Shadow Warrior (11 page)

With the enemy in hot pursuit, the NORSOs retreated post-haste to their hut. Colby would not let his men rest, however. They gathered their equipment and set off immediately on the sixteen-hour trip back to Lake Jaevsjo. The Germans soon gave up the chase. The Wehrmacht subsequently brought in Russian slave laborers to repair the damaged line, but the flow of troops over the Nordland slowed to a trickle, an estimated 1,000 total for the last month of the war.
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Its Norwegian mission accomplished, Special Forces headquarters in London ordered a halt to further Carpetbagger flights. The NORSO team began to run low on food and other essentials. Then an order came dispersing all of the Rype team save Helgeson to duty elsewhere. Colby's force was cut to twenty. The snow was melting and the countryside was crawling with German patrols. At one point, a five-man enemy patrol stumbled into camp. Armed only with machine pistols, the Germans were outgunned. Colby believed he had talked them into surrendering when one raised his pistol. The Americans summarily gunned down the lot. But there would be more Germans, many more.

Before the NORSO team had set out on the Lurudal mission, a resistance figure code-named “Drama” had come to the mountains seeking a conference with the American Norwegian commandos, news of whose exploits had then spread far and wide. He proposed that NORSO begin training and equipping Norwegian volunteers for a partisan army that would operate out of Lierne, a nearby mountain redoubt.
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At the time, the idea had appealed to Colby and his men, most of whom had had experience with the maquis in France. The second attack on the Nordland rail line had put the scheme on hold. In the days after the Lurudal operation, however, the Lierne plan seemed not only attractive but vital. NORSO was isolated and would probably not receive any help from SHAEF until the war was over. Meanwhile, it was sure to be attacked by the tens of thousands of Germans it had bottled up. Operating out of Lierne, the commandos would have access to food, shelter, and allies in their struggle to survive.

But Bill Colby had a grander scheme in mind. “I urged a political gesture,” he wrote in
Honorable Men
: “let's seize the mountain redoubt of Lierne and declare it the first step of Norway's liberation, with the
NORSO Group and the friendly Norwegians who would flock to us, replaying France's liberation.” To his consternation, Special Forces headquarters denied permission. But Colby persisted. “I am here,” he radioed back. “I know what I am doing. I know I can do it; the Resistance wants me to do it, and I intend to do it.” London responded immediately. Colby and his men were to remain in hiding: “any unauthorized contact by you with enemy will subject you to immediate disciplinary action,” the message said. Before matters could proceed any further, Germany surrendered. The war in Europe was over.
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On May 11, Colby was instructed to proceed to Snassa and accept the surrender of the large German garrison stationed there. With two of his burliest sergeants at his side and the rest of the NORSO contingent, paltry as it was, covering them, Colby approached the camp's gate and bade the commander come out. Colby recalled that the German officer in charge was almost as nervous as he was and all went well. His men would remain in their barracks, the commander declared, and observe perfect discipline. At this point, the liberated people of Snassa poured out of their houses to festoon Colby and his men with laurels and flood them with champagne. Then followed a triumphal procession to Trondheim and more celebrating. When Crown Prince Olaf arrived in the city on May 17 for an Independence Day parade, NORSO became part of his honor guard.

