The Commando Who Refused to Die by Odd Bjerke

Recounts the extaordinary adventures of Odd Bjerke as he fled Nazi-occupied Norway. When the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, teenager Odd Bjerke bid his family farewell and confidently made his way to Sweden alone, on skis, with the intention of traveling to Britain to fight for his country. His wartime odyssey began when he joined the Norwegian Free Army in Scotland in 1940. He trained troops in skiing and winter warfare in Iceland; then was selected to go to the remote and barren island of Jan Mayen to help sustain the strategically important weather station there; before returning to Scotland where he would become a member of 5 Troop (Norwegian) No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. With his comrades in arms, he would go on to engage in sabotage and underground resistance training missions in Norway and in combined operations in Lapland before his wartime service ended was ended by the severe wounds he received at the battle of Kapelsche Veer in Holland. Rescued by resistance fighters, Bjerke was hospitalized in Scotland before returning to Norway after the end of the war. He would go on to a new, initially covert, life in America, drawing on his wartime experiences to train USAF crews in survival and evasion. Reconstructing Bjerke’s unpublished biographical account, this book captures in meticulous detail the training, planning and preparation for complex covert missions in occupied territories, and the unpredictable violence and dreadful consequences of their execution. It also evokes the constant, pernicious tension of life under Nazi rule, and the oddities of daily existence in wartime Britain. His self-deprecating manner highlights the bravery of adventurous people in exceptional circumstances. Gripping from the first page, this account of a fearless Norwegian patriot must rank among the very best accounts of British/Norwegian special operations in World War II.