Excursion to Norway: Commando in Action

by R. C. HUTCHINSON

1

THE distance in a straight line from Vaagsö to London is around one thousand miles. It was in London that the Vaagso raid was mainly planned, the chief reason being that the three services are accustomed to meet there. When the time comes to put an Allied force upon the mainland of Europe, the success of the operation will depend first of all on the precise interlocking of movements by sailors, soldiers, and airmen; people brought up by different schools, who eye one another with a mutual, smiling superiority as the Rugbeian eyes the Marlburian, as a man plowing the land looks upon his friend tending a machine.

So, through last November and nearly to Christmas, Lieutenant Commander Leerforce, who hates all towns, was working some fourteen hours a day on the top floor of a house in Cricklewood. At the same time a man well known to him, Captain Geoffrey Mellier, R.A., was inhabiting with continuous unhappiness the navigating officer’s quarters in the light cruiser Hazlitt, in a draughty and fogbound bay in North Wales. The connecting links began, “Sir, I have the honor . . .” and some had little pencil notes at the bottom: “Dear Maurice, could you, do you think, persuade your friends in Whitehall to crack along a little faster. . . .”

The house in Cricklewood was shabbygenteel, wanting paint on the front door and new panes in the bottom windows. The top-floor windows looked upon a galaxy of the underclothes of northwest London. The business managed in the four small rooms might have suggested a wholesale grocery concern: ledgers, stores lists, files of indent forms, typewriters chattering. But the place wore a naval tidiness; a Royal Marine stood sentry at the top of the ruinous stairs. For perhaps five hours in every twenty-four Peerforce was on the telephone. (“But I must have another hundred and fifty jerseys for the soldiers. Yes, it’s inclined to be cold at sea, even soldiers require jerseys. What? All right, then, I’ll get through to Phillips and get his authorization for a charge note to go through to Western Command Paymaster. No, old boy, I don’t really care one hoot in hell how you do it, but I’ve just damn well got to have those jerseys in Aberffraw by the 18th.”)

For perhaps an hour at a time, late at night, the telephone was silent, and he could really get down to the job, with the charts and oblique photographs and another fill of tobacco. . . . “ From the intersection QS the oil tanks on Maaloy should be in the line of visibility after 71/2 minutes’ steaming; allow 8 minutes; so if Gurkha was on QS at T.43, Pathan should sight tanks at T.58. The snag there was that Finchwater apparently couldn’t take on Task F in less than nine minutes from Task F, which was fixed now for T.53. . . That must be reworked somehow. He took the telephone again. “Give me extension 9. I want to speak to Squadron Leader Finchwater. . . . I’m fearfully sorry, but this thing doesn’t work out. You’ve got the large-scale thing there? Now look you see Sconce Point? And you see Hamstead Ledge? Well now, my distance he tween those is minutes, say 8 minutes. . . . What? No, old boy, I don’t go about in Spitfires or whatever you call your crazy contraptions. . . Vaagsö; it looked delicious in the obliques. The kind of place that Pauline would like for a holiday, and he could get some fishing there. But in those December days Vaagsö remained unreal, a focus merely, an enchanting formula. Some snag would crop up, and exercise “Uganda” would be scrapped in toto, like exercise “Angola” and exercise “Congo”; all this labor on detail gone to blazes.

In the Hazlitt, Mellier was bothering in the back of his mind about Michael’s tonsils. The doctor thought they would have to come out, Christine thought he wasn’t up to an operation with the effect of the September whooping cough still hasting; and somehow Christine seemed to have guessed a little about “Uganda.” Nothing in the world would make Mellier try to dodge it, but he wished it would happen and be done with.

In Cumberland, the 96th Commando was at rest after covering the Langdale course of forty-two miles in twenty-six hours; and Private Ebbury, comparatively new to the Commando, was writing a letter in the Keswick Y.M.C.A.: “Sir, I have to speak again about my war profishensy pay which I have owing from para 2 order of my old regiment last Jan or Feb and which I never got, and I pick up 7/6 from June to Aug, and no one wanks to fight for the old country more than me, but I don’t see how you fight for the old country on 7/6 a bloody week, so hoping you will oblige, sir.”

