North Strike

by John Harris

  That night there was a blackout and the air-raid sirens sounded, but there were no aeroplanes and the lights came on again quickly. She went to bed early, tired of her father’s complaints and desperately worried about the news of the torpedoed German troopship. They had its name now, Rio de Janeiro, and she took the trouble to look it up in the shipping register. It told her nothing very helpful but she knew it implied something terribly important. An exceptional amount of iron ore had been passing steadily through the town for months and at that moment there were twenty-five ore ships in the harbour, most of them German. She had also heard that leave had been stopped for Norge and Eidsvold, so that it was obvious the naval authorities were also suspicious and on edge.

  Early in the morning, she was awakened by the crash of gunfire. Then the windows rattled as the house shuddered under a tremendous explosion, and she heard snow, dislodged by the vibration, slide heavily from the roof and thump to the ground outside. Dressing quickly, she snatched up a heavy coat and her woollen cap and gloves and was heading for the door as her father appeared, half-clothed, her mother close behind him.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he said.

  Her reply was tart. ‘Of course something’s happened. Something’s been on the point of happening for ages but everybody’s been too blind to see it.’

  He didn’t seem to hear her. ‘It must be from the Iron Company,’ he said.

  ‘Of course it’s not from the Iron Company,’ she snapped. ‘It’s from the sea.’

  They moved to the window and, snatching back the curtains saw that the dawn was heavy with fog. The lightening sky was also obscured by a looming shadow and she realised it was a vast column of dark smoke that curled and coiled over the water down the fjord not far from the town.

  ‘Is it war?’ her mother asked.

  ‘No.’ Her father’s tone was one of certainty. ‘It can’t be anything to do with us. German ships must have been chased into the fjord by the British.’

  Annie hadn’t the slightest doubt in her own mind what it was and, cramming the woollen cap over her hair, she headed for the street. It was snowing hard as she slammed the door behind her.

  The sky was just beginning to grow paler as she made her way to the centre of the town. As she moved down the narrow street, a soldier from the guard post on the peninsula ran past shouting that the shooting was from Germans. Suddenly the cold seemed twice as fierce and she shuddered inside her clothes.

  As she reached the Ore Quay there was another explosion that seemed to rock the street and she saw a second huge column of brown smoke rise into the sky. As she began to run, a man pulled her into a doorway. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There’s shooting. It’s not safe!’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘German ships! They’ve blown up Eidsvold and now Norge. They’re putting troops ashore in Herjangsfjord.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we stop them?’ she demanded. ‘There are five hundred men at the Elvegårdsmoen depot.’

  The man merely shrugged. ‘The Germans are already coming into the harbour,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  She stared over the roofs at the rising smoke. Her cousin in Eidsvold was a fair boy scarcely out of his teens who spent all his time ashore with his eyes on her, mutely adoring, and she guessed he would not have survived. He was a born victim, gentle, kind and shy. In any rush for safety he would allow himself to be pushed aside. She sighed, wondering how his parents would take it. They had always had high hopes for him and had set their hearts on a match between them.

  As the firing died down, she moved cautiously towards the waterfront near the Post Pier. There seemed to be soldiers everywhere, most of them in German uniforms watched by a few Norwegian troops, mainly boys. She ran forward and grasped the arm of one of the Norwegians.

  ‘Why aren’t you using your rifles?’ she demanded.

  ‘We’ve had our orders.’ The boy glared at her, a look of shame and misery on his face.

  She stared about her, bewildered and as ashamed as the soldier. Middle-aged men were standing with their hands in their pockets, watching the Germans.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

  The man she addressed spat out a cigarette but seemed curiously unmoved. ‘They came ashore and organised a truce. They’re using it to post machine-guns. The German officer said “I come to greet the Norwegian army.” I heard him.’

  She stared at the Germans. They were placing weapons to cover the Norwegian gun posts, shouldering the leaderless Norwegian boys out of their way.

  She ran to a Norwegian sergeant. He was a grizzled, middle-aged man who was glaring fiercely at the Germans.

  ‘Why don’t you shoot them?’ she demanded.

  He brushed her aside. ‘I’ve got my orders.’ His frown deepened. ‘Or rather, I’ve not got my orders. No one seems to be running the show.’

  ‘But what about the officers?’

  ‘They’re waiting for the colonel. And he’s too old and likes the Germans, anyway. They say he’s on the telephone to headquarters now.’

  ‘Why? You don’t have to ask permission to fire on invaders!’

  Her voice had risen in her anguish and one of the German NCOs came towards her and pushed her away roughly.

  ‘Go on,’ he said in Norwegian. ‘Get away!’

  ‘You speak our language,’ she spat. ‘I expect you learned it here as a child when you were given shelter after the other war!’

  The German looked uneasy but he continued to push her away. Inspired by her fury, a few of the watching men started to catcall and jeer and the German unslung his gun and began to jab at her with it.

  An officer appeared, shouting, ‘Go back to your homes! There is nothing here for you! Move!’ When there was no reaction, he began to grow angry and drew his pistol. ‘If you don’t move I shall fire!’

  As his men began to unsling their weapons, the Norwegian she had first spoken to pulled her away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Or they’ll fire!’

  ‘And you’re afraid?’ she snapped. ‘I’m not.’

  But she went nevertheless, depressed, miserable and shocked, unable to see what she could do.

  German troops were occupying the railway and, as she neared the water’s edge, she was stopped again by a man with a rifle. More Germans, many of them still green from seasickness, their uniforms stained by seawater and vomit, were climbing ashore. The snow was coming down again now, plastering their greatcoats.

  She looked at her watch. It was only six a.m. Out in the harbour, she could see the smoking wreckage of Eidsvold and Norge floating on the water, flames still flickering about it. A few rowing boats and small fishing vessels circled it, picking up living and dead. Around her, people were still rubbing their eyes, asking themselves where their northern troops were and knowing that no other troops had been mobilised. The crowd included bewildered children and a few angry students.

  ‘I offered to fight,’ one of the students was shouting. ‘I offered my services straightaway but they turned me down because I’ve had no training! How can I have training if they won’t accept me?’

  ‘Pretend you’ve had it,’ Annie snapped at him. ‘You can always learn after they’ve given you a rifle.’

  In the market place, a large open quadrangle faced by the old post office and telegraph building, people were gathering. The bronze lamps on the bridge had once been the pride of the town until it was discovered they’d been purchased second-hand from a town in the south which had bought better and larger ones and the pride had disappeared. The railway tracks ran under the bridge, fanning out towards the harbour, the ore in huge conical heaps between them. She could just see the steamers in the harbour but could hear none of the roaring rumble of ore streaming into the hulls which normally went on night and day.

  There was a sound from the people around her like a sigh, and she saw that German swastika flags were being run up over the telegraph building and the town hall. One of the Germans was t
rying to commandeer a bicycle from a messenger boy, and the boy was fighting back. ‘It’s mine,’ he yelled.

  ‘The Führer says we take what we need,’ the German shouted. ‘If you want to argue, go and see the Ortskommandant.’

  Norwegian soldiers were being hustled into the market place now, but, as Annie watched, a few managed to slip out of the column and vanish between the houses. It wasn’t much but it lifted her heart because, like the messenger boy’s spirited defence of his bicycle, it indicated that somewhere there was still the will to resist.

  The Germans were forming up now, carrying strange weapons she had never seen before, grenades dangling from their waists. They were marching with a grim bearing and the precision of expert, experienced troops. The Norwegians watched them, numbed, as they placed guards on the station, the quay and the principal buildings. Following them angrily, she wondered wildly why nobody had thought of shooting Colonel Sundlo, the Norwegian commander. He had always been known as a reactionary with a sympathy for fascism, a short, stocky man with a formless face who wrote for the newspaper on the danger of communism.

  Tears of humiliation and fury trickled down her cheeks. The long decades of peace had turned the army into an inefficient and inflexible fighting machine, and in recent years military men had even come to be hated by the working classes so that it was difficult to be an officer.

  More Germans were climbing ashore at the piers and jetties, and began to march into the square after the others. They were carrying placards in Norwegian, saying ‘Be calm. We come to help you against the English’. Roused by the shooting, people were peering sleepily through the windows of their houses into the thickly falling snow, clearly attaching greater importance to the machine-gunners than they did to the placards.

  A lorry filled with soldiers with slung rifles rumbled past. A machine-gun poked out of the rear from among the hard-muscled, stony-faced men. A pro-German youth acted as self-appointed guide, complete with home-made armband and, as they passed, a chic, blonde woman whom Annie had known for months as a German sympathiser waved and smiled. German flags were floating from all the public buildings now and soldiers were billeted in the Realskole, watched by the infants who should have been going there later in the morning.

  For a long time, she wandered about aimlessly, almost as if she were torturing herself by the sight of the Germans, then she decided it would be a wise move to clear her office. But the Germans had already taken over the building as a billet and she was refused admission. For a quarter of an hour she argued, knowing that in her desk there were documents which showed without doubt that she had passed information on to the British, but the German officer refused to allow her to enter, like the rest of them nervous and uncertain of what the Norwegians might decide to do.

  Returning home, she found her father listening to the radio, his face anxious.

  ‘The Germans have invaded Denmark,’ he said. ‘Their army didn’t fight.’

  ‘They’ve invaded Norway too!’ she snapped at him. ‘Here! In Narvik! And our army didn’t fight either! We should be ashamed!’

  He looked at her with the same bewildered expression she had seen in the town, and she was sorry for her anger because he was obviously at a total loss what to do.

  ‘They’re in Oslo, Kristiansand, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger too,’ he said, ‘and they seem to have taken over the radio.’

  ‘Then try to get Stockholm! The Swedes will give us an unbiased picture.’

  The triumphant braying of the Germans had not mentioned that in other places they had suffered heavy losses. At Oslo, the out-of-date fortress of Oscarsborg had even managed to sink the German cruiser, Blücher, with the loss of a thousand men, while the pocket battleship, Lützow, had been put out of action. There was a faint trace of triumph in the Swedish announcer’s words, as if the Swedes, no less vulnerable than the Norwegians, enjoyed seeing the German plans go wrong.

