We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (5 page)

The morning passed. The only thing which was at all unusual was
the number of aircraft they could hear. There was the sound of machinegun fire too, from time to time. It was all out at sea. But none of the aircraft flew over Toftefjord. It sounded as though there was a practice
target somewhere beyond the islands, and that seemed a possible explanation. The air forces at Bardufoss must have somewhere for training,
and the sea or the outer skerries would be a likely place. As the day went
by, the men began to relax. By noon, they were reassured. Eskeland and
his party went below to sleep leaving half of the crew on deck.

A shout awoke them: "Germans! Germans!" They rushed for the
hatch. The men on watch stood there appalled. Two hundred yards
away, coming slowly into the fjord, there was a German warship. As
the last of the men reached the deck, it opened fire. At once they
knew that the aircraft were on patrol stopping the exits from the
sounds. There was no escape for Brattholm. Eskeland shouted
"Abandon ship! Abandon ship!"

That was the only order. They knew what to do. Somebody ran up
the naval flag to the mizen head. The crew leaped down into one of
the boats and cast off and rowed for shore. The German ship stopped
and lowered two boats. Troops piled into them and made for the
shore a little farther north. Jan Baalsrud and Salvesen poured petrol
on the cipher books and set them all on fire, and cast off the second
dinghy and held it ready in the lee of the ship out of sight of the
Germans. Eskeland and Blindheim tore off the hatch covers and
climbed down among the cargo and lit the five-minute fuse.

With her boats away the German ship began to approach again.
It was firing with machine-guns and a three-pounder, but the shots
were going overhead. The Germans meant to capture them alive:
they were not expecting much resistance. Eskeland called from the
hold: "Jan, hold them off!" Jan took a sub-machine gun and emptied
the magazine at the German's bridge. The ship stopped for a
moment, and then came on again. Eskeland jumped up from the
hold, calling to the others "It's burning," and all of them climbed
down into the dinghy, and waited. They knew the drill: to wait till the
last possible minute hidden in Brattholm's lee before they started to
try to row away.

Eskeland sat looking at his wrist-watch, with his arm held steadily
in front of him. One of the others held on to the side of Brattholm's
hull. Two were ready at oars. One minute had gone already. They
could not see the German ship from there. They could hear it
approaching the other side of the Brattholm, firing in bursts at
Brattholm and at the crew in the other dinghy. Per Blindheim said:
"Well, we've had a good time for twenty-six years, Jan." Eskeland said:
"Two minutes." Jan could see the crew. They had got to the shore.
Two were still in the dinghy with their hands up. Three were on the
beach. One was lying on the edge of the water. One was trying to
climb the rocks, and machine-gun bullets were chipping the stones
above him and ricocheting across the fjord. Eskeland said: "Three
minutes." The German landing party came into sight, running along the shore towards the place where the crew had landed, jumping
from rock to rock. When they got near, the firing stopped, and for a
few seconds there was no sound but the shouts of German orders.
"Three and a half," Eskeland said. "Cast off."

They began to row, keeping Brattholm between them and the
Germans. In that direction, towards the head of the fjord, it was two
hundred yards to shore. But the German ship was very close, and it
was much bigger than Brattholm. Before they had gone fifty yards
they were sighted, and at this point-blank range the Germans opened
fire. The dinghy was shot full of holes and began to sink. But the
German ship was slowly drawing alongside Brattholm, and the last
quarter of a minute of the fuse was burning down, and the fascination of watching the trap being sprung blinded them to the miracle
that so far they had not been wounded.

The ship and Brattholm touched, and at that very moment the
explosion came. But it was nothing, only a fraction of what it should
have been. Only the primer exploded. The hatch covers were blown
off and the front of the wheelhouse was wrecked, but the German
ship was undamaged. There were shouts and confusion on deck and
for a few seconds the firing stopped. The ship went full speed astern.
Brattholm was burning fiercely. In that momentary respite, the men
in the dinghy rowed for their lives, but the ship swung round till its
three-pounder came to bear. Its first shot missed the dinghy. And
then the whole cargo exploded. Brattholm vanished, in the crack of
the shock wave, the long roar in the hills, the mushroom of smoke
streaked with debris and blazing petrol. Eskeland was blown overboard. Jan leaned out and got him under the arms and hauled him
on to the gunwale, and the German gunner recovered and a shot
from the three-pounder smashed the dinghy into pieces. They were
all in the water, swimming. There were seventy yards to go. The
Germans brought all their guns to bear on the heads in the water.
The men swam on, through water foaming with bullets, thrusting the
ice aside with their heads and hands.

All of them reached the shore. Jan Baalsrud stumbled through the
shallows with his friend Per Blindheim beside him. As they reached
the water's edge Per was hit in the head and fell forward half out of
the water. With a last effort, Jan climbed a rocky bank and found
cover behind a stone. As he climbed he had been aware that his leader
Eskeland had fallen on the beach and that Salvesen, either wounded
or exhausted, had sunk down there unable to make the climb. He
shouted to them all to follow him, but there was no answer. A bullet
hit the stone above his head and whined across the fjord. He was
under fire from both sides. He looked behind him, and saw the
Germans who had landed. Four of them had worked round the shore
and crossed the hillside fifty yards above him to cut off his retreat. He
was surrounded.

At the head of the fjord there is a little mound, covered with small
birch trees. Behind it the hills rise steeply for about two hundred feet.
A shallow gully divides them. Within the gully the snow lies deeply, a
smooth steep slope only broken by two large boulders. The patrol
came floundering down the hill, pausing to kneel in the snow and
snipe at Jan with rifles. Caught between them and the fire from the
ship he could find no cover. But to reach him the patrol had to cross
the little dip behind the mound, and there for a moment they were
out of sight. He got up and ran towards them. He could not tell
whether they would come over the mound, through the birches, or
skirt round it to the left. He crept round it to the right. He had been
wearing rubber sea-boots, but had lost one of them when he was
swimming, and one of his feet was bare. He heard the soldiers crashing through the brittle bushes. Soon, as he and the patrol each circled
round the mound, he come upon their tracks and crossed them. It
could only be seconds before they came to his. But now the foot of
the gully was near, and he broke cover and ran towards it.

They saw him at once, and they were even closer than before. An
officer called on him to halt. He struggled up the first part of the
gully, through the soft sliding snow. The officer fired at him with a revolver and missed, and he got to cover behind the first boulder in
the gully and drew his automatic.

Looking back down the snow slope, he watched the officer climbing up towards him with the three soldiers following close behind.
The officer was in Gestapo uniform. They came on with confidence,
and Jan remembered that so far he had not fired a shot, so they possibly did not know that he was armed. He waited, not to waste his
fire. Beyond the four figures close below him, he was aware of uproar
and confusion, shouting and stray shots in the fjord. As he climbed,
the officer called to Jan to surrender. He was out of breath. Jan fixed
on a spot in the snow six yards below him. When they reached there,
he would shoot.

The officer reached it first. Jan squeezed the trigger. The pistol
clicked. It was full of ice. Twice more he tried, but it would not work,
and the men were within three paces. He ejected to cartridges and it
fired. He shot the Gestapo officer twice and he fell dead in the snow
and his body rolled down the slope over and over towards the feet of
his men. Jan fired again and the next man went down, wounded. The
last two turned and ran, sliding down the snow to find cover. Jan
jumped to his feet and began the long climb up the gully.

For a little while, it was strangely quiet. He was hidden from the
fjord by one side of the gully. The snow was soft and deep and difficult, and he often slipped with his rubber boot. With all his strength,
he could only climb slowly.

Above the second boulder, for the last hundred feet, the gully
opened out into a wide snow slope, perfectly clean and white and
smooth, and as soon as he set foot on it he came into sight of the
German ship behind him.

