The first Shetland Bus voyage

On 30 August 1941 the Norwegian fishing boat Aksel sailed from the small harbour of Hamna Voe on the Lunna Ness peninsula, on Mainland in the Shetland archipelago. She was skippered by August Nærøy, and her crew consisted of four other fishermen from the west coast of Norway: Mindor Berge, Ivar Brekke, Andreas Gjertsen and Bård Grotle. The boat was bound for the area around Bergen, some 300 kilometres across the North Sea. From the outside she looked like an ordinary fishing boat, but she was working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Her voyage is regarded as the first official trip of a secret transport line between Shetland and occupied Norway. The British and Norwegians soon called it the “Shetland Bus”, and to this day Norwegians call its seamen Shetlandsgjengen, “the Shetland gang”. By the end of the war the service’s fishing boats and submarine chasers had carried hundreds of tons of weapons and equipment and almost 200 agents to Norway, and brought back refugees whom the occupiers were hunting.

War chronologies state that on 30 August the Shetland Bus “began operating”. This needs to be made more precise. Individual Norwegian boats had been sailing between Shetland and Norway on behalf of the British secret services since 1940, and the boat Vita made one such voyage on 22 December 1940, among others. What began operating on 30 August 1941 was an organised unit with its own base, fleet and command. That is why this date is taken as the beginning of the Shetland Bus.

Escapes across the North Sea

In the spring of 1940, while the fighting in Norway was still going on, boats carrying refugees from the west coast began arriving in Shetland and Orkney. After Norway’s capitulation this traffic, which Norwegians called Englandsfarten (“the England run”), grew even heavier. Young men wanted to join the Norwegian armed forces in Britain; others were fleeing arrest. According to Norwegian figures, some 3,300 refugees landed in Allied ports in civilian boats over the whole occupation. Around 300 boats took part in these crossings. Many of them were lost at sea.

The secret transport line grew out of this traffic. Before the war British intelligence, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), had studied the coasts of Scandinavia through its Section D as places for infiltrating agents and materials. In 1940, with the help of Norwegian fishermen, it ran its first expeditions to Norway. When Section D was absorbed into the newly created SOE in the autumn of that year, both services began asking skippers who arrived from Norway whether they would be willing to go back to the coast with agents. Through the winter of 1940–1941 such voyages were made on an ad hoc basis. At the beginning of 1941 the decision was taken to create a permanent group of men and boats. Its leadership was entrusted to a British army officer, Major Leslie Mitchell, and to a naval reserve lieutenant, David Howarth, who after the war told the unit’s story in his book The Shetland Bus (1951). The staff took over Flemington House at Weisdale, and the crews were quartered at Lunna House on the bay of Lunna Voe. It was a quiet, sheltered anchorage with few inhabitants, who asked no questions.

The boats and the men

At first the unit had fourteen fishing boats of various sizes. Most were two-masted vessels between 15 and 21 metres long from the west coast of Norway. The Hardanger boats had a straight stem and a long stern, while the tubby boats from around Ålesund proved the most resistant to North Sea gales. They were driven by single-cylinder engines of 30 to 70 horsepower that made a characteristic “tonk-tonk” sound, familiar in every Norwegian harbour. A boat could make at most about 9 knots. Spare parts for these engines were not available in Britain, so members of the resistance smuggled them out of the engine factory on the island of Bømlo near Bergen, which was working under German supervision, and the next “bus” took them to Shetland.

The best protection was camouflage. The boats looked like vessels fishing in coastal waters, and the crews dressed as fishermen. In time, however, the boats were given concealed armament. Howarth and the Norwegian seaman Per Blystad devised, among other things, oil drums bolted to the deck that hid machine guns ready to fire. By the end of the war every boat had several such positions for defence against aircraft. The crews were made up of Norwegian fishermen and seamen, mostly in their twenties, who knew the coast like the back of their hand. Many had themselves come to Shetland as refugees, sometimes in boats “borrowed” with the owners’ tacit consent. Some 300 Norwegians served in the unit during the war.

