K2, the second highest mountain in the world, is widely recognised as the most difficult of the fourteen 8,000 metre peaks; its first ascent by the 1954 Italian expedition was therefore much admired by the entire mountaineering world. But in Italy there was pandemonium, and the victorious team was greeted in Genoa by a wildly cheering crowd 40,000 strong. After the humiliation of crushing defeat in World War 2, the conquest of K2 (following the dramatic American failure of the previous year) restored to the Italian public a renewed sense of national pride. The two victorious climbers, Compagnoni and Lacedelli, were feted as supermen, particularly since they had ultimately reached the summit without the use of oxygen -- which had run out well below the summit according to the official account of the climb. But behind the faade of national rejoicing and hero-worship all was not as it seemed. The team was later embroiled in accusations, counter-accusations and even court cases revolving around the events of the final climb to the summit. The two climbers who had carried up the oxygen to the highest Camp, Walter Bonatti and the porter Mahdi, had been abandoned on the summit eve and compelled to bivouac in the open with no protection whatever. Fortunately they survived, but worse was to follow: ten years later Bonatti was accused of betraying Compagnoni and Lacedelli and of using some of their oxygen during his night in the open so that the cylinders became exhausted 400 metres below the peak. He fought and won a libel case in 1966, but despite this there was never any retraction of the various sordid versions of the affair that emerged over the next four decades. Bonatti's story was finally vindicated only recently when the Italian Alpine Club in 2007 published K2 -- Una Storia Finita, a revised official account that accepted his version of events as completely accurate. This book is the story of Bonatti's battle and how he challenged and finally changed forever the official record of the first ascent of K2.