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In early 1943 Baalsrud was part of Operation Martin consisting of three other Norwegian agents who were taken to Norway by a clandestine fishing boat with a Norwegian crew of eight. Their mission was to destroy a control tower at a German airfield at Bardufoss and then recruit and establish a resistance movement.
They had been given the name of a resistance contact who ran a small shop but after making contact were unaware the shop had been bought by a man with the same name. Fearing for his life and believing it was a German trick the shopkeeper reported the agents to the police who passed the information to the Germans and the Gestapo started an investigation.
The following morning their fishing boat that contained over 100 kilograms of explosives for the attack was intercepted by a German gunboat and under fire the agents placed timing pencils into the explosives to destroy the vessel and cause confusion whilst escaping in small boats that were quickly sunk by the gunboat and the survivors begun swimming ashore in the icy Artic waters. Baalsrud was the only one not killed or captured and by the time he reached the shore he was freezing cold, missing one boot and then ran into a snow gully where he was confronted by a Gestapo officer who he shot dead with his pistol before continuing his escape.
Whilst evading German troops Baalsrud wandered through a snowstorm for three days, his feet froze and used a knife to amputate nine of his frost-bitten toes to stop the spread of gangrene, an avalanche then buried him almost to his neck and was entombed in snow for four days. After being found by Norwegian villagers he was tied to a stretcher and for seven weeks was close to death as they dragged him across mountains in the snow.
A villager contacted the resistance and was told to leave him on a high plateau on his stretcher and people would be sent to rescue him but because of bad weather and many German troops in the area he was there for 27 days suffering from snow blindness, he had not eaten and was close to death. After being found by the resistance he was carried to the border with Finland where villagers put him on a reindeer sledge and eventually reached neutral Sweeden.
Baalsrud then spent several months in a Swedish hospital before returning to England aboard an RAF aircraft. After being passed fit to be an instructor he helped train and select recruits for the Norwegian Section at the SOE phase two training school on the remote Scottish Highlands and after learning how to walk with only one toe with a walking stick, he volunteered to return to Norway as an agent and continued his clandestine work until Norway was liberated in May 1945.
Jan Baalsrud died on 30 December 1988 at the age of 71 in Kongsvinger, Norway.
Alan Malcher 