The boats were to carry agents to Norway – including soldiers of SOE’s Norwegian company, later named the Linge Company after its first commander, Captain Martin Linge – as well as radio sets, weapons, explosives and supplies for the underground. On the return trip they brought back agents who had completed their missions and Norwegians in danger of arrest. Occasionally they took part in special operations. The crossings were made mainly in the dark season, from autumn to spring. The long nights gave cover from German aircraft and patrol boats, but the boats sailed without lights across a stormy sea that was at its roughest at precisely that time of year. Aksel’s first voyage at the end of August came just as the nights over the North Sea were beginning to lengthen again.

The first winter

The first season showed how high a price this service would exact. On 22 September 1941 the Germans, tipped off by an informer, seized the boat Vita at the islet of Rekøy in Trøndelag, where she had come to pick up refugees. Her crew remained prisoners until the end of the war. On 20 October the minelayer Nordsjøen sank in a gale off the coast of western Norway, although her whole crew survived. Her second-in-command was Leif Andreas Larsen, who had come to Shetland in February 1941 and began sailing with the “bus” in the autumn. On 28 October German aircraft attacked the boat Siglaos on her way from Norway, and Nils Nesse was killed, the unit’s first casualty. In mid-November the boat Blia disappeared in a great storm with seven crew and more than thirty refugees aboard. Norwegian sources speak of 43 dead. In the same storm the seaman Karsten Sangolt was washed overboard from the boat Arthur, which Larsen was commanding on his first voyage as skipper.

The occupiers responded to the traffic across the North Sea with draconian law. On 26 September 1941 Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven, who in August had already confiscated Norwegians’ radio sets, introduced the death penalty for attempting to leave the country illegally “in order to go to an enemy state”. According to Norwegian figures, in 1941–1942 the Germans detained 121 Norwegians in connection with escapes by sea, and several dozen refugees and their helpers were executed. Even so, the “bus” kept running.

Place in the war

The Shetland Bus was one of the most important links between Norway in exile – King Haakon VII and the government in London – and the occupied country. It allowed the British to build intelligence and sabotage networks in Norway, and it showed the Norwegians that they had not been left on their own. After the Lofoten raid in March 1941 Hitler was increasingly afraid of an Allied landing in Norway, and every agent put ashore from a fishing boat confirmed those fears and tied down additional German forces in the country.

The following years brought both successes and tragedies. In time the base was moved from Lunna to Scalloway, where there were workshops and where a repair slipway named after Crown Prince Olav was built. From mid-1942 the unit was called the Norwegian Naval Independent Unit. In April 1942 two agents brought in by the boat Olaf were discovered in the village of Telavåg near Bergen. Two Gestapo officers were killed in the shoot-out, and in reprisal the Germans razed the settlement and deported its men to Sachsenhausen, where 31 of them died. In the autumn of 1942 Larsen attempted to carry two British Chariot manned torpedoes in Arthur into the Trondheimsfjord to attack the battleship Tirpitz. The operation failed, and the boat had to be scuttled. The hardest winter was that of 1942–1943, when several boats were lost at sea with all hands. In the spring of 1943 the boat Brattholm was destroyed, and of her crew and agents only Jan Baalsrud survived; his escape across northern Norway became legendary.

The losses led to the fishing boats being replaced by faster vessels. In October 1943 the Americans handed over three submarine chasers to the unit, Hitra, Hessa and Vigra, each 34 metres long with two 1,200-horsepower diesel engines. Larsen took command of Vigra. The unit then officially became part of the Norwegian navy as the Royal Norwegian Naval Special Unit. The submarine chasers made more than a hundred voyages without losing a vessel or a man. According to tallies based on the unit’s records, the Shetland Bus made some 200 voyages during the war, carried 192 agents and some 390 tons of weapons and supplies to Norway, and brought out 73 agents and 373 refugees. Forty-four of its men were killed, and ten boats were lost at sea. Larsen made 52 voyages and became one of the most highly decorated naval officers among the Allies, receiving among other awards the War Cross with Sword twice. In May 1945 Vigra and Hitra sailed into a Norway that was now free. Today a memorial to the Shetland Bus stands in Scalloway, and Hitra is preserved in Norway as a museum ship.