After Germany invaded Poland and the British and French declared war on the Third Reich, there was little war between these countries. Everyone had begun to strengthen their defenses against each other and naval battles were breaking out in the Baltic and North Seas.
This was mainly due to German efforts to maintain the flow of urgently needed Swedish iron ore to fuel their war engine. Most of this iron comes from Norway.
The northern port of Narvik was especially important as iron could be transported from there during the winter, when the Baltic Sea was frozen and dangerous.
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- Who forged an unlikely friendship during World War II?
- What happened at the site of the war?
- Where did the two end up?
- How did the two of you help each other?
Who forged an unlikely friendship during World War II?
When Europe fell into war, Norway began mobilizing its army, navy, and air force to protect its neutrality. The British and Germans became increasingly bold in attacking each other from a naval and aerial point of view.
In early 1940, Hitler was determined to invade Norway to ensure its strategic relevance in the fight against the Allies. The Norwegian campaign lasted from April 9 to June 10, 1940, when the German invasion of France drove most of the Allied forces south and Norway was captured. The Norwegian government moved to London.
What happened at the site of the war?
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Despite the horrors of war, occasional cooperation between enemies occurred, if only to survive, deep in the forest.
Lieutenant Horst Schopis’ Heinkel bomber was shot down by Captain RT Partridge and his radio operator, RS Bostock, in their Skua. Schopis’s tail gunner, Hans Hauck, was killed on impact, but Schopis and the survivors of his crew, Unteroffizier Josef Auchtor and Feldwebel Karl-Heinz Strunk, faced the vast, frigid unknown.
However, they were not alone. Partridge and Bostock had crash-landed not far away on a frozen lake after their engines failed. The two crews were the closest to Grotli, Norway, but were surrounded by mountains and lakes, and miles from any road.
Where did the two end up?
Partridge spotted a reindeer hunter’s old hut not far away as he tried to land his sputtering plane. They trudged through the snow, only to be ambushed by the German crew, who were armed with guns and knives.
Partridge, using a mix of German and English to break the language barrier, convinced the Germans that he and Bostock were survivors of a downed Vickers Wellington bomber (rather than the aces who had shot down their plane).
According to Schopis’s memoirs, Partridge advised on the first day they met that the Germans remain in the cabin while the British sought protection elsewhere. That night, the British came across the Grotli Hotel, which was closed for the winter but provided shelter from the elements. The Germans arrived the next morning and everyone enjoyed breakfast.
Partridge and Strunk set out that day to search for people and hopefully save both crews. It would be useless for either party if they were discovered starving when the seasons finally changed.
They quickly located a Norwegian ski patrol, which was close enough to the hotel that Bostock heard a gunshot, which he imagined was Feldwebel Strunk shooting his captain.
But Strunk was the one who died, supposedly shot by ski patrol as he went for his gun. Schopis and Auchtor were detained by the Norwegians, handed over to the British, and subsequently deported to a prisoner of war camp in Canada, where they remained throughout the war.
How did the two of you help each other?
Partridge and Bostock, under suspicion for their collaboration with the Germans, managed to persuade the Norwegians that they were, at the very least, English by showing them tailor’s labels on their uniforms and a half-crown coin. Additionally, the ski patrol leader had some mutual contacts with Partridge.
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The two British pilots were freed and traveled to Alesund, a town on the Norwegian coast many kilometers away and heavily bombed by the Germans. The ship that was supposed to bring them and other British soldiers back to England never arrived, so they stole a car and headed northeast to Andelsnes, where they were able to secure passage back to England.
Partridge was shot down and captured by the Germans in June 1940 while attacking the German battleship Scharnhorst. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war. Bostock was killed in the same combat, this time flying a Blackburn Skua.
Many years later, in 1977, Schopis received a phone call from Partridge and the two finally met as friends in their respective hometowns of Munich and London.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn