David Howarth
DURING THE GERMAN OCCUPATION OF NORWAY, FROM 1940 TO 1945, every Norwegian knew that small boats were constantly sailing from the Shetland Isles to Norway to land weapons and supplies and to rescue refugees. The Norwegians who stayed in Norway and struggled there against the invaders were fortified by this knowledge, and gave the small boats the familiar name. “To take the Shetland bus” became a synonym in Norway for escape when danger was overwhelming. This record of the adventures of the Norwegian sailors who manned the boats is offered as a tribute from an English colleague to Norwegian seamanship, and as a humble memorial to those who lost their lives.
* * *
On 17 March Larsen left Scalloway to carry out the last trip of the season to Traena. By the end of the month, when he was due back, it would be too light up there to visit the district again till September.
Bergholm was faster than the smaller boats, and they made good time to Traena in fine weather, arriving off the islands in three and a half days. Larsen sighted the coast and fixed his position in daylight, and when darkness fell he closed in and felt his way in among the skerries. He reached one of the sounds between the islands, where the rocks rose steeply from the water, and laid the Bergholm alongside them. One of the passengers jumped ashore and climbed over the steep hills to some houses on the other side of the island.
When he came back he brought with him a man who had volunteered to come with them to another very small island, where a single family lived who he thought could take charge of the passengers and cargo until the small local boats were able to ferry them across to the mainland. Larsen took Bergholm through the sounds to this little island and moored her to the quay there. The owner of the island had a boathouse on the quay, in which were two dinghies and a lot of nets. They woke him up, and found he was quite willing to keep the cargo in the boathouse and to take care of the passengers. Most of the rest of the night was spent in taking out the boats and nets, packing in the cargo, and arranging the boats and nets on top of it.
By the time this was finished it was too late to put to sea again that morning, and as it was a good place to lie, sheltered from observation on all sides but one, Larsen stayed there till the following evening. All day, from the island, they watched a German patrol boat steaming up and down its beat nearby, and there were several alarms when it seemed to be approaching a point from which its crew could have seen the Bergholm. Had it done so they would have had to fight their way out, so they cleared away the guns and started the engine. It was only an armed Norwegian Arctic whaler, and they could probably have sunk it, but the aftereffects of a fight on the passengers who had been landed and the local people who had helped them would have been disastrous, and Traena would have been finished as a landing place. So it was lucky that its beat seemed to stop just short of the point from which the quay would have been visible, and that each time discovery seemed imminent it turned back on its tracks. As darkness approached it steamed off towards the mainland, and at eight in the evening Bergholm left for home. It was still very fine and clear.
At two o’clock the next afternoon they were steaming on their homeward course, parallel to the coast and about seventy-five miles off it, when a twin-engined plane approached them from astern and flew round them, very low and about three hundred yards away. As they expected the plane to attack at a moment’s notice, and as they were much farther offshore than an innocent fishing boat had any right to be, they dropped their camouflage and manned the guns. But it did not attack; it flew off towards the coast.
The crew of the plane had certainly seen their guns, and it seemed sure that when it reached the coast and their position was reported, a real attack would be made. Larsen altered course to the westward; but after a bit he reflected that in such perfectly clear weather, at eight knots, he had no chance whatever of evading a search, so he returned to the course he had set for Shetland. The crew tested all their weapons and brought all the ammunition on deck. They had a single .5 Colt machine gun mounted forward and a twin one aft, two twin Lewis guns amidships, and two unmounted Brens.
About six o’clock the attack came. Two twin-engined seaplanes approached the boat from the port beam and circled it at a height of two hundred feet. Then, diving to mast height, they flew across her bow, firing with cannon. Bergholm returned the fire with all her guns. Not much damage was done to the boat, but for a few seconds the decks were swept with cannon shell splinters, and Klausen, on the port Lewis mounting, received so many wounds that Larsen sent him below.
