On 24 May 1928, a silver airship called the Italia circled the top of the world. Below her lay the North Pole, and her crew dropped an Italian flag, a banner from Milan and a small wooden cross onto the endless white. It was a triumph. It should have been the story.

Instead, what people remember is what came next: a crash onto the drifting pack ice, a gondola torn open like a tin can, six men carried helplessly away inside a runaway envelope, and a little tent dyed blood-red so the world might find the survivors before the cold did.

And it is remembered for one more thing. The greatest polar explorer alive, Roald Amundsen — the man who had beaten Scott to the South Pole — climbed into a French flying boat to help rescue a rival he had come to despise, flew north into the fog, and was never seen again.

A dirigible built to conquer the top of the world

Umberto Nobile was an Italian engineer and airship designer, not a swaggering adventurer, and that matters to the story. In 1926 he had piloted the airship Norge across the Arctic with Roald Amundsen and the American Lincoln Ellsworth — the first verified flight over the North Pole. But the triumph curdled into a bitter, public feud over who deserved the credit, and Nobile came away determined to prove that Italians could conquer the Arctic without the great Norwegian’s help.

So he built the Italia, a semi-rigid airship flying under the flag of Fascist Italy and the gaze of Benito Mussolini, who smelled propaganda. On the eve of departure Nobile was clear-eyed about the danger.

Down on the ice: the crash and the Red Tent

For hours the Italia fought the wind and the ice building on her skin, sinking lower and lower. On the morning of 25 May, tail-heavy and falling, she struck the pack ice. The control cabin was ripped clean off and smashed open, spilling nine men and one body onto the floe. Then, suddenly lightened, the wounded envelope rose again and drifted away — carrying six crew members who were never seen again.

What followed is one of the great survival stories of the century. The injured Nobile was among the nine on the ice. Radio operator Giuseppe Biagi salvaged a field set and began tapping out an SOS that, for agonising days, no one seemed to hear — until a young Soviet farmer picked it up on a homemade receiver. The survivors dyed their little silk tent red for visibility, and “the Red Tent” passed into legend.

Then came the controversy that would shadow Nobile for the rest of his life. When a Swedish pilot landed a small ski-plane, he flew the injured commander out first, under orders. It looked like a captain abandoning his crew. The remaining men waited until 12 July, when the Soviet icebreaker Krassin finally smashed through the ice and lifted them off, 48 days after the crash.

The greatest of them all: Amundsen’s final flight

Roald Amundsen was dining in Oslo when the news broke that the Italia was down. Everyone in the room knew about the feud. His answer was immediate: he was ready. Ageing, in debt, recently ill, he seemed almost to be reaching for a fitting end. Weeks earlier he had told a journalist, gesturing at a model flying boat, exactly how he wished to go.

Sidelined by Mussolini from the official rescue, Amundsen launched his own, in a French Latham 47 flying boat crewed by five others. It was an underpowered prototype, ill-suited to Arctic ice. On 18 June 1928 it took off from Tromsø and flew north into the fog. Two brief radio messages came, then silence. Only a wing-float and a fuel tank were ever found. Amundsen died searching for a man he could not stand — and, in one of history’s cruel ironies, was already lost before Nobile was even lifted from the ice.

Sources: Wikipedia (Italia (airship); Roald Amundsen); Mark Piesing, N-4 Down (HarperCollins); American Heritage; PolarQuest.