Jan Baalsrud – 4 Months behind enemy lines
Before World War II, Jan Baalsrud was a normal guy living in Norway and training as an instrument maker during the late 1930s. When the war broke out everything changed for the population of Europe, and Norway along with every other country wasn’t spared the horrors of the war.
After Norway was invaded in 1940, Jan Baalsrud decided to join a resistance movement against the Nazis, but soon after the country fell to the German war machine, he decided his best option would be to escape to the neutral country of Sweden.
After being arrested on charges of espionage, he was tried and kicked out of the country. After traveling through the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa he finally arrived in Britain where he was trained as a commando.
In 1943 he joined “Company Linge”, which was a British-created group of commandos made up of resistance members from across Europe. Jan joined a group of 2 other commandos and was sent on a mission codenamed Operation Martin.
The goal was to destroy a German air control tower and recruit locals towards the Norwegian resistance movement. He boarded a small fishing boat named Brattholm, along with his 2 companions and 5 crew members, and headed towards Troms county in Norway. The boat was carrying 8 tons of explosives and would require the help of local contacts to get it into place.
They had a contact who lived in the area, but upon trying to find him they accidentally located a shopkeeper with the same name who reported them to the Germans. The next day on the morning of March 29, their boat was attacked by a German patrol ship, and to avoid leaving anything behind for capture they set a time-delayed fuse which successfully detonated, before escaping in a small row boat.
The boat didn’t last for long and was quickly shot out of the water, forcing Jan and the others to swim for shore in the freezing Arctic sea. The others were quickly captured but Jan managed to run up a small snow-covered gully where he even managed to kill a Gestapo officer with his pistol.
He lost one of his boots in the initial swim to shore and by now was soaking wet in a freezing environment with little equipment and no way of completing his mission. He spent the next 2 months trying to evade German patrols and dealing with his frostbite and near starvation.
He managed to survive with the help of some local Norwegians who gave him food and some clothing. He found a small abandoned wooden hut that he nicknamed Hotel Savoy where he spent most of his time, and while he was there he operated on both of his legs with a pocket knife. He thought that he had blood poisoning and that letting out some of the blood would help, but whether it did or not, or even if there was anything wrong in the first place is unclear.
He was eventually forced to leave his hut due to German patrols and headed further into the mountains, where he relied entirely on friendly Norwegian patrols for food. He had to hide in the mountains for 27 days because of high German activity in the area and built a snow wall around a boulder for protection from the wind. He stayed on a stretcher covered with blankets to keep himself warm, and also had to amputate 9 of his toes to stop the spread of gangrene he’d developed from frostbite.
His ordeal finally came to an end when some friendly locals carried him to the border of Finland where he was put into the care of the Sami, a native people of northern Scandinavia. They took care of his frostbite and dragged him on a reindeer-pulled sled to Sweden.
He was picked up in a seaplane which took him to a hospital in Boden, northern Sweden where he spent 7 months recovering from his wounds and learning how to walk again. After he recovered he was slipped out of the country by the RAF and flown back to Britain where he spent his time in Scotland training members of the Norwegian resistance for missions in Europe.
He was later awarded the position of honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire and received the St. Olav’s medal with Oak Branch. After the war, he made huge contributions to local charities and also acted as chairman for the Norwegian disabled veterans union between 1957 and 1964. He lived out most of the rest of his life in Tenerife before moving back to Norway shortly before his death.
He died on 30 December 1988 at the age of 71, his ashes were buried in Manndalen in a grave shared with one of the local men who helped him during his journey.