N-4 Down: The Hunt For The Arctic Airship Italia by Mark Piesing

 

N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia by Mark Piesing.

Published 27th October 2022 by Mariner Books.

From the cover of the book:

The riveting true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history: the desperate race to find the survivors of the glamorous Arctic airship Italia, which crashed near the North Pole in 1928.

Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries . . .

Whereas previous Arctic and Antarctic explorers had subjected themselves to horrific—often deadly—conditions in their attempts to reach uncharted lands, airships held out the possibility of speedily soaring over the hazards. In 1926, the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—the first man to reach the South Pole—partnered with the Italian airship designer General Umberto Nobile to pioneer flight over the North Pole. As Mark Piesing uncovers in this masterful account, while that mission was thought of as a great success, it was in fact riddled with near disasters and political pitfalls.

Braiding together the gripping accounts of the survivors and their heroic rescuers, N-4 Down tells the unforgettable true story of what happened when the glamour and restless daring of the zeppelin age collided with the harsh reality of earth’s extremes.

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This absorbing book tells the story of the largest polar rescue mission in history, which took place when the massive Italian airship Italia crashed on its way back from its exploratory journey to the North Pole in 1928, after becoming caught in an unexpected Arctic storm. Conversely, despite the number of lives lost among the crew of the airship itself and the souls involved in the rescue, this was a mission hailed as a great success given the huge logistical difficulties the rescuers faced. This was a disaster that I had never heard of, although it was the focus of a media circus at the time, so I was really interested in learning what Mark Piesing had to say about the extraordinary events that surrounded this historic episode - and what a rewarding experience it was!

There is so much more to this book than a simple retelling of crash, rescue mission and its aftermath, which is not hinted at by the blurb. Piesing starts by laying out an intricate account of the events which led up the disaster, helping to paint the picture about the hows, whys and wherefores of what happened. He includes fascinating information about the international disputes around the ownership of the lands that inhabit the icy Arctic region, and the political wrangling between the countries that wished to lay claim to them, which extends nicely into the rivalries that came with the fierce race to conquer the Arctic for personal and national renown, and the competitive development of the mind-blowing, massive airships that were intended to make the region more accessible.

However, for me it is the personalities themselves that are the stars of the show, and I really enjoyed the great lengths Piesing goes to in making them leap from the page as real people, warts and all. There are more famous names than you can throw a snowball at in this adventure, such as the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, whose fate was sealed when he became involved in the rescue mission, despite being rather less than friendly with the Italia's captain General Umberto Nobile in the years leading up to the crash. At times, the story Piesing tells seems bizarrely like something out of an old-time movie like The Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, or The Great Race, with shady shenanigans, and backstabbing double-dealing, fuelled by the competitive natures of the pioneers of Arctic exploration who pushed themselves to the very limit of human endurance, and sometimes tragically beyond. It is all quite surreal, especially when you discover the intriguing parts played by Mussolini - and the feminist fire-brand American millionaire Louise Boyd whose name really does deserve to be more widely known.

There is also something quite magical about the way Piesing takes you back to the glamourous days of air travel by those behemoths of the sky - the luxurious airships that seem like something out of a fictional steam-punk world (think Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books). Although at no point does he shy away from the impracticalities and the dangers of airship travel. And to read about the dark times when air ships were used for horrific silent bombing raids in the Great War is intensely chilling.

I came to this book expecting an account of an air disaster that was oddly named a success, but along the way I have learned so much about the Arctic region, its recent history, the politics of exploration (including the propaganda that surrounds it), and the characters that marked this period of history as so captivating. Piesing's own visits to some of the locations he talks about give a poignant perspective too, as he looks back over the gulf of the years between the disaster and the present.

It is fair to say that this is a book heavy in period and technical detail, delving into the intricacies of history, which tells of the amount of research Piesing has undertaken about Arctic exploration and the downing of the Italia. It is not a light read, but Piesing writes in an engaging way and manages to make the story absolutely riveting, which is quite a feat for a non-fiction book of this kind.

N4-Down is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Mariner Books for sending me a paperback copy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Literary PR for inviting me to take part in this blog tour.

About the author:

Mark Piesing is a successful freelance technology and aviation journalist and author. He writes for brands such as BBC Future, The Guardian, Wired, and The Economist. Piesing is passionate about aviation, history, innovation, and exploration. His passion has led him to search for lost World War II airfields in the New Forest, find the last surviving Nazi helicopter, fly drones inside a fusion reactor (a world first), and tread carefully around Bosnian minefields. He has been driven by an autonomous car, flown in Britain’s flying laboratory, gone underground at CERN, and dug up the skeletons of gladiators in a lost Roman city in Spain. 

For Piesing’s first book, N-4 DOWN: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, he travelled to frozen Svalbard and the Arctic Circle, discovered forgotten manuscripts in an overlooked archive in Tromsø, and tracked down one of the last people alive who knew Umberto Nobile, the protagonist, to a Copenhagen suburb. 

Mark Piesing lives in Oxford, UK, with his wife, two children, and dog