How Very Sad!

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For some years as part of fundraising efforts for my local service club, I used to write personalised letters to children who sent their Christmas wishes to Santa Claus. A number of service clubs still do this, and the letters received from innocent children are an absolute delight to read.

But, alas, the dark shadow of paedophilia has fallen across the town of North Pole in Alaska, for the US Postal Service are no longer sending them mail addressed to Santa Claus at the North Pole.

Why? Because a registered sex offender was found to have been working on the programme last year. and, as a result, the US Postal Service now prohibits volunteers from having access to children;s names and addresses.

Volunteers in North Pole used to ensure each child got a reply signed by a Santa elf and bearing the crucial North Pole postmark. But no longer.

The town’s Mayor has agreed that caution is necessary, but has compared the action of the US Postal Service as akin to the Grinch trying to steal Christmas.

How right he is. And how very sad!
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Solving A Mystery

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It was the American, Robert Peary who on April 1909 was the first to reach the North Pole, and others then tried to claim the record of having reached it first by air. The great Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, tried it unsuccessfully in 1923 and 1925 and in 1926 two Americans, Byrd and Bennett, claimed to have circled the pole, though their claims quickly became mired in controversy.

Amundsen, along with the American, Lincoln Ellsworth, made another attempt in the dirigible Norge. Piloted by its Italian designer, Umberto Nobile, Norge took off from Spitsbergen in May 1926 and crossed the pole en route to Alaska. This successful flight confirmed Amundsen as the first person to have visited both the North and South Poles. Two Australians, Wilkins and Eilson, unsuccessfully tried to cross the Polar Sea by plane in 1926 and 1927, but succeeded in 1928 by flying from Alaska to Spitsbergen.

Umberto Nobile decided to see if there were any undiscovered islands in the Arctic, and he persuaded the Fascist government of Italy to finance the building of a new airship, the Italia. On 6 May 1928, Italia settled to its mast in Spitsbergen, having flown there from Milan via Germany where storm repairs were carried out.

On 23 May, Italia lifted off for what would be its last flight with a total of 16 men on board. Having reached and circled the North Pole, Nobile turned the airship around and headed back towards Spitsbergen. But on 25 May worsening weather conditions resulted in ice and snow making Italia heavier and difficult to handle and the dirigible eventually crashed. One man was killed in the crash and, though nine men including Nobile, escaped onto the ice, the other six men floated away on the wrecked airship and were never seen again.

The survivors had a tough time waiting for rescue which did not come until a Swedish pilot, Einar Lundborg, reached them on June 20 in a seaplane. Lundborg flew Nobile back to Spitsbergen, a decision Nobile was to regret for the rest of his life, as it led to charges that he abandoned his colleagues. When Lundborg flew back for the other survivors, he also crashed and was marooned on the ice. Finally, a Russian icebreaker rescued the survivors on 12 July after a 49 day ordeal.

Though treated as a hero by the Italian people, Nobile was excoriated by the Fascist government who blamed him for the expedition's failure. Nobile emigrated to Russia and then to America and, after Mussolini’s fall, he returned to Italy where he was rightly honoured and féted as an aviation pioneer until he died in 1978.

However, when Amundsen heard that Nobile’s airship had crashed, he joined a French rescue operation by seaplane. This aircraft left Tromsø in Norway en route for Spitsbergen and was never seen again, though parts of his aircraft are thought to have been washed up from time to time.

Today a Norwegian team is set to embark on an expedition to find the wreck of Amundsen’s plane, a Latham 47 sea plane. Two ships will set sail from Tromsø to begin a two-week expedition making sonar scans to scour around 45 sq miles of the sea bed.

And, perhaps, another mystery will have been solved.

Spitsbergen is a wonderful place to visit. It is surrounded by snow-capped mountains in crystal-clear air and is also a place where the spirit of the early Polar explorers still exists. Amundsen is memorialised there by a large and rather forbidding bust. And, within sight of this, is the poignant and rusting remains of the mast to which Nobile’s airship, Italia, was moored.
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