One last task remained. The town of Namsos, some 60 miles up the coast, had been heavily bombed in 1940 and was the home base for some 10,000 German troops. When the people of the town asked for some Allied presence to convince the Bosche that they were no longer conquerors but the conquered, London ordered NORSO to undertake the job. Colby and his thirty men traveled over the very railway they had worked so hard to destroy and were billeted in the homes of friendly townsfolk. Colby hoped for the best, but his men reported conspicuous shoulder brushes with German troops on the streets, together with hostile stares and assorted insults. He ordered his men to avoid confrontations and under no circumstances try to disarm the enemy soldiers. But when the crews of five German naval vessels lined the harbor chanting, “Sieg Heil!,” he realized he would have to act. Colby telephoned the commander of the German forces and informed him that at 9:00
A.M
. the next day he would “inspect” each of his naval vessels. Accompanied by four NORSO soldiers, all former mariners, Colby arrived at dockside at the prescribed time. The team was
escorted by each vessel's commander to his respective ship. There were sullen looks, but no open defiance. Germans and Norwegians alike had gotten the word that the war was over, and Norway was a free country.
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Eight days later, Colby and his team boarded a plane for Oslo. The Norwegians were treated to a hero's welcome and dispersed. Their commander and their other American colleagues then departed for London. Bill visited Elbridge, who was working at SHAEF headquarters at Versailles, and learned that the NORSO Group was to be reassembled and dispatched to the Pacific. Colby had long wanted to return to Asia and serve in the China-Burma-India theater, but there was, he believed, still some unfinished business in Europe. He asked Russell Forgan, who had succeeded David Bruce as OSS European chief, for permission to mount a Jedburgh-type operation that would drop into Spain, link up with anti-Franco partisans, and topple that country's fascist government. Absolutely not, headquarters responded. The United States was not at war with Spain and did not intend to go to war with Spain.

Colby's proposal, which was met with a combination of amusement and derision by the OSS staff, was revealing in a number of ways. The Jedburgh would later write in
Honorable Men
that as a result of the episode, he “learned that America's mission in Europe was not purely ideological.”
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In truth, Colby was only being consistent. He had thought the war was about ideas, the principles embodied in the Atlantic Charter. While in France working with the maquis, he remembered being inspired by Colonel Chevrier's “political” speeches to his comrades. By political, he meant patriotic, ideological. Like Chevrier and T. E. Lawrence, Colby believed he was acting to bring oppressed peoples freedom, self-determination, and, if possible, democracy. Unlike them, perhaps, he believed that he was facilitating the advance of social and economic justice as well. Spain, to Colby's mind, had been the original battlefield. Franco's triumph and survival would remain a blot on the honor of the Allies. Were not freedom, democracy, and individual liberty inseparable, just as totalitarianism, racism, and imperialism were inextricably linked? Actually, given the culture that Bill Donovan had encouraged in the OSS, Colby's proposal was not outrageous at all. Donovan had encouraged thinking outside the box, and if it did nothing else, the agency shunned political, military, and diplomatic orthodoxy throughout the war. In this context, what was surprising was the idea's peremptory dismissal by Forgan and his staff. Perhaps ideology was taking
a backseat within the OSS, or perhaps the focus of that ideology had already begun shifting from fascism to communism.

And what of Bill Colby, the bespectacled, diminutive, twenty-five-year-old war hero? A hero he was; the citation for the Silver Star he was subsequently awarded was emphatic about that. He had engaged, endured, led, and prevailed. There seemed to be no limit to his will and determination—carrying a pack one-third of his own weight, scaling icy mountains, and fording frozen rivers. He had served as point man on the advance of every patrol and personally covered every retreat. The morale of his men had remained high even in the most desperate situations.
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Colby's college friend Stan Temko had visited him during his Jedburgh training. How would you describe Bill Colby? he had asked another commando. “Ballsey,” was the reply. His contemporaries then and later would call him fearless. No person is exempt from fear, but Colby's ability to control his was truly remarkable. Bill Colby was a warrior in the making when he arrived in Europe and a warrior in full when he left, a veteran of unconventional warfare. In many ways, that experience would mark him for life.

In this, Colby was in some ways like any other individual who fights in a war. As “the Judge,” a character in Cormac McCarthy's novel
Blood Meridian
, observed “[war] endures because young men love it and old men love it in them.” The Judge goes on to observe that “the world is forever after divided into those who fought and those who did not.”
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As a Jedburgh and a NORSO operative, Colby was the elite of the elite. He had experienced the intensity of relationships that come only to men who have survived combat together. For some, it would be an experience they would seek to recapture even until death. Moreover, Colby had fought in the “Good War,” against the real Axis of evil. His experiences had not compromised his morality, but confirmed it. In some ways, the young soldier was still the naive adolescent, a captive of Elbridge's outsized expectations.

