The Italian government’s commission of inquiry into the loss of the Italia was appointed in the autumn of 1928 and reported on 27 February 1929. Its report went to Mussolini on 3 March and was given to the press the same day; the New York Times carried it from Rome on the 4th. It was printed the next year, with the technical treatise of its adviser, in the navy’s journal Rivista Marittima for January 1930 and as a volume of the Ministry of Marine, with the four volumes of evidence left unpublished. That printed text I could not reach; what follows is pieced together from the Times of 4 March 1929, from the Italian sentences of the report that have been reproduced since, in my translation, and from the account given in 2019 by Gregg Bendrick and Sergio Alessandrini in Polar Research, who read the 1930 edition and give its page numbers.
The commission
Its president was Admiral Umberto Cagni, who in 1900, as a lieutenant with the Duke of the Abruzzi’s expedition, had led the sledge party that reached 86 degrees 34 minutes north, the record of its day. With him sat, by the Times’s count, four generals, an admiral and a senator; Italian accounts name among its members the airman Francesco de Pinedo, Vacchelli, Denti di Pirajno, Cavalli and a magistrate, Pujia. The technical adviser was General Gaetano Arturo Crocco, the aeronautical scientist who had built Italy’s first military airships and who had been, with Nobile, one of the founders of the semi-rigid school. The commission held sixty sittings between 12 November 1928 and 27 February 1929, questioned every survivor, the officers of the Città di Milano, the rescuers and Balbo himself, and read the logbooks, the telegrams and the published accounts. Its report ran to a hundred typewritten sheets.
It was charged with three questions: the causes of the loss of the airship, the conduct of the survivors after the catastrophe, and the conduct of the rescue.
The first question
On the cause the commission was unanimous. The sentence that was printed everywhere, in Italian, is that it “ritiene concordemente che v’è una precisa responsabilità del Comandante per errata manovra”: it finds unanimously that there is a precise responsibility of the Commander for an erroneous manoeuvre. The Times gave the fuller reasoning: the wreck was due to “a faulty manoeuvre, the result partly of the composition of the crew and of the way the craft was handled. Responsibility of the faulty manoeuvre falls on the Italia’s commander.”
What the manoeuvre was, the commission set out in a list of what it called the normal rules of piloting, which Bendrick and Alessandrini summarise from the 1930 text. When the ship went heavy, the commander should have put all engines to full speed, pitched the nose up with the elevator, kept the bow “exactly” against the wind, and thrown off all the ballast he had; or, failing that, stopped the engines and made a static descent with the bow in the wind. Instead, in the commission’s account, the airship “continuing to descend, came to the left and described a wide semicircle, disposing with the stern to the wind”: the commander sought a snowfield to land on instead of holding her into the wind, the rudder was for a moment unattended, the engines were stopped “only when it was already very close to the ice”, and so the ship struck at the sum of her own speed and the wind’s, about a hundred kilometres an hour, “and this largely explains the disaster.” If she had been handled by the normal rules, the commission said, the disaster might still have been avoided, or its effects “in any case have been reduced”. It also faulted the first alarm of the morning, when gas had been valved to check the climb above the fog, as a loss of “prudent lightness”; and it found, among the conditions behind the manoeuvre, that the crew at the end was “obviously exhausted”, that there were “undecided orders, imperfect organization on board and also on the ground”, that two unlicensed men had been allowed to steer the elevator, that one radio operator had been carried instead of two, and that the last flight had not been postponed to examine an envelope that had needed patching an hour before take-off.
The sentence that followed Nobile for the rest of his life was the commission’s summary of the whole expedition: “il Generale Nobile ha dimostrato di avere limitate qualità tecniche di pilota e negativa capacità di comando.” General Nobile has shown that he has limited technical qualities as a pilot and a negative capacity for command.
The second and third questions
On the survivors, the commission found that the conduct of Commanders Mariano and Zappi “is not open to criticism”, and that the general’s leaving the ice before his companions was “contrario alle tradizioni ed alle leggi dell’onore militare”, contrary to the traditions and the laws of military honour, and “non trova nessuna giustificazione plausibile”, finds no plausible justification. The Times added the commission’s qualification: that it could perhaps be explained by the general’s state of depression, “and a consequence of pressure exercised by Lieutenant Lundborg”.
On the rescue it found nothing to blame. “The rescue work performed with dutiful enthusiasm by Italians with the efficacious collaboration of foreigners constitutes a wonderful example of human solidarity, culminating in the ice-breaker Krassin’s fortunate exploit and the chivalrous and generous sacrifice of Roald Amundsen.”
Crocco’s appendix
The first part of the report, on the causes, was accompanied by Crocco’s technical treatise. He faulted the commander for not holding the ship into the wind as she fell, and judged that “the management of the airship at the time of the alarm until the end was uncertain and contradictory.” He also proposed a mechanism, that the big forward air inlet which fed the ballonets had been left open and had forced gas out through the valves, which Trojani, who had stood beside the gas gauges, later showed could not have worked as described. And he ended, in the translation of Bendrick and Alessandrini, with this:
“If, from the proximate causes of the catastrophe (moreover indeterminable), which could be called its specific trauma, it goes back to the ultimate causes where it was potentially contained, one cannot but find them in the structural composition of the crew and in the uncertain distribution of tasks and responsibilities among its members. Above all, a skilled pilot, possessing that trained capacity acquired only by a long course in navigation, was lacking on board.”
The commission’s own list of latent conditions had said something of the same kind. It reported that a working limit of twelve hours should not be exceeded “in order not to risk it becoming dangerous for the regular and timely execution of the manoeuvre”; that the second flight had lasted sixty-nine hours “without any manoeuvring crew rest”; that the men had been “at least 54 hours” in flight at the end; and that the airship “had always left Kings Bay with the men already tired, since everyone was held in the hangar for the whole night before the flight.”
Afterwards
Nobile resigned from the air force. He wrote his own account in 1930, in which he put the fall down to ice loading the ship and gas escaping at the stern through frozen valves or a tear, and he went on answering Crocco in the aeronautical press as late as 1945. He designed airships in the Soviet Union from 1931 to 1936 and taught in the United States from 1939; after the fall of the regime he was reinstated in the air force with his rank, and he died in Rome in 1978, at ninety-three.
Bendrick, a flight surgeon, and Alessandrini went through the record in 2016 and again in 2019. They note that the commission’s evidence on the last three minutes was the memory of men questioned six months after a crash and forty-nine days on the ice, without cross-examination and without being shown the minutes of what they had said; that the manoeuvres the commission prescribed were, except one, the manoeuvres Nobile ordered; that the one he did not make, holding the bow to the wind, was not available to a ship falling stern-down at thirty or forty degrees with her rudder tilted out of the airflow; that Crocco’s inlet theory was wrong; that the likeliest cause of the sudden heaviness was gas lost from the stern cells through a tear in an envelope that had been cleared of ten tons of snow with brooms and patched twice, worsened by heating in the sun above the fog and cooling below it; and that the commission’s finding of “limited technical qualities as a pilot” was made against a man who had more hours in a semi-rigid airship over the Arctic than anyone alive. They put the political context beside it: Balbo’s testimony to the commission on 13 November 1928 that he had opposed the expedition and wanted airships abolished, his refusal of a big Savoia flying boat and of smaller seaplanes for the ship, and the advantage to the heavier-than-air party of a verdict that an airship had been lost by the man who flew it. Their own conclusion is Crocco’s last paragraph taken seriously: the ship had no second-in-command, no relief pilot and no rule for the commander’s rest, and a commander awake for fifty-four hours was the structure’s failure, not the man’s.