In his dark naval uniform against the gleaming snow up there he
was exposed as a perfect target for every gun on the warship and the
rifles of the soldiers on the beaches. He struggled in desperation with
the powdery snow, climbing a yard and slipping back, clawing frantically with his hands at the yielding surface which offered no hold. The virgin slope was torn to chaos by the storm of bullets from
behind him. Three-pounder shells exploding in it blew clouds of
snow powder in the air. He could feel with sickening expectation the
thud and the searing pain in his back which would be the end of it
all. The impulse to hide, to seek any refuge from this horror, was
overwhelming. But there was nowhere to hide, no help, no escape
from the dreadful thing that was happening to him. He could only go
on and on and on, choking as his lungs filled with ice crystals, sobbing with weariness and rage and self-pity, kicking steps which
crumbled away beneath him, climbing and falling, exhausting the
last of his strength against the soft deep cushion of the snow.

He got to the top. There were rocks again, hard windswept snow,
the crest of the hill, and shelter just beyond it. He dropped in his
tracks, and for the first time he dared to look behind him. The firing
died. There below him he could see the whole panorama of the fjord.
Smoke hung above it in the sky. The German ship was at the spot
where Brattholm had been anchored. On the far shore, a knot of soldiers were gathered around the crew. Nearer, where he had landed,
his companions were lying on the beach, not moving, and he thought
they were all dead. All round the fjord there were parties of Germans,
some staring towards him at the spot where he had reached the ridge
and disappeared, and others beginning to move in his direction. In
his own tracks before his eyes the snow was red, and that brought
him to full awareness of a pain in his foot, and he looked at it. His
only injury was almost ludicrous. It was his right foot, the bare one,
and half of his big toe had been shot away. It was not bleeding much,
because the foot was frozen. He got up and turned his back on
Toftefjord and began to try to run. It was not much more then ten
minutes since he had been sleeping in the cabin with his friends, and
now he was alone.

IF JAN had stopped to think, everything would have seemed hopeless. He was alone, in uniform, on a small bare island, hunted by
about fifty Germans. He left a deep track, as he waded through the
snow, which anyone could follow. He was wet through and had one
bare foot, which was wounded, and it was freezing hard. The island
was separated from the mainland by two sounds, each several miles
wide, which were patrolled by the enemy, and all his money and
papers had been blown up in the boat.

But when a man's mind is numbed by sudden disaster, he acts less
by reason than by reflex. In military affairs, it is at moments like those
that training is most important. The crew's training had been nautical, the sea was their element, and when their ship disappeared before
their eyes and they were cast ashore without time to recover themselves and begin to think, their reaction was to lose hope and to surrender. But Jan had been trained to regard that barren hostile country
as a place where he could live and work for years. He had expected to
go ashore and to live off the land, and so, when the crisis came, he
turned without any conscious reason to the land as a refuge, and
began to fight his way out. If his companions had not been wounded
or overcome by the icy water, no doubt they would have done the
same thing, although none of them knew then, as they learned later,
that any risks and any sufferings were better than surrender.

For the moment, his thoughts did not extend beyond the next few
minutes. He thought no more than a hunted fox with a baying pack
behind it, and he acted with the instinctive cunning of a fox. It served
him better, in that primitive situation, than the complicated
processes of reason. On the southern slopes of the island there was
less snow. Here and there, where the rocks were steep, he found bare
patches, and he hobbled towards them and crossed them, leaving no
track, laying false trails, doubling back on the way he had come,
jumping from stone to stone to leave the snow untrodden in
between. But there was no cover. Wherever he went, he could be seen
from one part of the island or another; and as the shock of the battle faded and his heart and lungs began to recover from the effort of
his climb, he began to believe that although he had escaped, it could
be only minutes before the Germans ran him down.

Running blindly here and there among the hills, hampered by his
wounded foot, he had no idea how far he had come from Toftefjord,
and before he expected it he found himself facing the sea again.
Below him on the shore there were some houses and a jetty, and from
Eskeland's description he recognised the shop. He had crossed the
island already. He remembered that the shopkeeper had a boat, and
he thought of trying to steal it. But the water in front of him was
wide and clear, and the Germans would be over the hill behind him
at any moment. He knew he could not get out of sight in a boat
before they came.