The planes stood off and circled for about five minutes. Perhaps the fire put up by Bergholm was more than they had expected, and they were discussing it on their shortwave radio. After a time they swooped again, both attacking from the starboard side. As they approached, Larsen at the wheel tried to turn the boat to bring all the guns to bear. Another storm of shells and splinters hit her. The Colt and Lewis tracers were seen hitting the planes. Enoksen, at the twin Colt, staggered away from his guns with his face and hands hidden with blood. When they went to help him they found he was riddled with shell splinters from head to foot, and he could not see, so he also had to be sent below. Kalve, at the bow Colt, was hit in one hand and one foot. As the planes roared by he swung his gun round and aimed it with his remaining hand, then jammed his other elbow onto the trigger. Faeroy and Vika, the two engineers, were firing the two Bren guns. Hansen had gone below to try to send a radio signal to us, but the aerial was shot away. By then the boat was badly damaged, but she was still underway, and they knew they had damaged the planes. Suddenly as they watched for the next attack, one plane broke away and flew off low towards the coast.
The other one went on circling round, then dived again. Faeroy and Noreiger had taken over the Colts. Enoksen was trying to get up the ladder again from the cabin, but he was hit again and fell back down the hatch. Faeroy was also wounded, but he was able to stay at the gun.
On its next attack the plane dropped a stick of six bombs. None of them fell near the boat, but its cannon fire was still accurate, and Faeroy was wounded again and could not do any more.
Then there was nobody left to man the Lewis guns or Brens. Noreiger was still at one Colt, and Vika took over the other. Larsen was still at the wheel in what remained of the wheelhouse, manoeuvring the boat to meet each attack.
In the next run another stick of bombs came down, and the last of them fell a few feet from the stern. It shook the boat badly. Noreiger and Vika both shot accurately, and Larsen saw strikes on the plane. But as it receded once more Vika fell, and when Larsen ran to help him he found his foot was shot off above the ankle. Five of the eight men aboard were out of action. Hansen had come up from below and reported that the radio was dead and the boat was leaking. Larsen, wondering how to dispose his remaining men to meet the next attack, looked up at the plane. It was disappearing to the eastward, smoking.
The whole fight had lasted just over half an hour. This short time had wrought a terrible difference on Bergholm and her crew; but dusk was falling, and they could be sure that the night would give them respite. Larsen, Noreiger and Hansen, who were not wounded, first went to attend to the other five men. Vika was the most seriously hurt. Someone had already put a tourniquet on his leg, but they knew he was dying, and they thought he knew it too. He was conscious, and sometimes smiled, but he did not speak or complain. Faeroy, Enoksen, and Klausen were in great pain from the number of steel splinters in their hands and heads and bodies, and they could not move. Enoksen, however, was not blinded, as they had thought at first, it was only blood which had run into his eyes, and the shock of a shell which exploded in front of his face, which had made him unable to see. Kalve, who only had one leg and one hand out of action, was able to move and to give some help with the work that had to be done. They disinfected the men’s wounds and bandaged them, then turned their attention to the boat.
The engine was still running, and with the wheel lashed she was holding nearly to her course; but the water in the bilges was rising, and the two pumps on the engine could not hold it in check. Kalve and Noreiger manned the hand pump, but still the water rose, and in spite of all they could do, at about eight o’clock it reached the air intakes of the engine, and the engine stopped.
In the meantime Larsen had inspected the rest of the boat. The decks were full of holes and covered with blood and empty cartridge cases. The masts were still standing, but a lot of the rigging was shot away, and wire and rope were swinging from side to side as the boat rolled. The wheelhouse, in which Larsen had stood unscratched through the whole engagement, was literally shot to pieces. The windows were all gone and the inside was littered with broken glass. All the doors were shot away, and the wooden walls and roof were smashed by exploding shells, so that nothing but the broken framework remained.
Most important of all was the lifeboat, which was stowed on top of a deckhouse on the port side of the wheelhouse. Most of its gunwale was split off, and it had seven shell holes in its bottom. Larsen and Noreiger set to work to patch the holes with canvas and sheets cut from bully beef tins. Hansen collected food and water and navigating instruments, and the lifeboat’s mast and sail and oars. By midnight they had made the boat tight enough to be kept afloat, and they launched it and stowed the essential stores aboard. Larsen tore up his marked charts and ciphers and threw them overboard. Then came a grievous struggle to get the wounded men up the steep companionway from the cabin and into the boat without hurting them too much. At last they got Vika laid in the bows, on the floor of the boat, and Enoksen and Faeroy amidships. Klausen and Kalve had to sit up in the stern, as the boat was only sixteen feet long and there was no room for them to lie down. The three who were not wounded arranged to take turns at rowing, two at a time, each rowing for four hours and resting for two. At one in the morning they abandoned the Bergholm. It was dead calm.
The first thing they had to do was to get as far away as possible before dawn, when the Germans would very likely send out a plane to see what had happened to the wreck. She might still be floating; a wooden ship will often float with gunwales awash. If so, there was a chance that the Germans, seeing no life aboard, would assume that they had all been killed; but it was more likely that they would see that the lifeboat was gone, and would make a search for it.
But apart from getting away from the scene of the fight, Larsen had to decide where to make for. They were seventy-five miles from the nearest point on the Norwegian coast, and three hundred fifty miles from Shetland. After thinking it over, he decided that it was very unlikely that they could reach Shetland in the lifeboat. It was heavily laden, and with most of its top plank on each side shot away it had very little freeboard, so that a very moderate sea would have swamped it. Besides, with the best of luck it would take them, say, ten days to get there, and none of the wounded men could be expected to survive so long in an open boat. On the other hand, he did not like to take the shortest route to Norway, partly because he thought it was what the Germans would expect him to do, and partly because it led to a part of the coast, near Trondheim, where he had no friends he could rely on, and he thought that even if they got there safely it would be difficult to get away again.
So he made up his mind to steer for Ålesund, a hundred and fifty miles away, twice as far as the Trondheim coast. Larsen was a seaman by nature, and the prospect of towing so far in a leaky boat did not worry him, provided that it gave some small hope of getting the wounded crew alive to Shetland.
The two men rowing took one oar each, sharing the midship thwart. The third unwounded man, taking his two hours off from the oars, could not lie down because there was no room, and was occupied with helping the wounded men to shift their positions and to take food and water. Kalve was able to bail with his undamaged hand, and he did so continuously. At four o’clock on the first morning Vika asked for water and aspirins. They had no aspirins, but Larsen gave him the water and he seemed satisfied. When he went to him an hour later he had died. They wanted to bury his body in Norway, but later on their journey they wrapped it in a blanket and lifted it overboard. They remained stubbornly sure that they would reach safety in the end.
At dawn on the first morning, when they had been rowing for six hours, it was still calm and crystal clear. They saw a plane searching the place where the Bergholm had been. It flew in increasing circles, and they realised that its crew must have found the wreck, seen that the lifeboat was gone, and started to look for them. Planes remained in sight for the whole of the day, quartering the ocean in which a boat seems dreadfully conspicuous and vulnerable. Whenever the planes approached, the rowers shipped their oars, in case the flash of sunlight on the wet blades should show them up. Often the planes came so close that the men in the boat were certain they had been seen, and nerved themselves to a fresh attack like those of the day before; but each time the plane sheered off, and after a day of suspense at last the darkness fell and covered them. They rowed all night.
On the second day a light breeze came, and as there was no plane in sight they hoisted the sail, and for a time they made good progress. But at dusk it fell calm again, and they rowed for the third night.
The third day was sunny and calm again, and they rowed all day without seeing anything.
During the fourth night they saw a light ahead. They made towards it, and saw it was a fishing boat. They hailed her and drew alongside. Larsen climbed stiffly aboard. He told the fishermen that he and his men had been torpedoed in a merchant ship, and he asked them if they had enough fuel to get to Shetland. The fishermen were friendly and sympathetic, but they said they were only allowed to carry enough fuel to get to the fishing grounds and back, in order to stop them sailing across to the other side. They came from Kristiansund, and were willing to take Larsen and his crew back there with them and to help them to escape; but Larsen was doubtful whether it would be possible to escape from there, so he thanked them but refused the offer. He also refused food, saying they had plenty in the lifeboat. The fishermen gave him his exact position, which was thirty-five miles offshore, and he returned to the boat and started to row again.
