Shadow Warrior (10 page)

Before climbing aboard the eight converted B-24s, Colby delivered a final briefing to his men. He reminded them that General Eisenhower had declared that the German forces in Norway must be kept bottled up; SHAEF had its eye on NORSO. Operation “Rype” (
rype
is Norwegian for ptarmigan, a bird whose feathers are white in the winter and brown in the summer, like the parkas of the NORSOs) was crucial to the success of the Allies' final push against the Reich.

Silently, the thirty-five commandos boarded, and the giant planes took off into the clear midafternoon sky. The men had been divided into teams and supplied in a manner that would allow them to operate independently for forty days. Sitting in the bomb bay of his plane, Colby considered those he had trained. “Their names read like heroes from some Norse saga—Paulsen, Johansen, Iversen, Eliasen, Oistad,” he wrote in his memoir. Many had been stranded on Norwegian ships early in the war and then enlisted in the US Army. They were typically stoic—men of the sea and the frost. They were bred to endure and adapt. “Among this group,” Colby observed, “were men who could do anything from butchering a cow to fixing a motor with a piece of wire, or operating on a casualty with a jackknife.”
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The round trip from the United Kingdom to northern Norway would stretch the range of the planes of the 801st Bombardment Group to the limit. It would be necessary to stop for refueling at Kinloss airfield on the bleak northeastern coast of Scotland facing across the North Sea to Scandinavia. The plan was for the Carpetbaggers to discharge their men and materiel over Lake Jaevsjo on the Norweigan-Swedish border, which, of course, was frozen over at the time. “The eight planes continued north, across the North Sea, over the stark fjords and the white mountains, then up the Norway-Sweden coast past Trondheim, Mansos—almost to the
Arctic Circle,” Colby wrote. “Below, a faint mist was spreading, taking the sharpness off the rocks, but meaning trouble later.” Trouble, indeed. The mist turned into fog. Three of the planes were forced to turn back. One dropped its five-man team into neutral Sweden, where the paratroopers were confronted by local police and briefly interned. Four other planes, one of which carried Major Colby, also strayed over Sweden but then discovered their mistake. Shortly after midnight the lead aircraft spotted the bonfires on the frozen lake. “Paulsen and Aanonsen pulled up the trap door,” Colby related, “and I went through into the awful quiet that closes in when the engines recede. . . . Dimly, I counted the others slipping into the air—one, two, three—formation perfect, five seconds apart.” At 500 feet, the parachutists could see the bonfires clearly. Colby landed, rolled, gained his feet, and tucked away his chute. He could see a tall, heavily clad figure approaching. Pistol in hand, the NORSO leader offered the pass phrase: “Is the fishing good in this lake?” Instead of the required answer, “Yes, especially in the winter,” the man replied, “To tell you the truth, it's no good at all.” Something kept Colby from shooting him. Fortunately, at that moment, Herbert Helgeson, the resistance liaison, appeared and vouched for the man and his companions, who had now moved out from the bonfire. The NORSO team, now fifteen in number, spent the night with their reception committee, trying to ward off the twenty-below-zero temperatures. Operation Rype was set to begin.
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Colby and his men spent Palm Sunday scouring the area for the containers of arms, food, and explosives that had been dropped with them. The team had not supervised the packing of the parachutes for their supplies. They should have. The materiel was scattered over a 36-mile area; some containers had not been chuted at all and had plunged deep into snow drifts. The work had to be done quickly; the arrival in the area of four-engine aircraft was sure to have been noticed, and German spotter planes would soon be roaming the area. The NORSO men gathered what they could and then, using their parachutes, built a tent camp in the woods, hoping to avoid detection by vacationing skiers and German patrols.

According to its official orders, Operation Rype was to paralyze the relevant segments of the Norwegian rail service for as long as possible. The Nordland Railway was the only north-south transportation route; the country's heavy snows rendered road travel impossible, and the Allies' Eighth Air Force made air transport too risky for the German troops. As
a consequence, every kilometer of the Nordland line was heavily guarded by either fixed encampments or patrols. Convinced that he did not have enough men and explosives to successfully complete the mission, Colby decided to wait for reinforcements. He learned through the group's radio contact with London that the Liberators that had turned back would try again. As he had in France, Colby tuned in each night to the BBC and listened to the Norwegian personals to learn whether that was the night. On the sixth evening, word came that the Carpetbaggers, with their commando cargo, were on their way. Colby recalled that at the first sound of engines, the weather was perfectly clear; but then “in seconds[,] a mist out of Hamlet shrouded the lake.” The three aircraft pulled up and turned around for the trip home. Two made it; the other plane crashed in the Orkney Islands, killing all thirteen men aboard, including six NORSO volunteers.
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Six days later, London tried again. Four B-24s departed Harrington. This time the subarctic weather proved uniformly bad, with high winds, blowing snow, and ice. The first aircraft attempted a pass over the lake but hit a nearby peak and exploded, all within earshot of the men on the ground. The three surviving aircraft turned back. A month later, with their operations complete, Colby and his men would locate the wreckage of the downed B-24 and bury the dead with full military honors. “Meanwhile,” Colby later wrote, “12 days—wasted days—had gone by, and with each one, more Germans had seeped out of the trap.” The NORSO team felt its failure keenly. “We decided to scrap first plans and fight our own war.”
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The scheme that Colby, Helgeson, and Lieutenant Glen Farnsworth, NORSO's demolitions expert, came up with was a reprise of the “Great Locomotive Chase” of American Civil War fame. The team would seize a train (it was unclear whether a German troop train or a civilian transport), throw it into reverse, and blow up every bridge and tunnel it came to until the explosives ran out. The team would then derail the train and make its escape. Farnsworth was exultant; the sheer audacity of the scheme would throw the Wehrmacht off balance. If this plan fell through, Colby and his men would simply bring down a bridge, probably the one at Tangen, which was much less imposing than the one at Grana.

Shortly after Easter, the NORSO team moved into a farmhouse given up to them by a local family that sympathized with the resistance. Several days later, with six local resistance fighters added to their number, the men set off on the 100-plus-mile journey south. Each soldier carried a 50-pound
pack, and team members took turns pulling one of three toboggans loaded with 60 pounds of explosives. The weather turned against them almost immediately. “Three hours after setting out we were plodding into a sleet storm, carried by the strong west wind and turning our clothing, equipment, and the snow into a sheet of ice, making it almost impossible for the skis to take hold,” Colby later wrote of the experience. After only 15 miles, the team took cover in one of the unoccupied huts that dotted the Norwegian countryside. The next day Colby and his men made 25 miles before stopping. It was up one boulder-strewn, ice-covered mountain after another, with daytime temperatures frequently hovering near zero. Frostbite and broken limbs were ever-present dangers. Colby remembered worrying about a broken bone, in particular. How would he treat and evacuate an injured man? Would he have to be sacrificed to the mission? He told his men to forget their pride and sit on their skis when they felt themselves losing control. “Finally,” Colby wrote, “we got to the peaks overlooking the Tangen bridge, somewhere north of Tangen, where the railroad skirts Oi-ingen Lake.”
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The commandos were appalled at the scene that unfolded before them. “Picture the Hudson River,” Colby wrote, “visualizing the Palisades three times their true height. Place a railroad snug against the foot of the cliffs, and then crust the whole thing with four feet of snow and six inches of wet ice.”
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The men would have to descend with their packs, their weapons, and the three explosive-laden toboggans. Helgeson, a lieutenant in the Norwegian resistance force and an expert skier, declared that the descent was impossible; the men would at the least break their skis and their legs and at the worst fall to their deaths. The team decided to sleep on a final decision, taking refuge in a large crevice in one of the peaks. By this time, Colby and Farnsworth had ditched the Great Locomotive Chase idea and settled for merely blowing up a span of the Nordland. The next day, Colby led a reconnaissance patrol to the bridge at Grana. It was more accessible than the one at Tangen, but too heavily guarded. They would have to choose the smaller, almost unguarded span at Tangen.

Upon his return, Colby dispatched additional patrols to search for a means of descent. Miraculously, one found an iced-over waterfall that descended in fairly easy stages to the lake. The team took this path and arrived at the bottom just before dawn the next day. Colby sent Captain Tom Sather and a squad to knife any German sentinels they encountered and
to cut telephone and telegraph lines. Meanwhile, Helgeson had been dispatched to scout an escape route. While Farnsworth and his three noncommissioned officers set their charges along the long I-girded bridge, Colby and the rest guarded the approaches to both ends of the span. The team waited forty-eight hours hoping for the arrival of a German troop train that could be dispatched into the lake along with the bridge, but with the chances of their discovery becoming unacceptably high, Colby gave the signal.

