March, 1943.
Norweigan Commando Jan Baalsrud swims desperately through the icy water of the Toftefjord Bay,
near the heart of the Arctic Circle.
The air around him is ringing with gunfire and screams.
Death is everywhere.
The great pillar of smoke rising from the Brattholm, the vessel that he and his eleven
companions were sailing on just minutes ago, blots out the sun above.
The others on his small team scream and swear in Norwegian as gun-toting Gestapo agents
pull them from the freezing depths, and clap restraints on them.
The grim fates that await these men in the hands of Hitler’s brutal secret police makes
drowning look like a dream.
Jan and one other escaping member of his team manage to wrap their shivering fingers around
land on the shores of Toftefjord Bay.
It’s only willpower, and the fear of torture and death at the hands of their enemies, that
keeps them going now.
But even that has its limits.
Moments on dry land, and tragedy strikes.
A bullet from a Nazi rifle tears through the head of Jan’s only companion, killing him
instantly.
There is no time to mourn.
Jan can only keep walking, his wet and freezing uniform feeling like a suit of heavy armor
without the benefit of protection.
He even lost a boot to the water.
Suddenly, he can hear them coming towards him: Furious German voices, black boots marching.
He looks up and sees an advancing group of Gestapo, ready to murder him there and then,
or worse.
The ten captured men from his team - the elite group of Allied Norwegian Commandos known
as Company Linge - were being taken to a Nazi base in Tromsø.
There, they would be interrogated, tortured, and executed.
Jan would do anything to avoid this same fate.
He had to live now, or his allies had died for nothing.
He hides behind a nearby rock to gather his thoughts with what little time he has.
His rifle is gone, all he has is his sidearm: A small Colt pistol.
The Gestapo are approaching with rifles, submachine guns, and superior numbers.
They’re getting closer.
It’s decision time.
If he fights, he’ll probably die.
If he waits, he’ll definitely die - whether they capture him, or hypothermia takes him.
In the end, the choice is obvious.
Jan gets up, aims his pistol at the enemies, and squeezes the trigger.
Click.
It’s jammed.
Jan pulls the magazine out of his pistol, clears the chamber, and throws away the first
two rounds.
He reloads, trains his sights on the advancing Gestapo, and fires twice.
For the first time tonight, Jan gets lucky.
One shot clips a Nazi in the head, killing him.
The other wounds another, sending the group scrambling back in a sudden panic.
They have every advantage - the last thing they expect is for their prey to start fighting
back.
But Jan doesn’t want to be another dead hero.
He wants to survive this nightmare and return to his family, to a Norway free of Hitler’s
iron grip.
He runs into the nearby hills - wearing one shoe, a uniform so wet and cold that it’s
killing him a little more each moment, and a Colt 1911 with four rounds in the magazine.
This is the story of Jan Baalsrud’s incredible survival, against all odds.
The risks he took, the people who helped him, and the horrors he endured in his quest to
get back home.
But be warned: Just because he got back alive doesn’t mean he got back in one piece.
But why was he there in the first place?
As we mentioned earlier, Jan was part of a twelve-man team known as Company Linge.
These were brave soldiers who’d managed to escape Nazi-occupied Norway, and were trained
by the British in Scotland to carry out covert missions behind enemy lines.
This time, they were being sent back to their homeland on a mission known as Operation Martin,
along with eight tons of high explosives.
The objectives were twofold: Recruiting people in occupied Norway to join the resistance
against the Nazis, and blowing up a German airfield tower in Bardufoss to weaken the
enemy’s hold over the area.
But one little mistake doomed the mission: They were supposed to rendezvous with a secret
contact in Norway to let them know why they were there.
However, they accidentally contacted a shopkeeper who just happened to have the exact same name
as their contact.
The shopkeeper feared this was a test of loyalty from the Gestapo, and he would surely be killed
if he failed to report it to the authorities, so that’s exactly what he did.
The German forces descended on Company Linge, forcing them back to the Brattholm in hopes
of escaping through Toftefjord Bay.
But that’s when the German frigate Räumboot R56 descended and began to attack, leaving
them with nowhere to run.
They were boxed in, and capture or death seemed certain.
They did the only thing they could: Detonated all eight tons of explosives on the Brattholm
with a timed delay.
The plan was for the explosion to create chaos, so Company Linge could escape on a smaller,
faster boat.
But this didn’t work.
Their boat was fired upon and quickly sunk by the Räumboot.
And the rest, you already know.
Jan was left near-dead from the cold, running through the Norwegian hills from a numerically
superior force.
Even a miracle wouldn’t save him, he needed several.
Thankfully for Jan, someone up there must have been smiling at him, but to get back
to heaven, he needed to spend three months in pure Hell.
First, in his frantic escape from the Nazi forces, he came across the modest cottage
of the Idrupsen Family.
They were terrified to see him: This delirious, freezing man with a gun.
He told them that he was an Allied soldier, the last of his team, on the run from the
Gestapo.
He told them he needed somewhere to shelter, but that the risk was great: If ever the Nazis
discovered that they had harbored a fugitive like him, they’d kill the entire family.
But, even knowing this risk, they took him in.
