Raid on Spitsbergen

With plenty to occupy them elsewhere, the Germans took time last week to raid Spitsbergen the frozen, far-north island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Heavy naval forces shelled a garrison of Norwegians. Said a Berlin communique: German grenadiers, in the face of "violent resistance," landed, destroyed installations and coal dumps, seized prisoners, retired.

London minimized the importance of the raid, said the garrison numbered no more than 100 Norwegians. The installations included a weather station and docks. Defenses were three 4-in. cannon and some machine guns. Allied naval units were too far away to intercept the raiding force, which may have included the battleship Tirpitz and other heavy units of the land-loving German navy.

Allied forces landed on inaccessible Spitsbergen two years ago. They destroyed coal mines and evacuated some 3,000 Norwegian and Russian miners. After that censorship closed down around the island at the top of the world.

With last week's raid the rest of Spitsbergen's wartime story was revealed by the Norwegian Government in London.

Late in September 1941 the Germans moved in, made an air base at Longyear City, from which they could harass Allied shipping to Murmansk. Six months later a Norwegian force returned. Eighty-two of them in an icebreaker and a fishing vessel crawled up Green Fjord, where they were sighted and attacked by German Condors. One ship was sunk, the other set afire. Survivors climbed out of the subfreezing water on to the ice and got ashore at Barentsburg, carrying their wounded, 15 skis, a few rifles and a single, broken lamp.

Using the salvaged lamp, the Norwegians signaled a wandering Catalina of the British Coastal Command, and on June 2 a British force arrived with supplies. The reinforced Norwegians moved against Longyear City. The Germans had gone. Since then drear, desolate Spitsbergen has been in Allied hands.

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