We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (3 page)

These, then, were the four men who stood on the deck that March
morning at the climax of a year of preparation. They had trained
together in the highlands of Scotland, doing forced marches of thirty
and forty miles with packs across the mountains, living out in the
snow, studying weapons and underground organisation, doing their
quota of parachute jumps, and learning to draw and cock an automatic and score six hits on a half-man-sized target at five yards, all in
a space of three seconds; finally learning all the vulnerable points of
airfields; and incidentally, enjoying themselves tremendously. They were tough and healthy, and elated at the imminence of danger; and
very confident of being able to look after themselves, whatever the
dawn might bring.

ON THAT sort of expedition it was useless to make a detailed plan,
because nobody could foresee exactly what was going to happen. The
leader always had a degree of responsibility which few people are
called upon to carry in a war. The orders he was given were in very
general terms, and in carrying them out he had nobody whatever to
advise him. His success, and his own life and the lives of his party,
were in his own hands alone.

As leader of this party in north Norway, Eskeland had a specially
heavy load to carry. From the south, or from any country from which
a lot of refugees had escaped to England, a fund of information had
been collected about German dispositions and the characters and
politics of innumerable people, and the information was always
being renewed. The leader of an expedition could be told, in more or
less detail, whom he could trust and whom he should avoid, and
where he was most likely to meet enemy sentries or patrols. But
information about north Norway was scanty. A good many people
had escaped from there, but the only route they could follow was
across the mountains into Sweden, where they were interned. Many
of them were content to stay in internment and wait for better times;
and even those who made the effort to escape again, and managed to
pass on what they knew to the British intelligence services, had usually been held by the Swedes for a matter of months, so that all that they could tell was out of date. Eskeland had been given the names of
a few people who were known to be sound, but beyond that very little could be done to help him. Once he left Britain, he could only
depend on his own training and wit and skill.

He had been as thorough as he possibly could be in his preparations. Ever since he had known he was to lead a landing from a fishingboat, he had pondered in a quiet way over every emergency he could
foresee. On the high seas, the skipper of the boat was in command, and
out there the problems had been comparatively simple. The boat
might have been overcome by stress of weather, which was a matter
of seamanship; or its one single-cylinder engine might have broken
down, which was a job for the engineers; or it might have been
attacked by aircraft, which would have been fought with the boat's
own "Q-ship" armament. But now that it had closed the coast, he had
to take charge, and now anything might happen and an instantaneous decision might be needed. For the present, the boat's first line
of defence was for its guns to be kept hidden, so that it seemed to be
innocently fishing. But once they got into the constricted waters of
the sounds among the islands, they might meet a larger ship with
heavier armament at short range at any moment, and then the boat's
armament would be nothing but a hindrance. They might still bluff
their way out as a fishing-boat, but they could not hope to fight an
action at two or three hundred yards. Apart from anything else, a single shot in their cargo might blow them all to pieces. The only way
they could prepare for that kind of encounter, as Eskeland foresaw it,
was to hide every vestige of war-like equipment and to lure the
enemy ship to within pistol shot. Then, by surprise, there was a
chance of boarding it and wiping out its crew.

During the past night, as Brattholm approached the coast,
Eskeland and his three men had begun to prepare for this possible
crisis. They had cleaned and loaded their short-range weapons, Sten
guns and carbines and pistols; and they had primed hand-grenades
and stowed them in convenient places, in the wheelhouse and galley, and along the inside of the bulwarks, where they could be thrown
without warning on board a ship alongside. In case it came to close
quarters, he and his three men had all put on naval uniform,
although they were soldiers, so that the Germans would not be able
to identify them as a landing party.

But even while they made these preparations, they all knew that
although with luck they might be successful in that sort of hand-tohand action, they had very little chance of getting away with their
lives. Between themselves and safety there were the thousand miles of
sea which they had crossed. They might hope to kill or capture the
entire crew of even a larger ship; but unless they could do it so
quickly that no radio signal could be sent, and unless it happened in
such a remote place that nobody heard the gunshots, all the German
defences would be alerted; and then, it was obvious, Brattholm at
eight knots would not get very far. The only hope of escape then, and
it was a small one, was to scuttle the ship and get ashore.

Eskeland had provided for this too. The three radio transmitters
in their cargo were a new type still graded top secret, and they also
had a few important papers: ciphers, maps, and notes about trustworthy people and German defences. They all understood quite
clearly that they had to defend these things with their lives. It went
without saying. It was one of the basic rules which they had been
taught. Ever since they had entered enemy waters, the papers had
been stowed in an accessible place with matches and a bottle of
petrol; and a primer, detonators and fuses had been laid in the eight
tons of high explosives in the hold. The transmitters were on top of
the primer. There were three fuses. One had a five-minute delay, for
use if there seemed to be a chance to destroy the ship and cargo and
then to get away. The next was thirty seconds, and the last was instantaneous. Each of the twelve men on board was able to contemplate
soberly the prospect of lighting the instantaneous fuse, and they
understood the circumstances in which they were to do it; if they had
tried a hand-to-hand fight with a German ship, for example, and been defeated. The main point was that the Germans should not get
the cargo.

Eskeland should have felt satisfied with these preparations as he
approached the coast; they were intelligently conceived, and carefully
carried out. But on that very day a change of plan was forced upon
him, and he was reminded, if there had been any doubt about it, how
sketchy his information was. They had intended to land on an island
called Senja, about forty miles south-west of the town of Tromso; but
as they approached it, steaming peacefully through the fishing zone,
they sighted a trawler coming out towards them. They altered course
to the eastward, waiting to see what was going to happen. The trawler
reached the open sea at the outer edge of the islands, and then it
turned back on its track and went into the sounds again. As it turned,
they saw a gun on its foredeck. It was a patrol ship, where no patrol
ship had been reported.