2

On December 19 the Rear Admiral at Aberffraw had a signal which read, when translated, “Meteorological office states 27th most likely date for favorable conditions Vaagso.” A message went to Peerforce, “Report station immediately.” Peerforce thought, ‘So it really is happening, and I’m really going to be in it.’ He telephoned Dobells flat. Dobell said, “Yes, I’ve had the same one. Curse of it is I’ve got a party on — I mean a party of my own. Going to be a bit difficult to find my toothbrush and so forth. You won’t mind my being slightly blotto? Not really blotto. . . .”

Back at Downshire Avenue, hunting for his binoculars, Peerforce thought, ‘It cannot be true. They would find some way to dodge me out of it. It will only be a rehearsal. I’m not really going to Vaagsö, it can’t be true.’ The binoculars couldn’t be found, and he worried about them all the way to Aberffraw: eleven hours of comfortless dozing, the lines jammed up with Christmas traffic, twelve passengers in Peerforce’s carriage, Dobell incessantly grumbling. “It’s not that I have any objection to war per se. But I cannot see why it has to get all muddled up with my parties. One thing at a time is what I say. Allow me to finish my party, gentlemen, and I shall then interest myself keenly in your war. Allow me to extricate myself from my friends and I shall be delighted to intricate myself in your railway carriage.” Pauline would probably find the binoculars, Peerforce thought, and they might just get through in time. A shocking thing to go to Vaagsö without binoculars. The train provided no food. “You see, it’s the Christmas season, sir,” the guard explained. Dobell said, “A picturesque custom among the British: at every Christmastide a certain number of officers are roped together and starved to death in railway trains.”

Aberffraw was dark like the grave, the houses in a corpse-like stillness. A Welsh voice breaking into song was washed away by a gusty wind, which blew fine rain and locomotive smoke across the quay. The long train on siding 5 had no lights in the carriages: in that intensity of darkness you realized rather than saw the blobs of men who were forming on the cinder track; in a moment’s lull of the wind you heard the chunk of someone’s rifle-butt against the carriage, a voice almost whispering “Troop Five.” Against the wall of the customs shed you could just see the crocodiles of men as they passed from that darkness to the other darkness where the ships lay. The gasps of the shunting engine hid the noise of the sea.

The Brigade Major and Mellier shared a cabin: throughout the morning of Christmas day they were sick alternately, and sometimes sick in unison. “I suppose the blasted nautics are enjoying this,” the Brigade Major said. The orderly who came in with messages stood by respectfully while the Brigade Major vomited. Between his spasms, Mellier was trying desperately to write to Christine again about Michael’s operation, meaning to get the letter posted at Bridget Sound. As the starboard side rose from every roll, he saw the sea like a gray scarf coming out of a mangle, twisted and torn. In the afternoon he fought himself out of his bunk and struggled down to see the men. The men, of course, had guessed, though no one had told them. “It’s a proper show this time?” and Mellier said, “I’ll tell you later on. Where? My dear Spud, I haven’t the faintest notion,” An Irishman groaning on the floor turned over and said, “Honolulu, it would be.” “That’s right,” Mellier said, " Honolulu. We’re starting a war there,” and a man stopped vomiting to laugh, and they all said, “Honolulu it is,” laughing. A gray, small man, whose army age was twentynine, was carefully ironing his battle-dress trousers. Private Ebbury, yellow with nausea, came over to Mellier: “Excuse me, sir, I’d like a word with you if I might, sir, it’s about my war proficiency pay. I never had . . .” “You’ll all get used to this presently,” Mellier said. “You’ve only got to pretend you’re on the sing-boats at a fair.” Then he rushed away and was sick again.

There was no sensation when the ships came into Bridget Sound: it happened once a week or once a month that warships put in to fuel there. The Gurkha, with decks slightly awry from the buffeting, made fast at Union Wharf, and the party standing by from Stafford’s Yard set to instantly to bandage her. At dinner the Rear Admiral talked of Avignon and Vaucluse wines.

