Operation Outward in Sweden

During the night of 19–20 January 1944, at the station in Laholm, a small town in south-western Sweden, a goods train ran into a stationary overnight express from Gothenburg to Malmö. Two people were killed. The chain of events that led to the disaster began several hundred kilometres away, on the east coast of England: there, at the British sites of Operation Outward, balloons were being released that were meant to drag steel cables across German high-voltage power lines. The wind carried some of them over neutral Sweden, where one or more of them cut the power on the railway line along the west coast.

It is often said that the British Operation Outward accidentally took lives in Sweden by putting out the lights and causing a railway disaster. That is how British studies describe it. Swedish railway accounts show, however, that the balloon was an indirect cause: the collision itself was brought about by an error on the part of the station’s traffic controller, made in the confusion caused by the power failure.

Balloons over the North Sea

Operation Outward was run by the Royal Navy from March 1942. Cheap, unmanned balloons filled with hydrogen were released from the Suffolk coast and carried by westerly winds over Germany and occupied Europe. Roughly half of them trailed a steel wire: when it was dragged across two conductors of a transmission line, it caused a phase-to-phase short circuit that could burn out transformers and circuit breakers. The rest carried incendiary loads intended for forests and heathland. In July 1942 one balloon caused a serious breakdown at the Böhlen power station near Leipzig. According to a post-war British report of 1946, Outward caused the Germans damage worth about £1.5 million, and German fighters and anti-aircraft defences wasted time and fuel shooting down balloons that each cost less than two pounds.

A balloon, however, could not be steered. The mechanism that kept it at altitude was primitive – it dropped ballast or released gas – and the wind decided where it would come down. Balloons had already turned back over England; on one occasion a balloon cut off the power to Ipswich. Others drifted north-east, over Denmark and Sweden. The British knew the risks: in September 1940 a gale had torn a number of British barrage balloons from their moorings, and they had flown across the North Sea, damaged power lines in Sweden and Denmark, disrupted rail traffic and brought down the mast of a Swedish radio station. It was this very incident that suggested the idea for the whole operation.

The night at Laholm

Laholm lies on the Västkustbanan, the West Coast Line linking Gothenburg with the south of the country, between Halmstad and Ängelholm. According to Swedish railway-history accounts, based among other things on press reports of the time, that night the line lost its electric power for about three hours after the steel cables of drifting balloons became caught on it. Train services were thrown into disorder. The overnight express from Gothenburg to Malmö, which normally passed through Laholm without stopping, had to halt at the station because the goods train running ahead of it had not yet reached Grevie station further south.

Shortly before 5 a.m. on 20 January the traffic controller at Laholm – a twenty-year-old station assistant who was standing in for the regular controller – gave permission for a long-distance goods train following behind to enter the station. In doing so he failed to return to “stop” the home signal behind the express, which was still standing at the platform. The goods train ran into the rear of the passenger train. The impact was taken mainly by the mail van (PL). The 55-year-old driver of the goods train and a 60-year-old postal worker travelling in the mail van were killed. Accounts differ as to the number of injured: according to one, a postal worker and the fireman were slightly injured; according to another, some 50 people suffered minor injuries. The mail van and the goods locomotive were badly damaged, and the material losses were estimated at about 200,000 kronor.

According to the same accounts, the traffic controller was convicted of causing death and injury by negligence and given a four-month suspended prison sentence.

What is certain and what is not

The date raises the most doubts. British studies and Swedish chronicles give the night of 19–20 January 1944, and the railway accounts a time of around 5 a.m. on 20 January; one local study, however, dates the accident to 25 January. The date of 19 January is justified, since the chain of events began that evening, even though the collision itself occurred in the early hours of the following day.

The mechanism is also uncertain. The British history of the operation says that the balloon put out the lights on the railway; the Swedish accounts speak of a loss of power along the whole line, with the collision itself decided by the mistake with the signal. The two versions can be reconciled – the power failure brought disruption to traffic, lights going out and an unscheduled stop by the express – but no available source describes exactly what happened at the station in the last few minutes. Nor can it be stated with complete certainty that the cable was left by an Outward balloon rather than by a barrage balloon that had broken loose. The British themselves, however, attributed this accident to Operation Outward, and its wire-trailing balloons were regularly being blown over southern Scandinavia at that time.

Neutral Sweden in the shadow of other people’s war

For the Swedes, Laholm was one of many reminders that neutrality did not protect them from the effects of a war being fought next door. From 1940 aircraft of both sides strayed over the country, ships struck by mines and torpedoes sank in its territorial waters, and wreckage from battles in the Baltic and the North Sea washed up on its beaches. Sweden guarded against all this throughout the war, but at the same time it was gradually changing course. In August 1943 the government of Per Albin Hansson ended German rail transit across its territory, and in 1944, under Allied pressure, it cut further deliveries to the Reich. British balloons falling on Swedish power lines and railways were thus not a matter of high politics for Stockholm – rather one of the nuisances a neutral country had to live with. There is no record of the Laholm accident prompting a formal diplomatic protest to London.

A few weeks later, on 22 February 1944, Sweden suffered a more serious violation: Soviet aircraft dropped bombs on Stockholm, most probably as the result of a navigational error. There were no fatalities on that occasion, but the incident showed how thin the line was between a neutral country and the front.

The end of Operation Outward

The balloons kept flying for several more months. From May 1944, when the skies over the Channel and the North Sea were swarming with Allied aircraft preparing for the invasion, mass launches were replaced by a “trickle” – single balloons released every ten minutes during the day, of which only a small proportion carried wire. The hydrogen cylinders and vehicles were now needed for the defence against V-1 flying bombs and to supply the troops in Normandy. The last balloons were launched on 4 September 1944. In all, according to British figures, 99,142 Outward balloons were released, roughly half of them with wire and half with incendiary loads. At about the same time, from November 1944, Japanese fu-go balloon bombs were drifting across the Pacific – a more advanced weapon of the same kind, which killed six people in Oregon in May 1945.

Significance

The Laholm disaster was a minor episode of the war, but it illustrates well the nature of a weapon that cannot be aimed. Outward proved a cheap and effective way of harassing the German power industry and air defences, except that the wind knew no national borders. The same wires that tore down high-voltage lines in the Reich also fell on the grid of neutral Sweden, and at Laholm, through a combination of breakdown and human error, they cost the lives of two men who had nothing to do with the war: a locomotive driver and a postal worker. Their deaths take up at most a single sentence in histories of Operation Outward, yet this is one of the few documented cases in which the operation’s balloons killed people.