Audacious saboteur who energised Norway’s wartime resistance movement by blowing up cunningly chosen German installations
The resistance structure in Germanoccupied Norway, “Milorg” (Military Organisation), focused its attention on preparing for the eventual liberation, rather than on harassing the occupiers or sabotaging their installations. But the Special Operations Executive (SOE) headquarters in London had other priorities, seeking to tie down the maximum number of German troops in Norway — away from the active battle zones — and disable elements of Norwegian industry diverted to the Nazi war effort. Into this scenario stepped Gunnar Sønsteby with a few friends intent on a resistance campaign of their own.
Aged 24, Sønsteby’s motivation was outrage at the German invasion of his country, cheerfully disregarding the fact it had been provoked by the Royal Navy mining Norwegian waters to block Swedish iron ore being shipped to Germany. On hearing that a Norwegian military unit was forming up in Britain, he made an attempt to reach this country by sea, only to suffer severe frostbite in northern Sweden, and he was obliged to return to Oslo. There he established contact with Milorg but resolved to take a more proactive role after a second visit to Sweden, when he met a representative of SOE at the British Embassy.
This and later border crossings were facilitated by a courageous and resourceful Norwegian customs officer, Johan Ostlie, and his wife Tora. Sønsteby’s task on return to Norway was to gather information for SOE on German activities, in particular on the construction of a U-boat harbour at Trondheim. When a radio transmitter operated by a colleague for passing information to London broke down, Sønsteby returned to Stockholm for spare parts. The Ostlies again helped him to make the crossing, as they continued to do for him and others until Johan was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943. Even then, his wife persisted with this work.
The concentration of Norway’s population in ports and small towns was a serious obstacle to clandestine operations, as uncustomary behaviour or strangers were immediately noticeable. Sønsteby therefore purported to be working for the collaborationist neo-Nazi Norwegian state police. Using forged papers, he travelled openly by car to gather information SOE required. Ostensibly driven by a gas-generator on the back, his car was actually using black market petrol.
Relations between the Milorg resistance and London came under strain after British commando attacks on targets in Norway that led to German reprisals against the local population and a consequent coolness between Milorg and Sønsteby’s group. Shortly after he had borrowed plates for printing Bank of Norway notes (required by SOE) and smuggled them over the frontier to Sweden in the summer of 1942, one of his contacts was arrested by the Gestapo. Recognising the danger to himself, he decided to take temporary refuge in Sweden. There he was persuaded by SOE’s contact in Stockholm to go to England for training in sabotage techniques.
He was parachuted back into Norway in November 1943 with instructions to return to Oslo, this time using an alias, establish useful contacts and seek sabotage opportunities. The situation in the capital was more dangerous than when he had left: his father had been arrested and imprisoned, many of his former colleagues had disappeared and the underground press had been put out of action. Nevertheless, he set about forming a group to work with the “Home Front” in overall control of resistance co-ordination.
The Front’s priority at that time was to frustrate plans for the conscription of young Norwegians into the German Army for service against the Russians. A countrywide programme was under preparation to deprive Vidkun Quisling’s puppet government of the records needed for the call-up and give heart to the population at large to resist the draft in every conceivable way. Sønsteby’s group blew up the Oslo Labour Office containing the bulk of the records and draft card printing machines without loss of life, the staff having been given two minutes to clear the building. A few days later, the same group destroyed the building housing the reserve printing machinery.
Messages broadcast from London gave the news of these and similar acts to the population and young Norwegians refused to answer calls to register for service. An underground press service was also re-established to provide reliable news and advice on how to avoid the draft. By his own admission, Sønsteby was so exhilarated by these events that he became less cautious while driving around. He had a narrow escape at a roadblock where a Norwegian policeman actually knew the person whose name he was using as an alias. He escaped by accelerating away at speed.
His later sabotage spectaculars included destruction of the Messerschmitt aircraft and aircraft parts storage depot at Korsvoll, the arms factories at Raufoss and Kongsberg and the oil depot in the Oslo dockyard. Despite his exhilaration, each of these operations was planned with meticulous care to avoid loss of life. Two final acts of his group were to collect Quisling — whose name had become synonymous with the word “traitor” — from his office for trial and, after the liberation, to escort King Olav and his family on his triumphant drive through Oslo on his return from England.
