Book Review: We Die Alone

    We Die Alone is the miraculous survival story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando infiltrated  into northern Norway in the  late winter of 1943 with a mission to disrupt or destroy Nazi communication and air assets. The four man English trained unit arrives at a remote island in a disguised commercial fishing boat laden with explosives and arms smuggled inside herring barrels and fish boxes only to be betrayed by collaborators who alert the Nazi occupiers. Everything goes wrong in a brief firefight as the 4 man commando group and the 8 man crew flees to shore under a hail of gunfire. Only Jan escapes up a steep snow slope, shot in the foot and fighting for his life. Thus begins one of the most improbable escape and evasion stories ever to come out of the Second World War.

      The author, David Howarth, a Naval officer and British historian was involved in the Shetland Bus, the very SOE operation based in the Shetland Islands  that was responsible for this particular  tragic fiasco. After the arrival of the doomed vessel at the tip of Norway, nothing more was ever heard again of the fate of the men until much later in the war when it was revealed that there had been one survivor, Jan Baalsrud who managed to escape to neutral Sweden. This is the story of that escape pieced meticulously together by Howarth in a thin book published in 1954.

     Howarth had heard of bits and pieces of the saga during the war and found it almost unbelievable and his work to unearth the details was a masterwork in itself. He went back to the area some years later and retraced all the events, photographing and interviewing not only Jan Baalsrud but all of the Norwegian farmers and fishermen who concealed Baalsrud and help him reach the Swedish border. The photographs in the book showed  the heroic Norwegians and their Fjords and villages and even include some pictures of a memorial climb by Baalsrud and three of his rescuers a decade later. The final leg was a mad dash across a thawing lake on the border  in Lapland being pulled by reindeer  with  German bullets  zinging over their heads.

      Baalsrud is clearly a remarkable man but the real heroes were the villagers in these remote hamlets who risked their lives to save him. Above and beyond the call of duty is an understatement and Davis Howarth gives credit where credit is due.

      We Die Alone was written almost seventy years ago and deserves much wider dissemination and remembrance. IT is extremely well written and suspenseful and is a page turning extravaganza which will lock the reader from beginning to end. I couldn’t put it down.

 Book Review: Into the Raging Sea by Rachel Slade(2018)

On Oct 1, 2015 An 800 foot container ship called El Faro(“The Lighthouse”)  inexplicably sailed headlong into the eye  one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recordered in the late  Atlantic hurricane season. All thirty three crewmembers went down with this ship which crashed into the seafloor 15000 feet down just SE of the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas where Christopher Columbus  first staked his claim to the New World. How in this technology besotted twenty first century could such a ridiculously improbable event have occurred? This was the task that a young  Boston based magazine journalist named Rachel Slade assigned  herself to try to find out.

       At first the assumed conventional narrative was that the aloof and somewhat arrogant and lightly experienced ship’s master, a fifty something man named Michael Davidson on the downside of a undistinguished  maritime career was just not paying attention as he blithely sailed right into the eye of Hurricane Joaquin. There were no survivors. It was “pilot error”, obviously. Case closed. It was just a task for the insurance underwriters to draft some checks to cover the vessel and her contents and have the lawyers buy off any grieving relatives as long as they signed non disclosure agreements. With no way to prove one thing or another it was time to move on.

    But for one indomitably curious young woman journalist, that would have been what would have happened. Ships in all ages have sunk, often without a trace. The El Faro was a tragedy but the facts seemed straightforward to almost everyone except a few dogged investigators at the NTSB who investigate transportation accidents in the air and on the sea and to Ms Slade. As things played out there was a lot more to this story than the blunders of one ship captain.

    Accident investigations have long established that while accidents  sometimes happen as an Act of God, many more happen because of a chain of events which lead inexorably to a catastrophe. With no evidence but an oil slick and some scattered debris,investigators would have had almost nothing to go on besides radio transmissions if there were in fact any. In fact ships, even old rustbuckets like the El Faro carry position transponders like Semi Trucks and a black box like airliners. The obvious first task was to recover the black box and listen in on the last minute conversations of the stricken bridge officers, just like cockpit conversations and machinery and position and altitude data recordered by all modern airliners.. These data recorders are relativelty robust instruments which usually survive even fiery explosions. They are designed to emit a sound   powered by a battery which pings for at least 30 days. The approximate location for the El Faro was known by virtue of its last transmitted signal. A  research vessel was dispatched from its homeport of Jacksonville, Florida to listen for the signal and recover the black box if possible. It turned out that  after many days trolling over many many square miles of ocean, there were no pings to be heard which either meant that the assumed location was wrong or that the black box was dead or gone. The discovery of the Titanic by Dr Robert Ballard in 1985 using a submersible named Argo has opened up many  deep ocean mysteries. If you know where to look and you have an enormous budget it is often possible to photograph and even recover objects from the ocean floor, even two or three miles down. The problem was there was no unlimited budget and they did not know exactly where to look. The ship was old and at the end of its useful life carrying low value cargo like vehicles and frozen food for Puerto Rico. The other issue was overlapping jurisdictions without unlimited budgets. Even if somehow the data recorder was found and recovered, what if there was nothing on it because it was destroyed by the accident and the deep ocean pressures.

    Perhaps at this point I should lay out Rachel Slade’s book structure. It is basically in several parts: the search and rescue and recovery and the investigation and conclusions. If that were it it would be, you know, BORING. Rachel could have perked up her story with human interest digressions like biographies of the key personnel and their grieving relatives. (Spoiler alert!)What gives the book gravitas is that over half the book reads exactly like a  page turning novel with plot and conversations and dramatic turns of events. Rachel did not make up these conversations. They were taken verbatim from the 24 hour transcript that resulted from finding that Swedish made black box. Some of those conversations were hard to even read and fortunately the reader does not get to hear these interchanges and desperate last moments as the 155mmph winds and 50 foot seas battered El Faro to death.

      The book is excellently laid out and organized in its search for how and why an old and worn out ship ended up someplace it shouldn’t have been.  AS might be surmised there are reasons and villains and circumstances galore that Slade unearthed. They include bumbling, evasive, complicated bureaucratic  holding companies under reorganization by bean counters with no nautical experience looking only at the bottom line with reams of corporate lawyers to ensure that no blame would accrue to the companies. The other players the US Coast Guard and the NTSB  come out  a  better but politicians come out at the bottom as might be expected for cutting safety budgets and trying to influence outcomes to suit their political interests. Then there are overlapping jurisdictions and vague laws and unenforced regulations written to benefit the big guys at the expense of everyone else, the US taxpayer included. Even the Norwegian weather reporting and routing software gets implicated by its long delays and bogus predictions. Even poor Hurricane Joaquin gets blame for behaving in ways that baffled  29 of 30 National Weather Service computer models, yet  another US organization with slashed budgets and over extended personnel. One of the more interesting tidbits was the model from the European Medium Range Weather Forecasts(ECMWF)   absolutely nailed Hurricane Joaquim’s meanderings and explosive development. It turns out that the ECMWF is super well funded with crème de la crème scientists using the best supercomputers and up to date evolving models. It is based in the UK, Italy and Germany instead of North America which gets the brunt of almost all hurricanes. Go figure.