The Aviation Historian — January 2018

Issue No 22 THE AVIATION HISTORIAN 119

translated into marginal lift for a long flight with

high weight, in turn making even modest ice

build-up a grave threat.

The bibliography (comprising five pages) and

endnotes (23 pages) attest to wide research,

but it is surprising to discover that the author

did not use the 1929 inquiry report, relying

instead on the summary in Wilbur Cross’s 1960

tome Ghost Ship at the Pole and the rebuttals in

Nobile’s own works — but only those available

in English. Italian-language sources are generally

under-represented, which leads to an inadequate

description of the crucial hours up to the crash

and failure to address the serious charges made

by the board of inquiry. This significantly clouds

the reader’s understanding.

There are also needless errors. British readers

will be annoyed to see R100 designer Barnes

Wallis become “Wallace” (p171), just as Italians

will frown reading that Nobile taught in Milan

(rather than Naples, p161); the copilot on rescue

pilot Umberto Maddalena’s long-distance record

flights was Fausto Cecioni (rather than Fausto

Cecconi, p151) and that Davide Giudici, on

whose account the author draws to describe life

on the Krassin, is misspelt “Guidici” seven times

in Chapter 12 alone.

GREGORY ALEGI

War Birds — The Diary of a Great War Pilot

By Elliott White Springs; Frontline Books, Pen & Sword

Books,47 Church Street, Barnsley, S70 2AS; 6¼in x 9¼in

(160mm x 236mm); hardback; 256 pages, illustrated; £25.

ISBN 978-1-473879-59-1

FIRST PUBLISHED in 1926, War Birds is a first-

hand account of flying in the First World War by

American 17-victory ace Elliott White Springs. It

is now reissued by Frontline Books, an imprint of

Pen & Sword, with an introduction and copious

endnotes by author Mark Hillier.

from its envelope, which disappeared with six
crew members; another died in the crash. Nine
survivors, including the ship’s designer and
captain, Umberto Nobile, were stranded on
the ice. An unprecedented international land,
sea and air search claimed nine other victims,
including famed explorer Roald Amundsen,
but allowed their small red-painted tent to be
spotted (on June 20), Nobile to be rescued by
air (on June 23) and the others by the Soviet
icebreaker Krassin on July 12. The official inquiry,
the results of which were published on February
27, 1929, praised Nobile as the designer of the
airship but blamed him in no uncertain terms
for his failures as pilot and commander. The
saga has been told in memoirs, books and a
memorable Soviet-Italian film — The Red Tent,
starring Peter Finch as Nobile and Sean Connery
as Amundsen — each with its own conclusions.
This latest addition comes from Garth
Cameron, a New Zealand lawyer with more
than 3,000 flying hours’ experience, and author
of FromPole to Pole: Roald Amundsen’s Journey in
Flight (Pen & Sword, 2014). Here, a scene-setting
prologue describing the fatal flight is followed
by three sections themed “Air”, covering
airship history, Nobile and his relationship with
Amundsen, previous polar flights and the Italia
expedition; “Ice” (with seven chapters detailing
activities at the location of the red tent and each
of the different rescue groups) and “Earth”,
which wraps up the story with the inquiry,
Nobile’s later work in the Soviet Union and
various memorials. A glossary, chronology and
two appendices covering airship development
since 1928 round out the book, which also
includes 20 photographs and eight maps and
drawings on 16 glossy pages.
The author does a creditable job of keeping in
order the various strands of an easily confusing
story. While he makes no revelations on the
various contentious points of this epic story, he is
probably correct in identifying the root cause of
the disaster as being the Italia’s small size, which