McHugh & crew of a rebuilt WWII Subchaser in Norway
“Splinter” is an award-winning World War II novel, set in Norway at the dawn of the Nazi occupation.
It dramatizes the manner in which Norway launched a movement to resist the fascist invaders. In this newsletter, I’ll describe why and how I grew inspired to pen the book.
It began with an effort to get famed San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti to hang out and chat with me for a good, long while at an espresso bar in North Beach. My interest had been sparked by rumors that this poet-cum-peacenik—and noted founder of the City Lights bookstore and publishing house—actually boasted notable warrior exploits, achieved some six decades prior.
Interestingly, I couldn’t find a thing in print that explored this alluring topic beyond a brief mention. To my eyes, it meant a grand opportunity beckoned.
A motto had long guided my freelance apprenticeship in journalism, one that could also function as a slogan for a paving company: “Find a need and fill it.” Even after I left freelancing behind to be a full-time Outdoors beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, I retained my freelancer’s nose for a sweet and saleable yarn.
I soon found that I had ways to freelance for my own newspaper. That route was called volunteering to do “enterprise” stories. These were pieces above and beyond the call of one’s ordinary duties. And no, they didn’t mean (usually) scoring extra pay or overtime. Often, you had to struggle just to get reimbursed for expenses.
But! It did mean I might score the periodic glory (fleeting, to be sure) of seeing my byline on a story that appeared in prime real estate, on the front page, above the fold. Which I rather liked.
So! I pitched it to the paper’s editorial pooh-bahs, they liked it. Then I reached Ferlinghetti through the City Lights front desk, and he liked it too. Which is how I came to discover that the man had in 1943 made a giant contribution to Norway’s Resistance when he undertook a covert mission for the U.S. Navy.
MY TREAT AT CAFFE TRIESTE
If poetry was the Beatnik religion—and, given the achievements of Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder, Kerouac and the rest, a good case can be made that it was precisely that—then Lawrence Ferlinghetti was that faith’s pope, its spiritual royalty. Some wags in the media had dubbed Kerouac, “The King of the Beats,” but I consider such attribution far off the mark. It was Lawrence himself who acted as the true force who pushed and prodded and guided this talented but unruly mob, the publisher and champion of them all. His San Francisco bookstore was pretty much the Beat Generation’s Vatican. When new claimants to the post of cultural trend leader, like Bob Dylan, trudged along, they sooner or later had to go there and, if not quite genuflect, then certainly mark out some turf.
Anyway, decades later, by 2006, when I began work on this story, Ferlinghetti, at age 87, had become a highly venerated eminence. After he had launched the City Lights, the first Euro-style espresso house in San Francisco began to steam grounds nearby—Caffe Trieste—and it long held sway as that poet’s favorite hangout, not least because it was just a short stroll from his bookstore.
And that’s where we met. I was in a chair on the sidewalk out front when Ferlinghetti vigorously strode up: tall, fit, with pale blue eyes and white beard, and straggly hair more-or-less tucked under a black cap that he wore at a jaunty angle. We greeted each other and went inside. I noticed immediately how we were noticed. He wasn’t exactly treated with deference as we ordered our coffee drinks—since that would not have been cool. But affection, respect, plus an assiduously curated level of familiarity? Yes, all of that.
THE PEACENIK’S WAR STORY
Ferlinghetti was a midshipman, training for a post as an ensign in the U.S. Navy, when Japan attacked our base at Pearl Harbor in early December of 1941. Our president at the time, FDR, apparently did not know that attack was coming. However, Adolf Hitler did: just five days later, he declared war on America as well, in alliance with Japan. The Germans already had long-range U-boats in place off our East Coast, and they promptly began to torpedo the hell out of our commercial shipping.
As one immediate consequence, Ferlinghetti was assigned to anti-submarine warfare. To illustrate how paltry our nation’s abilities were in this regard, his initial duty was to cruise in winter off the coast of New Jersey aboard J. P. Morgan’s commandeered yacht, deploying an array of equipment that consisted—in its entirety—of a hydrophone, binoculars, and a radio. This gave him a tiny chance to locate U-boats and almost no way to do anything about them.
