The Shetland Bus Gang of WW2
Script:
Known as Operation Weserübung, on April 9th, 1940, the German army invaded the sovereign nation of Norway, primarily to obtain naval bases for use against the British, as well as a geographic pathway to secure much-needed iron-ore shipments from neutral Sweden. A fiercely independent people, Norwegians were unwillingly incorporated into the Greater Germanic Union, yet much like the French under Hitler’s control, resistance fighters soon rose in numbers to push back against the brutality of Hermann Goring’s Gestapo police force. Many Norwegians attempted to flee to the safety of England, including King Haakon VII, his family, top government officials and most of the gold from the Norwegian National Bank, leading to the rise of a fleet of mainly small fishing boats that ferried Norwegians across the dangerous weather conditions inherent on the North Sea, landing in Lerwick in the Shetland Islands; the first landfall north of the Scottish mainland.
Nicknamed Little Norway after the mass migration of Norwegians, Lewick soon became home to a gang of largely youthful resistance fighters known as the Shetland Bus Gang, who operated under the direction of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service or SIS and the Special Operations Executive or SOE. As the Shetland Bus Gang evolved, their role was to ferry spies, commandos and supplies into Norway, with the intent of harassing German occupying forces, supply lines and infrastructure. Made up of Norwegian civilians who staunchly refused to comply with military order or discipline, men like Lief Larsen of Bergen—one of the oldest at 35 years of age—purchased a fishing boat and sailed it to Lerwick, where he would risk his life on 52 clandestine missions to Norway, which by the end of the war made him the most decorated person in British and Norwegian naval history. By war’s end, his awards include the British Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, Distinguished Service Medal and Bar, Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, while his Norwegian awards included the War Cross with Sword, St. Olav’s Medal, the Norwegian War Medal and the Defense Medal of 1940-1945.
For many of the Shetland Bus Gang, the families they left behind were subjected to Gestapo interrogation, while many of their fathers were sent to concentration camps or simply executed on the spot. Of the nearly 200 fishing boats employed in the Shetland Bus, each clandestine mission exposed the Bus Gang to a gauntlet of deadly obstacles, including treacherous weather conditions on the North Sea—made worse by the fact that they only sailed at night—German patrol boats, shoreline gun emplacements and even air attacks by the Luftwaffe. After Norwegian commandos sabotaged the railway line near Bergen in June of 1941, Lerwick became not just a sanctuary for those fearful of Nazi persecution, but a base of anti-Nazi resistance that eventually led to the liberation of Norway.
Initially organized by British Army officer Major Leslie Mitchell and his assistant, Lt. David Howarth, the men set up their command post in Flemington House, before moving the fleet to Lunna Ness north of Lerwick, which offered a sheltered harbor and a local population that showed little interest in their nocturnal operations. Officially named Military Establishment Number 7, the name Shetland Bus emerged due to the groups uncanny disregard for military authority and discipline, since the gangs true chain of command came from the SIS and SOE. Oslo native Martin Linger, an early Bus Gang member, took on the task of recruiting young men into the resistance, drawing exclusively single men into a two-month bootcamp training program that, in his words, drove men hard to learn in two months what most people learn in two years, including a robust knowledge of weapons, enemy planes and warships, as well as parachute training and hand-to-hand combat techniques—all the things necessary to mold a competent spy.
The Bus Gang in concert with their SIS and SOE handlers soon fulfilled Churchill’s direct order to set Europe ablaze by whatever means possible, be it poison pill, silenced pistol or plastic explosives. The Shetland Bus Gang also became the private navy of MILORG or the Norwegian Military Organization—a third clandestine group—ferrying MILORG personnel and supplies into Norway for the purpose of sabotage and espionage. Although Major Mitchell was overall commander of the Bus Gang, Lt. Howarth moved to Lunna to oversee day-to-day operations and departures, which became most active during the winter months, when the nights were long and the days were short, and while the practice of night operations allowed the Bus Gang to avoid German detection, by the end of the war, weather would sink more Shetland Bus vessels than German interference.
Sailing in boats 45 to 70 feet in length, most missions to Norway were over 300 miles round trip, while some ventured out over 2,000 miles of treacherous seas, in boats with a one-cylinder engine that could at best produce eight knots of headway in following seas, making them easy prey for German sea patrols. Disguised as innocent fishermen aboard working fishing boat, if their deception failed to fool the enemy, Bus Gang members always stood their ground for a fight, breaking out WW1 era Lewis guns or heavy calibre machine guns cleverly hidden inside empty oil drums. Shetland Bus boats also served a two-way function for the resistance, ferrying in weapons and agents on their outbound voyages, while carrying endangered refugees on their homebound trips, including some 700 Jews saved from the gas chambers.
Norwegian resistance fighters like the Shetland Bus Gang proved to be so effective against German occupying forces that by war’s end, over 300,000 German troops remained tied down in Norway—a situation that proved its worth during the Allies D-Day invasion of five beachheads at Normandy France. Frustrated by the Norwegian resistance, Hitler ordered increased Gestapo pressure on Norwegian resistance fighters, leading to the capture of the Bus Gang’s fishing boat Vigo on the night of August 10th, 1941. Sixteen refugees were summarily executed without due process, while in September, the Nazis made flight from Norway a crime punishable by death. In October of that same year, the town of Telavag, 200 miles from Shetland and no stranger to the Shetland Bus, was destroyed by the Nazis, and while the town was later rebuilt, Norwegians still think of it as the town that died.
On October 28th of 1942, Leif Larsen set sail from Lunna on a mission to sink the 52-ton German battleship Tirpitz, the pride of Hitler’s surface fleet that had played such an instrumental role in the arctic convoy disaster, PQ-17. Larsen and Howarth had first considered packing a fishing boat with explosives used to ram the Tirpitz, but when that was deemed impracticable, the Royal Navy gave them a pair of experimental two-man torpedo delivery submersibles known as Chariots. Driven by a battery powered silent motor, each Chariot carried a 600-pound warhead designed to attach to the hull of an enemy ship by magnets. After a series of mock raids had been carried out on the battleship HMS Rodney, a special compartment was built in the hold of Larsen’s fishing boat, Arthur, to hide and house four frogmen buried within a cargo of pete, while the two Chariots were attached along the Arthur’s keel, ready for final deployment.
After the Germans issued a death warrant for all members of the Shetland Bus Gang, to emphasize the importance of Operation Title, the code name for the attack on Tirpitz, Crown Prince Olaf, the present Norwegian king in exile, saw the men off on what was likely a oneway suicide mission. Approaching their destination at Trondheim Fjord, Larsen was approached by a German guard boat, which let him pass when he told them his hold carried nothing more valuable than pete, only to have his luck run out five miles from the Tirpitz, when a violent wave tore off both Chariots, sending them to the bottom of the sea. Scuttling the Arthur, Larsen and his men successfully crossed Norway into Sweden and back to the Shetland Islands, at a cost of one man’s life.
By the time of Operation Title, Lunna had grown into an armed encampment with a garrison of 40,000 men, leading Haworth to move all Shetland Bus operations to the harbor at Scalloway, since by then Haworth and other Shetland Gang leaders guessed that the Germans were fully aware of their Lunna operations. In February of 1943, the SOE launched Operation Gunnerside, intended to cripple the Norse heavy water facility at Rjukan, which manufactured byproducts vital to the German’s attempt to build a nuclear bomb. Employing British commandos injected into Norway by the Shetland Bus Gang, their first attempt met with disaster due to bad weather, costing the lives of 40 commandos. A second attempt was led by 23-year-old Joachim Ronenbach faired better, when the Shetland Gang successfully delivered a Norwegian engineer first to Scalloway before making his way to London with blueprints of the plant at Rjukan, leading to a second successful commando raid and follow-up Allied bombardment that destroyed both the plant and the remaining stocks of heavy water, putting an end to Hitler’s aspirations for an atomic bomb.
By early 1943, the Shetland Bus faced a crisis brought on by its own success, after the gang had lost many boats, 44 crew and over 100 passengers over the past two winters. Fishing boats and replacement engines became increasingly hard to come by, and while four Icelandic whalers made for a temporary solution, disaster struck twice in March and April, when Larsen was forced to abandon his whaler after it was attacked by German aircraft. A second whaler was lost in April when it was attacked by a U-boat off the Norwegian coast, before the U-boat’s crew executed every man aboard the vessel.
When word of the disasters reached Allied naval command, Admiral Chester Nimitz of the U.S. Navy came to the Shetland Gang’s rescue, ordering three sleek, 110-foot subchasers transferred from New York to Scalloway. Christened the Hitra, Vigra and Hessa, the fast attack ships were equipped with unheard of luxuries for Shetland Gang veterans, including hot and cold running water and a galley replete with a toaster, and while their cover as simple fishermen was thrown to the wind, they could now offer express service in and out of Norway, which greatly accelerated the infusion of spies, commandos and supplies necessary for subterfuge.
Admiral Nimitz’ gift of subchasers could not have arrived at a more providential time in the war, just as D-Day invasion plans were being finalized, since the much larger and faster boats now allowed the Shetland Bus Gang to transport more spies, commandos and supplies into Norway, resulting in a dramatic uptick in resistance sabotage that forced the German high command to commit more troops into Norway, keeping the ever dwindling supply of able body German men away from the soon to be front lines surrounding Normandy.
Unfortunately for average Norwegians, increased resistance meant increased Nazi repression. Even as Germany faced it’s impending defeat, the Gestapo in collaboration with the Norwegian secret police ramped up their brutal efficiency, including mass arrests, torture and interrogation of suspected resistance sympathizers, as well as the capture of two resistance fighters, SOE operative Sverra Roald and SIS radio operator Erling Ronneberg, who had both been recent passengers of the Shetland Bus.
On May the 9th, two days after Germany’s surrender, the Hitra, Vigra and Hessa cast off from Scalloway for their final voyage home, followed by the few remaining fishing boats that remained operational after years of high seas abuse, at last motoring into the Lyngoy Harbor near Bergen in free Norway. Over the course of its clandestine existence, the Shetland Bus Gang had made 198 trips to Norway in fishing boats and subchasers, transporting 192 agents and 383 long tons of weapons and supplies, while extracting 73 agents and countless refugees, all at a cost of 44 lives lost, making the Shetland Bus Gang, one of the toughest resistance organizations in Norway’s fight for freedom against Nazi oppression.