Authors: Ed Viesturs
Bitterly stung by the report, Wiessner resigned from the AAC. The most chilling (and, in retrospect, comically absurd) episode in the backlash against Wiessner came only a few months after he was released from the hospital. Wiessner never publicly spoke about this confrontation until 1984, when he told a writer about it.
One day [in early 1940] my secretary in my New York office told me that two men from the FBI had come by. I went down to the FBI office and met two very nice young chaps—they were both Yale graduates. We sat down and talked. They wanted to know my whole history, and they had the funniest questions. Such as, “You go skiing often in Stowe in the winter, do you not? That’s very near Canada, isn’t it? Can you get easily over the border?” I said, “Yes. It’s quite a distance to walk, but I’m in Canada very often anyway because I have a business in Toronto.” And they laughed.
I wasn’t very keen on Roosevelt then. And so they said, “You don’t like the president? You made some remarks about him.” I said, “Well, I wasn’t the only one. There are very many people who feel that way!” They laughed again.
They asked about some of my friends. We sat there half an hour, then we just talked pleasantly. On the way out I said, “Now
look, fellows, I was pretty open to you. I have my definite suspicions. Would you tell me the names of the men who put you up to this?” They said, “Naturally we can’t do that.” So I said, “Let me ask this question: was it some climbers from the AAC?” They nodded. They said, “Don’t worry about it. You know who we had here yesterday? We had Ezio Pinza, the famous opera singer. It was the same thing, a little jealousy from his competitors. They complained that he was a Mussolini follower.”
If Wiessner’s story is true—and it seems too bizarre for him to have made it up—it leaves ambiguous the question of whether his AAC detractors simply wanted to harass him or genuinely believed he was a Nazi spy.
Sadly, the criticisms leveled in the AAC report, full of innuendos attributing Wiessner’s “mistakes” to his “Teutonic” style of climbing and leadership, became the received wisdom about the 1939 expedition. Kauffman and Putnam rescued from oblivion the memorandum Edward Groth, the American consul in India, had sent to the State Department. It is full of aspersions based on ethnic prejudices. For instance:
With his German background, also owing to the fact that he possesses a large share of German bluntness … it is not remarkable that there should have been a clash of temperaments. Wiessner is undoubtedly an excellent climber and a good leader, but like every German, he is very forceful in giving commands and totally unaware that the abrupt, blunt manner in which the order may have been given might have wounded the feelings of his associates, who in this instance, being Americans, naturally have a different attitude and outlook in matters of this sort.
At its worst, the second-guessing took the form of outright condemnation. In
Abode of Snow
, a widely read history of Himalayan climbing,
the British writer Kenneth Mason gave an utterly garbled summary of the events on K2 in 1939, concluding, “It is difficult to record in temperate language the folly of this enterprise.”
For the most part, Wiessner ignored these criticisms and got on with his life. In 1955, however, he published a very small book about the expedition in German, titled
K2: Tragödien und Sieg am Zweithöchsten Berg der Erde
(K2: Tragedy and Victory on the Second-Highest Mountain in the World). Miriam Underhill, Robert Underhill’s wife, the finest American woman climber of her day and the editor of
Appalachia
, persuaded Wiessner to allow the publication of an English translation of the part of the text that covered events on the mountain between July 9 and August 7. Underhill’s introduction ended with a challenge: “If any other member of the expedition disagrees with Mr. Wiessner in any respect, and will send us his version of the matter, we should be very glad to print it.” No one responded.
That text for the first time lays out Wiessner’s version of the stripping of the camps and makes it clear that this dismantling was what wrecked the expedition and led indirectly to the deaths of Wolfe and the three Sherpa. In a single sentence, Wiessner summed up the personal impact of the tragedy. Had he and Pasang Lama found sleeping bags at Camp IV, he insists, he and Wolfe might have been able “to resume our final attack on the summit of which I felt so confident.” Instead, “a cruel fate determined otherwise, and therewith ended the hardest fight, the greatest hope, and at the same time the greatest disappointment of my climbing career.”