The operational conference was at half past ten. “I must call your particular attention, gentlemen, to paragraph 7 in the method section of Operation Order No. 1. There will be some damage to purely Norwegian property — that can’t be helped. But as far as possible you are to take note of all damage of that kind, giving the owner’s name when you can. You must emphasize that loyal Norwegians will be treated with the greatest consideration. You, Mr. FieldWarwick, have to destroy the herring-oil factory in the north side of Uversund by gunfire. You will be very careful to keep your fire short of the bungalows in the hill beyond.” Field-Warwiek wrote on his pad, “Preserve bungalows,” and said, “Very good, sir.” Afterwards, in the Pathan’s wardroom, Mellier said to Peerforce, “I suppose it won’t turn out to be just another rehearsal?” And Peerforce said, “No, I think we really go there this time. Sickening, losing my damned binoculars.”

Next day was boxing day, and at four in the afternoon the expedition sailed. The wind held, the passage was rough, and they damned the meteorological office. The soldiers were inclined to blame the nautics, considering an influence on weather to be some part of the seaman’s craft. The Brigade Major was anxious, wondering if his troops would get there in shape for fighting, since the best of warriors is not so good when his belly is swiveling, as they say, upon the navel. Mellier had found his sea legs and was trying to learn the last amendment to the operation order by heart — relieved that he had got his letter posted; relieved, in a way, that he had kept the rules and not told Christine what was on.

Between decks, the common feeling was a little changed, the torment of seasickness relieved by expectancy: as a theater queue standing for hours in the rain will brighten when the actors start to arrive. And the meteorological people proved, after all, that they had the weather under control. For though the cold remained, intensified, the gale fell dead and the sea to the flatness of pavement. The clouds had gone. The sky looked tangible, superbly rich in its depth and ablaze with stars. A little unreal the brilliance of these stars; unreal the first shape of Norway, the distant, snow-draped hills cut as if from paper and laid against the darkness. Still less believable that this was battleground. They saw, with some surprise, that the lighthouses of Hovdenoes and Bergsholmenes were working. So nothing had leaked. At 08.49 hours the Pathan passed into the fjord. She was precisely sixty seconds late. No longer a rehearsal, but the show itself; and still, to Mellier, it lacked reality, a battlefield so silent yet, an operation so precise.

3

At Z.12 the first assault ships pulled to port, steered for the bulge of Matrog, the destroyer nursemaid steaming in their wake. The Hazlitt held her course, the rest in line ahead, their intervals exact, till the Gurkha swung sharply nor’ard for the shelter of Maaloy. The minute lost had been made up: the Studland had dropped astern; at precisely 09.11 hours she released her assault landing craft. A minute to go and the lads above should be starting up the orchestra. A minute went and the voice of thirty kestrels filled the sky.

“ Pretty good for Finchwater,” Peerforce said. You could feel on the Hazlitt’s bridge the force of the bombs exploding on Maaloy: as if the ship was clutched by that ferocity of sound, and shook a little to get free. Uneasy, for he liked the solid earth to fight on, the Brigade Major kept one eye on his watch. It was nice, he thought, the Air Force timing; the Air Force was a good show after all, he might put his son there. Another minute and the Hazlitt’s guns began to speak, treading across the air bombardment as if that were mere silence. Like all things that the Navy does, the barrage was tidy, precise in time and space; to the eye a window display of golden sausages, to the ear a vast contusion. Far over, high and angry flames showed that the oil tanks had gone up, and a show of fireworks leftward must come from the ammunition store. Those were the Air Force jobs, the Brigade Major remembered, and he jotted the time approvingly. The assault landing craft were lost beneath the smoke. A red Very light leaped from the haze, and three more followed. So quickly that it seemed to be simultaneous, the destroyers pitched a row of flares far up into the sky. The guns had stopped already, and before the last of the star shells burst, the crunch of bombs had ceased; the RAF made no mistake about their cues. You caught sight, over to the north, of a Hampden banking steeply, you heard her with her sisters come screaming along the line of shore. The smoke bombs fell, a row of bulbs planted by a titanic gardener, and the separate puffs were joined in a cloudy sash. Like toys packed up, the Hampdens were gone, no one knew how or where.

“Soup, sir,” the Brigade Major’s batman roared into the silence; and “Flags,” the Rear Admiral said testily, “request that person to moderate his tone.”

