A twenty man expedition had set off from Italy to explore the polar area based from Spitsbergen. Two successful flights had been made but bad weather during the third caused the airship to crash on the icepack on May 25.
When the radio message from Umberto Nobile and 9 of his crew was finally picked up by a soviet amateur radio operator Nikolai Schmidt on 3 June 1928, they had been stranded on the ice for eight days. Where the rest of the crew of the airship Italia could be, they had no idea.
Nine survivors of the crew were stranded on the ice and during the next month and a half, a multi-nation sea, surface and air search took place until the crew and various would-be rescuers were all retrieved from various locations by August 14th. The monument commemorates the French seaplane Latham 47 02 which joined the search but disappeared over the Barents sea on its flight to Spitsbergen. Four men were lost including the explorer Roald Amundsen.
http://progress-is-fine.blogspot.com/2016/09/latham-47-02.html
An aeronautical engineer, Umberto Nobile designed and piloted the first successful airship to fly across the Arctic; the Norge, reaching the pole with Roald Amundsen (expedition leader) on 12 May 1926. But Umberto’s friendship with Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole in 1911, deteriorated during the cramped voyage.
Their relationship was not helped by Umberto dropping a much larger Italian flag than Amundsen’s Norwegian one on the North Pole. After the voyage Amundsen arrogantly and loudly took credit for the success of their expedition, to the fury of Nobile, Mussolini and the Italians.
https://www.normandythenandnow.com/the-disastrous-latham-47-polar-rescue-from-caudebec-en-caux/
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/tag/roald-engelbregt-gravning-amundsen/
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