He was awarded the Norwegian War Cross with two bars, the British DSO and United States Medal of Freedom with silver palm. He left Norway in 1945 to attend the Harvard Business School and then worked for Standard Oil in Panama, New York and Oslo. From 1950 he was personnel director (and later sales director) for the Saugbruksforeningen Paper Mill. He formed a consultancy in 1970 and was general manager of the Getty Oil Company, Norway, from 1979 to 1985.
His memoir of his wartime service Report from No. 24 (his number when he began his service with SOE) was first published in 1965 and became a European bestseller.
He is survived by his wife AnneKarin and three daughters.
Gunnar Sønsteby, DSO, hero of the Norwegian wartime resistance, was born on January 11, 1918. He died on May 10, 2012, aged 94
Intrepid Chindit officer who was captured and sentenced to death in Burma’s postwar rebellion but escaped to marry his sweetheart
Neville Hogan embodied the potent combination of derring-do and determination that typified the Chindit Long Range Penetration brigades in Burma during the Second World War. In the Chindits’ first intervention in early 1943 — Operation Longcloth — eight columns, each of 400 men under command of Brigadier Orde Wingate, marched into the jungle to attack the Japanese lines of supply. When they launched their second operation a year later Hogan was with them.
Born in Rangoon in 1923, the son of an Irishman working for the Irrawaddy Shipping Company and a schoolteacher from one of the Karen hill tribes, Hogan had joined the local Territorial force when the Japanese invaded Burma in January 1942 and had seen action in the fighting at the Sittang bridge in late February.
Wounded in the leg by shrapnel, he swam the 600-yards-wide river after the bridge had been blown, denying its use to the Japanese but leaving two brigades of the 17th Indian Division on the far bank. This was the beginning of the great retreat; in company with many other soldiers and civilians, Hogan walked out of Burma into India.
On recovery from this ordeal he was sent for officer training and commissioned into the Burma Rifles in early 1943. He had heard of the Chindits because of the publicity given to Operation Longcloth and volunteered for the second operation, codenamed Thursday, to which six brigades were allocated with the support of the United States No 1 Air Commando of strike and transport aircraft.
In early March 1944, leading elements of the first two brigades were flown by glider into jungle clearings. Air photographs had shown one clearing strewn with tree trunks, believed to have been placed there by the Japanese. In fact they were logs left by the locals to dry, but these needed clearing to allow the preparation of airstrips to receive the DC3 Dakotas bringing in the follow-up echelons.
Hogan flew into the jungle clearing codenamed Broadway with elements of 77 Brigade commanded by Brigadier Mike Calvert (obituary, November 28, 1998). Once on the ground, each brigade set about establishing a jungle stronghold from where attacks on the Japanese lines of supply could be launched, in particular against those of the enemy facing the Chinese 5th Army in the north.
Hogan commanded a reconnaissance platoon of the Burma Rifles tasked to check out targets for the force at Broadway to attack. One of his more daring “reccies” put an end to a particularly notorious Japanese officer in a grenade attack on a village.
“Getting out was more difficult than going in,” he said. “One of my men seemed drunk with success. He was barking like a dog as we ran through the village. Fortunately the Japanese had their bayonets fixed which did nothing to improve their aim. We got out unscathed.”
How to deal with the injured and wounded was a serious problem. While the Chindits were based on the strongholds such as Broadway, aircraft of No 1 Air Commando could make the 400-mile flight over enemy territory to lift them out. Once the troops left the strongholds, their chances of survival rapidly diminished. Sickness also took its toll. After weeks of intense operations, Hogan was suffering from typhus, malaria and pneumonia and flown back to India.
Years later, in 1995 at an event at the Imperial War Museum, he met Vera Lynn and told her that she had kissed him on the forehead on July 25, 1944, at a field hospital in Assam. “How can you be so precise?” she asked. “You visited that hospital on that date which was the day after my 21st birthday,” he replied.
Back in Burma in 1947 he was asked to help form an officer training unit in Maymyo and one evening a friend invited him along to a party, mentioning that he would have the chance to meet a lovely girl. The girl happened to be one named Glory, whom he had met in 1945 when given the task of releasing internees held in Japanese camps. They were due to be married in early 1949, but Burma’s internal politics intervened and Hogan found himself fighting with the Karens against the army of the newly independent Burmese government.
He was captured and sentenced to death, but was sprung from prison and escaped to marry Glory back in Maymyo. After receiving death threats, he was advised to leave Burma and he and his wife arrived in England a year later. As someone who had fought against the central government, he could never return to Burma.
