History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: Leif Larsen and the Shetland Bus

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for his whole life Life Larsen had sailed the Norwegian fjords.

It's a very sort of harsh landscape to have all these fjords, which is a result of the ice ice age when the ice retreated inside it kind of ate up the gravel on the way and and made these very sort of deep fjords which are very narrow very sparsely populated as well

it was october 1941 larsen was aboard a small wooden fishing boat the nordchen named after the north sea it sailed on eight other men were with him A thin mist hung in the air.

Through it, the coastline was still visible. The Nordschen was in the Edoi Fjord, an inlet near Christiansen.
The weather was calm. As Larsen steered the wheel, though, he felt a sense of foreboding.

He had an important job to do. They lay the so-called R-mines, which is explosive devices that are laid into the sea and are laying in the sea in a form of a belst.

The plan was to put this belt of mines in place before German troops sailed across in the dark of the night. And then

the mines would explode and sink the ships. As evening began to fall, the Norwegians laid the mines.

The Nordchen had a special hatch cut in its side to release the mines into the sea, but they needed to be dropped quickly. If one of those mines exploded, the entire boat would blow up as well.

Larsen and his crewmate, Carsten Sangholt, gave the first few a push and hoped for the best. All of a sudden, the weather turns.
They were buffeted by the winds of a strong gale.

The sea starts rolling and taking this small fishing smack up and down the waves. It's very hard to get the hatch opened.
The mine starts rolling backwards and forwards with

the tempo of the boat, you know, the boat is going up and down. Larsen and his crewmate worked fast to keep the mines on board dry.

Two fell from the skid and could have exploded. Waves rushed in, drenching the men.

Finally, Larsen and Sankholt heaved the last two mines out by the horns and shut the door of the opening. They had laid six chains, each with seven mines.

Now, the Nordchen needed to leave the area as quickly as possible.

But there was a problem. The boat had filled with water.

They are in a terrifying situation. The engine is choked.
The pumps are not working anymore.

They can literally see the waters rising within the hull of the boat and they see that the boat is about to sink.

Then they heard a coughing and spluttering sound. The motor died.
Now they were adrift in German-occupied waters.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4 this is History's Secret Heroes. True stories of deception, acts of resistance and courage from World War II.

Life Larson and the Shetland bus.

I'm not young, I'm fifty.

I grew up in the 1980s, so became of age in the 1980s, early 90s. This is Askar Ullan, a Norwegian historian and journalist.

We only had one channel when we grew up, you know, so there wasn't much to watch.

You know, the TV used to run from six in the evening until uh eleven at night. Uhlan remembers watching a film as a teenager.
It was this an old sort of black and white film.

Made in the 50s, it was called Shetlandsjöngen, literally the Shetlands Gang, but its English title was Suicide Mission. It was based on a true story about a group of sailors in the Second World War.

They maintained a route between the Shetland Islands, an archipelago far off the north of Scotland, and occupied Norway.

The sailors transported undercover agents to the Norwegian resistance and supplied it with weapons. They also brought Norwegian refugees back to the Shetlands.

In this film, many of the original crew members played themselves, including a man named Life Larsen.

We knew there was a guy called Shetlands Larsen, as we've called him in Norwegian, and that he was a sort of hero of the Second World War, but beyond that, it wasn't very much a part of Norwegian society, or people were talking about him.

Well, you know, I think every little girl thinks their father is very handsome and very nice.

Astrid Larsen's father was Life Larsen. He was not a very big man.
He was not very tall. But he had been,

what do you call it in English? Boxing. Larsen had a broken nose.
He had a tattoo on his arm like every Norwegian seaman had, and it was an anchor and a heart. I think that was so beautiful.

I remember I was... Yeah, I thought that was the finest I ever had seen.

Life Larsen was born in January 1906 into a working-class family living outside Bergen. They were nine children.
They didn't always have a big flat and they didn't always have

all the things they really needed. Like the whole family couldn't sit around the table at the same time because they didn't have enough chairs.

After school, Larsen joined the Merchant Navy. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland in what was known as the Winter War.
Larsen was 34. He joined up to fight on the Finnish side.

A year later, in April 1940, Germany's forces invaded Denmark and Norway. Which was a combined operation with air, sea and land forces, which attacked Norway and Denmark simultaneously.

Denmark surrendered immediately and was occupied by the Nazis. Hitler used the victory as a stepping stone to invade Norway.

He believed, first, that if he could command the Norwegian coastline, he would secure Germany's naval bases.

And the second factor was this natural resources, which there were plenty of in Scandinavia at the time.

Two months later, with German forces poised to take Oslo, Norway's government and treasury fled.

