He wrote an account of the Shetland Bus operation, as well as many other books of history, bringing to his many of his books an immense practical knowledge of ships and the sea.ĭavid Howarth died in 1991. The King also made Howarth a Chevalier First Class of the Order of St Olav.Īfter the War he designed and built boats before turning to writing full time.
For his contributions to espionage operations against the German occupation of Norway, he received King Haakon VII's Cross of Liberty. He was involved in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), including the Shetland Bus, an SOE operation manned by Norwegians running a clandestine route between Shetland and Norway, which utilized fishing boats with crews of Norwegian volunteers to land agents and arms in occupied Norway. He rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and spent four yeas in the Shetland Islands, becoming second in command of the Shetland Naval base. After graduating from Cambridge University, he was a radio war correspondent for BBC at the start of the Second World War, joining the Navy after the fall of France. Miller (edited)ĭavid Armine Howarth (1912 - 1991) was a British historian and author. This amazing book will disappoint no one. Baalsrud's feats make the travails in Jon Krakauer's Mount Everest classic Into Thin Air look like child's play. How he avoids capture and ultimately escapes-revealing that much spoils nothing in this white-knuckle narrative-is astonishing stuff. He's poorly clothed (one foot entirely bare), has a head start of only a few hundred yards on his Nazi pursuers and leaves a trail of blood as he crosses the snow. A quick fight leaves Baalsrud alone and trapped on a freezing island above the Arctic Circle.
But he's betrayed shortly after landfall. Baalsrud and three compatriots plan to smuggle themselves into their homeland by boat, spend the summer recruiting and training resistance fighters, and launch a surprise attack on a German airbase. It begins in the spring of '43, with Norway occupied by the Nazis and the Allies desperate to open the northern sea lanes to Russia. Howarth confirmed the details of Jan Baalsrud's riveting tale. If this story of espionage and survival were a novel, readers might dismiss the Shackleton-like exploits of its hero as too fantastic to be taken seriously.
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