At dawn on the next day, their fourth in the boat, they could see land, but it was still a long way off. As they struggled on towards it they saw a lot of fishing boats coming out towards them. This was an unwelcome sight, for it meant that by the evening, when the boats got back to port, the approach of a shipwrecked crew would be common knowledge. But it could not be helped, and when the boats reached them they hailed the first, and Larsen asked again if they had enough fuel to get to Shetland. This time the skipper tried to persuade them against going to Shetland, and after some hedging he came out into the open and said that if they would come back with him he would use his influence to help them; he thought it would only mean a month or two in prison, and then they could join the merchant service for the Germans. Luckily, before the conversation had reached this stage, his crew had given the men in the boat some cooked fish and coffee. It was the first hot food they had had for four days, and they felt much better for it; and they thanked the skipper politely, and went on their way. It turned out later that they had hit on the only local quisling [traitor]. When he got home that evening he reported them to the Germans, and was seen the next day walking in Ålesund with a German officer.
After leaving the fishing boat they rowed at the best speed they could make. They were sure he meant to report them, but they did not think he would lose a day’s fishing to do it; so their only hope was to get into hiding on the coast before he could reach home. As they neared the coast a tidal stream against them slowed their progress, and they had a hard struggle to make any headway against it; but about three in the afternoon, very thankfully, they reached the first of the islands, and ran the boat in among some rocks, and waited for darkness.
There were still about ten miles to go, among the islands, to the place where Björnöy lived. They set off at eight, and got there soon after midnight. They were very tired, and some of the wounded men were very ill.
Larsen went ashore and knocked at the door of a man called Nils Sorviknes, who had helped him when he had been there before. It was some time before he could get an answer, and he leaned against the doorpost in the last stages of exhaustion. But at last the door opened, and Sorviknes, astonished to see him again, took him inside. Larsen told him what had happened, and told him he had six men waiting in the lifeboat. He asked what chance there was of getting a boat to go to Shetland. Sorviknes said he would talk to Björnöy, but that it was too late to do anything that night; and when Larsen told him the name of the fishing boat they had spoken to, Sorviknes knew it at once as belonging to a quisling, and was sure that by then the Germans would have been told that they were in the district. So the first essential was to hide them before dawn. He thought for a while, then advised Larsen to go to a man called Lars Torholmen, who lived with his wife and two sisters in the only house on a very small island a couple of miles away. He gave him a letter to Torholmen, and told him to lie low there till he got further instructions.
Back in the lifeboat, Larsen took to the oars for the last time and rowed to the small island. He went ashore again, and woke Torholmen, who took him in without any hesitation. As soon as he gave him the letter from Sorviknes and explained about the wounded men in the boat, Torholmen and his two sisters came down to the shore and between them they carried the wounded men to the house. The mother and the sisters put them to bed and fed them and washed their wounds. It was beginning to get light, and the boat had to be disposed of before daybreak. There was no time to take it out and sink it, so Larsen and Torholmen rowed it round to the other side of the island and hid it in a boathouse. It was a compromising thing to keep on the island, but there was nothing better they could do. As the sun rose they got back to the house, and Larsen was also put to bed. They all slept for the whole of the day.
They stayed with Torholmen for a week, living in two rooms at the top of the house, and being well looked after by the three ladies. With good food and rest their strength began to return, but some of the wounded men were still in great pain from the shell splinters in their bodies.
Björnöy, on whom they were relying to find them a boat to get away, was skipper of a local ferry, and Nils Sorviknes was one of his crew. So they knew that Sorviknes would be able to tell Björnöy about them during the ferry’s morning run to Ålesund on the day they arrived. But the story Larsen had been able to tell Sorviknes was incomplete, so one of Torholmen’s sisters invented some errands in Ålesund, and went as a passenger on the boat to give him more details. She also asked him whether he knew of a doctor who could be trusted to come to Torholmen to see the wounded men, as she was worried by signs of sepsis and gangrene.