The king of Norway, Hawkon VII, and his son, Crown Prince Olaf, went across the sea to to Britain.

This evacuation saved Norway from formally surrendering to the Nazis, yet it could not save Norway itself from Nazi occupation. In an interview with the BBC, Larsen recalled this moment.

At the beginning of the war, we had the Germans walking the streets in my hometown. I didn't very much like it, so I decided to get into the forces.

In February 1941, Larsen travelled to London along with a group of Norwegian volunteers. They were taken to the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Battersea, along with refugees from all over Europe.

They were screened by MI5 basically and

they had to give information what they've seen, you know, in the matter of German forces,

what positions they were building, the Germans in Norway, what they knew about resistance movements and so forth.

And there were attempts to send people who were actually spying for the Germans at the time. But the screening system worked very well and most of these people were innocent.

The following month Larsen was sent to train with a Linger company, the Norwegian section of the Special Operations Executive.

They were taught special skills, blowing up things, silent killing, navigating, running organizations and so forth. After that, the third part was the parachute course.

After training, Larsen joined the Norwegian Naval Independent Unit. He was told, Report to Shetland.

During the German occupation, the British military needed to find a way of getting weapons, supplies and people into Norway.

You couldn't fly people into Norway, you had to ferry them over with fishing boats.

In November 1940, they established a secret network of small boats to sail the 140-mile route between the northernmost part of Britain, the Shetland Islands, and Norway.

The Norwegians nicknamed the boats the Shetland Bus. If a Norwegian said they were taking the Shetland bus, that meant nothing to the German occupiers.

During the summer, there could be light on the northern parts of the Norwegian coast for 24 hours a day. This made it too dangerous for the Shetland bus to run.

Missions had to be carried out in darkness and often in rough conditions. By the spring of 1941, the Shetland bus urgently needed more sailors.

As a seasoned seaman, Life Larsen was a perfect candidate. Larsen joined 100 or so Norwegians based in the Shetlands.
Carson Sankhold

was another guy from the same area as Larsen. They founded a very strong bond, I think.
Together, Larsen and Sankhold battled the awesome fury of the north and Norwegian seas.

One of their first missions was the expedition to lay mines on the Edøy Fjord in October 1941. That's when the Nordschen's engine cut out.

The men were forced to abandon ship. They made for land in a small skiff.

The next morning they could see the masts of the sunken Nordschen sticking out of the water. They knew the Germans would see them soon too.
It was time to leave.

Over the next few days, they traveled southwest down the coast. There, they found a fishing boat, the Arthur, a sturdy vessel around 60 feet long.

Larsen decided it was a good enough vessel to return to the Shetlands. There was no guarantee the owner would give it to them.
So they decided the best course of action was to steal it.

Larsen was chosen by his crewmates as skipper. They knew he kept a cool head.
Many saw him as a fatherly figure. He was, you know, older than the other guys.

He was in his mid-30s and most of the other crews they were in the early 20s.

Larsen, I think, was the most sort of quiet one of them. So maybe that was his strength.
It was very sort of calm. The crossing back was smooth and relatively comfortable.

Delighted with the Arthur, Larsen kept it for future missions.

The following month, he was again returning to the Shetlands in the Arthur after delivering an agent to Norway.

They entered a hurricane, and Sankholft was out on the fishing boat to do some repairs and he was captured by a giant wave in a hurricane storm in the North Sea and he vanished into the North Sea.

Larsen's men were so busy pumping water out of the boat to restart the engine that they didn't notice for an hour that Sankholt had been swept overboard by the wave.

When they realized that he was missing, they were devastated. But there was nothing to be done.
They fought through the storm for f ⁇ ing.

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Four days.

In between missions, Larson lodged with the other men of the Shetland bus in a house at their base in Lana on the north coast of the Shetland mainland.

There were no farms and no people right around us. We had to go to Levak to to see people at all.
So we managed to do our do our jobs from that place.

And as the place was very remote,

no people come in contact with us directly there. They couldn't see what we did, they didn't

see when we sailed, and they didn't see when we come back. So we wasn't scared of anybody

talking about us. In 1942, Larsen packed up his few belongings.
The base was moved to Scalaway, in the south of the Shetland mainland. I am Bill Moore.

I was born and bred here in Shetland, and my father was an engineer, Jack Moore. He had the engineering business in the village.
Maintenance was so important to the operation.

Bill Moore is a local historian. He notes that fishing boats sailing the Shetland bus route often returned with serious damage.

Because the boats who are coming back from Norway, if not affected, smashed to pieces by the Luftwaffe, then by the weather.

It's hard to say which was the worst enemy at times on the sea. Bill's father, Jack, met Larsen when he was fixing his boat.
He liked him.

