We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (2 page)

That particular day was sunny, as it happened, and the twelve
men watched it dawn with intense excitement. It is always exciting to
make the land after a dangerous voyage; the more so when one's ship
approaches the land at night, so that when daylight comes a coast is
revealed already close at hand. In that landfall there was an extra
excitement for those men, because they were all Norwegians, and
most of them were about to see their homeland for the first time
since they had been driven out of it by the German invasion nearly
three years before. Above all, here was the supreme excitement of
playing a dangerous game. Eight of the twelve were the crew of the
fishing-boat. They had sailed it safely across a thousand miles of the
no-man's-land of ocean, and had to sail it back when they had landed
their passengers and cargo. The other four were soldiers trained in
guerrilla warfare. Their journey had two objectives, one general and
one particular. In general, they were to establish themselves ashore
and spend the summer training the local people in the arts of sabotage; and in particular, in the following autumn they were to attack a
great German military airfield called Bardufoss. In the hold of the
boat, they had eight tons of explosives, weapons, food and arctic
equipment, and three radio transmitters.

As the day dawned, they felt as a gambler might feel if he had
staked his whole fortune on a system he believed in; except, of
course, that they had staked their lives, which makes a gamble even
more exciting. They believed that in a Norwegian fishing-boat they
could bluff their way through the German coast defences, and they
believed that with their plans and equipment they could live ashore
on that barren land in spite of the arctic weather and the German
occupation; and on these beliefs their lives depended. If they were
wrong, nobody could protect them. They were beyond the range of
any help from England. So far, it had all gone well; so far, there was
no sign that the Germans were suspicious. But the gleaming mountains which they sighted to the southward, so beautiful and serene in
the morning light, were full of menace. Among them the German coast watchers were posted, and soon, in the growing light, they
would see the fishing-boat, alone on the glittering sea. That morning
would put the first of the theories to the test, and that night or the
next would bring the boat and its crew to the climax of the journey:
the secret landing.

At that time, in 1943, that remote and thinly populated coast had
suddenly had world-wide importance thrust upon it. Normally, in
time of peace, there is no more peaceful place than the far north of
Norway. For two months every summer there is a tourist season, when
foreigners come to see the mountains and the Lapps and the midnight
sun; but for the other ten months of the year, the people who live there
eke out a humble livelihood by fishing and working small farms along
the water's edge. They are almost cut off from the world outside, by
the sea in front of them and the Swedish frontier at their backs, and by
bad weather and darkness, and by the vast distance they have to travel
to reach the capital of their own country or any other centre of civilization. They live a hard life, but a very placid one. They are not
harassed by many of the worries which beset people in cities or in
more populous countrysides. They take little account of time.

But when the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, the thousand
miles of Atlantic seaboard which fell into their hands was the greatest strategical asset which they won; and when Russia entered the
war, the far northernmost end of the coast became even more important, and even more valuable to Germany. The allied convoys to the
Russian arctic ports, Archangel and Murmansk, had to pass through
the narrow strip of open sea between the north of Norway and the
arctic ice; and it was from north Norway that the Germans attacked
them with success which had sometimes been overwhelming.
Bardufoss was the base for their air attacks and their reconnaissance,
and the coast itself provided a refuge for submarines and a safe passage from German harbours all the way to the Arctic Ocean.

As soon as the Germans had installed themselves on the northern
coast, their position was impregnable. It was a thousand miles from the nearest allied base, and the country could not have been better
for defence. A screen of islands twenty miles wide protects it from
the sea, and among the islands are innumerable sounds through
which defending forces could maneuver by sea in safety. The mainland itself is divided by a series of great fjords, with mountainous
tongues of land between them. Beyond the heads of the fjords is a
high plateau, uninhabited and mostly unsurveyed, snow-covered for
nine months of the year; and across the plateau, marked by a cairn
here and there among its deserted hills, is the frontier of Sweden,
which was a neutral country then, entirely surrounded by others
under German occupation. To attack the Germans in arctic Norway
with any normal military force was quite impossible. Every island
and every fjord could have become a fortress; and if the Germans had
ever found themselves hard pressed in northern Norway, they could
have reinforced their position by occupying Sweden, which would
not have been to the advantage of the Allies.

In these circumstances, the voyage which had come to its end on
the March morning had a possible importance out of all proportion
to the size of the expedition. Great hopes of its outcome were held in
London. Only four men were to be landed, but they were quite capable, with a little luck, of putting the air base at Bardufoss out of
action long enough for a convoy to have a chance of getting through
undetected; and the time was also ripe for the training of local people. The great majority of Norwegians up there would have gladly
taken some positive action against the Germans, and would have
done it long before if they had had any weapons and any instructions
on how to set about it. Once the training was started, it would grow
like a snowball.

The only reason why nothing of the kind had been done in
Norway before was that it was so difficult to get there. Small parties
of men on skis could get over the mountains across the border from
Sweden, and a radio transmitter had been taken in that way and was
installed in the town of Tromso. But a saboteur's equipment was much too bulky and heavy to carry across the mountains, or to
smuggle past the Swedes. The only way to take it was by sea.

By that time, a great many landings had been made in the southern part of Norway by fishing-boats fitted with hidden armament,
which sailed from a base in Shetland, and the resistance movement
down there was well supplied and flourishing. But none of these
boats, up till then, had tackled such a long and risky journey as the
one to the north of Norway. The boat which had just accomplished
it had come from the Shetland base. Its name was the Brattholm. It
was 75 feet long, and had a single-cylinder engine which gave it a
speed of eight knots. Its appearance had been carefully preserved, so
that it looked like any Norwegian fishing-boat, and it had false registration numbers painted on its bows. But it was armed with seven
machine-guns hidden on mountings on deck, and each of its passengers had his own spare machine-gun stowed somewhere where he
could get it in a hurry.