Two years later, the “sleeping giant” of U.S. industrial might had gone into full uproar, and our response took a far more robust form. Steel production was directed into a weighty stream of tanks, ships and trucks. But it was seen there might be military use for wooden weapons as well—such as PT Boats, 80 feet long, constructed of mahogany boards and marine plywood, and Subchasers, 110 feet long, built of three-inch-thick pine planking.
Ferlinghetti, now a lieutenant trained to command these new Subchasers, awaited delivery of a trio of such vessels with his crew in Miami, so they could hop to work off the Florida Keys. However, when three Liberty Ships did dock with the trio of Subchasers sitting in cradles on their decks, the captain informed him that he’d just opened up some fresh orders. Those boats weren’t coming off the ships; Ferlinghetti’s boys, plus two other crews, were getting on. They would head out to perform a new and secret mission, all the way across the Atlantic.
HOPPING ONTO THE SHETLANDS BUS
Many people consider Viking lore almost ancient history—with the heyday of those seafaring raiders taking place more than a millennium ago. However, some Norwegians would dispute this, and I would join them. That Viking spirit has endured, although it did evolve. The Norwegians remained ardent seafarers, but channeled their skills into commercial shipping and fishing in modern times. Since we’re speaking of open ocean voyages in general, and on The North Sea in particular, its easy to see how boldness, endurance and a high degree of willful independence could yet remain cultural themes.
Such were the forces that the would-be Nazi occupiers soon ran up against. The Norwegian shipping companies transferred men and assets to support the Allied opposition on a wholesale basis; and they soon formed the backbone of North Atlantic convoys. Norwegian fishermen did likewise; they established a sea-going force within Britain’s new Special Operations Executive, or SOE.
Britain’s great wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, felt more than a bit impatient with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, considering it too stodgy and hidebound. So, he created his own alternative, the SOE, to “set Europe ablaze.” An important role was found in the SOE for Norwegian exiles: to run a covert, marine transfer service from a base in the Shetland Islands to the fjords of Norway. Using fishing smacks or trawlers, these eastbound runs brought guns, explosives and commandos over to aid the Resistance; the westbound runs going back brought aboard downed Allied pilots seeking to escape, and other refugees hoping to flee the Gestapo.
This highly hazardous transit service was known by a humorous nickname, “Shetlandsbussen,” or The Shetlands Bus.
UPGRADE TO THE SPLINTER FLEET
Now, this clandestine maritime service did appear to be highly successful—but only at first. Those fishing boats were quite slow, with a cruising speed around six knots, and the transit they faced was large, over 200 nautical miles, depending on which Norwegian isles or fjords had been selected as drop-off sites. This meant the boats spent far too many hours putting along over the billows in broad daylight.
Well, the Nazis might’ve been bullies, but they weren’t fools. They soon twigged to the nature of the operation, and began actively hunting down those landing zones as well as the boats that utilized them. It became clear to The Shetlands Bus operators that they needed to ramp up and get much faster vessels, especially ones that could shoot back. Enter, that trio of U.S. Navy Subchasers, delivered by skipper Lt. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When his Liberty Ship reached Scotland, he found out his new mission was transferring those vessels to members of Norway’s Resistance and training them in their use.
This accomplished, the Shetlands Bus continued a robust and highly successful operation from early in 1943 until the end of the war.
Naturally, the Norwegians had to take certain steps to render these vessels their own, something beyond simply flying Norway’s battle burgees from their signals masts. Where the U.S. Navy had designated them by letters and numbers—SC683, SC1061 and SC718—the Norwegians invoked their old cultural habit of naming boats for their nation’s islands, and proceeded to dub them Hessa, Vigra and Hitra.
Because these boats were built of pine, and absorbing damage and performing repairs made this key component rather obvious, the U.S. sailors nicknamed their Subchasers, “The Splinter Fleet.” I don’t know whether the Norwegians ever adopted or even chuckled about this moniker. However, I do know that it influenced my selection of a title for my subsequent novel.
STRAIGHT SKINNY FROM A SECOND SOURCE
I considered Mr. Ferlinghetti an honest and honorable man. Nonetheless, I was working for a professional news organization, which meant I had to get everything he said confirmed by some other sources. This meant consulting with U.S. Navy historians, which was relatively easy. Then Norwegian sources, which proved somewhat more fraught.
