We Die Alone

A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance

David Howarth

Brace for an all-too-real WWII adventure story that’s unlike any you’ve read before.

The tale begins in Shetland, the cold islands off Scotland’s north coast. It’s March of 1943, and a team of four hardy men have been training for many months to sabotage a Nazi air base in Normandy. While they’re at it, they’re going to start up a resistance movement.

The mission goes horribly awry.

At first, the plan works: They board a boat — made to look like a Norwegian fisher — along with eight other men and eight tons of explosives. They make the dangerous winter-time crossing and send a small crew to establish contact with a local shopkeeper they’ve been told is a resistance supporter.

The conversation with the man goes as expected until just after they say the words, ‘We’re from England.’ At that moment, they realize they’re talking to the wrong guy. The supporter? He died a few months ago. And this man? He has the same name as the previous shopkeeper but is not down with the resistance. Concerned that he’s being tricked and the ‘English’ are really Gestapo, he notifies the authorities.

The now-alerted Germans find the boat. Our heroes blow it up — while taking fire from approaching Nazis — so the Germans can’t get their grubby hands on the explosives or the plans. In short order, most of the men are rounded up; within about 72 hours, all of them are dead. Except for one man. His name was Jan Baalsrud.

The remainder of the book is the story of how Jan — indomitable and seemingly with the nine lives of a cat — escaped from the freezing water near his burning boat to the neutral territory of Sweden, about 125 miles (200km) away.

Before his ordeal is over, Jan will suffer from hypothermia, frostbite, delirium, gangrene, and snow blindness. He’ll be helped by Norwegian villagers and nomadic reindeer herders, most of whom take on the responsibility of hiding a fugitive with grace. Jan will avoid the Nazis, sometimes on skis, sometimes barely.

In the end, it takes Jan a little under three months to make the trip, and the journey will almost kill him a few times.

This book was first published in 1955. Before he started writing, the author David Howarth was a WWII Special Operations Executive, or what we would call a spy. He helped set up the Shetland Bus, a boat operation that carried men and supplies from Shetland to Nazi-occupied Norway.

Because he was writing so soon after the war, Howarth was able to interview the people directly involved — and his story includes very satisfying epilogue with just a touch of romance.

Our hero Jan returned to active service after his escape and lived to be 71. He’s buried under a stone with his name and a single sentence: ‘Thank you to all who helped me to freedom in 1943.’

This book is a fantastic true-life adventure that will definitely give you a strong sense of northern Norway — what it’s like and the fortitude of the people who live there.

It was on that coast, on the 29th of March, 1943, that this story really began. On that day, a fishing boat made landfall there, six days out from the Shetland Islands, with twelve men on board. Its arrival in those distant enemy waters in the third year of the war, within sight of a land which was occupied by the Germans, was the result of a lot of thought and careful preparation; but within a day of its arrival all the plans which had been made were blown to pieces, and everything which happened after that, the tragedies and adventures and self-sacrifice, and the single triumph, was simply a matter of chance; not the outcome of any plan at all, but only of luck, both good and bad, and of courage and faithfulness. — David Howarth

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