Shortly after his return from the European theater he wrote an account of his NORSO experiences entitled “Skis and Daggers.” It was a precursor of the World War II genre books for adolescents such as
Dave Dawson over Burma
. Just as Dave's sidekick consumes a whole cherry pie before flying off to shoot down Jap Zeroes, the men of NORSO engage in delirious horseplay after their return from Tangen. Helgeson sends his comrades
into a fit of mirth by demanding “a dish of pineapple,” while Sather calls Colby a “Trojan Norse.”
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War, of course, is a dangerous business, for body and soul. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not be, generally eclipse questions of right and wrong. For the men and women who served as Jedburghs and NORSO commandos, this was doubly true. Not only were they deciders of life and death, as all soldiers are, but they were agents of revolution, molders of societies, and purveyors of ideals, however small the scale. Donovan's people worked outside of traditional political, diplomatic, and military channels; that free agency could be intoxicating. Bill Colby was a good man, a good Catholic, fighting a just war. And yet, in that righteous conflict, in the very triumph over the fascist empires, there lurked danger for the man and for his country. As the Judge in
Blood Meridian
says to a former priest turned Indian fighter (the novel takes place in the 1850s' American West), “For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor [war]. The priest also would be no god-server but a god himself.”
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Colby may not have been the archetypal Nietzschean superman Cormac McCarthy was referencing, but he had allowed his patriotism and his religion to take the fine edges off the horrors of war. For the vast majority of men and women who served in World War II, the experience would be unforgettable, but temporary and eventually fleeting. For a few, it would determine the course of the rest of their lives, and they in turn would shape the future of the nation. William Egan Colby was one of those few. No conscript crusader he, but a professional, a lifer.

Following the operation in occupied France, most of the Jedburghs were reassigned to the Far East, dropping behind Japanese lines in China or Indochina to rally, train, and equip the native resistance movements. NORSO had not been intended as a substitute for service in the Pacific theater, only a detour. Accordingly, when Colby arrived in London from Oslo, he was informed that he would take ship for America and, after a brief shore leave, depart for the other war, probably to be stationed in Indochina because of his French.

Rejection of his proposal to overthrow the Franco regime in Spain notwithstanding, Colby was pleased. The ensuing transatlantic voyage was
slow but uneventful—there were no Nazi wolf packs to dodge. Colby remembered sailing into New York Harbor past a huge banner that read “WELCOME HOME—WELL DONE.” Almost the first thing the young hero did was to call Barbara Heinzen, the Barnard co-ed he had dated while he was at Columbia. Whether it was love or lust—the family later would joke that John, the eldest child, was born nine months and one minute after Bill landed in New York—the couple became engaged just two weeks after they were reunited. But Bill and Barbara did not set a date for the wedding. He recalled that he did not want to leave a war widow, and she probably did not want to become one.
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In the Pacific, the Allies had turned the tide. General Douglas MacArthur had returned to the liberated Philippines in the fall of 1944, and early the next year the US Marines, supported by the army and navy, began their island-hopping march northward toward the Japanese homeland islands. By the summer of 1945, the Japanese had lost all of their carriers and most of their air force, but the assumption among MacArthur's staff was that the enemy would fight to the bitter end. The battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been the bloodiest of the war. Then, as Colby was packing his bags and mentally girding his loins, word came of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6. The Soviet Union invaded Manchuria on August 8, and Nagasaki was bombed the next day. On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered unconditionally. World War II was over. On September 15, Bill and Barbara were married in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Washington, DC. “I stopped in advance at a quiet Catholic church to confess the lively bachelor life I had lived as a paratrooper for three years,” Bill wrote in
Honorable Men
.
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