PERSONAL COLUMN

Return to Namsos

PETER FLEMING

'Purpose of Visit . . The last question on the hotel registration form was not easy to

answer. In a civilised country like Norway it didn't really matter what one put down, but I felt an odd reluctance to prevaricate, to evade the issue. I was certainly not on business. 'Tourism' is an abject formula, in- dispensable behind the Iron Curtain but unfit for use elsewhere. 'Research' would have given my motives too intellectual, and 'Sentiment' too emotional, a gloss. In the end I wrote 'Curiosity'.

The friendly girl behind the desk took the form without looking at it. 'You notice some changes in Namsos, perhaps?' she asked. It was clear that she knew who I was.

Thirty years earlier almost to the day—on 14 April 1940, to be exact—I had had my first sight of Namsos, a little wooden town tucked under beetling outcrops of rock at the head of a thirteen-mile-long fiord. In the previous week the Germans, in a series of daring operations, had seized all the prin- cipal Norwegian ports; the Allies, with a recklessness to which the frustrations of the phoney war and the bellicosity of Winston

Churchill may have made contributions of roughly -equal importance, resolved to

challenge the invaders on Norwegian soil; and amid barely describable confusion three separate expeditionary forces were directed on Narvik, Namsos and Aandalsnes.

In London, however, there was some uncertainty (that is to say, nobody had the slightest idea) whether Namsos was or was not in German hands, and it was prudently decided that a reconnaissance of this obscure little port—only 125 miles by road north of Trondheim, where the enemy had been installed for a week—should be carried out before an attempt was made to land there. Less prudently, it was also decided that I should carry it out.

As the Sunderland droned towards the Norwegian coast my last-minute orders from

the cruiser Glasgow ended : 'Essential observe complete secrecy'. But it is hardly possible to dissemble a four-engined flying-

boat, and after circling low over Namsos for ten minutes without seeing—except for some herring gulls—any sign of life, we had no more idea than Mr Neville Chamberlain whether the Germans were in the town or not. So we veered off southwards, landed in an arm of the fiord at a little place called Bangsund and, after being assured by a Norwegian in a rowing boat that the Germans bad not yet arrived, sent an officer ashore to ring up the Namsos telephone ex- change and tell them to stop all outgoing calls. Then we took off again, touched down off Namsos and taxied up to the wooden quay, now peopled by an apprehensive crowd. We landed, I made some sort of speech and we tried, unsuccessfully, to con- tact the Navy on our portable wireless sets.

Today, thirty years later, these events are vividly remembered by the senior citizens: as is the controversy—only resolved by the appearance that evening of foul° Tribal class destroyers—as to whether or not I was a German officer in disguise. But it was what happened six days later that made the deepest impression. In the intervening nights, which gave us only about four hours of darkness, a British territorial brigade, cumbered with enormous fur coats but short of transport and totally devoid of any supporting arms, had somehow got ashore and been deployed southwards towards Trondheim without being observed by the Luftwaffe's thrice daily reconnaissances. On the night of the 19th three battalions of Chasseurs Alpins, less their indispensable mules, were landed; but nobody had told the French that we were playing hide-and-seek, and when the "Luftwaffe arrived, bang on time, for their pre-breakfast inspection the Chasseurs engaged them, ineffectively, with machine- guns. By noon the little wooden town was a holocaust; by dusk two thirds of it had been destroyed. Astonishingly, there were only six fatal casualties—two Norwegian civilians and four French soldiers. I was reported killed, and several American papers published trite but kindly obituaries.

The Allied Force Commander was that legendary, admirable character, Adrian Carton de Wiart, vc. He flew out in a Sunderland which came under air attack while rendezvousing with a destroyer, and his only staff officer was wounded : so for some days I found myself acting as his bat- man, driver, chief of staff and (mercifully on rare occasions) cook.

The Luftwaffe, unopposed save—towards the end—by a very few AA guns, continued to pound Namsos whenever weather permitted. Standing the other day outside the little wooden house which the General and I had shared, high up under the rock-face which dominates the town, I remembered the 'morning when I had to tell him that Fanny, the beautiful Norwegian girl who did for us, had departed to safer quarters in the coun- tryside.

'Don't blame her', said the General, ac- cepting a mug of melted snow to shave in; the supply of water, as of electricity, no longer existed. 'I'll go and scrounge some of those French rations while you do the breakfast.'

Shovelling more snow into the saucepan (it takes an awful lot of snow to produce a very little water), I watched him saunter down the steep hill towards the quay as the church- bells rang and the first air-raid of the day was unleashed. A conspicuous figure in his red hat (Carton de Wiart refused to wear a steel helmet), he maintained an even pace down the centre of the gutted street. Machine-guns chattered; smoke drifted from burning buildings; the Heinkels were flying so low that the bombs had no time to whistle before they burst. Carton de Wiart paid not the slightest attention. From safe bivouacs in

the wooded heights around Namsos hun- dreds of men were watching him—French

infantry, British base personnel, all in some degree shaken by their recent ordeals, all (at a guess) becoming a little more war- worthy as they followed his lackadaisical progress.

The Luftwaffe went home with empty bomb-racks. The General returned with some delicious sardines. His single eye surveyed my preparations for breakfast. Devastation was all around us. 'Better get rid of those egg-shells somewhere,' he said. 'Don't want the place in a mess.'

The Allied plans for a pincer movement on Trondheim from Aandalsnes and Namsos were, after much shilly-shallying, aban- doned; German air supremacy decisively cancelled what had never been much more than a pipe-dream. On the short night of 2 May the Royal Navy, with some help from the French, extricated us from Namsos, a sour, charred, flat mass of rubble, eerily and dangerously illumined by a huge dump of inextinguishably burning coal.

Today these frightful scars have heeled. A new, pleasant, unpretentious town has risen on the ruins of thirty years ago. Only one of the massive German barracks still stands, and there is no longer any trace of what the Norwegians called 'the English Channel'.

This was an enormous anti-tank ditch, built right across the middle of Namsos, by Russian and Yugoslav prisoners of war, who were treated with extreme inhumanity. A main theme of the Allied deception plans in the last war was the simulation of a threat to Norway, and the construction of this obstacle, at the head of a long, narrow fiord ,lavishly protected by minefields and coastal artillery, is one of the many proofs offered by the Norwegian coast-line that Hitler's intelligence was successfully deluded. It was called 'the English Channel' because the citizens felt that, if the Allies could get across the Atlantic, and across the North Sea, and all the way up the fiord, they would probably manage, somehow, to get across the big ditch in the High Street.

I was surprised, as well as touched, by the warmth of my welcome. I had, after all, been the harbinger of doom and disaster; I had aroused in stout hearts and bewildered minds hopes which were soon proved cruelly false; no single action of mine had done anybody in Namsos any good, indeed I cannot remember one which failed to inconvenience the population and endanger the town. 'It is 126 years,' I had often, and sometimes querulously, been reminded in 1940, 'since Norway was involved in war.' Now people who had been children then, apprised by the local paper of my presence, stopped me in the street and said how glad they were that I had come back. I suppose the truth is that in a small place the past, however unpalatable, is converted quite quickly into legend; and legend, especially in a small place, is something to cherish in all its aspects.

Fanny, for a short spell the Force-Com- mander's elfin cook-housekeeper, now a handsome lady with five children, apologised for deserting our quarters and seemed not to blame us at all for deserting her country. Other old acquaintances took the same line: so did the man I had come to see, though he had suffered worse than any of the survivors of 1940.

Henrik Andersen was then harbourmaster of Namsos, and the Allies owed a great deal to him. It was he who, on the day I landed and while I was still under a cloud as a putative imposter, persuaded the four pilots whom the Navy needed to go out and guide the destroyers in. In the crucial following nights the small harbour was regularly overcrowded with ships, all anxious to get away before the quick dawn came. When the troops disembarked, they found none of the normal apparatus of a base—no Em- barkation Staff Officers, no Military Police, no signs directing traffic, nothing—except Henrik Andersen, and Martin Lindsay, and me; and it was up to us, with such volunteer help as we could scrounge, to restore the

status quo—to put the gangways and the coils of rope and all the other stage-pro- perties back where they had been the day before, so that the Luftwaffe's first, early- morning emissary would take back to Trondheim the same mise en scene that his cameras had recorded yesterday.

It was mainly thanks to Andersen that this trompe l'oeil succeeded, for five nights, in its purpose, that we won the game of hide-and-

seek. When we left I handed over to him what was left of the thick wad of Norwegian bank-notes with which, by courtesy of the Bank of England, my theoretically clan- destine mission had been provided.

Carton de Wiart took a poor view of the senior naval officer in charge of the ar- rangements for our evacuation. 'I don't know much about butterflies, but I've heard of a Red Admiral. Never realised there was a yellow variety.' When the last destroyer to leave Namsos had embarked the rearguard and the stragglers, she was ordered to open fire on the assorted vehicles which, now massed on the quay, had made possible our withdrawal. 'I only hope', the Force- Commander wrote, sub-acidly, in his official dispatch, 'that no Norwegians were killed.'

I asked Andersen if any had been killed. 'No', he said, 'but a shell came through the harbourmaster's office and I felt most lonely. You had all gone. Nothing was left of Namsos, nobody there. Only me. And now this shell in my office. Lonely, that was how I felt.'

We were talking in a sort of private recep- tion-room in the new hospital; Andersen, now in his late seventies, has to go there for monthly blood-transfusions. In the long years after the Allies left he worked for the

Resistance: was betrayed: and fell into the hands of Rinnan, a young sadist quisling working for the Gestapo who was executed, with six of his associates, after the war. Andersen was atrociously tortured and con- demned to be shot. An elderly German, who had nominally taken over his duties as harbourmaster, interceded for him. An- dersen was reprieved; he would be transported to a concentration camp in Germany. But the ship which was to transport him was sunk by the RAF and Andersen survived the war.

From his son's letters I had expected to meet a ghost, a man wandering in his mind, inarticulate, moribund. Not a bit of it. Reprieved from a formal execution, he has because of what was done to him lived under the shadow of death for more than a quarter of a century; only constant blood transfu- sions kept him alive. Yet nobody could have been jollier, more perceptive, less self-pity- ing, more grateful for being made by King George vt a member of the order to which, at the time of writing, a majority of the Beatles still belong.

He remembered Carton de Wiart as 'a lovely man'. The Allied Force-Commander was not given to hyperbole, but I think he might have returned the compliment, suitably modified.