Jan Sigurd Baalsrud, MBE (13 December 1917 – 30 December 1988) was a commando in the Norwegian resistance trained by the British during World War II. Biography Early life Jan Baalsrud was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway and moved with his family to Kolbotn in the early 1930s. He lived there until the 1950s. He graduated as a cartographical instrument-maker in 1939. World War II During the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Baalsrud fought in Vestfold. He later escaped to Sweden, which was neutral, but he was convicted of espionage and expelled from the country. In 1941, Baalsrud reached Great Britain after having travelled through the Soviet Union, Africa and the US. He joined the Norwegian Company Linge. In early 1943, he, three other commandos, and a boat crew of eight, all Norwegians, embarked on a mission to destroy a German airfield control tower at Bardufoss, and recruit for the Norwegian resistance movement. This mission, Operation Martin, was compromised when Baalsrud and his fellow soldiers, seeking a Resistance contact, accidentally made contact with a civilian shopkeeper who had taken over the store run by their intended contact and had the same name. Fearing for his life and suspecting it was a test by the Germans, he reported them to the local police office, which notified the Germans. The morning after their blunder, on 29 March, their fishing boat Brattholm – containing around 100 kilograms of explosives intended to destroy the air control tower – was attacked by a German vessel. The Norwegians scuttled their boat by detonating the explosive using a time-delay fuse and fled in small boats, but they were promptly sunk by the Germans. Baalsrud and others swam ashore in ice-cold Arctic waters. Baalsrud was the only commando to evade capture and, soaking wet and missing one sea boot, he escaped into a snow gully, where he shot and killed a German Gestapo officer with his pistol. Kolker summarises what happened next as follows: What happened over those nine weeks remains one of the wildest, most unfathomable survival stories of World War II. Baalsrud’s feet froze solid. An avalanche buried him up to his neck. He wandered in a snowstorm for three days. He was entombed alive in snow for another four days and abandoned under open skies for five more. Alone for two more weeks in a cave, he used a knife to amputate several