On their second day with Torholmen, which was a Sunday, Björnöy came to see Larsen and to tell him what he was doing. The problem of getting them away had been made much more difficult and dangerous by their meeting with the quisling skipper. As they had expected, he had reported their arrival to the Germans and a tremendous search was going on. Within an hour of their arrival at Torholmen’s house the Germans had started an air search of the whole of that part of Norway, and had sent two armed trawlers to the part of the coast the quisling had thought they were making for. They had also dispatched a ferry steamer to land parties of soldiers on each of the string of large islands which ran north from Ålesund; and they had evidently seen or photographed the registration number which was painted on the Bergholm at the time, for they sent a detachment of thirty men to the village which the number denoted.
Advertisements offering rewards for their capture were printed in the papers, and everybody in the district was talking about them. The little island where they were hiding was in the very middle of the area which was being searched, and Björnöy thought that until the excitement had died down it would be foolish to risk the slightest move which might draw attention to the place. He did not think it was safe even to bring a doctor out to the island. He offered to take the wounded men to the doctor, in a rowing boat by night, but it would be a dangerous journey, partly over land, where the men would have to be carried and the whole party would be at the mercy of anyone who happened to see them. Larsen and Björnöy agreed that in any case the doctor could not do much unless the men went to a hospital to have the splinters extracted, and they decided to give up the idea unless any of them got much worse.
Björnöy was against using a local boat to escape to Shetland if it could be avoided. The Germans were obviously very anxious to capture the Bergholm’s crew. If a local boat disappeared they would be sure to guess that the crew had escaped in it, and their punishment of the owners would be severe and might even lead to discovery of the whole organisation to which Björnöy belonged. Although this might be risked as a last resort, he had first got in touch with Karl-Johan, and had a radio message sent to England to ask us to send a boat over to fetch them.
This signal, of course, was the first news we had had in Shetland of what had happened to the Bergholm. Knowing that she had been attacked confirmed us all in our opinion that the use of fishing boats was getting too dangerous to be worthwhile. By the time we received it, it was the beginning of April. The nights were already very short, and to send a fishing boat into a district already so thoroughly on the alert would be very risky. A naval M.T.B., on the other hand, would not only have a much better chance of doing the job, but also of fighting its way out if it was spotted. The Navy was very willing to send one; but unluckily the weather by then was very bad, and until it moderated it was impossible for these fast light craft to leave harbour. Every one of the fishing-boat crews which survived at the base was ready and eager to go, and the fishing boats could easily have weathered the gale. But Rogers would not let them. It was natural that everyone’s first reaction was to set off at once on a rescue expedition; but when he weighed it up he concluded that it was wrong to take so great a risk of losing a second crew, and that so far as we could tell it was probably safer for the Bergholm crew themselves to stay in hiding till an M.T.B. could go, than to embark on a fishing boat which might so very easily be lost on the voyage home. It was hard for him to decide to leave the crew in their dangerous position, but he was certainly right; and the decision was transmitted to Ålesund, and ultimately to the men on the island.
Meanwhile the search continued around and over their hiding place. From the windows of the house they could see aircraft quartering the district, and every day Torholmen brought them news of what the Germans were doing. The search lasted for nearly a week. Then a rumour spread around in Ålesund that a fishing boat had been stolen. Larsen heard it and was pleased, because even though the Germans would not be able to trace it to its source and prove that it was true, they would certainly not be able to prove that it was not, and as time went on they would probably be more inclined to believe it. It would at least offer them a plausible explanation of the disappearance of the boatload of men. He never knew whether it was a spontaneous rumour, or whether it had been started by some friend as a means of bringing the search to an end. At all events it seemed to help.
The intensity of the search gradually died down, and after about ten days the Germans seemed to have given it up as a bad job. Why they missed the little island where the men were hiding remains a mystery. Perhaps it was because it was so small, or because it was so close to the headquarters town of Ålesund; or perhaps they hardly expected that men who had rowed a hundred and fifty miles would row a farther ten among the islands.
As soon as it began to seem that the Germans were convinced the crew had escaped from the district, Björnöy proceeded with his plans for getting them away. He had asked through Karl-Johan that the rescue boat should be sent to the island of Skorpen, a dozen miles farther south, where we had already landed and picked up many agents. Johann Skorpen, the fisherman who lived there, was well used to hiding people and would look after the crew somewhere on his island till the boat could come.
Moving them down there would be the most difficult job. There was a control point on the way at which papers had to be produced, but boats were not usually searched there; and if Björnöy could find a boat with a plausible reason for going through this control, he thought it would be better to risk this than to bring one of our boats too close to Ålesund.
The movement was deputed to Sverre Roald, another member of the organisation, who lived in the island of Vigra, close at hand, and was a neighbour and relation of our foreman shipwright Sevrin Roald. After the men had been a week with Torholmen, Roald came one night to tell them what he had arranged. The next night he came again, and they embarked in his little motorboat. But by then the calm spell which had lasted throughout their journey in the lifeboat had given place to strong southerly winds, and after trying to stem the short seas between the islands they had to give it up and go back to Torholmen.
The next night the wind had dropped a little, and they tried again. This time they reached the island of Vigra in safety, where Roald transferred them to another boat: the small decked fishing boat which was to take them through the control to Skorpen.
There is an important radio station in Vigra, which was guarded by German sentries. The fishing boat was lying within a hundred yards of the station buildings, within sight of the sentries. The trip to Skorpen had to be postponed through bad weather, and the men stayed on board the boat for five days. It was an inconvenient position to be in, because they could not go on deck in daylight but had to stay confined in the little cabin of the boat. But on the other hand it was reasonably safe, because the Germans would not expect the seven men they were looking for to be hiding in a boat under constant watch. Sverre Roald had to be careful in his visits, but he managed to see them every night, bringing them food and the latest news of how things were going. At last they were able to get away. They passed the control quite easily and safely, and reached Skorpen, where Roald handed them over to Johann Skorpen and went back to Vigra. Skorpen installed them in a cowshed on the opposite side of the island to his house, and brought them a primus stove and some food and coffee.
Skorpen was not worried at having them there, because his house and island had been searched only a week before and he did not think the Germans would bother him again for some time. Some M.T.B.s manned by the Norwegian Navy had attacked a convoy in that district, and it seemed that the Germans had not seen the boats leaving the coast and believed they had been sunk and that the crews were hiding. They had been searching for them round Skorpen, just as they had been searching for the Bergholm crew round Ålesund, and a party of soldiers had been landed in each island. Luckily Skorpen had seen them coming, and had retreated to the hills, taking with him his radio set, since it was forbidden to possess such a thing, and leaving his wife, who would be less suspect than himself, to deal with the search party. The officer in charge of the party had opened her door and said, ‘Where are you hiding them?’ It must have alarmed the lady, whose house had harboured so many different agents and refugees; but she pretended not to be able to understand the German officer’s Norwegian. This universal means of avoiding difficult questions must have been very annoying for Germans who were perhaps not very sure whether they were really able to make themselves understood or not. It was very effective. The party searched the house and found an old pair of headphones from a disused crystal set, which they took away with apparent satisfaction.
As this search had been made so recently, and as the Bergholm crew were now out of the immediate area where the Germans had supposed them to be, they settled down with a feeling of comparative security to wait for the boat from Shetland.
Our headquarters had arranged with Karl-Johan that they should send a code message in the B.B.C. Norwegian news bulletin on the night before the rescue boat was due to arrive at Skorpen. Karl-Johan had warned Skorpen to expect this message, and Skorpen listened every evening on the radio which he had retrieved from the hilltop. When Roald got home and sent a message to Karl-Johan that the men had safely arrived at the rendezvous, a signal was sent to our headquarters and passed on to us in Shetland. The weather was still bad, and although the naval M.T.B.s were ready to sail we had to wait another week before they could leave the harbour. As soon as the wind subsided the code message was broadcast by the B.B.C. and an M.T.B. left Shetland. Skorpen heard the message, and when the boat entered the sound of Skorpen the next evening the seven men were waiting on the shore. Afterwards Larsen said, ‘We are glad to be on our way.’