The Flight of the Vikings: Daring Escapes in Small Boats From Nazi-Occupied Norway 1940-45
304 pages
Mike Farquharson-Roberts PhD (Mar Hist)
In 1940 the population of Norway was less than three million, and yet, when it was unexpectedly invaded, held out the longest of any of the nations occupied by Germany before accepting defeat. For a small nation their military resistance (not covered by this book) was nothing short of spectacular and included sinking a heavy cruiser! Across Europe the occupied nations were very different in their patterns and degree of resistance. What was initially almost resigned acceptance in France contrasted with resistance which seemed born of visceral hatred in Poland. Norway tended to the latter.[1] Some historians (Max Hastings is quoted) decried the efforts and contribution of European resistance, but there was another factor, occupation tied down troops. Hitler is quoted as saying in 1942 that “Norway is now the area of destiny of the war”, and nearly half a million troops, one for every six of the population, were kept there until the end of the war, “far from the beaches of Normandy.”
A major feature of Norwegian resistance was that many Norwegians appear to have taken any opportunity to leave Norway to get to the UK, 314 went with the landing force at the conclusion of the Lofoten raid in 1941. Most escapers were young men who wanted to join the exiled Norwegian armed forces. Many then returned to Norway as SOE agents, some many times.
As the author says, this is not another account of the ‘Shetland Bus’, the operation ultimately run by the Royal Norwegian Navy which existed to exfiltrate and infiltrate agents into Norway and evacuate escapers; he does not include those who made it to the UK by that means with his numbers of escapers; he is only concerned with those who made it independently by sea, including one pair who commandeered a seaplane! There are some accounts of those who failed, either by turning back or being lost at sea, but listed are 316 boats (and one seaplane!) carrying 36,525 successful escapers. Not to be forgotten, a significant number were lost at sea and became ‘mackerel fodder’.
Some of the accounts are simply breathtaking; across the North Sea in a kayak? The photographs show some of the vessels that made it, an 18ft boat with three men took 27 days covering around two thousand miles in continuous storms in September 1940. A recurring feature of the escapes is the stolen (sometimes with the acquiescence of the owner) boat with a less than reliable single cylinder 3HP engine, many relied on sail.
As well as accounts of those who escaped, the author includes some fragmentary instances of civilian and armed resistance. Apparently because people would not sit next to Germans on buses or trains, preferring to stand, the Nazi government introduced a law compelling people to occupy vacant seats!
The NS (Quisling’s paramilitary collaborators) and the Gestapo made every effort to stop the escapers, and there are many episodes of their frankly barbaric reprisals. There were inevitably attempts to use escapers to infiltrate agents into the UK – a chapter is devoted to ‘Sieving for Spies’-, so all arrivals were arrested and taken to London to be screened at the ‘London Reception Centre’ before being handed to the Norwegian government in exile.
This book covers its stated subject very well in the context of an occupied Norway. The discursions into broader matters hint at the bigger subject of Norwegian resistance, civil and military, which is not as widely known as perhaps it should be.
[1] Halik Kochanski, Resistance (Penguin; Dublin, 2023), gives an excellent overview of European resistance efforts.
