I have finally gotten around to reading a book for youth written by a family friend, Gunnar Skadberg about Rogaland (the county I’m currently in here in Stavanger) during WWII, «Livet er å velge: en bok om andre verdenskrig i Rogaland – skrevet for ungdom».
In his opening descriptions he recounts a bizarre but ultimately tragic little anecdote (page 40) about some sacks of flour. German troops took the local airport here, the largest in Norway at the time, within an hour of dropping troops onto the runway and within a few hours controlled the entire area. When they arrived at the military base located in Madla, only about a 10 minute bicycle ride from where I’m writing this posting, they found it deserted of its 800 troops. Their commanding officer decided that being caught facing Germany’s invasion on Stavanger’s “rat hole” of a peninsula with untrained troops newly arrived from the east was probably not wise. He moved all the troops south to the more mountainous Sviland, Ålgård, and Oltedal off the peninsula.
Two volunteer truck drivers returned to the Madla military base to try to pick up sacks of flour to supply the Norwegian troops but when they arrived they found that German troops had already occupied it. Apparently, the German troops had instructions to be friendly towards any Norwegians who showed no resistance so, when the truck drivers explained they had come to collect sacks of flour, the soldiers helped them load the flour onto the trucks. The truck drivers then proceeded to deliver this flour to the, still resisting, Norwegian forces further south.
The story ends tragically when the trucks get to Sviland and are stopped by trigger-happy Norwegian guards and one of the truck drivers, for some reason, ends up fatally stabbed by a guard’s bayonet.