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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Topic Author's Original Post - May 10, 2012 - 08:29pm PT
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Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sønsteby, considered to be Norway's greatest hero of World War II, died today. He was 94, and was the most decorated ever Norwegian.
Before the war Sønsteby was an accountant. His specialty during the war was sabotage, and many of his attacks were carried out by bicycle. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was never caught by the Germans. After the war he became a successful businessman, and put a lot of time into speaking about his experiences to young people. There is now a statue of him on his bicycle in Oslo.
Sønsteby's decorations included:
 Norwegian War Cross, with three swords, a unique honour.
Distinguished Service Order (Britain).
U.S. Medal of Freedom with Silver Palm.
U.S. Special Operations Command Medal, the only non-American so far to be awarded with it.
Both King Harald and Prime Minister Stoltenberg spoke about Sønsteby today.
http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/05/10/norway-hails-its-greatest-war-hero/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_S%C3%B8nsteby
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Kameratene-om-Kjakan---Han-fortjener-all-heder-6826040.html
Sønsteby was depicted in the successful 2008 film Max Manus, about the Norwegian war resistance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Manus_(film);
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North
climber
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May 10, 2012 - 11:04pm PT
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Wow!! Bad Ass! RIP.
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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May 11, 2012 - 12:18am PT
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One dangerous individual. In military speak, that's high praise!
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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May 11, 2012 - 12:27am PT
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Now this is one bitchin' picture.
The dude oozes badassery.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Topic Author's Reply - May 11, 2012 - 01:29am PT
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Sønsteby's statue, at Solli Plass in Oslo, not far from Frogner Park and the US embassy. The plaque simply has his name, and the words (in Norwegian) "Freedom Fighter".
Sønsteby is in the headlines of all Norwegian news media today - given that he spent a lot of time speaking to young people about war and peace, it's perhaps not surprising. A kind of confirmation of Norwegian values and beliefs, after the horrors and evil of the last year.
It has been announced that he will have a state funeral, which is quite unusual.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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May 11, 2012 - 01:58am PT
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He stands as a wonderful example of how one person can make a difference for good.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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May 11, 2012 - 02:15am PT
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Sønsteby talked about himself as one among many, a mediocre man, but put under pressure he was anything but mediocre. He is known for his remarkable rationality and coldbloodedness in difficult situations. And the rest, what was up to "the grace of God", was always on his side.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Topic Author's Reply - May 11, 2012 - 11:35am PT
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The statute, today. (Winston Churchill in background.)
The film Max Manus, about one of Sønsteby's colleagues in the resistance, somewhat downplayed Sønsteby's role.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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May 11, 2012 - 11:47am PT
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RIP Gunnar - ta det med ro, you earned it.
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Blakey
Trad climber
Newcastle UK
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May 11, 2012 - 01:10pm PT
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Right now Norway's got a real need for Gunnar's memory.
They are doing a remarkable job of Brevik's trial.
Here in Newcastle my father's WW2 veterans organisation used to host Norweigian veterans, some 'who served as Free Norweigans, some who were members of the Resistance.
I recall helping many of them get back to the ferry, they were ardent shoppers and fearsome drinkers!
As a tale of derring do, the attack on Heavy Water Production at Vermork Norsk Hydro is second to none, and worth reading.
Hilse, Gunnar
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guido
Trad climber
Santa Cruz/New Zealand/South Pacific
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May 11, 2012 - 04:29pm PT
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Watched Max Manus several months ago on Netflix streaming-excellent movie!
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Port
Trad climber
San Diego
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May 11, 2012 - 04:50pm PT
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Great post MH.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
merced, california
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May 11, 2012 - 11:02pm PT
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Before I read this Topic, will someone tell me, do bicycles figure in here even a little bit? I like Norvies and all, but I gotta have inflatable tyres or three gears, like.
