an international team of rescuers' determination to find the missing Italians only to be lost themselves; the most famous to never return was Roald Amundsen. And it's about the controversy surrounding the rescue of Nobile while much of his crew perished in the icy wastelands of the Arctic.Filled with political intrigue, heroics, and cruel twists of fate, "Disaster at the Pole" is the fascinating story of one of the greatest polar tragedies.