Page 14 - 2021 AMA Summer

MISCARTICLE
A VISIT TO A MUSEUM & A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
Alun Davies
In 2006 I organised an expedition to follow the footsteps of some brave Norwegian patriots who had been
trained in Scotland by the SOE to return to Norway and sabotage German military installations. The group which inspired us had left Scotland in 1943 in a small Norwegian fishing boat to travel to northern Norway. On arrival they were given away by a traitor and the saboteurs and crew were killed or captured. One saboteur called Jan Baalsrud got away from the pursuing Germans and made his way into the mountains, and on foot and ski made his way across Norway into Finland and then over the border into neutral Sweden and freedom. The very exciting true life story is told in a book called We Die Alone and in a film which has been made recently called The 12th Man. The story below sees us following the route Jan took up in the Arctic Circle. In our party was Mike Wright who had been the Chief Instructor at the Army Outward Bound School in Towyn and also at BOBC Norway, while I had been in the Royal Regiment of Wales and joined the AMA fifty years ago in 1970.
All aboard
We had started out rather late as the museum did not open early. It was a small museum on the shore of a Norwegian fjord, and it celebrated the heroism of a local resistance fighter who opposed the Nazi invasion of his homeland in 1940.
After a fascinating look around the many and poignant exhibits, we walked with our skis and rucksacks to the nearby jetty where a boat was waiting to ferry us across the cold fjord to the opposite bank.
The crossing in a high-speed boat, provided by the Norwegian Marines, did not take long and we quickly disembarked near a small wooden hut where one of the resistance fighters had spent many weeks hiding during the war. He had frostbite in the unheated hut and to avoid gangrene, which he knew would kill him, he cut off his black fingers with a penknife. We silently paid tribute to such bravery before hoisting our rucksacks, clicking into our ski bindings, and moving off across the fresh snow.
Soon we were pushing our way up the steep hillside through young silver birch trees; they made the going tough. After fighting our way through the dense trees, we were hot and sweaty but at least we could now press on to ascend
Arrival in the valley
14 / ARMY MOUNTAINEER