My father always said that, but he just maintained a sort of placid demeanor all the time. But obviously

there was a lot going on in his head, and

he was just that sort of a leader.

In autumn 1942, a German battleship was moored in Trondheimfjord. The Tirpitz was nicknamed the Beast by the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

It was one of two great battleships built for Nazi Germany at the beginning of the Second World War, along with the Bismarck. In 1941, the British had sunk the Bismarck in the North Atlantic.

The Tirpitz was now Adolf Hitler's most important battleship, so Churchill was determined to sink it too.

This would not be easy. Trondheim Fjord is surrounded by high mountains, making it an impossible target for aircraft bombers.
The Tirpitz was the most heavily guarded vessel in Europe.

The only way it could be destroyed was by a close-range torpedo attack. To get close enough to it, torpedoes would have to be smuggled into the fjord on a small, inconspicuous fishing boat.

Life Larsen was asked to lead what would become known as Operation Title. Before they set off, the Arthur needed work.

Not only did she have to penetrate the recesses of Norwegian waters and get through all the security,

But in addition to her crew, she had to conceal

six additional men, which was very difficult in a small boat. Darson and his crew were equipped with two torpedoes, manned by six British torpedo operators.

Both torpedoes would be concealed on board the Arthur under a canvas cover.

This would be topped with peat. If they were interrogated by the Germans, they could claim to be delivering a cargo to Trondheim.
The six torpedo operators were to hide in a false bulkhead.

The German interrogator would be 18 inches, would be half a meter away from the Norwegian agents,

the British agents, in fact,

concealed

in a double-walled concealment.

Larsen and his crew of Norwegians and Britons spent a week on a loch in Scotland practicing towing the missiles. They waited 10 days at their base for the moon to be in the right place for the attack.

It was on the 26th of October. We went off and all went well.

We passed the

German watchposts until we come in the inner Trondheimsfjord.

At the watchpost, Larsen handed the German officer a false fishing permit and crew list.

The officer studied the documents and demanded extra papers, records of previous trips.

As the German compared the documents to his own, Larsen held his breath.

Then, the officer asked him if he knew the harbour master at Christiansund, a man named Ormann who came from the same town in Germany that he did.

Well, yes, of course I know Captain Ormann, said Larsen. He's an excellent fellow.

The German officer brightened immediately and struck up a long conversation about this man. He lost all interest in the papers.

Cheerfully, the German officer signed the pass and told them to carry on through the fjord.

Larsen and his men sailed on. The water was calm.

Now they were only 50 miles from the turpitz. Darkness fell.

They all of a sudden hit a wave and they hear something snapping.

And then they don't know what has happened because the torpedo, they can't be seen in wavy water. They felt something hit the propeller.
Larson ordered the men to sail for a small inlet.

There, one of the British operators dived under the boat to check on the torpedoes. And what he sees is just four wires hanging into the sea.
The torpedoes were gone.

They have no chance of doing the mission. They can't get out again because they don't have enough fuel to return to the UK.

With the torpedoes lost somewhere in the depths of the fjord, Operation Title had to be abandoned. So too did the Arthur, in order to hide the evidence.

The crew took the lifeboat and rowed ashore, leaving the Arthur's sea valves open so it would drift and sink.

On land, the ten men of the crew would look conspicuous traveling together, so they split into two parties to make for the Swedish border.

They had an arduous journey ahead across frozen rivers, forests and mountains. The first snow was falling.

They went ankle-deep into the snow, you know, crossing mountainous terrain and forests in Norway. And, you know,

there was a real danger that these people could freeze to death. When if they fell asleep during night, they could freeze to death.

They walked for three days, sheltering in farmhouses and shepherds' huts at night.

By the fourth day, One man was suffering from frostbite.

About 10 miles from the Swedish border, Larsen's group hit a sharp bend in the road. Somebody shouted, HALT!

Two armed policemen held them at gunpoint. Larsen drew on his commander training and leapt at them, knocking them over.
Behind him, one of the British crew drew his pistol and fired off a shot.

In the confusion, one man, a British soldier, was shot. The remaining four, including Larsen, escaped.
But one Norwegian was separated from the group and was lost.

Then they run into the fields and it's snowy outside, there's little bits of snow and they take a few of these bencedrine tablets which is a form of amphetamines to keep going.

Larsen and his two remaining men pressed on to the border. Finally they reached a Swedish military camp and were welcomed with hot tea.
Their lost companion was soon found and they were reunited.

The other party of five also made it to Sweden, even though one of them sacrificed several toes to Frostbite.

Larsen later received the conspicuous gallantry medal for his role in the mission. But they had failed to sink the Tirpitz, which, despite a relentless series of attacks, survived until 1944.

In the months after Operation Title, the work of the Shetland bus became more and more difficult. It was a tough winter.
German intelligence improved.

They increased their patrols and altered their fishing zones. In March 1943, Larsen carried out his final mission of the season.

Soon, it would be too light to travel back and forth safely between the Shetlands and Norway. Following the loss of the Arthur, he had a new boat.
The Bergholm was a shark fisher from Iceland.

They were longer and bigger than the other boats. And faster.

The number of SOE operations in Norway had increased dramatically. These undercover officers needed a lot of supplies to continue working behind enemy lines.

Larsen and his crew on the Berkholm transported three Norwegian army men and four tons of supplies to the edge of the Arctic Circle.

When he has delivered his men and the goods and is on his way southwards,

The Berkholm is attacked by two German seaplanes who are trying to bomb them. The Berkholm fired back.
Larsen is standing inside the steering house and trying desperately to maneuver

this Berghom

away from the bombs which are dropped by the German planes and then finally

the boat is so shot up and is sunk by a mine and they have to abandon ship again.

Five of Larsen's crew were wounded, though he himself was unhurt. The ship's lifeboat had been shot to pieces.

So what they have to do now, while all the crew is injured in various ways, some have been hit in the foot, some have been hit in other places in the body and some in the arms.

And what they have to do now is a desperate attempt to try to fix the holes in the lifeboat. Larsen grabbed some metal cans, which had contained their food for the mission.

They smashed them together and managed to put some nails into it and make the lifeboat just about able to row it towards the shore because they are far out at sea.

They were 75 miles away from the Norwegian coast and 350 miles from Shetland.

Larsen realized that if the sinking Berkholm was found by the Germans without its lifeboat, they would immediately start a manhunt for its crew.

So he redirected the lifeboat away from Britain towards the Alesund district of Norway. The men began to row.
Four days later they reached land. Changing course saved saved the crew.

It was becoming too dangerous for the Allies to use Norwegian fishing boats. By October 1943, the Shetland bus was incorporated into the regular forces.

Larsen joined the Royal Norwegian Navy. In 1944, the Allies invaded Normandy, D-Day.

The war effort now shifted to winning the war in Europe. Larsson's missions grew less frequent.
In May 1945, Germany surrendered. Norway was free.

After the war, Life Larsen visited some of the widows of men lost in the North Sea to pay his respects. One of them was the wife of Carsten Sangholt, his friend who disappeared in the storm in 1941.

Her name was Anna. My mother, she was pregnant with her second child when her first husband went out

in the war.

She got to know that he was lost in the North Sea. Her first husband, Karsten Sangold, was his name.
Larsen and Anna struck up a bond. And then the two of them

fell in love. And yes.

Then it was the two of them. They were married.
In the following years, Astrid and her two sisters were born. Well, I'm a little proud that my father

took this trip to not only my mother, but other

people that had lost somebody during the war. And I think that was a very good thing to do.
And

I think the story is

a little romantic and a little nice. And I think that was

good for both of them, of course. It's always good to fall in love.

In total, the man known as Shetlands Larsen made 52 trips to Norway in fishing boats. It was a quiet but significant contribution to the Allied war effort.

The men of the Shetland bus route, including Larsen, brought hundreds of tons of arms and dozens of agents into occupied Norway.

The bus also saved 350 Norwegian refugees from the Nazis, bringing them to Britain.

Larsen was a famously steady man. In private, though, he later admitted that on his final mission aboard the Birkham, he was terrified.

Astrid remembers one of Larsen's wartime friends visiting the family home while she was growing up. He came often and they were sitting there in the evenings and he wanted to talk about the war.

And I still remember my father, he was sitting there, and

I think he just thinks

it's enough.

He didn't want to talk about this anymore. So, yeah, no, he didn't talk about it.
Larsen died in 1990. He was one of the most decorated Norwegians of the Second World War.
He grows with the war.

It's important to say that he grows with the war, and he goes from being a fairly sort of usual part of the Norwegian section of the SOE to becoming one of their ultimate heroes.

Next time on History Secret Heroes. In Cairo, an eccentric British army officer draws on magic tricks learned from his grandfather in order to fool the Nazis.

He created his persona by making it enormous, not by hiding and pretending not to be there and standing behind a potted plant. He went out to be boom! Dudley Clark, the great deceiver.

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Investment advisory services provided by Wealthfront Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. Discover the wit, romance, and charm of Jane Austen like you've never heard before.

From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, experience all six classics in full cast BBC audio dramatizations.

Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch, these productions bring Austin's timeless world to life. I cannot tell you how welcome your words are.
How I have wished for them.

My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true that you love me too? It is true. Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama Collection available wherever you get your audiobooks.