  The British radio was more wary, giving little away, and offering no indication that they were about to send help. It seemed desperately important to find out what was happening elsewhere, but everyone was as bewildered as she was and the picture she put together was one of confusion and complete surprise.

  Her mother was in tears, preparing to go to the hospital to give what help she could. It was packed with dead and wounded Norwegians.

  ‘Germans, too,’ she said.

  ‘They should let them die,’ Annie spat.

  ‘They’re behaving quite well.’ Her mother seemed to be trying to excuse the Norwegians’ own behaviour. ‘They had no Norwegian money for the cab drivers who took them to the Grand Hotel, but they promised they’d pay all right.’

  ‘They murdered Norwegians!’ Annie snapped.

  By evening, to her surprise, the first signs of resistance were being shown. The sweet-starved Germans were buying up all the chocolate and the shops were retaliating by hiding their stocks, while bakers were claiming they had no flour and were not baking any more pastries. But the radio said that an unknown politician with a doughy face and a total lack of humour by the name of Quisling had been made prime minister, backed by the Nazis, and that the invaders were already striking out in requisitioned buses to the unsubdued districts.

  There was still no sign of help coming from anywhere and, sick at heart, feeling that somehow Britain ought to have followed the Germans down the fjord and wiped them out, she began to wonder what she ought to do. Her days in Narvik were numbered. The Nazis had never shown much mercy to people who opposed them and she knew she had to get away.

  But where to?

  Rumours were already coming in that Norwegian troops stationed further north were moving on the town, but the snowstorms were hampering their movements and already the Germans were setting up roadblocks and were in control of the railway. She wondered if there were any chance of one of the British ships escaping, and, as she used her binoculars, she remembered Oulu in the entrance to the fjord. As far as she knew, the Germans hadn’t yet noticed her.

  Her father was standing by the telephone when she returned home and her mother was sitting on the settee, weeping. Her grandmother had her arm around her, comforting her, but was dry-eyed and frozen-faced.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded. ‘Have the Germans been?’

  Her father lifted his head. ‘Your brother Jens’ ship has been sunk. The Germans blew it up. One of the petty officers who got ashore telephoned. Nothing’s known of Jens.’

  She tried to comfort her mother but somehow she seemed already to belong to a different world. Numbed by what had happened, shaken and afraid, the only thought in her mind was still that she must go. After a while, she went to her room and packed a haversack; then returning, she kissed her parents. Her mother and grandmother wept a little but they didn’t argue. As she left the house, the snow was coming down faster than ever. Making her way into the town, she saw what seemed to be hundreds of Germans, standing in groups everywhere, clutching their weapons, their eyes shaded by their helmets in the gloom. A few lost-looking Norwegians still wandered about but, for the most part, now that the shock of the invasion had sunk in, they seemed to have disappeared to their homes and were staying out of sight. One or two shops were open, trying to do normal business, but there were no customers and most of them were already closing their doors. The harbour seemed to be full of ships. The huge Jan Willem towered over everything, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be a German destroyer – heavy vessels, more powerful than anything Norway possessed – and picket boats were crossing and recrossing the dark waters of the harbour to the quay.

  The wreckage of Eidsvold and Norge still lay in the water, and a mat of small boats still circled it, searching for survivors. She noticed that none of them was German.

  She seemed to be looking at her home for the last time. To her surprise, the place didn’t seem to have changed. Vaguely she had felt it would look different. But, apart from the Germans, it was exactly as it had been before, throughout all he
r life. Yet it was different, and she knew there was nothing there for her any more.

  Sighing, she hitched the pack over her shoulder and, walking swiftly to the stop near the Ore Pier, caught the bus to Djupvik.

  Three

  During the day Oulu’s radio picked up the broadcasts from Oslo, and soon afterwards, learning by morse from a passing German ship that the Germans had taken over Narvik, they started making plans to slip away in the night.

  ‘It’s going to be difficult with only ten men,’ Campbell said.

  ‘Eleven,’ Magnusson said. ‘We’ve got the Pole. He’s just been round the world on a training ship, for God’s sake! If he doesn’t know what to do, nobody does. The experts can do the work aloft and the amateurs can pull the ropes. You’d better gen them up on what’s a hoist and what’s a downhaul.’

  The topsails were bent on and furled, as if for a neat harbour stow, with the heavy weight of the sheet taken as far in towards the mast as possible. The body of the sails was then hauled up and beaten down in a neat packet on top of the yard, and the rope gaskets passed round the sail and secured ready for easy slipping.

  The Polish boy, Wolszcka, worked like a madman, as if by so doing he could cleanse his system of its loathing for the Germans. His eyes black with hatred, he seemed to move twice as fast up the rigging as everybody else.

  Towards evening a small trawler appeared, creeping almost shiftily towards them along the line of the shore. Opposite Ramnes, it anchored and a boat was lowered. Three men climbed into it.

  ‘That’s Vinje, the harbourmaster,’ Campbell said, watching with narrow eyes.