“It is difficult to blow up steel,” Colby subsequently observed. “Most often it simply bends out of shape. But the second Farnsworth touched the wires and the TNT went off, the structure vanished.”
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If the Germans did not know Colby and his men were in the area before the explosion, they did afterward. The roar from the detonation was horrific, lingering as it bounced off one mountain to another.

The NORSOs reached the woods just ahead of the pursuing Wehrmacht. What ensued was a running gun battle that lasted for more than two days and nights over ice-encrusted peaks and frozen rivers, and through woods with snow so deep that even farm animals had to wear snowshoes. The destination was neutral Sweden, some 40 miles away. Colby and his men could not pause for a moment, or the massive German force would envelop them. Spotter planes buzzed overhead, radioing their position to the pursuers. One long steep stretch the men named Benzedrine Hill for the drug that enabled them to get up it. People who reach the end of their resources and go beyond frequently hallucinate. Colby may have recalled a passage from T. E. Lawrence: “The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and our joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish; we left it below us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own level.”
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With Helgeson, who would later captain the Norwegian Olympic crosscountry ski team, and Hans Liermo, an experienced timber guide, breaking the path, the commandos gradually began to separate from their pursuers. At the Swedish border, they turned north, eventually reaching a hut controlled by the resistance. The men stumbled in, exhausted to the point of delirium. After some self-congratulatory banter, all fell into a deep sleep—all, that is, except Sather, who managed to shoot an elk. The beast provided a fine repast when Colby and his men finally awoke.
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Rested and to a degree restored, the NORSOs made their way back to base camp at Lake Jaevsjo, where they found waiting for them the five men
who had been mistakenly dropped into Sweden. The authorities at the internment camp had chosen to look the other way when the contingent “escaped,” taking their weapons and equipment with them. The additional men would come in handy; NORSO was not through. London informed Colby that the Germans were frantically trying to bypass the fallen bridge at Tangen, and it would be only a matter of time before the Nordland train was running again. With headquarters' approval, Colby decided to destroy an extensive stretch of rail line at Lurudal at both ends of the Plutten Tunnel. It, too, would be a dangerous mission. The Germans had more than 250 guards stationed along a 5-kilometer stretch of track. On April 22, a resupply flight dropped additional food, ammunition, cigarettes, and rail bombs, plus five uniforms for the commandos who had made it in from Sweden. “We needed the new uniforms,” Colby observed sardonically, “because they [the new men] could be shot legally as spies [sans uniforms] if the enemy caught us. The remainder would have been shot illegally.”
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On Monday, April 23, Colby once again led his men into the white wilderness, this time heading toward the Nordland rail line via Lilefjeldt and Seisjoen. That night and the next, the NORSOs broke into abandoned huts to warm themselves and sleep. The tiny structures were nowhere to be found on maps of the area, and therefore relatively secure. On the morning of the third day, Colby, accompanied by expert skier Hans Lierman and a radioman, set out to reconnoiter. After six hours of steady skiing, they reached the railroad at Lurudal. The trio surveyed the entrance and exit to the Plutten Tunnel and marked on their maps where charges should be placed. They then returned to the main force, which had remained in a hut at Skartnes.

At moonrise the following evening, the twenty-four men of NORSO separated into eight teams, each carrying 30 pounds of rail demolition charges, and set out. The weather was beginning to warm, the temperature dropping to a mere zero by nightfall.
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To the group's amazement, the Germans were all in barracks. The commandos spread out and planted their devices along a 2.5-kilometer expanse of track on either side of the tunnel. Colby and an enlisted man took the area closest to the largest German guardhouse. At Farnsworth's signal, all of the charges were detonated simultaneously. Colby recalled that the Germans reacted like bees flying from a hive that had been violently disturbed. They rushed from their huts firing their automatic weapons and shooting off flares. As the main body
of commandos headed for the woods, Sather and a rearguard kept the closest Germans pinned down. Colby and his men had to dodge a spray of bullets but managed to join the others unscathed.