The Norwegians recognized that counterattack was futile. So Loberg and thirty-four other pilots of the RNAF were instructed to evacuate. They took to the sea and spent the next four weeks making their way to Britain by freighter and fishing boat, and were eventually escorted by a British coastal vessel to Lerwick in the Shetland Islands.
Norwegian land forces had had better luck on the first day of the invasion—a coastal battery sank the German heavy cruiser Blücher in the Oslo Fiord. On that day, April 9, twenty-two-year-old Harald Jensen was about to write his sergeant’s exam at the Oslo military school. He witnessed the thwarting of the first German assault.
“Next morning, we got out on the parade ground and planes were circling overhead. One came down quite low—it looked like a Heinkel. I was on my way to a machinegun post. I had been ordered out to a railway station. I commandeered a car to get to the station, and when we arrived at the machinegun post, it was already manned and there were three German planes coming down in perfect formation. But the whole thing was completely silly. They landed at Fornebu airport and captured Oslo within a few hours.”
Jensen was allowed to go home to Larvik, but he decided to search out resistance forces. With the equivalent of about five dollars in his pocket he trekked through Sweden trying to get into the fighting. He made his way to Stockholm, where he remained for eight months before he managed to get hired on board the Taurus, one of five ships planning to run the gauntlet from Sweden, past Denmark, and up the Skagerrak to the North Sea and England.
The morning the ships weighed anchor, “it was supposed to be snowing. . . . We were steaming along the Norwegian coast past Sola, the biggest air base the Germans had in northern Europe at that time, and the weather started to clear. Next thing we know there’s a warship bearing down on us. We all ran up on deck. We could see the ship’s bow drawing closer and closer. The captain was going to [open] the sea-cocks and sink our ship, when the warship swung broadside, and we saw she was flying the British navy flag. She was a light cruiser.”
Jensen and all the crewmen of the Taurus became instant celebrities in the British press. They received the Norwegian War Medal for bravery. Five modern freighters had broken the German blockade of Norway and Denmark at a time when Britain had a dwindling number of ships in its merchant marine and even fewer successes against the German invasion of Europe.
It took the Germans sixty-two days to complete the seizure of Norway. In the course of those two months there were 2,600 German and 7,000 Allied casualties. However, the government of Norway survived. Almost the last to leave the country was King Haakon, who immediately formed a government-in-exile in London, England.
Fridtjov Loberg and Harald Jensen had become expatriates too. Yet they and thousands of their countrymen would return to emancipate their homeland five years later. Their route to victory would begin 3,000 miles away, at a military flying training station in Canada as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
From April through June 1940, the flow of Norwegian military personnel aboard planes, pleasure boats, fishing vessels, and merchant marine ships to Britain was constant. They were a people without a home and a military force without a place to regroup. In Britain, the RAF had its hands full. Europe was falling and British authorities could offer no surplus planes, equipment, instructors, or training fields to help rebuild a Norwegian air force.
The commanding officer of the Norwegian army air arm, Captain Bjarne Oen, had fled to England aboard the same Norwegian fishing vessel as airman Loberg. From the moment he arrived on May 12 he began a campaign to reorganize Norwegian flyers. At first he negotiated them into the RAF Volunteer Reserve. But when Norway capitulated on June 7, Britain cancelled all plans to train Norwegians, since the RAF needed all its pilots, aircraft, and aerodromes for combat flying, not training. Oen approached the French for training facilities, but they were in disarray. However, diplomatic contacts in Washington and Montreal were already working to solve the problem of the homeless Royal Norwegian Air Force.
Canada and the RCAF had just launched the BCATP. The Canadian government agreed to provide the airfield on the Toronto Islands as a potential training facility for the RNAF. The Toronto Harbour Commission offered land adjacent to the airport rent-free for any required buildings to house the Norwegians. Aircraft, purchased by Norway before the outbreak of war and on order from American factories, would be sent to Toronto. In Britain, the Norwegian government-in-exile made plans to train both naval and army flyers at the Toronto Island Airport. The British government agreed to accept graduates as reserve flyers in the RAF.
The first 120 naval and army flyers of the RNAF-in-exile crossed the Atlantic aboard two former Norwegian coastal steamships—the 800-ton Iris and the 1,200-ton Lyra—in August 1940. Fridtjov, or, as he became known in Canada, Fred Loberg, was with the first contingent sent to establish a pilot training station for the RNAF in Toronto. Organizers of the Norwegian training camp were first headquartered at the Royal York Hotel, while the Norwegian army and naval servicemen were temporarily barracked at Lakeside Home, a Toronto Island summer home for the patients of the Sick Children’s Hospital, and aboard the Iris, which had managed to navigate the St. Lawrence Seaway up to Toronto harbour.
Beside the airport “was mostly vacant land,” Loberg remembered, “so we immediately started building the camp there. We had to build a barracks, mess hall, and equipment depot” before the pilot training could begin. There was training of another sort going on in the vicinity— no sooner was Loberg’s office up “next to the Maple Leaf Baseball Stadium, than I found baseballs breaking through the windows of my office.” The baseball players had the jump on the airmen in another respect too. They had uniforms. Procuring RNAF uniforms was Loberg’s next assignment.
“How many men can I count on?” Loberg asked the chief officer.
“You can guess just as well as I can,” was the reply.
So Loberg threw what little commercial experience he had at the problem. The Norwegian air force colour was green; their uniforms were also tailored much like German military uniforms, and that would never do. So, first Loberg sought permission from the RAF to use their air force blue for RNAF officers’ uniforms.* Then he assembled a uniform that would fit a man of his stature; it was a battle-dress uniform with a bloused top that was buttoned to the pants.
By fall 1940, the Loberg-styled uniforms had been manufactured and distributed, and elementary flying training had begun at Camp “Little Norway.” Trainees studied at the ground school and later in the wireless school (known popularly as “Radio City”), while they upgraded their physical training in the station’s new gymnasium-sauna facility (later named Haraldshallen because it was christened by Prince Harald). The first pilot trainees took one of the world’s shortest ferry rides, across the narrow channel to the island airport, for their elementary flying sessions in Moth and Fleet biplanes borrowed from the Toronto Flying Club.
The Battle of Britain was in its sixth week when Little Norway took delivery of its first American-built Fairchild PT-19 Cornells. Soon after, the first three Douglas light bombers arrived, and then a freighter full of Curtiss Hawk fighters. Still later, patrol bombers on pontoons arrived for the naval branch. In all, about $20 million worth of aircraft (financed by gold spirited out of Norway when the Germans invaded) got RNAF instructors and students off the ground. Training was well under way by November 10, 1940, when the Norwegian and RAF flags were raised at the official opening of the Royal Norwegian Air Force Training Centre.
During the months that followed, a steady parade of new aircraft and Norwegian royalty made their way to the island airport to bolster the training fleet and the morale. Whenever royalty showed up, so did the bevy of newsreel cinematographers, ready to document the unveiling of each new blue-and-yellow Fairchild Cornell. For propaganda purposes the RNAF hired a film crew and renowned American journalist Lowell Thomas to narrate how “Crown Princess Martha opens the christening ceremony for a number of gift airplanes,” while pointing to the fuselage inscriptions that read “Fra Nordmenn— Argentina” and “Fra Nordes Venner—Minnesota.” As the paper was ripped away to reveal more inscriptions