Tag Archives: World War II

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Memories of wartime

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My great-grandfather Lars Swelland and his wife Martha, in happier times.

I didn’t post anything in remembrance of the 80th anniversary of D-Day yesterday, for which I apologize. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking of the observance. I flew the flag at my house. It’s just that I didn’t know what to say about it – and still don’t. The scope of the sacrifice overwhelms me. It’s not enough to say that we need to be worthy of it all – the fact is, we’re not worthy, and as a civilization we’ve stopped trying to be. If those boys (most were just boys), European and American, could have seen what their children and grandchildren would do with the world they saved for us, they’d have turned back in disgust.

Instead, purely for the sake of my sanity, I’ll turn to smaller-scale matters. I’ve often written here of the occupation of Norway. It ended in 1945 – there’s a year yet to go before they celebrate the 80th anniversary of their liberation. Which they’ll do on May 8, 2025.

My own family has little to report (that I know of) in the whole story of the war. My dad served in the Japan occupation forces, and saw no action. One uncle on my mother’s side was a Marine in the Pacific — I know nothing about his service. One of Dad’s cousins was killed in the war (more about that later), but I never heard much about him. I believe one of my cousins on Karmøy Island was a War Sailor, a merchantman under military command. If you saw the miniseries War Sailor (which I helped translate), you know about that perilous service.

And then there was my great-grandfather Lars Swelland, of whom I’ve written here before – but that was in the days of the old blog host, and the post seems to have disappeared when we migrated. I’ll just recap his story briefly; perhaps I’ll flesh it out at another time.

In brief, Great-grandfather Lars lost his heart for America after his wife died and the Great Depression hit. Having missed one mortgage payment on his farm, and getting a single dunning letter from the company holding the note, he packed up, boarded a train, and traveled to New York, where he got on a ship back to Norway, ignoring all telegraphic pleas from his family and the mortgage company, who tried to tell him it wasn’t as bad as he thought. (The family lost the farm.) In Norway he did not return to his home farm, but settled in another town – Tysness, near Bergen, to live the rest of his life in poverty. He died during the war, out of communication with his children. I have a letter his landlady sent to my grandmother once the war was over, and I’ve translated it thus:

Tvedt,  6 February, 1946

Dear Sofie!

[I] can easily understand that you will wonder who is sending you this letter. It was here at my home that your father Lars Svelland lived. I have thought so often about sending you a letter, but somehow it never happened. As you have probably heard from your sister Millie, your father is dead. He died 14 August, at 1:00 midday, 1942. He asked me to greet you all, but we were caught up in all the worst of wartime, and were unable to send letters.

Your father died of a stroke, bleeding on the brain. He lay [in bed] 3 weeks, and was very sick, but he was so thankful; never a complaining word. It was his right side that was completely paralyzed, and he had so much trouble speaking. But after he had lain there 2 weeks, it happened that he got his voice again, and I was so happy, believing he had come back again, but God had other ideas.

And I thank God that he got his voice again. Then he was able to thank Jesus, and then he prayed the Our Father, the Lord’s prayer, and that is the holiest prayer we can pray. He had several times when he felt poorly, when he was plagued by the spirit of doubt, but at the end he was quite all right.

But in 1940 he [had] had a hemorrhage; it came on so suddenly. He spit up a great mass of blood. He recovered somewhat after that turn, so that he was up [and about], but never got his strength [back]. But remarkably, his weakness got better after he’d had the hemorrhage, so that he could eat more ordinary food.

The day he had his fatal attack he had been out fishing a little, and he ate so well at supper with fresh fish.

But Sofie, you would never believe how glad I am that God ordained it so that he was able to come home again and die at home, so that I could care for him. It would have been so terrible to think of if he had fallen into the sea. Now God was so kind that he came home again, and [I] was able to hear him thank Jesus, so that if you are not able to see your father again in this life, you will meet him at home with Jesus.

And he lived as a Christian and died in faith in the completed work that Jesus has done for all who receive Him in faith.

Your father sang so often the song, “I Know a Rest So Fair and Long in David’s city afar; there I will rest from the press of time, and shine myself like a star.” Yes, now he has [gone?; hard to translate] out, and he is shining like a star.

