Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  On an icy morning in March 1941, more than four hundred British Army commandos, accompanied by several dozen SOE-trained Norwegians, landed on two remote Norwegian islands high above the Arctic Circle. In a matter of hours, they had forced the surrender of the islands’ small German garrisons, destroyed German and Norwegian ships in the harbors, and blown up four fish-oil factories.

  The inhabitants of the snow-covered islands, in the rugged Lofoten chain off the coast of northern Norway, were overjoyed. They turned out en masse to welcome the raiders and guide them to their targets. According to one observer, many of the islanders were “almost ready to fight each other as to who should answer the British officers’ questions.” Several hours later, as the commandos prepared to return to England, more than a hundred young Lofoten residents, most of them fishermen, insisted on going along. The majority wanted to join the elite Norwegian SOE team that had participated in the raid. Officially called Norwegian Independent Company No. 1, it was commonly known as the Linge Company, after its tough, aggressive commander, Martin Linge, a former actor from Oslo who had fought in the 1940 battle for Norway.

  Militarily, Operation Claymore, as the raid had been christened, was of no real significance. The starkly beautiful Lofotens were not strategically important, the German presence there was almost nil, and the destruction of fish-oil factories was hardly a major coup. Nonetheless, the British touted Claymore as a triumph, “a classic example of a perfectly executed commando raid.” It was left unmentioned that the British desperately needed a victory of some kind, regardless of size or significance.

  The spring of 1941 was one of Britain’s lowest points in the war. Although it had survived the Battle of Britain, German bombs still rained down on its cities. Merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic had risen to astronomical proportions, and starvation for British civilians loomed as a distinct possibility. The British Army, meanwhile, had suffered one disaster after another. In the course of those dire months, Germany had conquered Yugoslavia and overpowered Greece, routing British forces there and on the island of Crete. In the Middle East, the early British triumphs over the Italians in Libya had turned to dust when German troops under General Erwin Rommel had rushed to the Italians’ rescue. In only ten days, the Germans had regained almost all the ground that the British had captured.

  That melancholy string of defeats led to an upsurge of parliamentary criticism of Winston Churchill and his government. Acknowledging a sense of “discouragement and disheartenment in the country,” Churchill wanted action—any action—against the Germans to prove to the world that Britain was not defeated. “We are in that awful period when everything is going wrong, and those in authority feel they have to do something,” Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, noted grimly in his diary.

  Churchill had been the guiding light of the Lofoten raid. With his innate love of adventure and danger, he had been drawn all his life to such daring, flamboyant, unconventional enterprises. What’s more, Operation Claymore required only a relatively small attack force, with little or no risk of serious casualties.

  In its self-congratulations over the raid’s success, the British government deemed it the “perfect example of Allied collaboration.” In fact, no such collaboration had existed: prior to the operation, the British had consulted neither the Norwegian government in exile nor the leaders of Norway’s nascent underground army, known as Milorg, which had been slowly and cautiously expanding since its founding shortly after Norway’s defeat. Milorg, made up of small, informal groups of young Norwegians who had fought against the Germans in 1940, had few weapons, little security, and no formal military training.

  Although many Norwegians had engaged in acts of civil disobedience against their occupiers, most shied away from taking part in sabotage or other forms of direct resistance. To do so, they believed, would be suicidal. Because of Hitler’s unshakable belief that Britain planned to invade Norway at some point during the war (a fear that Churchill encouraged), the Germans had turned the country into an armed fortress, defended by formidable coastal batteries, warships, submarines, and aircraft. More than 300,000 highly trained, well-equipped Wehrmacht troops—one German for every ten Norwegians—were stationed there.

  Acutely aware of its members’ lack of preparation and experience in clandestine activities, the Milorg leadership had only one aim: the gradual buildup of a secret army to take part in the liberation of Norway and the rest of Europe. That was not good enough, however, for a steady flow of impatient young Norwegians like Martin Linge, who, from the beginning of the occupation, had escaped to Britain by boat across the North Sea. Anxious to strike back hard against Germany, a good number of them had volunteered for the special SOE unit of Norwegian volunteers headed by Linge but operated under overall British command.

  Both Milorg and the Norwegian government in exile were upset when informed of the Lofoten raid. At the very least, Norwegian officials told the British, they should have been consulted about an operation staged on their country’s soil and carried out by more than fifty of their own citizens. What angered them most, however, were the immediate German reprisals against the islands’ inhabitants. Several dozen homes were destroyed and more than seventy residents arrested and sent to a concentration camp. For its part, Milorg contended that the raiders’ destruction of factories and fishing trawlers had been far more damaging to the islanders’ livelihoods than to the German war effort.

  Unmoved by the Norwegians’ complaints, SOE dismissed them out of hand. The agency’s Norwegian section contemptuously dubbed Milorg “a military Sunday school” and declared that sabotage was essential “to cause Germans in Norway as much trouble as possible and to force them to keep large garrisons there.” The Norwegians, SOE made clear, would have no say in the matter.

