Knut Haugland, Sailor on Kon-Tiki, Dies at 92
Matthew Kruk
Knut Haugland, Sailor on Kon-Tiki, Dies at 92 By WILLIAM GRIMES
Knut Haugland, the last surviving member of the six-man crew that sailed
on the Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, and a leader of the Norwegian
resistance who helped carry out one of the most daring acts of sabotage
of World War II, died in Oslo on Dec. 25. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by Maja Bauge, the director of the Kon-Tiki
Museum in Oslo.
By the time Mr. Haugland met Thor Heyerdahl, the future leader of the
Kon-Tiki expedition, in a British paramilitary training camp during the
war, he had already experienced enough danger to last a lifetime. A
101-day voyage from Peru to Polynesia on the open ocean aboard a balsa
raft would have been the ultimate test of courage and endurance for most
men, but for Mr. Haugland it was more like an adventure vacation.
As a radio engineer, Mr. Haugland had fought the invading Nazis at the
battle of Narvik in 1940 and then, while pretending to be a typical
worker at an Oslo radio factory, took a leading role in the anti-Nazi
resistance, training radio operators and setting up secret transmitters.
Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow
bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their
weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital
in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way
to freedom with a pistol.
His finest hour came in 1943, when he took part in a raid to sabotage
the giant Norsk Hydro plant in Vermork, Norway. The Allies suspected
that the plant, where heavy water was produced during the manufacture of
chemicals for fertilizer, was part of a German program to make an atomic
bomb.
While Mr. Haugland stayed behind to maintain radio contact with Britain,
his fellow commandos slipped into the plant, set explosives and escaped
without a shot being fired. Some 3,000 German soldiers combed the
countryside for the saboteurs, but in vain. All escaped. Gen. Nikolaus
von Falkenhorst, the Nazis' supreme commander in Norway, called it "the
finest coup I have seen in this war."
Knut Magne Haugland was born Sept. 23, 1917, in Rjukan, in the county of
Telemark. He trained as a radio technician in Oslo and led the radio
unit of an artillery battalion on the Narvik front after the Nazis
invaded in 1940.
Immediately after Norway's defeat, he began working for the resistance.
He was arrested for the first time in August 1941, but escaped and made
his way to Britain, where he joined the Norwegian Independent Company, a
commando unit made up of Norwegians.
On Oct. 18, 1942, he and three fellow commandos were parachuted onto the
bleak Hardanger Plateau in Operation Grouse, organized by Britain's
newly formed Special Operations Executive. Their immediate task was to
memorize blueprints and plans of the Norsk Hydro plant and await the
arrival of additional team members by glider.
Phase 2 of the operation was a disaster. Both gliders missed their
targets and crashed. Survivors were captured by the Nazis, interrogated
under torture and executed.
Stranded, Mr. Haugland and his companions hunkered down for the winter
in a hunting cabin, surviving on reindeer and oatmeal mixed with moss
and lichen that they scraped from rocks. After identifying himself with
the code words "three pink elephants," Mr. Haugland transmitted back to
Britain every night on a radio fashioned from a car battery and stolen
fishing rods.
The British, encouraged, sent a six-man commando team in mid-February
for Operation Gunnerside. The two units linked up successfully and
completed their sabotage mission on Feb. 27.
Afterward, four members of the 10-man team skied hundreds of miles to
the Swedish border. The rest, including Mr. Haugland, remained in Norway
to work with the resistance.
It turned out that the Germans were interested in electric power, not an
atom bomb, but the daring and brilliance of the Norwegian Heavy Water
Sabotage, as the raid became known, earned it a special place in the
annals of the anti-Nazi resistance campaign.
After evading capture in 1944, Mr. Haugland returned to Britain, where
he met Mr. Heyerdahl and became fascinated by his theory that Polynesia
had been settled by adventurers sailing from South America rather than
Asia. When Mr. Heyerdahl put out a call for crew members to test his
idea, Mr. Haugland signed on as a radio operator. With a six-watt
transmitter, he broadcast daily progress reports, as well as weather
data, to amateur radio operators, who relayed the messages to the wider
world.
At sea, Mr. Haugland showed the same pluck that carried him through the
war. In one of the most gripping episodes related by Mr. Heyerdahl in
his book "Kon-Tiki," he leapt into a storm-tossed sea to rescue Herman
Watzinger, who had been swept overboard. Holding a life belt secured to
the raft by a long line, he reached the struggling crew member just as
the raft threatened to leave him behind forever.
Mr. Haugland's postwar life, punctuated by the Kon-Tiki adventure, was
devoted to the military and museums. In 1949 he and Mr. Heyerdahl, who
died in 2002, founded the Kon-Tiki Museum. Mr. Haugland, its director
until 1990, turned it into the most popular museum in Norway.
At the same time he continued his military career, serving with
Norwegian occupying forces in Germany and on the general staff of the
Ministry of Defense. In 1952 he took over the Royal Norwegian Air Force's
electronic intelligence program for northern Norway.
In 1963 he was granted temporary leave to help found the Norwegian
Resistance Museum. The temporary leave became permanent, and he served
as the director of the museum, which opened in 1970, until 1983. He was
made a lieutenant colonel in 1977.
In 1951 he married Ingeborg Prestholdt, who survives him, as do their
three children and several grandchildren.
Mr. Haugland was twice awarded the War Cross with Sword, Norway's
highest combat decoration, and received the Distinguished Service order
and the Military Medal from Britain.
The great raid on Norsk Hydro inspired the 1965 Anthony Mann film "The
Heroes of Telemark," with Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris.
Mr. Haugland was not a fan. He particularly objected to the word
"heroes" in the title. "I never use that word about myself or my
friends," he told BBC4 Radio in 2003. "We just did a job." Referring to
the glider crashes and the killing of the survivors, he added:
"Forty-one men were killed, and it could have been avoided. Because of
the loss of life, you shouldn't glorify the story."
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