In what was the first combined use
of seaborne and airborne military units in history, the people of neutral
Norway found themselves under attack by Nazi Germany on April 9th
and 10th 1940. It came as an unmitigated shock to the unprepared
people of that Scandinavian country since they had declared their neutrality
under international law, just as they had done in WW I. Even with the
assistance of British forces and not without some naval losses itself, Germany
completed the defeat and occupation of Norway in a matter of three weeks Because Norway had unwisely required its
citizens to register personal firearms, the invaders were able to identify
every owner and thus confiscate virtually every gun in the country within
hours, leaving the citizenry without the ability to put up any meaningful
defense even as their ill-equipped and small military were being overwhelmed.
Thus the people of a country known for its love of independence and home rule
found themselves looking at four long years of bitter suppression under its
jack-booted conquerors.
While the King and government
leaders managed to escape and eventually establish a government-in-exile in
Great Britain along with thousands of their countrymen, the spark of patriotism
was alive and well in the land the Germans mistakenly believed to be supine and
helpless. A resistance movement quickly took shape, and with the clandestine
support of Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive) began a well-organized
and dedicated secret war of their own.
To understand what life in occupied
Norway was like during this period, it is important to recall the name of a
traitor named Vidkun Quisling, a former military officer and founder of
Norway’s National Socialist political party and admirer of Adolph Hitler, with
whom he enjoyed a personal friendship. Quisling was a collaborator of the
occupiers from the start, and eventually became the Reichcommissioner – or
titular leader – to the utter disgust of the citizenry who saw to it that he
was first to face a firing squad in 1945 at war’s end. The very name became an
epithet during the war years, and many people were assigned the sobriquet
“Quisling” if they were perceived to be traitors.
And this brings us to a resistance
leader named Gunnar Sonsteby who was 22 years old when he traveled to England
to receive Special Ops. training and returned home to begin blowing up locomotives,
military armories, German aircraft and anything else that could thwart or slow
Nazi exploitation of his homeland and its people. The extent and ingenuity of
his sabotage activities, even as he provided inspired leadership to other
resistance units remains almost without parallel. In one coups he engineered
the theft of plates for the printing of Norwegian currency kept in national
vaults to be smuggled out to the government-in-exile, and when it was learned
that the Nazis were preparing to establish a system for inducting citizens into
service on the Eastern Front he blew up the office of forced labor putting an
end to the enterprise. And as is now known, the Norwegian Resistance put finis to Hitler’s atomic bomb program by
destroying their heavy water plant at
Telemark.
As in other occupied countries, the
Germans were bleeding Norway’s agricultural production dry and when an even
more aggressive rationing system was about to be put in place, Sonsteby
arranged the theft of 75,000 newly-printed ration books setting the program on
its heels. Meanwhile, his group continued blowing up trains, repair depots,
parts manufacturing facilities, field guns and setting fires to oil storage
sites.
A master of disguise, Sonsteby
constantly changed between 40 different identities while known among his fellow
resistance leaders simply as “The Chin” and to his SOE controllers as “Agent 24”.
When Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann
Sonsteby passed away in 2008 at the age of 94, he had been honored by more
awards than any other Norwegian, and perhaps more than any Allied fighter in
WWII.
Keeping a proud memory alive, Gunnar
Sonsteby’s image appears on the vertical tail of a
Norwegian commercial jetliner today. Photo by Chris Cooper
Norwegian commercial jetliner today. Photo by Chris Cooper
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment