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.”8
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.”9
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.”10 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.”11 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.”12
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.13
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.”14
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-f
our 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.15 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.
With the enemy in hot pursuit, the NORSOs retreated post-haste to their hut. Colby would not let his men rest, however. They gathered their equipment and set off immediately on the sixteen-hour trip back to Lake Jaevsjo. The Germans soon gave up the chase. The Wehrmacht subsequently brought in Russian slave laborers to repair the damaged line, but the flow of troops over the Nordland slowed to a trickle, an estimated 1,000 total for the last month of the war.16 Its Norwegian mission accomplished, Special Forces headquarters in London ordered a halt to further Carpetbagger flights. The NORSO team began to run low on food and other essentials. Then an order came dispersing all of the Rype team save Helgeson to duty elsewhere. Colby’s force was cut to twenty. The snow was melting and the countryside was crawling with German patrols. At one point, a five-man enemy patrol stumbled into camp. Armed only with machine pistols, the Germans were outgunned. Colby believed he had talked them into surrendering when one raised his pistol. The Americans summarily gunned down the lot. But there would be more Germans, many more.
Before the NORSO team had set out on the Lurudal mission, a resistance figure code-named “Drama” had come to the mountains seeking a conference with the American Norwegian commandos, news of whose exploits had then spread far and wide. He proposed that NORSO begin training and equipping Norwegian volunteers for a partisan army that would operate out of Lierne, a nearby mountain redoubt.17 At the time, the idea had appealed to Colby and his men, most of whom had had experience with the maquis in France. The second attack on the Nordland rail line had put the scheme on hold. In the days after the Lurudal operation, however, the Lierne plan seemed not only attractive but vital. NORSO was isolated and would probably not receive any help from SHAEF until the war was over. Meanwhile, it was sure to be attacked by the tens of thousands of Germans it had bottled up. Operating out of Lierne, the commandos would have access to food, shelter, and allies in their struggle to survive.
But Bill Colby had a grander scheme in mind. “I urged a political gesture,” he wrote in Honorable Men: “let’s seize the mountain redoubt of Lierne and declare it the first step of Norway’s liberation, with the NORSO Group and the friendly Norwegians who would flock to us, replaying France’s liberation.” To his consternation, Special Forces headquarters denied permission. But Colby persisted. “I am here,” he radioed back. “I know what I am doing. I know I can do it; the Resistance wants me to do it, and I intend to do it.” London responded immediately. Colby and his men were to remain in hiding: “any unauthorized contact by you with enemy will subject you to immediate disciplinary action,” the message said. Before matters could proceed any further, Germany surrendered. The war in Europe was over.18
On May 11, Colby was instructed to proceed to Snassa and accept the surrender of the large German garrison stationed there. With two of his burliest sergeants at his side and the rest of the NORSO contingent, paltry as it was, covering them, Colby approached the camp’s gate and bade the commander come out. Colby recalled that the German officer in charge was almost as nervous as he was and all went well. His men would remain in their barracks, the commander declared, and observe perfect discipline. At this point, the liberated people of Snassa poured out of their houses to festoon Colby and his men with laurels and flood them with champagne. Then followed a triumphal procession to Trondheim and more celebrating. When Crown Prince Olaf arrived in the city on May 17 for an Independence Day parade, NORSO became part of his honor guard.