Luckily, Norway’s consul general in San Francisco at the time was eager to help, and he put me in touch with Norway’s own former Chief of Navy, Bernt Grimstvedt. Through long-distance phone calls, not only did I get the basics of my story bolstered, I also scored a startling discovery: the hulk of the Hitra had been found abandoned on a beach in Sweden, had been floated on a barge back to Norway in the 1980s, become fully restored, and was presently a working historical exhibit that made publicity calls to port towns during summers all along the Norwegian coast.
When I related this to Ferlinghetti, he seemed profoundly impressed. “You know, I’d really like to go over there and see her someday…” he said. But he never got to. I, however, did manage it. Under the auspices of Bernt Grimstvedt and his son Espen (a serving officer), I visited Hitra at her home base of Haakonsvern near Bergen, got to interview her current crew, and then photographed the Hitra herself from stem-to-stern, inside and out.
Some thirteen years after our meet-up at Caffe Trieste, on his 100th birthday, I presented Ferlinghetti with a photo book holding 100 images of one of those very same Subchasers he’d escorted across the Atlantic to serve in a fight against fascists, more than 70 years earlier.
I IMPLORE HISTORY TO COME TO LIFE
In 2018, I decided to try my hand at a historical novel. And there was no question in my mind about what era I would invoke, or which topic I’d take up. The more I learned about WWII in Scandinavia and Norway’s Resistance in particular, the more fascinated I became.
For one thing, the Resistance there amounted to far more than young men running off to the mountains to train and deploy as anti-Occupation guerillas and saboteurs. It included determined obstruction to German plans by schoolteachers, Lutheran ministers, trade unionists, athletes, students, government functionaries, and many more.
Yes, there were Norwegian collaborators, but nothing comparable to what was seen in Poland, Hungary and France. The very notion of a Vichy Norway was anathema to most of this nation’s patriots.
And so I sat down to write. My intent was to tell a tale that would begin with Germany’s blitzkrieg invasion on April 9, 1940, and run all the way up to the delivery of the Subchasers in 1943. But to my total surprise and partial chagrin, by the time I had compiled a manuscript of some 100,000 words, I hadn’t even made it out of 1940 yet! Clearly, I’d bitten off more than I could chew (or relate) in just one single book. So now, it looks like my “Splinter” tale shall have to become a whole series of books—a trilogy, at minimum.
But though my first book would never be able to get around to announcing the arrival of The Splinter Fleet, I decided to retain that title, thanks to other uses of that word. Splinter is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it suggests something sharp and penetrating, and often highly annoying to the recipient. And my main character is Kristian Thorsen, a fisherman’s son, who ably transfers his skills with a fillet knife to his use of a keen SOE combat dagger.
As a verb, splinter means to fragment or fall apart, and it can be used in both an active and a passive sense. And splintering is what soon comes to be inflicted upon daily life for all residents of Norway after Germany’s surprise invasion. Hence, the title.
HONOR & GLORY TO VETERANS
After many more maritime adventures in the European Theater, Ferlinghetti transferred to the Pacific, and found himself in Nagasaki just six weeks after the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb had utterly devastated the city. As he toured the miles of blackened rubble, Ferlinghetti told me, “In that instant, I became a pacifist.”
Still, the man retained some pride in his earlier efforts to combat fascism by more conventional means. My own attitude is somewhat similar. Certainly, I do not hold with massacring civilians wholesale as any sort of acceptable tactic. However, when a demented and destructive dictator assaults you in your homeland, I do feel that simply rolling over and putting your paws into the air isn’t the right response, not by a long shot. My character Kristian Thorsen illustrates the robust Resistance alternative—though this young man doesn’t emerge from his wartime experiences unscathed or unscarred. I don’t think anyone in such a role ever does…
In any event, to honor those who chose to vigorously resist aggression in our past and those who choose to do so today—such as brave Ukrainians, civilians and soldiers alike—I’ve arranged for a month-long special offer.
“Splinter” will be available in its Kindle ebook version from Amazon through November 25 at a nominal 99-cent price. Kindly mention this to anyone whom you feel might take an interest.