MFM (Sewedish)
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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May 11, 2012 - 11:17pm PT
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Mighty....who was the Norwegian resistance fighter who out skied and evaded the nazis for months before finally making it to sweden...? A must read adventure story....RJ
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Topic Author's Reply - May 12, 2012 - 11:42pm PT
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Possibly Jan Baalsrud, the protagonist of "We Die Alone"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baalsrud
And yes, mouseman, bicycles were involved. Big time. Sønsteby's modus operandi involved a bicycle, and that's depicted in the movie Max Manus, where he's always pedaling a bicycle that lacks tires.
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zBrown
Ice climber
Chula Vista, CA
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May 12, 2012 - 11:46pm PT
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Norwegians and Finnish people are some pretty tough customers. The Finlanders beat up on the Russians too.
RIP Mr. Sønsteby and many unsung heroes.
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Blakey
Trad climber
Newcastle UK
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May 13, 2012 - 05:24am PT
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Gunnar's passing is covered in a obituary in the Daily Telegraph. One to the UK's leading broadsheets.
6:06PM BST 10 May 2012
Gunnar Sonsteby
Gunnar Sonsteby, who has died aged 94, was Norway’s most decorated war hero, chief of operations for the underground resistance and sole surviving member of a team of saboteurs helmed by Max Manus, the daring leader of several numerous missions against targets in Nazi-occupied Norway.
Sonsteby spent five years fighting the Nazi occupation. “When your country is taken over by 100,000 Germans,” he noted, “you get angry.”
In 1942 he became agent 24 in the Special Operations Executive. After saboteur training in Britain in 1943, he became the contact for all SOE agents in eastern Norway and head of the Norwegian Independent Company 1 group in Oslo.
This group performed several spectacular acts of sabotage; among them smuggling out plates for the printing of Norwegian kroner from the Norwegian Central Bank, and blowing up the office for Norwegian forced labour, a strike that wrecked the Nazis’ plan of sending young Norwegian men to the Eastern Front.
In 1945 he was awarded the DSO. As well as the attack on the labour office, Sonsteby’s citation records the theft of 75,000 ration books, which put pressure on the authorities, stopping a threatened cut in rations; the destruction of sulphuric acid manufacturing facilities in Lysaker; and destroying or seriously damaging more than 40 aircraft under repair at a tram company depot in Korsvoll. He was also credited with the destruction of a railway locomotive under repair at Skabo; a number of Bofors guns; a field gun and vital machine tools at the Kongsberg arms factory; and with starting a large fire in a storage depot at Oslo harbour which destroyed large quantities of lubricating oils.
Operating in occupied territory, and ranked high on the Gestapo list of wanted men, Sonsteby became a master of disguise. He operated under 30 or 40 different names and identities, and the Germans did not learn his real name until near the end of the war. They were never able to catch him.
As a young man, Sonsteby’s long face led to him being nicknamed “Kjakan” (“The Chin”). A British journalist who interviewed him in the spring of 2011 still found him “a fine reed of a man, thin, poised and dignified, like a Nordic Giacometti”. At 93 he retained a keen intellect, a charismatic and considered delivery, and an erect, military bearing; he would grip a stranger’s hand like a steel vice.
Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sonsteby was born on January 11 1918, growing up in the same Oslo neighbourhood as Manus – though the two did not meet until July 1940, when they worked together on an underground newspaper to counter Nazi propaganda.
At the time of the German invasion in April that year, Sonsteby had been a student working in a motorbike shop in German-occupied Oslo. “Oh, the humiliation of seeing those green-uniformed creatures tramping our streets,” he recalled in his memoirs, Report from Number 24. Even more galling were the hated Norwegian Nazis, or Quislings.
Then he met Manus, 25, who organised the rag-tag group known as the Oslo Gang that made some early efforts to sabotage Nazi assets. Initially progress was slow. “The first year, very little,” said Sonsteby. “Second, more. In 1941 I knew it would last.” Apart from Manus, an expert saboteur, the Gang’s inner circle included Gregers Gram, who ran propaganda campaigns. Sonsteby’s field was intelligence: “To find out how the Germans built up their power.”
