Dudley Wolfe

Dudley Francis Cecil Wolfe (February 6, 1896 – July 30, 1939) was an American socialite. As a racing yacht owner and captain, he was the first person to race a sixty-foot yacht across the Atlantic, competing against much larger vessels. He was to inherit a large fortune from his maternal grandfather provided he changed his family name to "Smith", to which he agreed before reverting again. Wolfe became posthumously famous when he died on the 1939 American Karakoram expedition to K2 in controversial circumstances.

Family background Dudley Wolfe was born in New York on February 6, 1896, to Dudley Wolfe and Mabel Florence Wolfe (née Smith). His father had immigrated from England in 1888 and was a coffee importer. Claiming to have an aristocratic background, Wolfe senior mixed in New York high society telling entirely fictitious stories of his life tiger hunting in India and so forth.

His mother was the daughter of the immensely wealthy Benjamin Franklin Smith, who together with his three brothers had made their money in gold and silver mining in Colorado in the mid-19th century. They wisely sold at the height of the boom to move into real estate and railroads. When they returned to Maine in the 1880s they were thought to be worth $20 to $30 million (roughly $ to $ million in ). Benjamin's three brothers had no children so he was able to pass down the entire estate.

Wolfe's parents had married on October 15, 1892, and within a year his father's business was bankrupt. Despite these circumstances, the family lived a wealthy lifestyle thanks to a steady flow of cash from his mother's family. The couple had four children, three sons and a daughter – Dudley was the middle son. They had lavish educations at a series of boarding schools but none of the boys did well academically at school. Dudley was, however, good at sports – football, hockey, running, boating and hunting. Wolfe senior died in May 1908, and Mabel remarried, to a Nebraska businessman, Joseph Baldridge, and moved to Omaha. Eventually Wolfe's academic progress was so poor that he was not allowed to continue at Phillips Academy even though the headmaster recognized his "faithful, conscientious effort" and the goodwill he had engendered at the school.

Wartime In 1916, unable to find a satisfactory job, Wolfe tried to join the WWI war effort by applying to join several branches of the U.S. military but he was rejected because of poor eyesight and flat feet. He then put himself on the year-long waiting list for the French Foreign Legion, while in the meantime joining the Red Cross ambulance corps. In 1917 he sailed for Europe. In Liverpool by complete chance he met Lucien Wolf who, for the first time, told him of his father's true background. Lucien Wolf's brother, Dudley Wolf (before he changed his name to Wolfe), had been the son of a Bohemian Jew who escaped antisemitic uprisings in 1848 to become a tobacconist in London. Wolfe's grandmother, Céline Redlich, had come from Vienna. It is not clear whether the Smith side of his family ever knew about Dudley Wolf(e)'s true background.

Wolfe volunteered to work at various war fronts driving an ambulance, a slightly converted Model T Ford, under appalling conditions taking wounded soldiers back from the front to the field hospitals. Later joining the Italian Ambulance Service he was awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra and a campaign medal on the Italian front. After ten months' ambulance service, in October 1918 he was called up into the Foreign Legion but only served for a month up to the armistice – he was awarded the French Volunteer Medal and Campaign Medal. Phillips Academy now acclaimed him as having won more medals than any other former student.

Wolfe moved to live in Europe where he participated in climbing and skiing in the Alps, appointing guides to help him. He became an accomplished skier – he achieved a ski traverse across the Mont Blanc massif – but he struggled to master the technicalities of climbing.

Marriage to Alice Damrosch Wolfe met Alice Blaine Damrosch while skiing in St. Anton in the spring of 1934. They married in Geneva in October 1934. Alice, the eldest daughter of American conductor Walter Damrosch, had previously been married to Hall Pleasants Pennington but divorced in the late 1920s. She was an outdoor enthusiast and an accomplished skier, known for being the first woman to ski down the ice wall of Tuckerman Ravine.

Alice was deeply involved in skiing, organizing America's first Women's Olympic Ski team for the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. She was opposed to Nazism and used her influence to help Jewish friends in Austria during the Nazi regime, including physician Hans Kraus. By 1938, Wolfe decided he wanted to be single again and asked for a divorce. Despite the divorce, they continued to live together.

K2 expedition

In early 1938, Wolfe and his wife held a party in their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan to show friends photographic slides of their climbing and skiing activities in Europe. German-American mountaineer Fritz Wiessner had been invited, and he was on the lookout for wealthy mountaineers who might be willing to join in, and pay for, an expedition he was organising to attempt to climb K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. At the time, none of the 14 mountains over 8000 metres had been climbed. When Wiessner broached the subject with him, Wolfe was immediately hooked, despite his inexperience in climbing high mountains.

In early spring 1939 Wolfe tried and failed to reach the summits of Mont Blanc and Piz Palu, even with a guide. In March 1939, he met Wiessner in England where they bought climbing equipment to complement the sports clothes he had purchased in New York. The team boarded the SS Conte Biancamano in Genoa on March 29, 1939, to sail to Bombay.

At Srinigar, at the start of the expedition proper, Wolfe was dismayed to find out that Wiessner had not taken his advice to bring two-way radios. On the march in to K2 base camp, Wolfe coped as well as anyone else, but above Camp II he was noticeably slow and was criticised by some of his colleagues. Nevertheless, Wiessner favoured him over the other team members because he complained less and had good endurance. Wolfe did not take any sort of lead and reached each camp after it had already been established by other climbers. In this way he got further up the mountain than any of the Americans except Wiessner.

The team did not have bottled oxygen and, by Camp VIII at on July 14, Wolfe could get no higher. He waited there for seven days while Wiessner and Pasang Dawa Lama made their failed summit bid. Then, descending with the others to Camp VII at , Wolfe waited another seven days in poor conditions while his two companions went down further to get help, but they found the lower camps deserted and the equipment removed, until they finally reached base camp. On July 29, during one of three attempts at rescue, three Sherpas managed to climb up to Wolfe, but his mental state was poor and he refused to go down, asking them to return the next day. After that, the Sherpas themselves also died on the mountain.

In the following years, there were questions whether Wiessner had abandoned Wolfe, why the expedition was poorly organized, why Wolfe had been allowed to climb so high, and whether the Sherpas should have been allowed to try to rescue him. Wolfe's brother, Clifford Warren Smith, considered taking legal action, but eventually decided to drop the case.

In 2002, skeletal remains were found on the Godwin-Austen Glacier at the foot of K2. Close by were vintage pieces of mountaineering equipment and a leather mitten marked "Wolfe". Wolfe was memorialized by inscribing an ancient dinner plate from amongst the debris with his name, and a plaque was made for the nearby Gilkey Memorial, which at that time had the names of 52 other climbers who had died on K2.