At the stage of the expedition, it was their job to avoid trouble
rather than look for it, and there was no sense in trying to land their
cargo on the one island, from all the hundreds in the district which
they now knew for certain was patrolled. Their disguise had worked
so far. They had been seen, and passed as a fishing-boat. The sensible
thing to do was to choose another island; and after a discussion, they
agreed upon one a little farther north. It is called Ribbenesoy. It is
due north of Tromso, thirty miles from the town. On the chart of it,
they found a little bay on the north-east side which seemed to offer
good shelter, and one of the men who had been in that district before
remembered the bay as a remote and deserted spot. At about midday
on the 29th of March, they set course towards it. Its name is
Toftefjord.

It was late in the afternoon by the time they reached the skerries
which lie scattered in the sea for seven miles off the shore of
Ribbenesoy, and began to pick their way among them. In bad
weather the passage which they used is impassable. There are thousands of rocks awash on either side, and the whole area becomes a mass of spray in which no marks are visible. But on that day the sea
was calm and the air was clear. They sighted the stone cairns which
are built as seamarks on some of the biggest rocks, and passed
through into sheltered water. They steamed below a minute island
called Fuglo, which rises sheer on every side to a black crag a thousand feet high; they skirted the north shore of Ribbenesoy, a steep,
smooth, gleaming sheet of snow which sweeps upwards to the curved
ice-cornice of a hill called Helvedestind, which means Hell's Peak;
and as the light began to fade they crept slowly into Toftefjord, and
let go an anchor into clear ice-blue water.

When the engine stopped, Toftefjord seemed absolutely silent.
After six days of the racket and vibration of a Norwegian fishingboat under way, the mere absence of noise was unfamiliar; but there
is always a specially noticeable silence in sheltered places when the
land is covered thickly with snow. All familiar sounds are muted and
unresonant. There are no footfalls, no sounds of birds or running
water, no hum of insects or rustle of animals or leaves. Even one's
own voice seems altered. Even without reason, in places hushed by
snow, the deadening of sound seems menacing.

Yet the appearance of Toftefjord was reassuring. They stood on
deck when the work of coming to anchor was finished and looked
round them, talking involuntarily in quiet voices. It was almost a
perfect hiding-place. To the south and west and east it was shut in
by low rounded hills. The tops of the hills were bare; but in the hollows by the shore, the twigs of stunted arctic birch showed black
against the snow. To the north was the entrance of the bay, but it was
blocked by a little island, so that one could not see into it from outside. Brattholm was quite safe there from observation from the sea,
and she could not be seen from the air unless an aircraft flew almost
overhead.

The beaches showed that the bay was always calm. On the rocks
and islands which are exposed to the sea, there is always a broad bare
strip of shore where the waves have washed the snow away; but there in the land-locked fjord the snow lay smooth and thick down to the
tidemark. There were no tracks in it. Close inshore, the sea itself had
been frozen, but the ice had broken up and was floating in transparent lumps around the ship. The air was cold and crisp.

Yet the place was not quite deserted. At the head of the bay, below
the hill, there was a barn and a very small wooden house. Close by,
on the beach, there were racks for drying fish. There was nobody to
be seen, but there was smoke from the cottage chimney.

The first thing to be done, when the ship was at anchor, was to
find out who lived in that cottage, and whether they were likely to
cause any difficulties or danger. Eskeland and the skipper changed
out of their naval uniforms into fishermen's clothes and rowed
ashore. Perhaps they wanted to be the first to land in Norway. It was
always a moment of unexpressed emotion.

They soon came back, saying there was nothing to worry about.
There was a middle-aged woman with her two children, a boy of
about sixteen and a girl who was younger. Her husband was away at
the cod fishing in the Lofoten islands, and she did not expect him back
for several weeks. Eskeland had told her that they had stopped to make
some engine repairs. There was no reason why she should be suspicious, and there was no telephone in the house. It would be quite easy
to keep an eye on her and the children. She had told him, incidentally,
that no Germans had ever been in Toftefjord. In fact, she herself had
never seen a German. Her husband had had to hand in his radio set to
the authorities, and her nearest neighbours were two miles away. She
was quite out of touch with the world and with the war.

The landing party and crew had dinner in relays, leaving a watch
on deck. They were very cheerful. For one thing, it was the first good
dinner they had had on board, not only because it is difficult to do
much cooking in a fishing-boat at sea, but also because the cook had
been seasick and Jan Baalsrud, who had deputised for him, had had
rather limited ideas. The landing party was happy also because the
voyage was successfully ended, and they could really get to work. For soldiers, a sea voyage is always tedious; they are usually pleased to get
out of the hands of sailors.

While they ate, they discussed the coming night. When the four
men of the sabotage group had started to prepare themselves for the
expedition, they had divided among them the enormous territory
they were to cover, and each of them had studied his own part of it
in detail. But by changing the landing place from Senja, they had put
themselves farther north than any of the districts they knew best.
However, Eskeland remembered a little about Ribbenesoy from his
days as a postal inspector, and he had taken the precaution of learning the names of a few reliable people in the neighbourhood. One of
these was a merchant who kept a small general store on the south
side of the island. Eskeland had never met him, but his name was on
a list in London of men who could be trusted. His shop was only a
few miles away and they decided to make a start that night by going
to see him and asking him about hiding their cargo. Experience in
the southern part of Norway had shown that shop keepers were often
more adept than anyone else at providing a temporary hiding-place
for stores. Most shops had outhouses and back premises which in
war-time were nearly empty. Cases of weapons had often been
stacked among cases of groceries. A shopkeeper was also a likely man
to tell them where they could get a local boat to take them into
Tromso, where they would find their principal "contacts".