  To prove the point, British commandos and members of Company Linge staged another, much larger raid on the Lofotens and nearby coastal towns in late December 1941, nine months after the first operation. Nearly 15,000 tons of shipping were sunk, German installations and gun emplacements were destroyed, and 150 Germans were killed, with 98 taken prisoner.

  Assuring the local population that this time they had come to stay, the raiders received another warm welcome. Residents took the commandos into their homes, held public demonstrations of support, and helped identify local collaborators. But the joy over their sudden liberation vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The day after the raid, German planes bombed the Lofotens, and British intelligence warned that German troops were massing in northern Norway, apparently with the intention of staging a counterattack. After receiving that news, the expedition’s commander ordered an immediate evacuation of British and Norwegian personnel.

  As the raiders marched back to their ships, the islanders cursed and spat at their erstwhile saviors, who were fleeing, as the Norwegians saw it, without so much as a fight. As an SOE report later noted, the local population was furious that the British once again had scored a major propaganda triumph with few casualties of their own, while Norwegian citizens were left facing “the horrors of German reprisals.” The vengeance was swift to arrive. SS squads descended on the Lofotens, destroying homes and businesses and dispatching hundreds of people to concentration camps, many of them relatives of the young men who had earlier escaped to Britain.

  Once again, the Norwegian government in exile erupted. This time, its outrage was shared by more than twenty Linge Company members, whose leader, Martin Linge, had been one of the mission’s few Allied fatalities. Demoralized by Linge’s death and the latest reprisals against their countrymen, they declared that unless they received prior authorization from the Norwegian government, they would refuse to take part in any future operations. Faced with such insubordination, the British government realized it could no longer brush aside Norway’s disaffection.*1

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  NORWEGIAN OFFICIALS WERE HARDLY alone in feeling resentment toward the British. Accustomed to exercising power and
command within their own countries, all the European governments in exile had a profoundly difficult time adjusting to their dependence on the nation that had given them refuge. For each government, its relationship with Britain, unequal as it was, was essential to its survival. For Britain, with its myriad problems and responsibilities, the relationship was just one among many.

  Still trying to cope with the humiliation and trauma of defeat, the exile governments were also entangled in bitter, explosive battles within their own ranks. “Political émigrés are strange people,” Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright’s father, later reflected. “Uprooted from their national environment and deprived of a political base, they struggle among themselves for power.”

  Even before the war, the political scene in most of Europe had been highly fractious, reflecting each country’s social, economic, and religious divisions. European prewar governments, for the most part, were coalitions stitched together from several political parties with often widely divergent views. Such groupings tended to be fragile and short-lived, enduring frequent crises and behind-the-scenes machinations for as long as they existed.

  These homegrown pressures and strains were exacerbated by the twin shocks of defeat and exile. “Intrigues flourished like toadstools in London’s hothouse atmosphere,” Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema observed, “carried out by men with many personal and political scores to settle.” The backbiting and finger-pointing were especially evident in internal debates about which officials and political parties were most to blame for their countries’ defeat by the Germans.

  For young Europeans who had managed to escape from German rule, the quarrels and animosities of their government leaders were a source of anger and disillusionment. Speaking of the Dutch government in exile, Hazelhoff Roelfzema remarked, “They lived in a world of jobs and salaries, promotions and raises, which to us escapees, after fifteen months of occupation, was as illusory as the cell and firing squad were to them….They were unaware that reality had left them behind.”

  British officials, for their part, grew increasingly impatient with their European guests’ factions, feuds, and infighting. Few Britons were as empathetic as Mary Churchill, the young daughter of the prime minister, who later noted, “For the British, life had become very simple. We meant to fight; we thought we would win; but we would fight anyway. We were spared the [Europeans’] agonies of divided loyalties and complicated issues.”

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  INTERESTINGLY, DESPITE THE NORWEGIANS’ unhappiness over the raids on the Lofotens, their liaison with the British turned out to be the smoothest of all the wartime Anglo-European relationships. Thanks to its abundant resources, Norway was one of the few occupied nations able to pay its own way during the conflict. That was due largely to the income from its merchant fleet, which transported nearly 60 percent of Britain’s oil and half of its foodstuffs, thus also playing an invaluable role in that country’s survival.

  Unlike other governments in exile, the Norwegians also made things easier for the British by not bringing a complicated political agenda to the table. Their main postwar goal, the liberation and independence of their country, never caused a problem for the strategic interests of Britain or the two other powerful nations that would soon join the alliance, the Soviet Union and United States.

  In almost every other way, the Norwegians were low-maintenance guests. Although their officials always spoke up when they thought their interests were at stake, they committed themselves from the start to working closely with their British counterparts. In mid-1942, the cooperation paid off, with a resolution of the Lofoten furor. Agreeing to end all raids on Norway’s territory without its government’s approval, British officials announced that from then on, they would work with the Norwegians to create a partnership among SOE, the Norwegian high command, and Milorg. “In time, all realized that it was impossible to run two independent paramilitary underground movements side by side,” acknowledged the head of SOE’s Norwegian section. “Inevitably, it would lead to…the two cutting each other’s throats.” The new collaboration proved, in the words of one historian, to be “remarkably successful.”