Iota landing group, with the Lokke factory on the mainland as its objective, was put ashore in a narrow creek. Compared with practices on the English coast the landing was a simple affair, the rocks not hard to negotiate, no wire worth mentioning. “Like getting off a taxi stop,” someone said. The group commander, Lieutenant Stow Treddart, left his men narrowly dispersed in a vegetable garden and the adjoining timber yard, and went forward to reconnoitcr, taking only a runner. Neither came back. A man called Olland, normally a land agent’s clerk in Newbury, could see the chimneys of the factory from where he stood behind a stack of deals. He was colder than he had ever been in his life, and wanting desperately to urinate: for he happened to be a man whom noise alarms (he had just discovered this) as many children are scared by Christmas crackers. The barrage on Maaloy had stopped, there were no more of the shattering crunches — only from somewhere behind him the whipcrack of rifle fire and something which might be light machine guns. In an odd way he was sorry the row over there had stopped, since that had been someone else’s war and the next might come his way. Death was something a chap could put up with, but not with a noise like that if it came quite close.

Between Olland and the factory the timber houses were spread unevenly, like recruits on their first parade, with no fenced gardens: a careless town built wandering towards the hills. The nearest sound was of a dog barking; the smell of bread from one of the houses covered the smell of brine and fishery. The corporal, rather out of breath, said, “The sarge has taken over — we go this way,” and started off in cat darts towards the sea. Olland went after him. They used the drill for this, combined as the forwards are in football — Bob Collett and Dyson over on the right, Wee Peter left, with Olland and May beyond him. You had to look both ways at once, keeping the houses scanned, never letting Wee Peter get out of sight: with an eye to your feet, where boats and the clobber of fishermen could trip you at every stride, and one for the rear to be sure that Huggins was in his place there. That was all there was to it, except to shift like a bat out of hell. He began to like the cold, as the warmth of exertion came up to meet it, though the coldness of the air he breathed was like sandpaper along his throat and chest; he enjoyed the working of ship-cramped limbs, the sense of his body’s skill which he had got from High Pyke and Skiddaw. A little frightened still, he was glad to hear Mac’s familiar grunts, Mac’s blasphemy as he tripped on a rubber fender; he was reassured by the shape of Wee Peter’s huge behind and the grenades he always carried there. Seawards the guns had started again, but that was the other fellows’ war.

Some way ahead, a plait of fuliginous smoke had sprouted where the Mortens factory should be — so the Kappa group had done their stuff already. Something had stung him in the forearm: he was surprised to see blood running down the back of his hand. The corporal was swinging left and the section closing in. He turned and vaulted over a chicken shed and cut the shortest way up the road with Mac puffing behind and, from the strange nature of the Scots, occasionally laughing.

4

The German armed trawler Fahn had scampered away with her brood, the steamships Regmar, Norman, and Eduard Fritzen, and he beached them near the head of the sound. There happened, then, to be the noise of hell from the Hazlitt’s guns, in deliberate duel with the Rugsundo battery. But Peerforce was not a man much disturbed by sound, and as he sat in the boarding craft he was making notes in his neat, small writing: “I was ordered to board and search Regmar and Norman before sinking them; 11.06 hrs. boarding craft put off. . . . 11.09 hrs. first boarding party with Lieut. F. Dobell, R.N.V.R.; boarding party with seven ratings under my own command boarded Norman. Both ships found abandoned except for one officer on bridge of Regmar, dead. Stores and ammunition found in Regmar, some removed as Appendix D to be attached. Papers of both ships removed. Some sniping occurred from crews which had taken positions on the hill. One rating wounded in left foot, one in jaw. We returned fire from Norman. 11.19 hrs. I ordered Lieut. Dobell return with six prisoners. . . . 11.48 hrs. above-mentioned ships sunk by gunfire.”

In this affair Dobell was slightly wounded, a part of his left ear being blown away. He was an auctioneer in civil life, his training in land warfare had been negligible, and his methods were not according to the book. A lane led up from the shore towards a farm in the hill; up this lane Dobell trudged, vaguely flourishing his pistol and shouting in English, “Come here, you B-s, blast you, come over here.” These particular Germans knew less about land warfare than he did, and half a dozen of them came.

The Brigade Major wrote upon his message pads. This morning was full of aggravations. The No. 18 wireless sets were giving trouble (he made a note, “ Recommend spare battery with every set”); the last shell from Rugsundo had pitched unpleasantly close, bringing a spray of splint ers up to the bridge; and no one knew what had happened to Mellier. Still, there was some convenience in having a cruiser for one’s battle headquarters, and the uproar kept out all the little sounds that made most of life so tiresome. The sun appeared, and the hills became a glory of magenta. The Brigade Major smiled.

Close to the telegraph office, which was now on fire, Olland leaned against a wall. Mysteriously, he had lost his way among the houses; he thought the street going left would lead to the factory but he couldn’t be sure. He was very tired, the tiredness chiefly in his legs and brain; it came, he supposed, from the Norwegian air, for the exertions of that morning had been child’s play. It angered him to find himself so feeble, and he wondered how he would ever clean his battle-dress, filthy all down one leg with this perishing blood. A minute’s rest and he would get on again, trying the left-hand road. The sound of rifle and submachine-gun fire was distinctly from that direction. This road was narrow and cobbled, and had the fresh marks of scrapping in it: a handcart overturned, with bits of equipment flung about, and a body — one of ours, he thought — with its face on a doorstep. Further along, a wounded German sat against the wall, with his back this way, firing unsteadily but patiently through a gap in the houses. The smoke confused you, gathering and dissolving, creeping along the eaves. An Englishman with his helmet gone arrived through the smoke behind; his face was bloody and soberly anxious, the face of a man doing figures who can’t get the answer right. “You belong to Iota?” this man asked. (It was Captain Mellier, Olland saw now.) “Have you any idea where your chaps have got to?” As a kind of answer, the fire on the left increased; a Bren was letting fly by the sound of it, and fairly close grenades were popping. A man blackened with smoke run by, shouting, “Through that way, sir!” and Mellier followed, with Olland after him. There were more behind: the cockney Ebbury and Charlie Rose, Swindles and Spud and the redheaded corporal from Potter’s Bar. They ran together and silenced the German and arrived in the brewery square.

The demolition party with its bag of tricks was squatting behind a weighhouse, the sapper sergeant in gentle reproof eyeing his watch. The factory gates were forty yards away, and the bodies of Mac and Hyson showed what happened when you tried to get the Germans within their limited fire-power. They had rifles in the factory itself (they were sniping now) and (from the pepper-marks on the brewery wall) perhaps a light machine gun.

Captain Mellier moved out a little way and guessed where the machine gun was: beyond the church, the flat roof of a place that looked like a customhouse. A bullet chipped the cobbles beside his feet, he went back into shelter calling, “Corporal Wield . . . You will take the rest of your section, with Murphy and Rose. You see the yellow house, the second one, with the thingummy on its roof? That’s where you’re to wait till I give the signal — You’re clear on that? — Then straight in with grenades. Don’t stop for drinks or anything. Now, Hodson, you see where that cart is over there? . . .” (‘The surgeon’s fee might be ten quid, say three quid for . . . say fifteen quidall told. Christine’s people might be good for a fiver, and anyway it had to be done. Poor Mike — would it scare him when they put the mask over his head?’) “You’re in a bloody mess,” he said to Olland, and Olland grinning said, “Bloody’s the word, sir.” He looked about for something to clean his trousers with; Wee Peter would never cease to rag him for getting his trousers mucked like that. But the nearest likely place was the first of the yellow houses, and that was where the spasmodic bullets fell. He crept to the weighhouse and sat down among the sappers, shutting his eyes. A Bren was in action somewhere near, and it felt like knuckles drumming inside his forehead.

