Customer Reviews

We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance

5 star:		(76)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are few tales of epic endurance that can match this, in fact I find it hard to believe that anyone could have lived through this at all. I kept re-reading parts because I couldn't believe what I was reading. David Howarth's true story of the escape of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian Saboteur, in the Spring of 1943 was a page turner, I kept wondering how it could possible get end up, and each time I thought things were as bad as they could get it got worse.

It is a simple tale of escape and those brave souls who helped him make his way from Norway to neutral Sweden. In March 1943 Jan was part of group of 11 other men who travelled secretly to German held Norway in order to sabotage an airbase. However through an extraodinarily bad coincidence the contact they made there was with a man who betrayed them. Their boat was ambushed by the Germans the following morning, 30th of March. Interestingly there is the German news account of this ambush in the appendix at the back of the book and it does not tally well with the real event. Only Jan managed to escape from the ambush. The fate of the rest of his crew, which is only known in sketchy detail was horrific so his decision to try flee rather than surrender proved the right thing to do. However this left him alone on a bleak tiny island in the Norwegian Sounds with his toe shot off in the freezing arctic spring. The next two months he swam through icy seas, got caught in blizzards and avalanches and finally too injured to carry on himself, was carried by partisan Norwegians to Sweden. I don't know what is more incredible about this story or this man. His will was astonishing. For one week he was left alone on a deserted plateau alone with almost no food, frost bitten feet and wet clothes. When he was finally found again he had to endure a further two weeks living alone on the plateau with only occassional visitors.

I have read a lot of epic survival stories in my time - of Shackleton, and Scott and their epic journeys, but these men were generally part of a group and if nothing else may draw strength from their companions. For much of Jan's trip he was alone, and very often so weak and vulnerable his survival while others worked for his survival, very often for days at a time he was vulnerable and alone and with no hope that anyone would come and rescue him, yet he survived. Each time men came to him expecting to find him dead and he wasn't - he was clinging to life. This is such a powerful story, and well told. I don't think you could read it and remain unmoved.

first read this incredible tale of one man's refusal to die alone forty years ago--have been recommending to people ever since. jan baalsrud--a norwegian patriot during wwII--captured my imagination in the page's of david howarth's riveting book, and his story of survival under the relentless pursuit of the nazi's, is maybe the best to come out of that war. page after page, the twists and turns, the chance meetings and narrow escapes, the unrelenting suspense...a book you simply can't put down. and written well enough that it doesn't matter if you're a seventh grader, as i was four decades ago, or a senior citizen, as i'm rapidly becoming. its just a great read. you'll never forget jan baalsrud..guaranteed.

One winter, in the midst of WWII, a crew of expatriate Norwegians attempted to land a cargo of guerilla supplies on Nazi-occupied Norway's far-northern coast. This book tells the story of the incredible privation endured by one of those men, Jan Balsruud, his hardihood and survival, and the risks and sacrifices undertaken on his behalf by the men and women who help him evade capture.

I first read _We_Die_Alone_ some thirty years ago, in the first paperback edition, and I know that certain of its scenes and events will stay with me so long as I live. Howarth recounts the story simply, and lets the facts provide the drama.

Strongly recommended.

~~~~~~~~ IN FAVOUR: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I found this to be an intriguing true story. Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor of a foiled commando mission in German-occupied Norway cheated death about half-a-dozen times before eventually escaping to neutral Sweden (from which he had been expelled years before). The man's travails are extraordinary: surviving three days of wandering in the far north completely snowblind; amputating nine of his own toes with no anaesthetic; being literally buried under a blanket of snow for a week and thus - ironically - surviving the blizzard which raged above it. The story takes so many turns for the incredible that one begins to understand why author David Howarth prefaced his book with the assertion that he made every effort to verify the details of Baalsrud's account.

The even stranger thing is that Baalsrud is arguably not even the hero of the book. The real heroes are the ordinary rural Norwegians who took him in, cared for him, and ran enormous risks for him - because for much of this story Baalsrud was incapacitated. Each Norwegian he met after the initial Quisling who betrayed his team risked their own lives and that of their families in order to ensure that Baalsrud made it to safety. This sequence of events is even more remarkable in view of the fact that there was nothing the locals could have gained from Baalsrud's survival even by proxy: one crippled soldier, after all, could mount no resistance to the Germans who persecuted them. So the denizens of Norway's far north were not helping Baalsrud so that he would help them: What they did for him was done from motives of purest solidarity.

~~~~~~~~ AGAINST: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are, however, two things which vitiated this reading experience.

1. The most obvious one is the sheer number of spelling errors in the text. At most, even a long book will contain three typos. "We Die Alone" is a 200-page book in which a typo appears on about every fifth page. The sheer concentration of mistakes in the book (even befouling photo captions) makes for an ongoing distraction: it's like going out for a pleasant walk and finding yourself tripping over obstacles every twenty paces.

How did it happen? Consider the following sequence of examples:

[p. 52:] "... he like the idea ..."
[p. 53:] "... He house was the telegraph office ..."
[p. 56:] "... More over, the shopkeeper had told him ..."
[p. 67:] "... on skies he would be confident ..."
[p. 67:] "... chance acquaintances to whom he owned his life ..."
[p. 75:] "... and then came to and end ..."
[p. 93:] "... but a least they could talk ..."

Spot the pattern? Every misspelled word accidentally forms another word - different, but correctly spelled. There is not a single exception in the book. Conclusion? The publishers ran the manuscript through the spell-checking software but never bothered with a proofreader. The result is heap of distracting mistakes. That's slack.

Is the problem the author's? The book was written in 1955; this edition came out in 1999. Even if the typos belonged to Howarth, what did the publishers gain by preserving them? Only the blame, it would seem. Anyway, Howarth has other problems:

2. The author's prose style often strikes the wrong note, sometimes even creating outright gaffes. Examples include:

[p. 61:] "It was hard that these men were taken ..."
[p. 62:] "The other two were tortured to the point of death, and then put in the Catholic hospital, where they died."
[p. 62:] "Their own countrymen judged them hardly."
My favourite goof occurs when Howarth describes a scene in which a local villager conducts a conversation with Baalsrud in fluent Norwegian, whereupon the author renders the man's thoughts as follows:
[p. 69] "It seemed much more likely that [Baalsrud] was a German deserter."

~~~~~~~~ IN SUMMARY: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a great story; I'm really glad it has found a readership; but it's a shame that the publishers where [sic] lazy.

I rarely bother with adventure stories, but Howarth's fine prose swept me into this tale and kept me at it. The last half of the book I took in one sitting. We hardly care about the protagonist, Jan Baalsrud, as a personality. He has remarkable courage and incredible physical stamina but little spiritual depth. In the hands of a lesser writer, his story could easily have degenerated into a limp survival yarn of the sort regularly published in Reader's Digest. But Howarth gives meaning to the story both through his fine description of the harsh natural world and by his sympathetic treatment of the dozens of volunteers who came to Baalsrud's rescue. Their attempt to rescue one soldier at the risk of their lives became a political as well as a humanitarian cause, virtually the only blow these Norwegians could strike against German invaders in the wastelands of northern Scandinavia.

Second only to Slavomir Rawicz's The Long Walk in the annals of WWII escape stories I've read, the story of Jan Baalsrud's amazing escape after a failed commando insertion into occupied Norway is more a tale of endurance than one of derring-do. Penned by a former British spymaster, the book is a clear, if somewhat simply written, account of how Baalsrud was sheltered for weeks by various patriotic Norwegians who did their best to keep him out of German hands.

An expatriate Norwegian, Baalsrud and his fellow commandos were attempting to establish a resistance cell in northern Norway that would disrupt the operations of a major German airfield nearby. Betrayed, the commandos were ambushed by German soldiers, with only Baalsrud escaping. The bulk of the book described how over the next several weeks, regular citizens in remote villages attempted to keep him alive while arranging for him to get to Sweden. This was greatly hampered by the frostbite that made walking or skiing impossible for him. It's an excellent glimpse into the mundane details of how regular people did their best to resist the Germans with the knowledge that they and their families would be killed if their plotting was uncovered.

Ultimately though, the book is a tribute to Baalsrud's incredible physical and emotional endurance-he was buried alive for days under snow, left by himself for days at a time unable to move and in excruciating pain, and had to contemplate self-surgery-all while knowing that his discovery could mean the deaths of many innocent people. Think you're tough? Read this and think again! It would have been nice if the publisher had included a map.

'We Die Alone' was written by David Howarth in the mid-1950s, drawing on his Second World War experience of running espionage operations sent into German occupied Europe. The book recounts the experience of Norwegian Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor from an abortive attempt to land a commando team on the coast of northern Norway. Baalsrud made his way across Norway in the depths of winter, eventually to find safety in neutral Sweden. The heart of the book is about Baalsrud's amazing capacity to endure extreme hardship, frostbite, and long weeks of isolation in Norway's unbelievably harsh northern plateau region. Ultimately his survival rested on the willingness of the Norwegian people to feed and find him shelter even through the penalty for harbouring a spy was certain death should the German occupiers find out.

After the war David Howarth built a successful career for himself as a popular historian. For this book his admirably clear writing style has been paired down to match the absolute simplicity of Norway's stark winter environment. The writing is unadorned and spare. It perfectly suits the context, describing in a matter-of-fact way Baalsrud's incredible survival story. Here is a man who amputated nine of his own toes to prevent the spread of gangrene as he lay alone for three weeks in a shallow snow cave waiting for his rescuers to organise an escape to Sweden.

Reading about such events naturally leads to a sense of puzzlement about how Baalsrud survived hardships that would have killed most people put into a similar situation. David Howarth makes no direct attempt to explain this puzzle, but does explore his subject's psychology. It was as if Baalsrud simply could not conceive of giving up. Even well beyond the point when his Norwegian helpers imagined that he must have died from exposure, Baalsrud doggedly focussed on staying alive hour by hour until, close to death, nomadic Laplanders took him by reindeer-drawn sledge to safety.

'We die alone' has been through many printings. The absence of a map spoils my 2000 edition from the UK publishers, Cannongate. But readers can follow Baalsrud's journey with any large scale map of Northern Scandinavia.

This astounding account of survival gives the reader a perspective Americans are not generally familiar with--life within a country occupied by a ruthless enemy. Jan Baalsrud's uncanny survival story is told within the context of the north Norwegian underground resistance, and in that account is as inspiring as Soldiers of the Night and other volumes devoted entirely to the European resistance to the nazis. The only thing more terrifying than the German occupation forces are the impossible Arctic conditions Baalsrud and those who helped him to escape somehow survived. This true story is first-rate adventure and is highly recommended.

Mr. Howarth has captured an amazing WWII escape, from under the noses of the Nazi's, in a form which is both easily read and understood. From the moment of the failed Allied mission in the most northernly reaches of Norway, in the winter, to the final escape and recap, it is a fast moving, captivating historical account of the ordeals of one allied soldier, alone in occupied territory. A "must read" for any war buff or anyone who likes amazingly true stories. The author captured the real events by interviewing the participants after the war was over and reconstructing the whole scenario along with the principle, Jan Baalsrud. The bravery of those who helped Mr. Baalsrud escape is to be admired and be a lesson to all who face danger and trails in their lives. Jan's ordeal pushed the understanding of the limits of the human being's survival instincts to the a new level. John Sackenheim, Ross, Ohio USA

I received this book two days ago as an early Christmas present, having never heard of it either by title or author, and quite frankly I'm amazed that a story recounting heroism of this magnitude had escaped my notice for so long a time. As I'm writing these thoughts, I still have not finished reading the book, although as soon as I'm done recording these thoughts I have every intention of finishing it. The one (minor) quibble I have with the book is that the Author/narrator has a tendency to over-explain himself, and at times this results in an annoying tendency to put himself directly in the path of the story he's trying to tell. This caveat aside, I'm finding this work a truly compelling, sometimes horrifying and ultimately uplifting tale of the power of the human spirit to prevail against seemingly insurmountable odds. I would highly recommend this book to lovers of adventure tales in particular, and to readers of both fiction and non-fiction suspense and intrigue in general.