BATTLE OF EUROPE: Fifteen Minutes

Norwegians, your fellow-countrymen are here, and with them your British allies.-We wish you a good Christmas and a happy New Year. We bring you this greeting from all free men.

Cheery as a birthday sing-o-gram, that message boomed through the loudspeaker of a British ship, one of several anchored brazenly last week off the German-held Lofoten Islands on Norway's jagged northwestern coast. Bearers of the greeting were Britain's tough Commandos, bent on destruction of radio equipment guiding German shipping along the Axis sea route to the Arctic fighting front in Russia.

Working with the same cold precision that has marked Commando successes in France and Libya (see p. 25), the raiders took over in 15 minutes flat, destroyed a radio mast and transmitter, shot down a lone plane offering resistance, sank a German patrol boat, took several prisoners including six quislings. The Commandos did not lose a man. Simultaneously another Commando unit made successful raids on Vaagsoy and Maaloy, islands several hundred miles south of Lofoten.

There nine quislings were collared. In Commando-weary Vidkun Quisling's official newspaper there later appeared an angry complaint: other Norwegians had painted signs on the quislings' homes to identify them for the Commandos.

More than 200 Norwegians accompanied the raiders back to England, there to join the Royal Norwegian Government-in-Exile. Those remaining behind prepared stolidly for the reprisals sure to come—in their zeal to assist the visitors, the residents of one village had cut a German telegraph line in 35 places, had committed other appropriate forms of sabotage. Spreading throughout Norway was a growing conviction that Commando raids presage a mass British attempt to wrest from German hands the naval fortress of Narvik, and ultimately the whole of Norway.