  In February 1943, that cooperation led to arguably the most dramatic and daring Allied sabotage coup of the war—the partial destruction of the Norsk Hydro electrochemical plant in Norway responsible for producing the heavy water used in making a nuclear bomb. After the French had spirited away all the existing heavy water from the Norsk Hydro plant in March 1940, the Germans, following their occupation of Norway, had greatly stepped up production there. In late 1942, workers at Norsk Hydro sent word to the Allies that their German masters were on the verge of sending large quantities of heavy water to the Reich.

  On Winston Churchill’s orders, a small band of SOE-trained members of Linge Company were dropped onto one of the harshest, coldest, and bleakest terrains in Norway—the Hardanger mountain plateau near Norsk Hydro. Battling heavy snow, fierce winds, and below-zero temperatures, the Norwegians slogged their way to the factory—a seven-story building perched like a medieval castle halfway up a steep mountainside, whose apparent sole access was a heavily guarded seventy-five-foot suspension bridge spanning a gorge six hundred feet below.

  The saboteurs chose a different route—rappelling down the sheer cliff to the gorge, crossing it, then climbing up the other side. Evading the factory’s many German guards, they overpowered two Norwegian watchmen and slipped inside, placing timer-operated explosive charges and fuses around the heavy water tanks. By the time the explosives detonated, the Norwegians had vanished, returning the same way they’d come. None was caught.

  Although the explosion caused massive destruction and the loss of some 500 kilograms of heavy water, the Germans had the factory back in operation within a few months. Finally, an Allied air raid and another, smaller SOE sabotage operation ended Germany’s heavy water production altogether.

  As it turned out, the Reich had never made much of an effort to produce a nuclear bomb—a fact that the Allies discovered only after the war. Certainly, the repeated attempts to deny heavy water to the Germans helped to discourage them in that endeavor.

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  THE SUCCESS OF THE Norsk Hydro mission contributed to the strengthening of ties between Norway and Britain, as did King Haakon’s popularity with the British people. The Norwegian monarch’s influence was enhanced by his intimate relationship with King George VI, who once told his daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II, how much the “unshakable courage and resolution” shown by his uncle had “supported and uplifted him during those heavy days.” As the rallying point for his own people, Haakon also proved to be an essential link between those living under German domination in Norway and their compatriots in London.

  As was true in every occupied country, a huge psychological divide existed between those who had left Norway at the time of its defeat and those who had been given no such alternative. Since 1940, many Norwegians at home had been vocal in their criticism of the government officials now in London for the deplorable condition of the nation’s defenses that had helped lead to the German victory.

  At one point, considerable pressure was put on Haakon to push the government aside and take over leadership of the country. He emphatically rejected that idea, just as he had spurned the earlier proposal from Norwegian collaborationists that he abdicate. Both suggestions, he noted, were blatant violations of the Norwegian constitution. Proclaiming his solidarity with the current government, Haakon declared, “We are all in the same boat….Mutual trust is essential for Norway’s struggle for freedom.”

  When Haakon turned seventy in August 1942, his subjects in Norway joined their compatriots in London in massive celebrations of the man who had emerged as their nation’s most important unifying figure. In cities and towns all over Norway, tens of thousands of people carrying flowers and wearing badges emblazoned with “H7” (Haakon VII) marched to honor their king. In London, more than five thousand Norwegians, including top government officials, paraded past Haa
kon and his son, all of them headed for a huge birthday party for the monarch at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the largest gathering of Norwegians to take place during the war.

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  LIKE KING HAAKON, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands also became a major player in her nation’s wartime affairs. Highly respected by British officials and the British public, she, too, acted as a bridge between members of her government and her countrymen back home. But unlike Haakon, the combative Wilhelmina was no peacemaker, trying to ease and remain above fractious exile politics. Instead, elbows out, she charged right into the fray.

  Wilhelmina’s struggle with her government ministers began almost as soon as they all had arrived in London in May 1940. Several members of the Cabinet, including Prime Minister Dirk Jan de Geer, had not wanted to come to the British capital at all. A fervent pacifist, de Geer was convinced that Germany would win the war, and he initially wanted the Dutch government to approach Hitler to seek a compromise peace. After losing that struggle, he argued that the government should move from London, which he feared would be invaded by the Germans or destroyed by bombs, to the Dutch East Indies, more than seven thousand miles away.

  Only a couple of ministers were opposed to leaving Britain. They were joined by the queen, who was appalled and outraged by the defeatism she saw in a majority of her Cabinet. Wilhelmina was determined to fight on in London. If Germany invaded, she planned to try to cross the Atlantic to join her daughter, Princess Juliana, in Canada. But if that should prove impossible, she had already ordered her private secretary to shoot her before the Germans could capture her. She told de Geer she would not go to the East Indies, that her health would not permit such a long, arduous journey. In an audacious and unprecedented move, she also informed the prime minister that she had lost all confidence in him. He promptly offered his resignation, which she just as promptly accepted.