‘A man who refused to die under circumstances that would have killed ninety-nine men out of a hundred.’
NEW YORK TIMES
JAN BAALSRUD WAS a young Norwegian soldier with a taste for adventure. So the Linge Company, which trained up commandos to be inserted undercover into Nazi-occupied Norway, was the perfect place for him.
In March 1943, when he was just 25, he found himself on a fishing boat approaching one of the many tiny islands along the Norwegian coastline. At least, it looked like a fishing boat. In fact, it was a very heavily armed Allied vessel containing eight crew, several machine guns, eight tons of high explosive, plus Jan himself and his unit’s three other commandos.
They had all been highly trained in covert espionage at secret Special Operations Executive (SOE) training camps in Scotland – and now they were to be operating for real. The mission: to destroy an important air-traffic-control tower, and recruit as many locals as they could into the Norwegian resistance.
The mission was highly dangerous. If the Nazis caught them, they’d be horrifically tortured for information, then shot.
The men were well prepared and confident in their ability. They all knew the dangers involved, yet their nervousness must have been palpable.
On the night of 29 March, as the small craft approached the tiny island, the unit leader, Sigurd Eskeland, climbed into a small dinghy and headed to shore. The unit had been given the name of a local shop. The shopkeeper, they’d been told, would help them on their mission.
But out-of-date intelligence can kill an op – and this intelligence was as bad as it gets.
Having made contact with the shopkeeper, Eskeland revealed the existence of the commando unit and its boat, only to find out there and then that the shopkeeper he was supposed to be talking to had died a few months previously.
The new owner had the same name. But not the same loyalties.
The shopkeeper was terrified of the Nazis. He knew that the crime of helping the enemy would be death. And so he reported what he had learned.
Eskeland returned to the craft, and the following day the worst happened: a German warship slipped into view and opened fire on them.
The men quickly destroyed their top-secret ciphers before abandoning ship, hurling themselves into some small dinghies to get ashore – but not before setting a delayed-fuse detonator on the explosives in their fishing vessel.
From his dinghy Jan Baalsrud laid down rounds on the German vessel from his sub-machine gun, but it only halted the warship for a moment before it continued to bear down on them.
The Germans had the dinghies in their sights. They blasted the commandos with rounds, blowing massive holes in the sides of the little boats, which started to sink.
The men had only one choice. Stay where they were and wait for the German rounds to rip them to shreds. Or swim.
It was about 60 metres to the shore, and the freezing water was riddled with ice.
They went for it.
The Germans thundered all their guns at them. Still the men crashed through the water, fully dressed, expecting at each moment to feel the terminal thud of a bullet in the back of their skull.
Amazingly, they made it to shore. But as Jan ran out on to the beach, one of his comrades took a round to the head. A flash of red burst from his skull and he fell on to the beach.
Jan knew he couldn’t stop. He sprinted towards the cover of some rocks, and only then did he turn back. All the remaining commandos were lying face down on the shore.
He looked around and realized that he was surrounded at a distance by Gestapo soldiers. And they were closing in.
Jan barely had time to think. He ran towards a snow-covered gully and fought his way up it. But the Gestapo were catching up. A round from one of their revolvers pinged past him. Jan pulled out his own automatic pistol and, when the first Nazi came into view, shot him dead.
He fired off another round, wounding a second Gestapo soldier. And then he continued his frenzied struggle up the snow-covered gully.
He came into view of the warship back down below. It opened up on him as he reached the top of the gully where he was able, for a few moments, to seek refuge.
Jan looked back down to the beach. It was crowded with Germans. He looked at his own body. He had lost one boot as he swam to shore, and a German round had hit him in the foot, blasting off his big toe. Blood oozed from the wound, staining the snow red all around him. The foot itself was almost frozen solid. His uniform was black against the white snow, and he was leaving a red blood trail behind him.
He was easy prey, and he knew that Germans would be swarming round him any moment.
So he did the only thing he could. He ran for his life.
With a frozen, bleeding foot and a head crazed with fear, Jan crossed the island. He saw another island to the east, and wondered if he could swim there. In truth, he didn’t have much choice – he couldn’t hide from the Germans for long. He decided to pit his exhausted, frozen body against the frozen Arctic sea.