Sofie, I have found a letter which you sent your father, dated 1934, and that letter was so beautifully written that I wept happy tears, and among other things, you ask whether he has forgotten you [all]. But he thought much about all of you, so you were not forgotten by him, and especially when the war broke out with America, you were even more in his thoughts. As long as there was a radio in the parish, he walked a long way to hear how it was going. But then the Germans came and everyone had to turn their radios in. Yes, that was a hard time, when the war was going on, a hard time for Norway, but like a miracle it is over. But now it has come about that we have gotten more food, so the people are so thankful. The Germans took everything from us, so that if the war had been any longer, there would have been genuine famine, and not a little of it. You can judge whether we were in want. People around the countryside are directed to use [oil] lamps. This past winter we got 1 liter of oil per month. There was nothing for lighting; now we get 25 liters, and before the war people could get as much oil as they wanted. Yes, it was cruel to be without any light [over] the long winter nights.

But in 3 years there will be electric light here, and also for cooking. But it has been a difficult time. That can be forgotten, but what the many prisoners have had to endure, that is completely horrible; [they] were tortured to death and the poor mothers who grieve the loss of their boys. It is only God who can comfort the many who sit longing for their loved ones. I see from Millie’s letter that your sister has lost her boy; may God give comfort and help her in her sorrow. Your father always believed that the young sons of his children would have to go out, and spoke and thought so [much] about them; now he was not able to live to see the peace for which he longed so much. It would have been so precious if he had lived, but the Lord’s ways are not ours.

[I] hope you are able to understand my letter, even if it is not so well written.

[I] enclose a little picture which is a passport photo we all had to have when the war came.

So in conclusion,

                Hearty greetings,

                Yanette Tvedt Nymark

                Tysnes Bergen

                Norway

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘War Sailor’

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Another film project on which I worked as a script translator is now available in the US. War Sailor, a Norwegian film released last year (the most expensive movie ever made in Norway, I’m informed), has been expanded into a three-part miniseries for Netflix. I binged it last night and wish to recommend it to you.

After an opening set in Singapore after World War II, we go back to 1939 and observe our two main characters, Alfred (“Freddie”) and Sigbjørn (“Wally”). Freddie is a hard-working family man in Bergen, and Wally is his bachelor friend. Jobs are hard to find, and Wally encourages Freddie to join him in signing on to a merchant ship. Freddie’s wife Cecilia is concerned about the danger, as the war is going on, but Wally reassures her that they’re only going to New York. As both Norway and the US are neutral there’s minimal danger, he reasons. Anyway, he promises to keep Freddie safe.

By the time they reach New York, Germany has invaded and Norway is at war. The Norwegian government has nationalized the country’s merchant shipping (one of their major industries) and put it all at the disposal of the allies for carrying war munitions and supplies. The sailors are suddenly de facto members of the Navy (albeit unarmed), without the privilege of resigning.

What follows is a season in Hell. German U-boats are taking a desperate toll on the Norwegian ships (fully half of them were sunk over the course of the war) and casualties are high. Freddie takes an underaged sailor under his wing as a sort of surrogate son, and gives up a chance to escape from the service in order to protect the young man. When their ship is torpedoed, Freddie and Wally find themselves sharing a raft with a dying man and a madman.

Meanwhile, Freddie’s family at home is struggling to make ends meet, is worried sick about him, and is facing dangers of their own from Allied bombers. It all culminates in one of those bureaucratic snafus that start in mixed signals and end in ravaged lives.

It’s tempting to call the story a tragedy, but in fact it’s better described as aggravated irony. In the world of this war, virtue is never rewarded, and no good deed goes unpunished.

Brilliantly filmed, directed, and acted, War Sailor is not light entertainment. Be prepared for strong language, horrific violence, and dark themes. Not for the kids, but well worth watching for adults.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

The conservative resistance to Hitler

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My friend Gene Edward Veith has a review up at the Acton Institute. He reports on the book, White Knights in the Black Orchestra, by Tom Dunkel. Although the book is not primarily an examination of conservatives in wartime Germany, it does make it plain that the conservative conspiracy to kill Hitler was much bigger than Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his circle, and that German conservatives constituted a major, and serious, challenge to the Third Reich. He writes.

My impression had always been that Bonhoeffer was caught up in a quixotic and poorly planned attempt by a small group of German aristocrats and military officers at the very end of the war, and that his role was minimal, basically that of a courier. But Dunkel shows that the Black Orchestra conspiracy began in the earliest days of Hitler’s regime, that it penetrated to the highest levels of the German war machine, and that it carried out many anti-Nazi missions, some of which had an impact on the outcome of the war…..

Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was battling the so-called German Christians, who wished to Nazify the Protestant state church by turning Christianity into a cultural religion (as liberal theologians were already doing) and expunging its “Jewish elements” to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. (This, too, was made feasible by piggybacking on the work of generations of liberal Bible scholars who had succeeded in undermining biblical authority within the state church.)….

That National Socialism is thought of today as an extreme kind of conservatism is one of the biggest victories of Marxist propaganda. This book shows that Hitler and his followers were radical revolutionaries, who sought to liquidate—not conserve—the traditional Western values of faith, morality, and freedom.

Dunkel does not play up the conservative and Christian angle as such, beyond saying that the conspirators “tended to be politically conservative to the bone” and describing the key figures as devout Christians.

Read the whole thing here.
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‘Narvik’ coming to Netflix

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I see now that the movie ‘Narvik,’ dramatizing the World War II battle, is coming to Netflix January 23. So I guess it’s okay for me to tell you that I worked on this project as a script translator. It was one of the very first I was involved in.

I look forward to ‘Narvik’ with great anticipation. Not only does it tell the story of a nearly-forgotten, epic moment in the story of the war, but it gives proper credit at last to the Norwegian General Fleischer, who had the honor of being the first commander to defeat the Germans on land in that conflict. And who’s story was tragically suppressed.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Splendid and the Vile,’ by Erik Larson

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Diarist Phyllis Warner found that she and fellow Londoners were surprised by their own resilience. “Finding we can take it is a great relief to most of us,” she wrote on September 22. “I think that each one of us was secretly afraid that he wouldn’t be able to, that he would rush shrieking to shelter, that his nerve would give, that he would in some way collapse, so that this has been a pleasant surprise.”

Author Erik Larson has found himself a useful and profitable niche, writing about famous characters and events in historical accounts that combine the actions of famous persons with the lives of ordinary people, to give us a many-faceted picture. The Splendid and the Vile is his account of London during the Blitz; mostly set in the crucial year of 1940. The spotlight is, naturally, on Winston Churchill and his closest circle – his cabinet ministers and department heads, and his family. But we also get to see events through the eyes of ordinary citizens. And from time to time he looks across the channel to see how Hitler and his henchmen – who couldn’t understand why Churchill repeatedly snubbed their “friendly” peace offers — reacted and responded.

And meanwhile, the ordinary public suffered, died, and (most of them) survived.

It was a harrowing time, and this is a harrowing book. But also fascinating, informative, and sometimes even darkly comic. Historical figures come alive through their own words. The great drama and surprise in the book is something neither Hitler, nor even Churchill, really foresaw – the amazing courage of the English people; what they were willing to endure to defend their civilization.

What troubled me most as I read was something not in the book – the knowledge that this epic crusade for western civilization would end in the abandonment of eastern Europe to Stalin. Plus the knowledge that the children and grandchildren of these brave people would happily accede to the demolition of that civilization in our time.

Still and all, The Splendid and the Vile is an excellent look at a pivotal point in history. Highly recommended.

Non-fiction

America’s Year of Peril

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When she first heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, sixteen-year-old Elaine R. Engelson of Brooklyn was “amazed and ashamed” of her “weakness in facing a world crisis.” She wrote to the New York Times the next day that although she, like many others, had “felt the inevitability of war” for some time, “the thought of it actually having come upon us was sudden.” The horrifying events in Hawaii suddenly changed the rhythms of the teenager’s life. She had grown accustomed to countless airplanes flying overhead, but on December 8, the sound of an approaching plane produced a new sense of dread. Although “the world has not yet come to an end by any means,” she had the ominous feeling that “we are on the brink of a precipice overhanging a world of complete darkness.” What was at stake, she said, was something she and many Americans had not fully appreciated until then: “We are fighting to save the world from a fate worse than death.” For a stunned nation, it seemed impossible that the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been caught so unaware. Over twenty-four hundred Americans had died, and the navy had lost eight battleships…. Along with shock and anger came another reaction, shared by millions on both coasts. People wondered if Pearl Harbor was just a prelude to something far worse. In a Gallup poll taken shortly after December 7, 60 percent responded that it was “very likely” or “fairly likely” that the West Coast would be attacked in the next few weeks.

World News Group named Tracy Campbell’s The Year of Peril: America in 1942 their 2020 History Book of the Year for telling history with dramatic flair. They share an excerpt of the book in today’s Saturday series post.

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Liberation Day

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Today is the 75th anniversary of VE Day, “Victory in Europe Day,” in 1945. It was a bigger commemoration when I was a boy, when those events were still recent history to all the grownups I knew.

In Norway it’s known as Frigjøringsdag, “Liberation Day.” The bit of newsreel footage I’ve posted above provides one of the more amusing moments of that event. A German commander, Oberst Karsch, marches up to British Air Commander Darrell, a big smile on his face, as if hoping to convince him it’s all been a big misunderstanding and to let bygones be bygones. Darrell is not amused, and appears to defer to his Norwegian colleagues.

It’s an important date. Too bad the Norwegians can’t celebrate it properly under current conditions.

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Maundy Thursday, 2020

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Today is Maundy Thursday in the church calendar. The word “maundy” is related to the Latin root of the word “mandate,” meaning command. It’s a reference to Christ’s words at the Last Supper: “A new commandment I give you, to love one another as I have loved you.”

This is a day for Holy Communion in many churches. Most traditional Lutherans aren’t doing the sacrament until the quarantine is over, though. Because we believe actual physical presence is necessary. (My own church is doing virtual communion online, but we’re kind of outlaws.)

April 9 is a sad day in Norwegian history. 80 years ago today, German troops marched into Oslo. They actually expected to be greeted as saviors, protecting the Norwegians from the British, who’d been violating Norwegian neutrality in various ways. The Norwegian government wasn’t quite sure what to do with them at first — after all, Hitler was (for the moment) allied with Stalin, who was a friend and benefactor to Norway’s ruling Labor Party. When the troops marched in, they got a police escort.

However, on that same day, Norwegian troops at Oscarsborg Fortress on the Oslofjord, under the command of Col. Birger Eriksen, fired on a German battleship. The Blucher was a brand-new ship; many of its crew were raw recruits on their first voyage. But among the personnel on board were Gestapo officers and other personnel whose assignment was to capture the Norwegian royal family and government. Because the ship had refused to respond to warning shots, Col. Eriksen determined that whoever they were (he didn’t know at that point), they were hostile and it was his duty to fire on them. His words were, “Either I will be decorated or I will be court-martialled. Fire!” His guns and ammunition were old, but they performed admirably. Both his battery’s shots hit, and the Blucher began burning. Further shots from secondary batteries caused further damage, and the Blucher sank with the loss of 650-800 soldiers and sailors (1,400 survived). The delay caused by the sinking gave the royal family and the government time to escape the city, and ultimately to flee to exile in England.

The movie The King’s Choice includes a dramatization of the battle:

Aside from Atlantic Crossing, which I’ve told you about, I’ve done some other work having to do with Norway in World War II, which I still can’t tell you about. I hope they’re released eventually. I’m quite proud of them.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Return to the Future,’ by Sigrid Undset

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Pre-Christian pagans – Greeks and Romans and Nordic peoples, or redskins and Asiatic tribes – have usually conceived of the Golden Age as having been some time in the past. The present was hard, and the future was dark and full of menace. When the Christian Church began to speak and taught that God’s kingdom would come, it was in reality challenging people’s innermost convictions.

Inconstant and fickle as I am, I shall now contradict what I told you yesterday about blogging my way through The Conservative Mind. A small writing job came up which required me to bone up on Sigrid Undset, and I decided I needed to read an Undset book I’ve owned for a while but had not yet read – her 1942 war memoir, Return to the Future.

The original manuscript for Viking Legacy included a short passage from Undset, about the ancient piles of stones in Norway which have been cleared from the fields over the centuries. She declares them Norway’s “proudest monuments of antiquity” (my translation). Sadly, that passage (which I adored) was omitted from the final version. I didn’t realize, until I picked up Return to the Future, that it was the opening paragraph of that work.

In April 1940, as the Germans advanced northward in Norway, author Sigrid Undset left her home in Lillehammer in haste. She and her youngest son, Hans, fled with other refugees up to the coast at Molde, where they turned eastward toward the Swedish border, traveling at times on foot or on skis. It was only after their arrival in Sweden that they learned that her oldest son, Anders, an officer in the Norwegian army, had been killed in action. After a short stayover in Sweden, she and Hans took a Russian plane for a connection to the Trans-Siberian railroad.

The trip on the Trans-Siberian forms a large section of the book, and does not present an appealing picture. Even traveling first class, they found the accommodations (built under the Czars and badly maintained) filthy, the food terrible, the compartments stifling (you could not open the windows because of the soot, which got in anyway), and there was no running water. What she saw of the country revealed nothing but poverty, filth, and dull, lifeless faces. In spite of vaunted universal literacy, almost nobody read anything. The Catholic Undset saw in Russia everything she already suspected about Communism.

Arriving in Vladivostok, they take a steamer to Japan, and it’s a whole different world. Though like the rest of the world she is appalled by reports of Japanese atrocities in China, she can’t help but marvel at the beauty of the clothing and the architecture, the delicate politeness of the people (though they insist on ignoring her in favor of Hans, because he’s the male), and the cleanliness everywhere. Her description of the Japanese leg of her trip gives her the opportunity to meditate at length on the nature of politics and power, and how the West has – to some extent – brought the war on itself through treating non-westerners as if they were as materialistic as we are.

Her voyage ended in the United States, and she crossed our country by train, finally settling in Brooklyn. But the book ends before her arrival. One assumes it was brought out fairly quickly, as part of her campaign to promote the cause of the Norwegian government in exile.

Return to the Future was interesting, both for the first-hand account of Norway under attack, and for Undset’s thoughts about international politics, morality and war. She spends a lot of time on the historical sins of the Germans (she baldly declares Martin Luther a “psychopath,” but I forgive her). The sense of the title, as I understand it, is that the Nazi invasion had plunged Norway back into the dark past, and that in coming to America she was returning to the “future” to which she was accustomed. The implication is that America had an obligation to bring that future back for the victims of the war. I would rate the translation by Henriette C. K. Naeseth as adequate, though I flatter myself that I could have done better.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saboteur,’ by Andrew Gross

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In 1965, an English/American film called The Heroes of Telemark was released. It starred Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris as Norwegian saboteurs attacking the German “heavy water” (deuterium oxide) production facility at Rjukan in Telemark during World War II. Heavy water was a necessary buffering agent in the German program to split the atom, presumably to produce an atomic bomb.

The film took a highly cinematic approach to the story, compressing all the action into a couple weeks and replacing the actual participants with fictionalized and combined characters. It found a mixed response in Norway, where people who’d been through the war complained that it took Kirk Douglas two weeks to do by himself what it took a whole team two years to accomplish in real life.

I kept thinking of that film as I read The Saboteur, Andrew Gross’s similarly (though not so thoroughly) fictionalized account of the same clandestine operations.

Kurt Nordstrum is a Norwegian engineer who leaves his career to join the Resistance – with tragic consequences in his personal life. When an engineer at the Norsk Hydro facility in Rjukan tells him and a comrade that they need to get some microfilm to the English immediately, they hijack a coastal steamer and – just barely – manage to escape to Scotland. Then he and his friend join Company Linge, the Norwegian commando unit, and are eventually airdropped back in Norway. Their mission, from which they do not expect to return alive, is to destroy the Heavy Water production facility. Kurt’s father used to tell him, “A true man goes on until he can go no further… and then he goes twice as far.” And that’s precisely what he and his team will be called on to do before it’s over.

Honestly, I found this a hard book to read, but I’m not sure it’s the book’s fault. I knew this story pretty well already, and so was preparing myself emotionally for the unpleasant parts. Author Gross anticipates those expectations to an extent by making small changes in the story. Kurt Nordstrum (who is essentially standing in for real saboteur Knut Haukelid but has a very different back story), is enabled by his imaginary status to do stuff, and get into dilemmas, that Haukelid never did. I found some of those stuff and dilemmas somewhat implausible, but I can’t deny I was moved by the entirely imaginary heroics at the end.

I was bothered all through by the fictional changes, especially the handling of the characters. Several of the saboteurs here are real people, others are fictional (including an entirely imaginary Norwegian-American). I understand the narrative freedom that gave the author (as mentioned above), but it kind of nagged at me.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much about the spelling of Norwegian names and places. It’s pretty hit and miss, but I probably should be thankful for the effort.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that I can recommend The Saboteur to those who aren’t already familiar with the Heavy Water mission. But after you read it, you’ll want to read Neal Bascomb’s The Winter Fortress or something like that to get the actual facts.