The Swedish relief expedition reached Spitsbergen in the third week of June 1928 with two ships, the Quest and the Tanja, two Hansa seaplanes, a three-engined Junkers and one small Fokker fitted with skis, under Captain Tornberg. The Fokker’s pilot was Lieutenant Einar Lundborg of the Swedish air force, thirty-two, who had fought in Finland and Estonia and held the Iron Cross from a year in the German army. He wrote his account that winter, and it was published in New York in 1929 as The Arctic Rescue. The words below are his, except where Nobile’s or Arnesen’s are given.
23 June
Lundborg’s Fokker had been assembled on Danes Island and flown to a snowfield near the Swedish camp. Just after midnight on Midsummer Eve he took off from “a slight elevation on the shore”, with Lieutenant Birger Schyberg in the observer’s seat, and flew east along the north coast in company with the two Hansas, over Hinlopen Strait and the ice-cap of North-East Land, towards Foyn and Broch Islands, which from the air “looked far from inviting. They were more like two large stone heaps sticking up out of the frozen surface.” Beyond them was the pack: “It was more like a frozen desert broken up by a gigantic stone crusher.”
About twenty miles out over it the leading Hansa turned, “and behold below us: like a few tiny dots or dark pinheads I discerned a group of human beings beside a faint streak of smoke. This was the camp.” One man stood apart, waving a large red cloth, as he had the day before when the Swedes first flew over; the airmen had already named him “the man with the flag”. It was Běhounek. There was a tent, coloured flags laid on the ice, a mast with pennants, and a red T laid out to mark the landing field that Nobile had been asked, in a note dropped the day before, to choose. The T was placed wrong for the wind. A streak of smoke on the lee side showed Lundborg how to land, “just the reverse of the direction indicated by the T.” He made three trial glides along the snow with the skis touching, studying the tracks from the air each time, while Schyberg behind him reported, “This will go all right!” Then he landed. “The skis clattered against some icy projections at the far end of the field, now we got a tremendous bump from a hard snow ridge, so severe that we thought the machine would be wrecked. But no, there stood my noble Fokker, hardly fifteen yards from the piled up pack ice on the windward side of the field, without the slightest injury.”
He kept the engine running, left Schyberg with it, and walked towards two men coming to meet him: Viglieri, “tall and slender with chalk-white teeth which gleamed prominently against the considerably darker face”, and Biagi, “short and stubby”. English was the common language. Biagi gave him an ice pick for the gaps. The tent was about 220 yards away, and the General was sitting outside it with Běhounek and Cecioni, “bareheaded. He wore a grey sweater and light grey knickers, on one foot a civilian summer shoe and on the other a stocking and reindeer-skin slipper. The broken leg was wound with a grey bandage. I hurried toward him and he stretched out both hands and drew me to him in a warm embrace.”
“I then explained who I was and that I had come to take them away from their enforced stay on the pack ice. I asked him to be the first to come with me at once. I could not take more than one this time, as I had my scout with me; but I would soon return alone and then I could take two at a time.
“The General pointed to Cecioni, a large powerful man with a stately, typically Italian appearance. He sat close at hand trying to make a litter out of the parts of the crushed gondola on which he was to be helped over the floe, since both bones of his right leg were broken.
“‘I have decided on another sequence,’ said the General. ‘First Cecioni, then Behounek, Trojani, Viglieri, Biagi, and finally myself.’
“I then asked the General to change the order as far as he himself was concerned and to go with me at once, since I considered his presence on board the Città di Milano very desirable for directing the rescue work, especially in case I could not bring them all back the same night. Besides, it would take considerably longer time to bring the heavy Cecioni back the long distance to the plane. Finally, I hardly thought that the Fokker would rise on the relatively small field with both Cecioni and Schyberg on board.
“I watched the General discuss this with the others and by their expressions I could understand that they agreed to the revised sequence. Yet Cecioni began to cry, whereupon I felt moved to go to him with some comforting words which he, however, could not understand, since he spoke only his mother tongue. The General finally bade me wait while he went into the tent to get ready. Creeping on all fours he disappeared inside.”
While he waited Lundborg looked at the camp: the tent “about three yards square” with “a mass of rubbish of all kinds” round it, the skeleton of Malmgren’s bear, the pale streaks of aniline on the tent cloth that were the whole of its redness, Biagi’s flags sewn from charts and painted, a cardboard disc faced with chocolate foil for flashing at aeroplanes, the aerial on aluminium tubes stayed with eight lines, and “close beside the mast stood the sending apparatus, its batteries covered with a French flag.” Viglieri offered him a whisky bottle and a box of cigarettes dropped by the Swedes the day before, and he refused them. Nobile came out with a packet of the ship’s logbooks and asked him to carry them to the plane. The dog Titina “was actually put on board before the General.” Nobile kissed each of the five on both cheeks. Viglieri and Biagi, “who were in the best physical shape of all”, helped him over the ice, and he crawled the smooth stretches himself to give them a rest; it took three-quarters of an hour to cover the two hundred yards. “It was exactly midnight of Midsummer Eve.”
