Mountain Rescues

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30366, 15 February 1964, Page 3

Mountain Rescues

[Reviewed by N.D.H.] White Hell. By Kurt Burgbacher. Methuen. This book is concerned with the struggle of a group of Swiss mountaineering pilots to gain permission to use aircraft for Alpine rescue purposes. The controlling authority took many years to recognise that planes could land and take off safely on unprepared snow runways and that a patient being carried by air had much more hope of survival than one carried for days on a stretcher over tortuous terrain. The dust jacket describes the book as “fiction” but it would appear that it is frequently close to fact, with names changed, probably to avoid offending various Swiss officials. Twelve photographs in the book were taken in the area described in the text, with mountains and villages correctly named. A dog is shown digging out avalanche victims and his caption name is the same as in the book —a strange feature for “fiction.” The book includes much that is informative and entertaining, but it reads like a succession of short stories of various successful rescues. To people who have done any modern mountain travelling there are five or so embellished events which make one suspect the author is more a pilot, and that neither he nor the translator, Stella Humphries, is a mountaineer. Typical of these is the description of a man pulling his companion out of a crevasse single-handed after the former had stopped himself being dragged down by digging his finger nails into the ice. Both the stopping and the lifting are impossible. It is of interest to note that of the Swiss who have been rescued by air not many have

been mountaineers (who are usually regarded by officialdom as on the fringe of lunacy). The pilots seem to be very busy bringing out shepherds, forest workers, fallen skiers, tourists and victims of commercial air crashes, as well as taking up food to animals and supplies to stranded villages.