As few mountaineers ever do, Wiessner kept climbing at a very high level into his seventies and even early eighties, though he turned his talents away from the big ranges and toward rock climbing on smaller crags. Never again did he go on an expedition to the Karakoram or the Himalaya.
Beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s, American climbing underwent a cultural revolution. A new generation, reexamining the 1939 expedition, saw armchair critics such as Kenneth
Mason as reactionary old fogeys, while Wiessner was in effect reborn as one of the greatest climbers in history, his deeds on K2 considered heroic rather than foolish or neglectful.
In
In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods
, Galen Rowell pithily summed up this reevaluation:
Leaders don’t belong in the first summit team?
What about Maurice Herzog on Annapurna?
Sherpas must not move unsupervised over difficult terrain?
What about the repeated instances on many of the hallowed British attempts on Everest?
Mountain summits aren’t worth risking lives for?
Only a rare windless night on May 22, 1963, kept four Americans from perishing in an open bivouac near the top of Mount Everest…
. Taking a climber of Wolfe’s meager experience on a big mountain was unprecedented?
Andrew Irvine, Mallory’s famous companion on Mount Everest in 1924, was even less experienced, but like Wolfe he outperformed those with better records
.
In 1966, Andy Kauffman, Bill Putnam, and several other AAC members persuaded Wiessner to rejoin the club. (It would be decades before Kauffman and Putnam would turn critical of the man they had so long admired and championed.) Soon afterward, in partial expiation of the wrong it had done him years before, the club made him an honorary member for life.
In December 1978, the annual AAC banquet meeting was held in Estes Park, Colorado. The previous summer, my friend Jim Wickwire and his three teammates had become the first Americans to reach the summit of K2. The whole focus of the meeting was to be on K2, and Jack Durrance, who was then living in Denver, was invited to give a slide show about the 1939 expedition. Hearing about this, Wiessner flew back from a meeting in Europe in order to be present.
I wasn’t there, but a friend of mine who was later recounted for me the dramatic events that took place. All day long, the rumors flew that
a long-delayed confrontation was about to occur. Durrance was finally going to tell “his side” of the story. Meanwhile, Dee Molenaar, who had been on the 1953 K2 expedition, managed to talk Wiessner and Durrance into saying hello to each other. It was the first time they had seen each other since parting in India in 1939. The meeting was curt in the extreme.
A number of AAC old-timers took Durrance aside. They talked him out of making any inflammatory remarks. Whatever dirty laundry remained from 1939, they said, this was not the place to air it. Durrance gave in. His slide show carried the expedition up to base camp, then closed abruptly with a photo of himself in “retirement” in a cabin near the Tetons.
Later, at the banquet, Wiessner was given a special toast in recognition of his years of service to mountaineering. The crowd’s reaction was deeply emotional, and the whole assemblage rose to its feet, applauding wildly—except for Durrance, who remained seated, his face fixed in a scowl.
Fritz Wiessner died in 1988, at the age of eighty-eight. During the last decade of his life, Kauffman and Putnam interviewed him at length, as they planned to write his biography. Their book did not come out until 1992. For reasons best known to themselves, the work they published was not a biography at all but an account of the 1939 expedition that its authors hoped would be the definitive record.
Kauffman and Putnam did meticulous research, and they discovered evidence that no one else had been privy to, such as Durrance’s diary and Groth’s memorandum to the State Department. But
K2: The 1939 Tragedy
was deeply disappointing to younger climbers who had come to see Wiessner as a hero. For some, Kauffman and Putnam’s book verged on a betrayal.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it is galling to see the same old ethnic stereotypes from the 1930s and ‘40s recycled in the authors’ strictures and interpretations. And it’s annoying how Kauffman and Putnam sit in
condescending judgment of Wiessner. The authors were good climbers themselves—Kauffman was one of the two men who made the first ascent of Gasherbrum I in 1958, the only 8,000er pioneered by Americans. But their smug second-guessing of an even better climber, Fritz Wiessner, is hard to swallow. A couple of examples:
Fritz had a different attitude toward mountaineering from the others. The Americans played for fun, Fritz for keeps. Fritz also adhered to an authoritarian leadership model, whereas the Americans had a tradition of independence, even of rebellion.
