The first leg of the journey which led him to the mainland took 4 days and was plagued by violent snowstorms but ultimately, on the 4th of April, Jan reached Ullsfjord on the West-side of the Lyngen alps, a heavily-fortified area teeming with German soldiers. The various homesteads, families, and individuals he met on his way gave him food, shelter, safe passage, and even more importantly, information about local people who were involved in the resistance movement. Jan Baalsrud was very lucky on two fronts: he had not been been too badly hurt in his escape from the Germans and the first people he met were immediately sympathetic to the cause of a free Norway and helped him as much as they could. Jan Baalrsud is one of the most well-known Norwegian freedom fighters from the Second World War It was the start of one of the most epic journeys which ever took place under the skies of Arctic Norway. After a short while, Jan realized that the only way he could make it out of there alive was to leave the country altogether and reach the border of neutral Sweden about a hundred kilometers to the south. All except for Jan Baalsrud who managed to swim in the ice-cold fjord and reached the island of Hersøy where local women took him in in secret. However, all of them were either killed on the spot or captured and executed later. The next morning the twelve freedom-fighters were discovered by a German warship and had no choice but to blow-up the Brattholm and attempt to escape. Unfortunately, the store owner had died more than a year ago and the new owner of the store refused to help them, instead, he contacted the German garrison, telling them soldiers had come to him. Sailing northwards closer to Tromsø, they reached the little island of Rebbenesøya and made contact with the owner of a local store that was sympathetic with the resistance. The crew of the ship, a little fishing vessel named Brattholm, was supposed to reach the coast of Norway by the island of Senja but upon arriving there, they spotted a German patrol-ship and had to leave. The Brattholm carried Norwegian freedom fighters on a sabotage mission from the Shetlands to Arctic Norway Their destination: Tromsø, where they were supposed to meet a local contact who would help them gain access to the hydroplane airport and the military airport situated nearby in order to render them unusable. The expedition was set to leave the Shetland Islands the 24th of March with 12 soldiers. Ultimately in 1943 he was selected for a sabotage mission. Upon arriving there, he joined the Linge Company and was quickly promoted to the rank of sergeant. Later, Jan managed to reach the United Kingdom, strangely enough, by way of the Soviet Union. Already in 1940, while based in neutral Sweden, he was an active member of the then-embryonic resistance movement and was even jailed for months by the Swedish judiciary for spy-related activities. Baalsrud, a young man from the Oslo region, was willing to put his life at stake in order to fight the occupying German army. About 300 Norwegians were recruited and saw action under the banner of the company from 19. 1, which later became famous as the Linge Company after its founder Martin Linge. The Lofoten raid of 1941 was the baptism by fire for the Norwegian Independent Company No. The raid was highly successful and it led to the organization of many more in the following years.įrom 1940 to 1945, Nazi Germany controlled Norway The first of these actions took place, incidentally enough, in the Arctic, in March 1941 when an allied force of British and Norwegian soldiers attacked the archipelago of Lofoten in order to destroy the glycerin factories used in the making of explosives. The exiled government, still ready to fight, allied themselves with the British forces and started organizing a nation-wide resistance movement, the goal of which was to sabotage the military and industrial complexes. Still, after a few months of intense fighting, the whole country fell under the control of the German army. While the former had no natural defense from the advancing army and was conquered in just a few hours, Norway was a harder nut to crack so to speak, and the German plans for a quick take-over of Oslo, the capital, came to nothing, in large part due to the actions of a courageous North-Norwegian colonel. In April 1940, the German army invaded Denmark and Norway simultaneously. Numerous battles and other capital events took place on Norwegian soil but none is more harrowing than the Arctic escape of sergeant Jan Baalsrud in 1943. Norway was one of the focal points of both the allies and the axis during the second World War.
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