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In K2: The 1939 Tragedy, Kauffman and Putnam devote several pages to what they call the “phantom note.” Phantom, because no one else ever went on record as having seen the note. They entertain three hypotheses. The first is that Durrance did indeed write the note, and that it was later lost or destroyed by someone in the AAC. The second is that Wiessner lied, inventing the story of the note. But the third goes a long way toward clearing up the mystery.

The single most important discovery of new evidence made by Kauffman and Putnam comes in an entry from Durrance’s diary, written at Camp II on July 18: “Dawa danced up here yesterday aft. with notes from Toni [sic] and Chap: ‘Salvage all the tents & sleeping bags you can, we have ample food.’ Easier said than done!” Nonetheless, Durrance carried out the command, which surely had come from Cromwell and not from Cranmer (who had played no part in the assault since his early collapse at base camp). The same entry continues,

Dawa & Pasang [Kikuli] must go aloft and return rather heavily loaded—meanwhile … I must pack down 55 lbs. of equipment to [Camp] I and return to-night. The boys are more than willing—so that is precisely what we did. I had some time with my bulky load alone over several icy places and dodging stones in the large couloir…. Dawa brought down 65 lbs. and Pasang 75 lbs. from above!! We arrived simultaneously. Big feed!

So the lower camps were indeed stripped on orders from a “sahib”—but that man was Cromwell rather than Durrance. The note Wiessner claimed to have found at Camp II may well have existed and later been lost in the AAC files, but if so, on reading it in his frazzled state, Wiessner had mistaken Cromwell’s hand for Durrance’s.

The revelation of Durrance’s diary entry still leaves questions unanswered. Did no one realize that removing all those sleeping bags and air mattresses, on which the climbers up high completely depended, amounted to (as Wiessner had wondered in his diary) “sabotage”? Cromwell may well have been so witless and so eager to head home that he could issue such a ruthless demand. But why did Durrance and Pasang Kikuli obey it? Surely Kikuli, among all the men on the mountain except Wiessner, best understood the vital importance of that chain of camps so well supplied over the weeks, at the cost of so much labor and risk. Perhaps, despite the note Durrance left for Wiessner, by July 18 all three men had already decided that Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama must be dead—though the hastiness of such a conclusion defies credibility.

Kauffman and Putnam argue convincingly that for the rest of his life, Wiessner, whose tensions with Durrance had sprung from the moment they first met in Genoa, blamed the wrong man for the 1939 tragedy. This itself is curious, since it was Cromwell who, as soon as he arrived in the United States, went on the attack and accused the expedition leader of murdering Dudley Wolfe.

If Wiessner had fingered the wrong man, which he did explicitly in his 1956 article in Appalachia, why did Durrance not spring to his own defense? A published photocopy of his July 18 diary entry could have solved the question for good. Kauffman and Putnam argue that Durrance was in essence a private person, and that after the expedition he was so soured by its antagonisms that he preferred simply to ignore the controversy. In any event, Cromwell lived for forty-eight years after the expedition, Durrance for fifty-two, without ever committing to print a single line about what happened in 1939.

The ill-starred expedition led by Wiessner had seen the first fatalities ever to take place on K2. In addition, Wolfe’s death was the first incurred on any American expedition to the Himalaya or the Karakoram. Tragic those losses certainly were—but the controversy surrounding them would have quickly faded, had it not been for the political climate of the day.

Wiessner was still in Srinagar when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, and when Britain and France declared war on Germany two days