Olland passes in and out of sleep like a train through a few yards of tunnel. It is the pop of Mellier’s Very pistol which has wakened him and now the act is on. From his former place by the brewery gate he can see far along the seaward wall, can just discern the figures of Corporal Taper’s party as they dart across toward the farther gate. A random shot from one of Hodson’s men is enough to provoke the factory light machine gun; two rifles join in from the factory windows, and Hodson’s rifles reply. But as yet no noise from the left. The men waiting in the scanty shelter of the trees are very still. Mellier is kneeling there, with his head turned sideways, his face patient but a little vexed the face of a schoolmaster waiting for a simple question to be answered, faintly absurd, with the eyebrows sooty and mustache soaked in blood. “What’s the blokes waiting for?” the corporal asks. The sergeant says, “Ay, you Saxons, they’re bloody idle ; and then the racket starts on the left, grenades and yelling and 303, and 303; and Wield’s fun-and-games are under way.

5

To a point the improvised plan worked smoothly enough. The Germans in the factory had done well, managing their fire with discretion and economy, but the arrival of Taper’s party from the rear disturbed their steadiness. The light machine gun stopped altogether (perhaps from a jam, perhaps from a grenade lobbed neatly through the side window) and the rifle fire became erratic. What happened on the left is less clear. Mellier believed that the German machine gun was out of action; that was what the sounds had told him; and certainly Wield’s assault went in, for in Chatterley’s report he says that he afterwards saw the bodies of two machine-gunners lying close to Wield’s own. The fact remains that when Mellier’s party sprinted to the factory gates the machine gun opened up for a final burst, laying a cone from the factory gate to the other side of the square. When Olland saw Mellier running forward he felt quite fit again, and went hell-for-leather after him. When the machine gun opened, Mellier went over like a rabbit and Olland went past him, running flat out, supremely happy and a moment afterwards dead. Mellier got up again and went on doubled up, hugging his stomach. A man called Felworth got through the gate first, with Ebbury second, then Mellier and the rest behind. The sappers with their machinery followed sedately, the youngest of the party taking pains to keep in step.

The Brigade Major, whose helmet had been removed into the sea by the last explosion, had a typewritten list of the infantry tasks on the back of his message pad: “offices of the German command, w/t station, searchlight station, coast defense guns (4), can and lorry garage, lighthouse mechanism. . . .” As the messages came in he ticked them off. Nothing yet from Treddart, whose pigeon was the Lokke factory; he looked through his binoculars again, but all the smoke was confusing and the brewery got in the way. Also, the Hazlitt was eternally in gentle motion; another nautic custom he supposed, and a guest could hardly interfere. A tongue of light sprang from the way he looked, followed by a triple explosion like the bark of an old farmyard dog; and where the flash had once come from, the black smoke bulged to the shape of a chestnut tree. He murmured, “Good boy, Treddart ” (not knowing Treddart had been dead for an hour), and put a tick against the Lokke factory. . . .

They noticed at Bridget Sound, waking to find the warships back, that the Hazlitt had been patched close to the water line, that the Gurkha’s upper parts were all askew. “All done by seagulls,” they were told by Peerforce; “the beasts come very fierce this year.”

The soldiers lounged in the thin sunshine all along Crippett’s Yard, smoking, and some asleep. Along by the gates the color sergeant was fussing over his stores checks, and the children ran happily among the soldiers, sniffing the curious odor they had brought and begging for sweets.

In the Queen’s Hotel, Peerforce found his binoculars, sent on from London. He asked what had happened to Mellier. “One in the tummy and one in the left leg, ‘ the Brigade Major told him. “The Doc thinks he may get away with it — but the leg won’t be any good.” “I wish you’d see him, sir,” someone said. “He’s worrying frightfully. He got his first task through on time, but the Lokke show was frightfully late.” A sergeant came: “Begging your pardon, Mr. Chatlerley, sir, I’d be glad if you could see that bloke Ebbury. Just to put the fear of God into him, if you wouldn’t mind, sir. He does nothing but moan about his back pay. “I’ll leave you this to pay for the drinks,” the Brigade Major said. " I must go and talk horse-sense to Mellier. . . . Oh, and Maurice, you’ve heard, I suppose, that you’re going back to Cricklewood? ‘ “Cricklewood? My God.” “But this time it’s something really interesting. You’ve heard of a place called this?” He wrote on a piece of paper “Madagascar” and threw it in the fire. “Yes, Africa, or thereabouts. . . . It’ll want a good deal of donkey’s work; the programtiming at Vaagso was not nearly good enough. . . . I must go and see Mellier, and get this blasted bandage changed.”