This is John Batcher. What follows as an excerpt from my conversation with Mark Pising, his book

N-4 Down, the story for the downed airship Italian in 1928, and the airship is missing. Who's going to rescue it? And the reason this is

a contest that sets up what becomes a worldwide tragedy is that the Italians were then identified as

fascist following Mussolini. The fascist will momentarily in Germany become the Hitler rights.

But right now it's Mussolini setting the example of brutality and abuse and

supremacy. The Italian airship, Italia is to traverse the Arctic and fly over

the North Pole and return as a demonstration of air superiority. It goes missing. So how is it going

to be rescued? Mark Piesing now describes the thinking about rescuing a ship that they don't know where it is and they do

know that some of the crew have were last seen on an ice flow. One example of rescue is by sea and this is the story of an

icebreaker built in Britain that is now in the possession of the Soviets, the Stalinist. And the irony here is the Stalinist

racing to the rescue of the fascist.

1928. Here's Mark Picing. Well, this is a huge powerful pre-war, pre-World War icebreaker, which I think was built in Britain.

It's very powerful ship. It's been laid up in Leningrad for, I can't remember now, I think it's about maybe a year.

The crew had gone and had all been broken up, kind of moved away.

And what they were realizing was that there's a big divide

when they're trying to work at how to rescue these guys. One is by aviation,

put by planes, one is by airships, but there weren't any really around at that stage.

I mean the graph second was a possibility, but Hugo Agna was trying had offered it, but it wasn't quite ready.

And perhaps you could argue the British could offer some airships, but the British refused

to be involved in any of these activities, like Brexit, you know,

as a British person you can't help see some of these things in that event,

the British refuse to be involved.

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