One last task remained. The town of Namsos, some 60 miles up the coast, had been heavily bombed in 1940 and was the home base for some 10,000 German troops. When the people of the town asked for some Allied presence to convince the Bosche that they were no longer conquerors but the conquered, London ordered NORSO to undertake the job. Colby and his thirty men traveled over the very railway they had worked so hard to destroy and were billeted in the homes of friendly townsfolk. Colby hoped for the best, but his men reported conspicuous shoulder brushes with German troops on the streets, together with hostile stares and assorted insults. He ordered his men to avoid confrontations and under no circumstances try to disarm the enemy soldiers. But when the crews of five German naval vessels lined the harbor chanting, “Sieg Heil!,” he realized he would have to act. Colby telephoned the commander of the German forces and informed him that at 9:00 A.M. the next day he would “inspect” each of his naval vessels. Accompanied by four NORSO soldiers, all former mariners, Colby arrived at dockside at the prescribed time. The team was escorted by each vessel’s commander to his respective ship. There were sullen looks, but no open defiance. Germans and Norwegians alike had gotten the word that the war was over, and Norway was a free country.19
Eight days later, Colby and his team boarded a plane for Oslo. The Norwegians were treated to a hero’s welcome and dispersed. Their commander and their other American colleagues then departed for London. Bill visited Elbridge, who was working at SHAEF headquarters at Versailles, and learned that the NORSO Group was to be reassembled and dispatched to the Pacific. Colby had long wanted to return to Asia and serve in the China-Burma-India theater, but there was, he believed, still some unfinished business in Europe. He asked Russell Forgan, who had succeeded David Bruce as OSS European chief, for permission to mount a Jedburgh-type operation that would drop into Spain, link up with anti-Franco partisans, and topple that country’s fascist government. Absolutely not, headquarters responded. The United States was not at war with Spain and did not intend to go to war with Spain.
Colby’s proposal, which was met with a combination of amusement and derision by the OSS staff, was revealing in a number of ways. The Jedburgh would later write in Honorable Men that as a result of the episode, he “learned that America’s mission in Europe was not purely ideological.”20 In truth, Colby was only being consistent. He had thought the war was about ideas, the principles embodied in the Atlantic Charter. While in France working with the maquis, he remembered being inspired by Colonel Chevrier’s “political” speeches to his comrades. By political, he meant patriotic, ideological. Like Chevrier and T. E. Lawrence, Colby believed he was acting to bring oppressed peoples freedom, self-determination, and, if possible, democracy. Unlike them, perhaps, he believed that he was facilitating the advance of social and economic justice as well. Spain, to Colby’s mind, had been the original battlefield. Franco’s triumph and survival would remain a blot on the honor of the Allies. Were not freedom, democracy, and individual liberty inseparable, just as totalitarianism, racism, and imperialism were inextricably linked? Actually, given the culture that Bill Donovan had encouraged in the OSS, Colby’s proposal was not outrageous at all. Donovan had encouraged thinking outside the box, and if it did nothing else, the agency shunned political, military, and diplomatic orthodoxy throughout the war. In this context, what was surprising was the idea’s peremptory dismissal by Forgan and his staff. Perhaps ideology was taking a backseat within the OSS, or perhaps the focus of that ideology had already begun shifting from fascism to communism.
And what of Bill Colby, the bespectacled, diminutive, twenty-five-year-old war hero? A hero he was; the citation for the Silver Star he was subsequently awarded was emphatic about th
at. He had engaged, endured, led, and prevailed. There seemed to be no limit to his will and determination—carrying a pack one-third of his own weight, scaling icy mountains, and fording frozen rivers. He had served as point man on the advance of every patrol and personally covered every retreat. The morale of his men had remained high even in the most desperate situations.21 Colby’s college friend Stan Temko had visited him during his Jedburgh training. How would you describe Bill Colby? he had asked another commando. “Ballsey,” was the reply. His contemporaries then and later would call him fearless. No person is exempt from fear, but Colby’s ability to control his was truly remarkable. Bill Colby was a warrior in the making when he arrived in Europe and a warrior in full when he left, a veteran of unconventional warfare. In many ways, that experience would mark him for life.
In this, Colby was in some ways like any other individual who fights in a war. As “the Judge,” a character in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, observed “[war] endures because young men love it and old men love it in them.” The Judge goes on to observe that “the world is forever after divided into those who fought and those who did not.”22 As a Jedburgh and a NORSO operative, Colby was the elite of the elite. He had experienced the intensity of relationships that come only to men who have survived combat together. For some, it would be an experience they would seek to recapture even until death. Moreover, Colby had fought in the “Good War,” against the real Axis of evil. His experiences had not compromised his morality, but confirmed it. In some ways, the young soldier was still the naive adolescent, a captive of Elbridge’s outsized expectations.
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