On K2 and elsewhere Fritz Wiessner demonstrated outstanding skill as a climber. But what can be said of his leadership on the 1939 K2 expedition? … Did he treat his companions even-handedly? Did he make allowance for the weaknesses of those less competent than himself and recognize the perils to which these weaknesses might expose the undertaking? Finally, did he overextend his human resources and, at the critical moment, rely on luck?
The upshot of
K2: The 1939 Tragedy
is to blame Wiessner for much of what went wrong on the expedition, and even to implicate him in errors of judgment that led to the deaths of Dudley Wolfe and the three Sherpa. As if in counterbalance, Durrance comes across almost as the hero of the story, constantly solicitous of the well-being of his teammates and doing his best to hold the fragile team together.
It’s hard to understand how these two men, who, in the 1960s, had the most to do with rehabilitating Wiessner, who championed his readmission to the AAC and his honorary membership, could write a supposedly “authoritative” account of the 1939 expedition that on almost every other page makes some sly criticism of the leader.
A friend of mine who knew Wiessner well and Putnam fairly well has
his theory. He told me recently, “For years Kauffman and Putnam spent day after day with Fritz, recording his memories and listening to him tell his old war stories. Fritz could be pretty imperious, and he probably took for granted that these two guys would hang on his every word. And when you got Fritz talking about K2, his bitterness came to the surface.
“I can imagine that after years of this, Kauffman and Putnam got a little tired of Fritz. They may have started resisting some of the things he told them. And then they befriended Jack Durrance, and got on his good side, until Durrance let them read and quote from his diary. That July 18 entry was a bombshell—it pretty much disproved Fritz’s lifelong idea that Durrance was the villain of the expedition.
“So by the time Kauffman and Putnam were ready to write, they had lost interest in doing a biography. But they thought they had instead the true story of what happened on one of the most enigmatic expeditions of all time. And by now, conveniently enough, Fritz was dead. He couldn’t answer them from the grave.”
My friend used to be an English professor. He explained, “This kind of thing happens a lot in biography. The classic example is Lawrance Thompson’s bio of Robert Frost. Frost chose Thompson to be his official biographer, and he lived so long that the research covered decades. Frost was every bit as imperious as Wiessner. There are stories about how he would call up Thompson from his retirement home in Florida and say something like, ‘Come on down—I’m ready to tell you about 1913.’ By the time Thompson wrote the biography, he hated Frost. In that three-volume life, Frost comes across as a great poet but a monster in human terms. One reviewer called it ‘a big fat voodoo doll of a biography, with Thompson puncturing Frost from every angle.’ But that’s still the public image of Frost, which no amount of later scholarship has been able to undo.”
No matter what the ultimate causes of the tragedy were, any climber has to be in complete awe of Wiessner’s performance on K2. To lead virtually
every pitch of the whole climb, to break trail through the deepest and softest snow every single day, to have established a well-stocked series of camps all the way up the mountain with only minimal support from his American teammates, to have used his ax belay and self-arrest to save the lives of his teammates twice, to have done the hardest climbing so far accomplished anywhere at such an altitude in order to reach a point only 750 vertical feet below the summit, to be ready to go through the night to get to the top—there’s really nothing like it in the annals of mountaineering in the great ranges.
And you have to be in awe of the hard work, the loyalty, and the heroism of the Sherpa—particularly Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Phinsoo, who gave their lives trying to save Dudley Wolfe.
I’ve heard guys say that if Wiessner had reached the summit of K2 in 1939, with or without Pasang Lama, it would have been the greatest accomplishment in mountaineering history. I agree—but in my opinion, that feat would have been nearly impossible. In the years since 1939, such a tour de force has been performed on rare occasions, but more often climbers pushing their limits to such extremes don’t survive the ordeal.
I get asked all the time whether I think Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest in 1924. I always answer, “It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant, because they didn’t make it back down.” That may sound a little harsh, but it’s the logical application of the motto by which I lived during my pursuit of the fourteen 8,000ers:
Reaching the summit is optional. Getting down is mandatory
.