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History comes to life as boat that resisted the Nazis

In some ways it looks like just another boat, gliding into Scalloway harbour on Shetland on a clear crisp day. But for those who have come down to the pier to watch the vessel come ashore, the excitement is apparent. This is the first time that the MK Andholmen has been back to Shetland since the end of the Second World War, and its crew have returned to tell a remarkable story.

The flags flying from the mast -one Norwegian, the other the saltire - are a clue to the story. It is one of fear, great personal risk and suffering, but also of survival and heroism. The Andholmen was at the centre of it all 60 years ago and now the men who work it today are returning to declare their debt and Norway's profound and ancient links with Shetland and Scotland.

They called it the Shetland Bus: a network of small fishing boats that operated a secret operation between Scotland and Nazi- occupied Norway during the war. The men who risked their lives on those vessels performed a vital function and, perhaps more importantly, kept hope alive.

Andholmen and 20 other similar boats saw service from 1940 onwards. Together with three sub-chasers, loaned later in the war by the US, they made 205 crossings altogether, despite the constant risk of discovery by German planes and boats.

Initially from Lunna on Shetland but later from Scalloway, agents and essential gear were conveyed to resistance fighters scattered among Norway's fjords. Refugees often took the return journey. The boats were disguised as fishing vessels, the crew as fishermen and the weapons hidden in wooden barrels. Several of the boats were lost; many men died.

A solitary jetty at Lunna marks the spot where the boats were secured. Protected in an adjacent shed were munitions and supplies for the return crossing. It's still there, much the same as it was then.

Magne Stensland, a former submarine captain in the Royal Norwegian Navy and now Andholmen's skipper, encapsulates the mood of his crew as he steps off the boat. Through the generations, he has felt the legacy of the Shetland Bus and the sacrifices of the men who took part.

"This is a story I've grown up with, so I'm part of it," he reflects with evident emotion, his crew of volunteers gathered around him.

"It's encouraging to see how the people in the Shetlands relate to this. We're meeting our relatives' here. Some are really close, of course, having married, which keeps the story much more alive for them. For me it's not so much family history as history."

Stensland says the trip is about paying back a debt to Scotland and the Scots. "I'm also being paid back, for all the work I've put in, by the warmth and the welcome I've received from the people along the way."

Barbara "Baba" Melkevik, a local girl, married Shetland Bus man Arne Melkevik in June 1944. She has just turned 80 and when I meet her she is in a lively mood. She is visiting her sister in Scalloway and is keen to remember what her husband and his colleagues did for the war effort.

"Arne had to have another name, and chose Nipen, to protect his family in case the Germans found out," says Barbara. "They burned his town, Tælevåg, in 1942. They had got to know that something was up and sent officers and men. One of the officers was killed by one of the two agents there, one of whom was killed. The other was taken by the Germans and then killed. The very old people were taken away and interned.

"Officially, I never knew what was happening," she says, thinking about her husband. "But unofficially we guessed, mainly because the boats would always come back without fish."

After the war Barbara and her husband settled for a while at Scalloway before returning to Norway and what was left of Tælevåg. In fact, there was nothing, except the barracks the Germans had built for themselves. She recalls having to move into one of these buildings, for want of anything else, which would have housed people responsible for wiping out her home.

Lunna, some 10 miles across the bay from Scalloway, was the centre of the operation. Lunna House, built in 1660, become the heart and soul of the Shetland Bus and the first operational HQ of the Norwegian resistance. In the graveyard of the local church, St Margaret's, one of the casualties of the operation lies buried.

Nils Nesse was a 23-year-old Shetland Bus crewman who was killed at sea when his boat was attacked by German aircraft. It was a common fate. The only one of the so-called Shetland Gang - or "Shetlandsgjengen, as the Norwegians called them - ever to have been buried on Shetland, his body was removed by his brother after the war for reburial at home in Norway.

David Howarth, a British naval officer assigned as liaison to the Norwegians, in his superb chronicle The Shetland Bus, wrote of the burial: "In a morning of calm and winter sunshine, we buried him at Lunna, in the graveyard of the ancient church below the house. There was nobody to conduct his funeral in Norwegian; but many of the other young ones wept as the Scottish service, which they could hardly understand, was read in the sombre grey stone church. I saluted the grave and the other officers present followed suit. We were a solemn and silent party as we climbed the hill to the house."

Eventually the Shetland Bus operation moved to Scalloway while the bay at Lunna - Lunna Voe - continued as a training base for the two-man midget submarines, codenamed "Chariots". Another of the Norwegian boats, the Arthur, carried two of them to Norway where they attempted to sink Germany's battleship Tirpitz, which was in hiding near Trondheim.

The visit to Scalloway is coming to an end now and I board the Andholmen and make the journey south to Orkney with its crew. Departing Scalloway, we soon encounter rough weather. I spend a sleepless night in my bunk, tossed about, frozen and soaked under a constant leak from the deck. It is a mere taste of what the North Atlantic, especially in winter, would have thrown at such vulnerable boats, sailing largely by dead reckoning while at the mercy of discovery and the weather.

I speak to some of the crew about the boat and its place in history. "The history is the most important thing," says chief engineer Per Jervik. "The next is the amazing welcome everyone here has given us." His colleague Anders Hegland, the ship's first mate, is looking to the future instead. "I don't want to think too much about the history, I want to think about what we are achieving here for the relationship between our two countries."

When we arrive in Orkney, we visit the islands' main cemetery in Kirkwall and the 13 gravestones commemorating the Norwegian sailors washed ashore near Kirkwall early in the war. They were attacked by German forces outside Kirkwall, while Norway was still neutral. Their bodies were originally buried here but later returned to Norway.

The crew of the Andholmen lay a wreath in a simple, moving ceremony replicating the one held in Nesse's memory at Lunna. Following the playing of Flowers of the Forest by a lone piper of the Seaforth Highlanders, the group is taken on a guided tour of the Churchill Barriers.

Crew member Terje Torgersen is in a reflective mood, as he has been overwhelmed by the welcome from the locals. "They meet us as heroes," he says, "but I am not a hero."

After the moving service, the crew prepare to return to their boat, which they have worked hard to save and protect. Following the war, the Andholmen was again used in whaling and fishing, but was then abandoned and left to rot. A foundation was set up to look after her restoration, and today, under the aegis of the Royal Norwegian Naval Museum at Nordsjømuseet in Tælavåg, she functions as a museum with a volunteer crew in tribute to the past.

That night, her duties fulfilled, the MK Andholmen is quietly slipped of her moorings and sets a homeward course for Norway in a journey that 60 years ago would have been made under fire, but whose present peace she helped in her small way to bring about

Full story - The Herald.co.uk
many thanks to Stu Hogg