As the Gang began to dent the Nazi machine in Norway, Sonsteby was extracted to receive specialist training with SOE in the wilds of Scotland. But he reacted badly to British military discipline. A potshot at Highland sheep almost got him thrown out. But his record and character were defended by Colonel JS Wilson, chief of the Scandinavian section of the SOE and later the head of the World Scout Bureau.
Wilson sent him back to active service in Oslo, Sonsteby parachuting in during a night-time RAF drop. “It was very special to come over Norway,” Sonsteby remembered. “Seeing the whole country in moonshine, landing on the snow in the mountains with our skis. It was just wonderful.”
He targeted munitions factories and troop ships during the occupation. Crucially, after D-Day, he set his sights on the Norwegian railways, preventing German reinforcements moving back to the front line.
Throughout, he had a simple, but strict, process of using various names and forged documents, moving from flat to flat almost daily. One refuge was above a bakery. “When I came to that baker’s shop I always looked at the girl selling bread. If she gave a special face I would know the Germans were there,” he remembered. “I would turn around.”
It was easy for Sonsteby to slip into fresh identities as he made all his false papers himself. With his forger’s hand, he could replicate the signature of Karl Marthinsen, the notorious leader of the Norwegian Nazi police. Marthinsen was central to the implementation of the Norwegian Holocaust and was “liquidated” on an Oslo street by the resistance in February 1945. In reprisal, nearly 30 Norwegians were executed.
The greatest fear for Sonsteby and his team was torture. When one co-fighter, Edvard Tallaksen, was picked up by the Gestapo in a café at Grünerløkka, he committed suicide rather than talk. Manus, too, was captured. Injured during an attempted escape, he was hospitalised under guard, only to escape again, down a rope from a second-floor window.
After the liberation of Norway, both the British and Norwegian intelligence services tried to recruit Sonsteby, but he refused. “I didn’t want any more war. I had had enough. I’d lost five years of my life.” Instead, in 1945, he left Norway for America and Harvard.
In 1946 Sonsteby became the only Nord to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swords.
After Harvard he worked in the oil industry before returning to Norway and a career in private business. Throughout the post-war years and particularly after his retirement, he gave lectures to young Norwegians about the Second World War.
In 2008 the wartime biopic Max Manus, Gunnar Sonsteby was played by Knut Joner. The film ignited a fresh debate about how Norway and ordinary Norwegians had responded to the German invasion and subsequent occupation. Sonsteby attended the premiere with his wife, Anne-Karin, and the film became the most successful in Norwegian history, winning six Amanda Awards (Norwegian Oscars), including best picture, best screenplay and best actor.
In 2001 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s culture award. In the same year Sonsteby helped defeat a proposal to name a street in Oslo after the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who had welcomed the wartime German occupation of his country and given his Nobel Prize for Literature as a gift to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Hamsun later flew to meet Hitler at Hitler’s mountain lair in Bavaria. At the time Sonsteby said Norway should dissolve parliament and declare a dictatorship before so naming a street. But in the end he came to consider that commemorating Hamsun was acceptable, as long as the writer’s literary talent and political affiliation received equal attention.
In May 2007 a statue of Sonsteby on Solli Plass in Oslo was unveiled by King Harald of Norway. Sculpted by Per Ung, it portrays a 25-year-old Sonsteby standing next to his bicycle.
The King and other members of the Royal family also honoured Sonsteby, on the occasion of his 90th birthday in January 2008, with a reception at Akershus Fortress, the site of the Gestapo’s wartime headquarters and now home to Norway’s Resistance Museum.
In 2008 Sonsteby was the first non-American awarded the United States Special Operations Command Medal.
Gunnar Sonsteby, born January 11 1918, died May 10 2012
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