It was a cripplingly savage swim. The night was dark, the waters freezing and his body almost gave up. But, eventually, he washed up on the far shore, where two little girls found him and took him to their mother.
The mother had heard about what had happened, and knew that the Germans would be scouring the surrounding islands looking for Jan. Just having him in her house could mean death for her and her family. He was at their mercy.
But she was made of sterner stuff than the shopkeeper. She bandaged the bloody stump on his foot and gave him dry clothes and shoes, as well as food and hot drinks. But both she and Jan knew that her house would only be safe for a few hours. The Nazis would come calling in the morning.
Those small islands were not good for hiding. Jan had to get to the Norwegian mainland. Maybe then he could trek south into neutral Sweden. When the woman’s son came home, he offered to row Jan to a neighbour who was planning a trip to Tromsø, and might be able to take him.
The pair set out in the bleak darkness of the following dawn. But when they reached their destination, the son found that the neighbour had already gone. His wife gave him some food, but Jan was now left with no option but to head for the south of the island in the hope that from there he could somehow make it to the mainland.
But he had no idea of the terrain that was waiting for him.
The interior of the island was mountainous and covered with snow. Jan was wearing inadequate rubber boots, and his mashed-up toe left him in agony. Surrounded by frozen clouds of snow and mist, his clothes were soon, once more, soaked through.
The snow lay thick over the rocks, but still he limped through it, avoiding avalanche-prone couloirs and all the very real dangers of these ice-bound mountains, determined not to let the elements beat him. Every step was a massive effort, but he kept on going, knowing that this was his only chance to evade the Nazis.
Through sheer grit and determination Jan reached the south of the island. There, sympathetic locals gave him shelter and directed him to the house of the man who ran the local telephone exchange. He would help Jan get to the mainland, he said.
And so he did – along with his 78-year-old father, a tough old sailor who thought nothing of rowing ten miles at midnight across open seas in the middle of a snow-filled gale, nor of risking the Nazi firing squads if their actions were discovered. These hardy islanders deposited Jan on the mainland and gave him a set of skis before turning back to brave the stormy waters again to get home.
*
Once more, a sympathetic local man gave Jan shelter for the night. Jan explained to him his only plan: to head south, for Sweden. The man told him that the only way he could do this and avoid the Nazis was to head over the Lyngen Alps – a huge, treacherous mountain range of icy, snow-covered peaks. But only a madman would try a journey like that at this time of year. It was suicide.
But staying put was also suicide.
So Jan clipped on his skis and expertly headed towards the mountains.
He had to pass through a German garrison on the way. Germans were milling around on either side of the road. It was impossible to skirt around them. A master of the skis, he simply burst through an entire German platoon. The Germans were caught off duty and off guard, and they had hardly expected their bullet-fast enemy to speed through their ranks. They made chase. But Jan was Norwegian, and he was tough. He left the Germans far behind as he skied up into the mountains.
Things were going OK. He covered 20 miles at speed. But then the weather changed abruptly. Jan was suddenly surrounded by freezing fog. Visibility: 15 feet. He was forced to remove his skis and continue on foot. The wind kicked up the powdery snow. He had to close his eyes and mouth to stop it blinding him and freezing his throat. Ice formed on his body and in his beard. He couldn’t tell which way he was going, but he knew he couldn’t stop because to fall asleep in the brutal cold would mean he would be unlikely ever to wake up.
He wandered blindly among the frozen, treacherous peaks for four long, gruelling days and nights.
Then he got caught by an avalanche.
Jan was falling. Faster and faster. He was totally immersed in tons of suffocating, tumbling snow, crushing him from all sides.
To survive an avalanche like that is almost unheard of.
Jan did.
But he was in a bad way.
His hands and feet were frozen solid. He was now almost completely blind. His skis had broken into pieces. He had lost his small backpack of food.
But he kept going, stumbling blindly with no idea of his position or bearing. He was hallucinating: horrible visions of being chased appeared in front of his unseeing eyes. But something in him was sane enough not to stop and fall asleep.
It was entirely by good fortune that he stumbled across a small log cabin.
He burst through the door and collapsed, incoherent, right in front of a family in the middle of eating their dinner.
*
Again, luck was with him. He had fallen into the cabin of a local resistance leader named Marius. Here, in a tiny Arctic village which was riddled with Germans, he had found a man willing to risk his own life to save Jan’s.
The family treated his encroaching frostbite by gently massaging his feet while he slept. A little bit of life returned to the frozen limbs, but they were still in a very bad way. The family gave him food and hid him in a corner of their barn. He lay there, semiconscious, for a week, suffering agonizing pain in his hands and feet, and also in his eyes that were now beginning to regain their sight. But his presence was very dangerous for Marius’s family, surrounded as they were by Germans. They had to get him out of there.
Trouble was, Jan couldn’t walk.
And so Marius entrusted the knowledge of his secret patient to two friends. Together they loaded Jan on to a stretcher and carried him through the village, in the dead of night, to a small boat on a nearby lake. Then they rowed him to a deserted log cabin, four miles from any other habitation. Here, they hoped, he would be safe, for a while.
Marius and his friends left Jan alone in the cabin, promising to come back a couple of days later to check on him. Once he was alone, Jan did nothing but sleep and eat, hoping that his body would regain enough strength, and that his limbs would recover sufficiently for him to continue his escape. He was only 25 miles from Sweden, but in his current state he might as well have been on the other side of the world.
He could tell, just by looking at them, that his feet were deteriorating. His toes had turned black. He couldn’t move them or feel them. When he touched them, skin peeled away easily, and stinking, black effluent wept out of them.
Two days passed. Marius didn’t return.
Three days.
Four.
Jan grew delirious again. But through the delirium he was aware of one thing: utter, all-encompassing pain. It started in his feet and spread up his legs. He could only think that the blood in his dying toes had turned poisonous and was now spreading to the rest of the body.
If that was the case, he reasoned, then he needed to draw the blood.
He had no surgical implements with him, of course. Just a small penknife. Using the sharp point of the blade, he pierced the rotting skin on each of his putrefying feet and allowed the foul mixture of pus and blood to ooze out of his damaged limbs, and spill all over the small bed in which he was lying.
Lying agonized and on the brink of death, Jan felt sure Marius had been captured and killed by the Germans.
But Marius hadn’t been captured. He’d been busy trying to sort out another escape route for Jan – a route that involved climbing up into the mountains again. When Marius finally returned, however, he found a man whose feet were clearly in no state to do that.
Jan’s skin was white, his eyes dull. The blankets keeping his legs warm were saturated with blood. Marius cleaned the suppurating, bloodied feet as best he could. He revived Jan with hot drinks and food. But then he had to leave him once more.
He needed to think of another way to get him out of there.
A plan came to Marius before long. It was bold, incredibly risky and more than a little bit mad. But it was the best they had. Marius started to put it into action.
*
The first challenge was to get Jan and a large sledge to a frozen plateau 3,000 feet up the mountain. Here, another party of men would meet them and drag Jan on the sledge downhill and across the Swedish border.
To carry an injured man down a mountain is one thing. To carry him up a mountain is quite another. Jan was in such a poor state of health that Marius and his three friends believed the journey would kill him. But he would also die if they left him in the cabin. This was their only option.
They wrapped Jan in blankets then crammed him into a sleeping bag. Then they tied him to their sledge and, at midnight, started dragging him up the foothills of the mountain using short ropes and brute strength. As the mountain grew steeper, they devised a complex system of belaying up, but their progress was frighteningly slow.
Lying at an angle, with his head lower than his feet, Jan was mostly unconscious. Now and then Marius and the others turned him round to get his circulation going, but when the blood ran to his feet, it spurted out of the dreadful wounds on his pus-ridden toes.
Jan’s face was racked with agony, but he endured, and his rescuers persisted. They traversed treacherous faces and deathly chasms that they would have barely dared to tackle even without a heavy sledge in tow. They pushed their bodies to the very limits, while Jan held on through a cocktail of pain, exhaustion and fear.
It was a measure of just how desperate their endeavour was that they should have felt relief at reaching the plateau 3,000 feet up in the mountains. This was a howlingly desolate place. Forbidding mountain peaks stretched away to the east as far as the eye could see. There was no sign of life, human or otherwise. Just rock, snow, ice and wind that would suck the life out of anybody foolhardy enough to stay there too long.
