Late in the evening on June 3, 1928, a young Soviet farmer was monitoring broadcasts from remote parts of the world on a wireless radio set in his cottage on the northwest coast of Russia when he heard something unusual. It was a distress call, rendered weak and faltering by the vast distances of the Far North, and the words he jotted down initially seemed to make little sense: “Ital … Nobile … SOS … SOS … SOS …”
Although the farmer had no way of knowing it when he passed the message to others, that garbled plea for help would set in motion an international manhunt that swiftly grew to include a pair of seaplanes and a contingent of ski troops from Italy, a second pair of flying boats from Germany, a squadron of air-force pilots from Sweden, and the most powerful icebreaker in the world from the Soviet Union—all part of the largest search-and-rescue operation ever attempted in the Arctic.
Ultimately, 16 ships, 23 airplanes, at least a dozen dogsled teams, and more than 1,400 men from eight separate countries would come together in a desperate bid to locate and recover the survivors of a disaster that on both a literal and symbolic level represented the apogee of humanity’s efforts to reach one of the last and greatest prizes on the chessboard of discovery.
By the start of the 20th century, more than 300 years of venturing toward the top of the world aboard wooden sailing ships, behind dogsled teams, and harnessed to cumbersome “man haul” sleds had failed to put a single adventurer within reach of the holiest grail of exploration: the blank spot on the map surrounding the North Pole. In the early 1900s, however, a bold new technology was brought to bear on this challenge in the form of airships and dirigibles: motorized, lighter-than-air balloons that were capable of flying twice the distance and carrying many times the payload of the earliest airplanes.
The men who piloted the first airships above the frozen seas of the North are the focus of Realm of Ice and Sky: Triumph, Tragedy, and History’s Greatest Arctic Rescue, by Buddy Levy, an author who views his subjects as “the equivalent of the first astronauts,” and who makes a compelling case that although these trailblazers shared a number of important traits (at various points, each of them coveted fame, courted notoriety, and was incorrigibly seduced by the prospect of getting rich), the central thread that bound the men together so tightly was a level of audacity, ambition, and grit that bordered on total lunacy.
From its very earliest days, in the 1500s, polar discovery had been plagued by Homeric levels of privation and suffering: men attacked by polar bears or reduced to eating lichen; legs and arms turned black and gangrenous from frostbite; the bodies of the dead stripped of flesh and devoured by their starvation-crazed companions. Indeed, it’s difficult to conceive of anything less appealing than the prospect of venturing on foot or by boat into the terra incognita of the Arctic—unless one proposes to float above that unspeakably harsh terrain beneath the belly of a giant gasbag filled with combustible hydrogen, propelled by an engine sputtering an incandescent fantail of sparks.
That’s precisely what Walter Wellman set out to do in a series of bids to reach the pole between 1905 and 1910. Each of those efforts resulted in failure while simultaneously exposing Wellman to the only aspect of the High North that could match (and at times transcend) its miseries and its dangers, the evanescent but spectacular beauty conjured by the sea, the sky, and the ice—moments whose extolment and celebration form some of the finest passages in this book as they evoke splendors that can be found nowhere else: The “wispy tendrils of cirrus clouds,” unfurling like wing feathers amid the crystalline currents of cold air. The “blue and iridescent-green cakes of ice” smeared across the gleaming and limitless sea. And hovering mysteriously above it all, the northern lights, suspended like gossamer curtains across the night sky, shimmering in a slow and stately dance whose music was so hushed that it could be discerned only with the eye, never the ear.
In the course of his five aerial expeditions, Wellman managed to pilot his airship for 1,000 miles above the highest latitudes on earth. Falling short of his goal each time, he nevertheless proved that dirigibles were more than capable of flying the kind of distance that would be necessary to reach the pole, thereby laying the groundwork for the pair of men who would follow in Wellman’s wake—and whose partnership and rivalry forms the heart of Realm of Ice and Sky.
The first of these was a man whose renown had already spread far and wide, thanks to the fact that he had not only managed to pilot a boat through the Northwest Passage—a feat that had confounded mariners since the days of Henry Hudson and James Cook—but had also become the first person in human history to reach the South Pole.
By the age of 53, Roald Amundsen, known as “the White Eagle of Norway,” loomed supreme among the pantheon of polar explorers and could easily have retired to spend the remainder of his years enjoying the fruits of his hard-earned fame. Instead, he opted to launch a campaign to seize the grandest and most elusive treasure of all by heading back north with a man who stood as his absolute antipode.
As a senior officer in the air force of the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, Colonel Umberto Nobile was the opposite of Amundsen in every way imaginable: an engineer, scientist, and university professor who had dedicated his life not to exploration but to aeronautics and bureaucracy. Despite these differences, Nobile happened to possess two essential things that Amundsen lacked: access to a state-of-the-art airship nearly twice the size of Wellman’s old dirigible, and the skills to pilot it across the frozen wastes of the North with at least some prospect of returning home alive.
The story of what subsequently transpired between these two men is a tale of soaring jubilation (their 71-hour, 2,700-mile flight, in the summer of 1926, became the very first expedition to indisputably reach the North Pole) followed by an abrupt plunge into ignominy and malice as their alliance devolved into a petty and vindictive feud fueled by nationalism, hubris, and greed.
And so the true climax of this book begins to unfold two years later, in the summer of 1928, as Nobile resolves to return to the Arctic in a brand-new blimp to undertake an ambitious program of scientific research across 1.5 million square miles of still-unexplored territory along the coasts of Greenland, Siberia, and Canada. It is a mission whose discoveries, Nobile hopes, will decisively eclipse all of Amundsen’s achievements when the colonel finally succeeds in dropping a detachment of crew members on the pole itself.
Instead of reigning triumphant, however, Nobile’s venture sets in motion a chain of disasters when he and his men lose control of their airship and it tumbles out of the sky, crashing onto the pack ice and leaving almost half the crew dead, with the other half—including the injured colonel—marooned on a floating berg hundreds of miles from land, frantically trying to send out a distress signal on the airship’s shattered radio.
Perhaps the only thing more astonishing than the fact that they will repair the wireless and their SOS will eventually be detected by someone is that among the rescuers preparing to set off to find and recover the survivors is the one man who might most be expected to celebrate the catastrophe that has befallen Nobile and toast his disappearance: Norway’s White Eagle.
Readers who are eager to discover exactly why Amundsen was prepared to risk his own life in an effort to save his arch-nemesis, as well as the fates that awaited both men, can turn to Levy’s book. Among many other things, it offers an incomparable portrait of a place and a time that seem as distant from us today as the survivors of Nobile’s stricken airship must have felt, nearly a century ago, from the young Russian farmer who heard their plea from the far side of the pole.
A realm whose strange and magnificent seductiveness was perhaps best expressed by Amundsen himself when an Italian journalist prompted him, just prior to departing on his rescue mission, to explain what was drawing him to return to a landscape haunted by so much austerity and suffering.
“Ah, if you only knew how splendid it is up there,” he exclaimed. “That’s where I want to die.”
Kevin Fedarko is the author of several books, including, most recently, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon, winner of the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