The date when it sailed from Shetland, in the third week in
March, had been a compromise which was not entirely satisfactory
for anybody. The skipper and crew of the boat had to make up their
minds between sailing in the depth of winter, when they would
have the cover of the arctic night but would also have to weather
the arctic storms, or in the late spring or early autumn, when the
weather would probably be rather more moderate but the German
defences, and their air patrols in particular, would have the advantage of daylight. On the whole, from the skipper's point of view, it
would have been better to go earlier than March, because his boat
was sound and fit to stand up to any weather. But the passengers
also had to be considered. If they had been landed in the worst of
winter weather they might not have been able to keep themselves
alive after they got ashore.

But still, the choice of March had been justified in so far as the
voyage had been a success. The weather had not been bad. The little
boat had felt very conspicuous to the people on board it as it slowly steamed northwards day after day, but it had only been sighted once,
by a German aircraft about three hundred miles from land; and this
aircraft, which was probably on a weather reconnaissance flight and
not really concerned with stray fishing-boats, had only circled round
and then flown away.

So it seemed that whatever happened when they were sighted
from the shore, at least the shore defences could not have been
warned about them, and would have no reason to guess that the
humble boat they saw in front of them had crossed a thousand miles
of the Atlantic. But it still remained to be seen whether the coast
watchers would be deceived by Brattholm's innocent appearance. It
had worked often enough farther south, but on a new bit of coast
there was always the risk of infringing some local fishing regulation
and so giving the game away. For all that the crew or the passengers
knew, they might be pretending to fish in the middle of a minefield,
or an artillery range, or some other kind of forbidden area, because
nobody had been able to tell them before they left Shetland exactly
where these kinds of defences were.

At the tense moment of the dawn, all the four passengers were on
deck. Wars often bring together people of very different character,
and these four were as varied in experience and background as any
four Norwegians could have been. Their leader was a man in his middle forties called Sigurd Eskeland. As a young man, he had emigrated
to South America, and he had spent most of his adult life in the back
of beyond in Argentina running a fur farm. On the day when he
heard on the radio that Norway had been invaded, he got on his
horse and left his farm in the hands of his partner, and rode to the
nearest town to volunteer by cable for the air force. The air force
turned him down on account of his age, but he worked his way to
England and joined the army instead. He got into the Commandos,
and then transferred to the Linge Company, which was the name of
the military unit which trained agents and saboteurs for landing in
occupied Norway. Long ago, before he went abroad, he had been a postal inspector in north Norway, so that he remembered something
about the district he had been assigned to.

The other three men were very much younger. There was a radio
operator called Salvesen, who was a member of a well-known shipping family. He had been a first mate in the Merchant Navy when
Norway came into the war; but after a time that defensive job had
begun to bore him, and when he heard of the Linge Company he volunteered to join it as an agent.

The other two were specialists in small arms and explosives, and
they were close friends who had been through a lot of queer experiences together. Both of them were twenty-six years old. One was
called Per Blindheim. He was the son of a master baker in Alesund on
the west coast of Norway, and is in his youth he served his time on the
bread round. Superficially, he was a gay and very handsome young
man in the Viking tradition, tall and fair and blue-eyed; but hidden
beneath his boyish appearance and behaviour, he had a most compelling sense of justice. When the Russians attacked Finland, it
seemed to him so wrong that he threw up his job and left the home to
join the Finnish army. When the World War began and his own country was invaded, he hurried back and fought against the Germans;
and when the battle for Norway was lost, he set off for England to
begin it all over again, escaping from the Germans by way of Russia,
the country against which he had fought a few months before.

The other one of this pair of friends, and the fourth of the land
party, was Jan Baalsrud. To look at, Jan was a contrast to Per; he had
dark hair and grey-blue eyes, and was of a smaller build altogether.
But he had the same youthful quality, combined with the same hidden serious turn of mind; a depth of feeling which neither of those
two would show to strangers, but one which all four of the men must
have needed to carry them through the hardships of their training
and bring them to where they were.

Jan had been apprenticed to his father, who was an instrument
maker in Oslo, and had only just started his career when the invasion came. He had fought in the army, and escaped to Sweden when there
was no chance to fight any more. By then he had discovered a taste
for adventure, and he volunteered as a courier between Stockholm
and Oslo, and began to travel to and fro between neutral Sweden and
occupied Norway, in the service of the escape organisation which the
Norwegians had founded. Luckily for him, he was caught and
arrested by the Swedes before he was caught by the Germans. They
sentenced him to five months' imprisonment, but after he had served
three months of his sentence he was let out and given a fortnight to
leave the country.

This was easier ordered than done; but he got a Russian visa and
flew to Moscow, where he landed inauspiciously among Russian celebrations of German victories. However, the Russians treated him
well and sent him down to Odessa on the Black Sea; and it was while
he was waiting there for a ship that he first met Per Blindheim, who
was on the same errand. The two travelled together to England by
way of Bulgaria, Egypt, Aden, Bombay, South Africa, America and
Newfoundland. When they got to London, the first of the sights that
they went to see was Piccadilly Circus; and while they were standing
looking rather glumly at this symbol of their journey's end, and wondering what was going to happen next, Jan saw in the crowd an
English officer he had known in Stockholm. This man recruited
them both forthwith for the Linge Company, and there they found a
job which fulfilled all their hopes of adventure.