Receiving this help, as he did from many kind Norwegians during his horrifying three month
ordeal, wasn’t easy for Jan.
He’d already seen the other men of Company Linge suffer horrifying fates, and the thought
of the same happening to these innocent civilians tormented him.
In order to survive the almost crushing guilt of laying this risk on people, he developed
a method: He would never tell any one host who he’d stayed with before, or where he
was headed.
That way, even if worse came to worst and the Nazis captured one family, they couldn’t
use that one family to get them all.
Jan essentially hopped from home to home, traversing the brutal Norwegian winter between
each one.
People from all walks of life took in and protected him - from midwives to retired old
men.
A father, still grieving from the loss of his own son, rowed Jan across turbulent waters
in the middle of the night.
Another man hid Jan from his neighbor, a man suspected of being on the Nazi payroll.
A kindly fisherman even gave him a pair of skis.
In this regard, Jan was extraordinarily lucky, and the people he met were exceptionally kind
- each one knowing that they faced the possibility of torture and death from the Gestapo if ever
they were found out.
But the journey, already stretching on for over a month, was starting to take a physical
toll on Jan - a fact which really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
His feet got the worst of it, exposed to such incredibly cold temperatures that they were
frozen solid and suffering from frostbite that threatened to go gangrenous.
Even walking had become a prolonged state of agony for Jan, and he still had plenty
of walking to do.
And that wasn’t even the end of it.
Jan was suffering from malnutrition, and worst of all, snow blindness.
It seemed that with every passing day, even as he got closer to his goal - Crossing the
Norweign border through Finland and entering the safezone of a neutral Sweden - his odds
of survival diminished.
Skis made the journey easier, for a time.
On one occasion, he even skied right past a group of Nazi soldiers who seemingly had
no idea who he was.
But he was soon caught in a blizzard so severe it froze his eyelids shut.
He wandered, blind and freezing, until hallucinations began to take over.
By the time he was rescued by the Gronvoll Family, he didn’t even know which way was
up anymore.
He was kept safe inside the Gronvoll Family barn for a few days while he was recuperating
from the blizzard.
He was then hidden in the bed of a small fishing boat, and ferried on to the small Norwegian
town of Revdal.
There, he was kept in a freezing and isolated hut that he nicknamed the Hotel Savoy - a
reference to the up-market Savoy Hotel in London.
Here, Jan had to take an even more horrific measure to ensure his continued survival.
His frostbitten toes had started to go gangrenous, and unless he wanted the infection to spread
and become potentially life-threatening, he needed to take drastic action.
He had no surgical tools, no painkillers, no medical expertise, just a military pocket
knife.
And using that pocket knife, he carved off his big toe on one foot, as well as an infected
part of another toe.
Sadly for Jan, these wouldn’t even be the last parts he needed to shed in order to survive.
He’d become less of a person now and more of a barely-living package that his support
network needed to get back to safety.
The next part of the journey involved taking him to a mountain plateau, where Norwegian
resistance members would collect him and deliver him to the Finnish border.
But thanks to another unexpected blizzard and Nazi patrols in a nearby town, there was
a slight delay in that collection.
By which we mean, he was trapped up there for 27 days.
He barely survived, facing up against the twin threats of starvation and infection.
While up on that plateau, Jan was almost certain that he was going to die, but he wouldn’t
give up.
Using his trusty pocket knife once again, he amputated the rest of his toes.
A move that doctors said was the only reason they were able to save his whole foot in the
end.
Eventually, the Norwegian rescuers did come and liberate Jan from his frozen hell.
They took him to the Finnish border, where he was placed into the care of the Sámi,
the indigenous people of the region.
They were there with Jan for the final stretch across Finland, pulling him along on a sled
behind their reindeer, narrowly avoiding pursuing Nazi forces.
In the end, after months of pain and suffering, Jan had finally reached the safe haven of
neutral Sweden.
When he was finally rescued, he only weighed eighty pounds.
He spent months recovering in a Swedish hospital before finally being flown back to the UK.
Think that’s where the story ends?
Nope!
Jan Baalsrud may have been down, but he wasn’t out.
During his extended recovery process, he helped train other soldiers for Norwegian deployment.
When he was finally able to walk again, he even requested to be sent back to Norway to
assist in the ongoing war effort against the Nazis.
When the war finally ended in 1945, Jan was still in active duty, getting payback against
the Germans for what they’d done to his beloved Norway, and his fellow soldiers from
Company Linge.
In the end, Jan was able to return to his family in Oslo, whom he’d left to fight
five years earlier.
And the Gestapo officers who’d killed Company Linge were forced to dig up their bodies from
a mass grave with their bare hands, and wash them before they were placed in coffins and
given a proper burial.
The Norwegian government then had them executed.
Their leader, Kurt Stage, was also tried and executed for war crimes in Slovenia in 1947.
Despite his injuries and traumatic experiences, Jan lived a long and fulfilling life until
1988, passing away at the age of 71.
These days, he’s practically considered a Norwegian folk hero, and if you ask us,
he definitely earned the title.
Now go check out “The Unkillable Soldier, Modern Day God of War” and “Mr. Immortal
- A Marine Dives on 2 Live Grenades To Save His Platoon” for more incredible stories
of military survival!