He worked successfully in the insurance business in England, and in retirement he and his wife raised significant sums for Burmese and Gurkha charities and, as chairman of the Burma Forces Welfare Association, for old soldiers in need in Burma. He was appointed MBE for his charitable work in 2004.
In 2009, as president of the Chindits Old Comrades’ Association and in the company of 60 surviving Chindits and the Prince of Wales, he oversaw the laying up of the Chindits’ Standard in Lichfield Cathedral.
He is survived by his wife Glory and two daughters. A son predeceased him.
Major Neville Hogan, MBE, Chindit veteran, was born on July 24, 1923. He died on April 21, 2012, aged 88
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Mikhail Khorev
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Russian Baptist leader who refused to be silenced despite enduring long sentences in Siberian prison camps
May 16, 1966, was a glorious day of spring sunshine in Moscow, with tourists from all over the Soviet Union milling about the streets. On Old Square, outside the drab offices of the Central Committee of the USSR, there was a noticeable swelling of the crowd. This grew to be the first organised demonstration in a communist country. The 500 participants came from 130 towns and cities representing almost every republic of the Soviet Union.
One organiser of this unprecedented event was Mikhail Khorev, a partially sighted itinerant preacher in the unregistered Baptist Church. The Initsiativniki Movement, as it became known, took its name from the “initiative” of its leaders from 1961 to establish free elections to the central Baptist leadership which, they believed, had compromised itself by accepting restrictions imposed by Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. He had inaugurated a period of more severe persecution, leading to the imprisonment of some 200 leaders of the Reform Baptist movement, as it is sometimes called in English.
The demonstrators presented a petition to the Soviet authorities, but those who entered the Central Committee building to hand it over did not emerge. The demonstrators were cleared off the streets and dispersed in buses to railway stations to be sent back home, but Pastors Georgi Vins, the main organiser of the movement, and Khorev evaded arrest and went back to Old Square to enquire about the fate of the detainees. They did not re-appear.
They were tried separately. Vins’s sentence in November 1963 was three years. In a later trial he was condemned to ten years, but was eventually exchanged in a “spy swop” with the US and died in Indiana in 1998.
Khorev received a shorter sentence, two and a half years, but it was merely the first of four periods of imprisonment of increasing severity.
Mikhail Ivanovich Khorev was born to Baptist parents in 1931 in Leningrad but, because of his disability, he had only an elementary education. However, after his baptism as a young man, he educated himself and became an immensely respected preacher who travelled throughout the Soviet Union to present the cause of his church. When, at his trial, the prosecutor asked him in which towns he had preached, he replied, “It would be easier to list where I haven’t been.”
The core of his message was, “Everyone has the right to meet freely and to teach the Gospel, including to children.” It was over this very point that the Reform Baptists had broken away from the official, registered Baptist Church.
At his first trial Khorev claimed several times that he never challenged believers to break the law, but only to exercise the right to “freedom of religious worship” which the Soviet Constitution allowed. These gatherings, perforce, had to be in the open air or crammed into apartments, because the authorities had closed down more than three hundred registered churches.
The details of the trial became known shortly afterwards through the smuggling of a 22-page summary of the proceedings. A fellow-believer who managed to elude the courtroom guards noted down the essentials; then the manuscript was brought out of the Soviet Union. Today a copy resides in the Keston Archive at Baylor University, Texas. It concludes by describing the scene outside the courtroom: “When they took our brother to the car, his friends greeted him and threw flowers, with the words, ‘Remain faithful to God, continue your work as a preacher, warm the cold hearts!’”
Since he was denied any medical attention for his condition, Khorev’s eyesight deteriorated, but on his release he continued his preaching. Later he wrote letters and smuggled them out of the strict-regime camp in Omsk, Siberia. In January 1980 he wrote: “I knew that I would be taken to the Kresty prison in Leningrad. I waited for this moment with an almost holy reverence. When my father was 48 he too was arrested for his service to God and brought to this same prison. I was then 7. Now I had become a father myself and was to follow his path through these same prisons.” Khorev’s Letters from a Soviet Prison Camp was published in London in 1988.
With the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev, conditions quickly began to ease for all Russian believers; prisoners were able to return to their families and resume their ministry.
Khorev had moved to Chisinau in the 1970s, where, after Moldavian independence, he led his congregation to two decades of free worship. However, the movement in which he played such a large part has not reunited with the mainstream Baptist Church.
Khorev is survived by his wife, Vera, and ten children.
Mikhail Khorev, leader of the Russian Reform Baptist Church, was born on December 19, 1931. He died on May 3, 2012, aged 80