But their relief soon turned to despair. There was no sign at all of the men they had been expecting to meet on the plateau.
They left Jan tied to his sledge as they searched the plateau. But without success. Something had gone very wrong.
Marius and his men had been away from home too long already. If they didn’t return soon, the Germans would notice their absence. And not only did the rescuers have insufficient time to carry Jan back down to the bottom of the mountain, they had insufficient energy too.
Jan knew this as well as Marius and his men. He listened while Marius promised to get a message through to ensure someone came to pick him up the following night.
But no one really believed this would happen.
For now, Jan knew that his brave rescuers had no choice but to leave him, with nothing but a little food and the dregs of a bottle of brandy.
Here, far from civilization, he would undoubtedly freeze to death.
*
Once more, Jan was alone in the mountains. Unable to walk. Barely clinging to life.
Nobody came to his rescue the following night.
Marius and his men had lowered him into a snow hole with a few scant provisions. It was more like an open grave, but it would at least give him a little protection from the elements. It was too cold to sleep. His wet sleeping bag and blankets froze solid. As fresh snow fell, it drifted over his motionless body. He managed to keep his head free, but the rest of him was totally covered.
It carried on snowing. Soon, even his face was completely covered. He could breathe for now, but was entombed in snow. Waiting to die while the wind howled menacingly above him.
Another day and night passed. Then a week.
Ten days.
When Marius reappeared, he had no expectation of finding Jan alive. But, incredibly, he was. Marius dug Jan out of his icy tomb, gave him some food, and explained that the guys from the other side of the mountain had been waylaid by the bad weather. They would try again just as soon as the weather cleared. But nobody knew when that would be.
Until then, Jan would just have to wait.
And so he did, his commando spirit still dimly shining through.
For another forty-eight hours he endured the cold and the pain. Only then did the rescue party find him. They pulled him and his sledge out of the snow hole and started dragging Jan’s half-dead corpse across the icy plateau.
Yet again, the weather hit them with everything it had. A massive blizzard stopped them in their tracks. It was obvious that moving Jan any further would be impossible. For now, he was safer on the plateau than trying to descend the mountain. They dragged him to a rock that would shelter him from the wind, left him some food and promised to come back when they could.
He was alone yet again.
And he would remain like that for the next three weeks.
In many ways his new position was worse than the snow hole: more exposed, and therefore even colder. But he did have more room. That meant he could wriggle his legs out of the sleeping bag and examine his feet. The sight of them – gnarled, blackened and pus-filled – was so disgusting it made him want to vomit.
He was resigned to losing his feet if he ever got to safety. But he worried that gangrene would spread from his toes further up his legs. Simply draining the pus from them as he had done before wasn’t enough to stop this. He needed to do something more drastic.
Jan pulled out his penknife. He used brandy as an anaesthetic. And over a period of three days, he carved slowly through the flesh, bone and tendons that joined his remaining nine toes to his feet, amputating each one of them. He smeared the raw wounds with cod-liver oil and bandaged them with strips torn from one of his blankets.
*
All in all, Jan Baalsrud remained on that icy plateau for twenty-seven days and nights.
He was eventually rescued by a hardy Laplander and his team of reindeer, who dragged him off the plateau and back down into Sweden. But even that final part of his epic journey was fraught with danger. A German patrol saw them as they approached the border. They chased them, unleashing a torrent of rounds in their direction. Feeble and shaken, Jan was forced to try to unload his automatic pistol in their direction.
But against all the odds, they made it to Sweden, where Jan recuperated in a hospital under the care of the Swedish Red Cross.
He may have lost his toes and almost lost his life, but the most amazing part of Jan’s story is that he never lost his spirit. Back in England, he learned to walk again. His greatest wish was not a quiet life after the horrors of his war. Jan still retained his thirst for adventure. He returned to active service and was back in Norway working as an undercover agent yet again when the war came to an end in 1945.
In terms of his ability to endure hell and survive at all costs, Jan Baalsrud has to be one of the great heroes of the war, and his never-say-die attitude is an embodiment of quiet courage and true grit.