Secret Alliances by Tony Insall

Author:Tony Insall [Insall, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785905414
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2019-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Telavåg

As highlighted in Chapter 3, the incident at Telavåg led to one of the worst atrocities committed in Norway during the war. In April 1942, when the Borghild landed an SIS agent there, the vessel remained in port for four days and the crew walked around openly wearing Norwegian uniforms, presumably because they thought it would improve their chances of being treated as prisoners of war if they were captured. Shortly afterwards at the same spot, the Olaf landed two SOE agents, Emil Hvaal, the Anchor wireless operator, and Arne Værum, the Penguin wireless operator. Unwisely, they remained in the area for a while, were given away, and surprised by the Gestapo. In the subsequent exchange of fire, Værum and two Gestapo officers were killed. In retaliation, the Germans destroyed the village, sent all the able-bodied men to Sachsenhausen concentration camp (where thirty-one out of seventy-two people died), and shot a further eighteen hostages. The subsequent Security Service investigation of this incident did not really address the issue of crew behaviour, apart from recommending that they did not give imported commodities such as white bread, coffee or English cigarettes to the local population as it could attract attention.33

Could this atrocity have been prevented? Probably not. But the German raid was the culmination of an unfortunate chain of circumstances. The original plan had been to drop the Anchor team of Tor Gulbrandsen and Hvaal by parachute near Drammen in January 1942. However, there was an incident on the night before their departure, when the pilot of the aircraft which was carrying agents participating in Lark and Anvil decided during the flight that he had insufficient fuel to reach Anvil’s dropping point. He suggested that he should drop them both together (which was not normal procedure) on the dropping point which was to be used for Anchor the following evening, a proposal which they declined and which, in any event, was prevented by cloud and icing on the wings. The Anchor party declined to go the following evening, because they believed that Lark and Anvil had been dropped on their point the night before, and no one was able to provide information which would have disabused them. The plan was changed,34 and the Anchor team travelled separately by sea, with Gulbrandsen being delivered, also to Telavåg, in late February.‡‡‡

There followed a further instance when SIS did not share information with SOE about its sailings. SOE were not warned that an SIS boat operating from Peterhead had very recently visited Telavåg, where the Anchor team were to be delivered. When they later found out about the activities of the Borghild and its crew, SOE complained to SIS. During a conversation between Wilson and SIS a few weeks later in mid-June, to try to resolve some other inter-service difficulties in Bergen, the SIS representative attempted

to place all the blame on the Telavåg incident for his present troubles in Bergen. I told him that we knew that the German Intelligence Service had rounded on the

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