The Fokker lifted “about 15 to 20 yards from the ice ridge and sure failure”. Schyberg wound his scarf round the General’s bare head as a turban. On Russian Island, in Russian Fjord off the north coast of North-East Land, the Swedes had a camp, a snowfield with a landing mark, and their flag on a ridge. The General was carried ashore on the navigation seat and put into a sleeping bag, and fed “sandwiches with cheese, chopped beef and fried potatoes, coffee with white bread, and whisky to make him warm.” His first words were about the supplies the Swedes had dropped on the camp: “They must be a practical people, these Swedes!” Tornberg’s message to the Quest, for Sweden, was “GENERAL SAVED. RESCUE WORK CONTINUES.” Nobile’s last words to Lundborg before he went back were: “When I see all of you, my comrades out there on the ice and yourself, assembled here with me again, that moment will be the happiest of my life. They are worthy of your help, those men out there.”
24 June
Lundborg left behind his rucksack, tent and sleeping bag so that the Fokker could lift two men, took a rifle, a pistol, twenty-five cartridges and some chocolate, and flew alone, escorted by a Hansa. Between Broch and Foyn Islands the engine began to sputter. He tested both tanks; it made no difference; he thought of putting down “in a heap” on Foyn Island, and then, two hundred yards from doing so, the engine picked up again. Water in the petrol, he decided. Over the floe it failed again. The wind had changed since the night, and he had to land across it to use the length of the field.
“But this time I had hit on a poorer landing line. First the plane jumped or hopped over the icy knobs; then the skis dug themselves down in the snow, thawed and slushy from the strong sunshine. It was 4:30 in the morning.” He dared not open the throttle again with an engine he could not trust. “I did not have time to finish the thought before I felt the skis, especially the right pair, dig unbelievably far down, the tail grow light, and the nose begin to sink. … Before I knew what it was all about, I found myself hanging by the straps, head down, in my overturned Fokker.”
“Why, yes, it was Midsummer Day, the twenty-fourth!” His nose bled; otherwise he was unhurt. “I think that I was more angry, actually very angry, than desperate.” Viglieri embraced him and wept. Cecioni was waiting on the field, leaning on an alpenstock; in Lundborg’s absence the others had carried him there from the camp. The wing struts were broken and bent; there would be no repair on the ice. He went to the tent and slept off “the first spell of deep despair and discouragement”, and woke at eleven in the hot tent beside Trojani, who had a fever, under a picture of the patron saint of Italian aviation that had flown on the Norge. Through the camp’s glasses Foyn and Broch “seemed very near. They tempted and pulled in a way that is hard to describe.” He asked Viglieri how far. “Eighteen miles.” That evening he sent, through Biagi, a telegram to Nobile:
“AT MY SECOND LANDING ON THE ICE FLOE MY PLANE TURNED OVER AND WAS INJURED TO SUCH AN EXTENT THAT REPARATION OUT HERE IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. I MYSELF AM UNINJURED. IN THE NIGHT WHEN IT IS SOMEWHAT COLDER A PLANE EQUIPPED WITH SKIS CAN EASILY LAND HERE. I SHALL TRY TO MAKE THE BEST OF OUR LANDING FIELD. BE KIND ENOUGH TO INFORM MY WIFE IN SWEDEN THAT I AM ALL RIGHT. GREETINGS FROM US ALL, LUNDBORG.”
Nobile answered with news of the light aeroplanes ordered from England, of the Krassin and the Malygin, and of the sledge parties, and signed it “Your Nobile”. Viglieri showed him the camp’s account book, every gram of food entered: “We have provisions for two months.” Viglieri also told him at once that he, Lundborg, would be the first to go when a plane came, and Lundborg records that Běhounek afterwards told the newspapers it was because the Swede could not bear his fate. They moved the camp on to the big floe beside the wreck, where there was a field. Lundborg stayed thirteen days. On 5 July the Junkers dropped chocolate, brandy and a tent; on the evening of 6 July Schyberg landed a de Havilland Moth on the field Lundborg had levelled, and Lundborg, Arnesen wrote, “hurriedly climbed on board, so that no discussions might arise among the men on the floe as to who should first be saved”.
What was said afterwards
Arnesen, who met the Swedish airmen at Virgo Harbour the day after the first landing, reported the greeting that the captain of the Città di Milano gave Lundborg: “Why did you save the General first? He is nothing but a trouble to us.” Flight carried Nobile’s own explanation that week, that he had opposed the plan but that his companions had insisted on his going and the Swedish pilot had insisted that his orders were to take him first. The Italian commission of inquiry, in March 1929, found that Nobile’s leaving the ice before his companions was contrary to the laws of military honour and had no plausible justification, though it might be explained by his state of depression “and pressure exercised by Lieutenant Lundborg”.
Lundborg had written his own view before the commission sat, after visiting Nobile in his cabin on the ship and finding him “quite depressed, not the least because of all the adverse criticism that had been directed against him and his Italia venture from practically the whole world.” “Whether or not General Nobile carried out his Italia expedition scientifically is a matter that I cannot decide. But I know that he is a fine and noble man, and I am convinced that all the severe judgments passed on him and certain details of his polar expedition would never have been uttered if catastrophe had not befallen it. And to criticize the General because I took him off the floe first, I consider inhuman and cruel.”
Einar Lundborg was killed in January 1931, testing an aeroplane at Malmslätt.