Post #500984 by khan_tiki_mon on Sun, Dec 27, 2009 9:28 AM

From Kon Tiki by Thor Hyerdahl:

"...I met Knut for the first time in England in 1944. He'd been decorated by the British for having taken part in the parachute action that held up the Greman efforts to get the atomic bomb; he was the radio operator, you know, in the heavy water sabotage at Rjukan. When I met him, he had just come back from another job in Norway; the Gestapo had caught him with a secret radio set inside a chimney in the Maternity Clinic in Oslo. The Nazis had located him by D/F, and the whole building was surrounded by German soldiers with machine-gun posts in front of every single door. Fehmer, the head of the Gestapo, was standing in the courtyard himself waiting for Knut to be carried down. But it was his own men who were carried down. Knut fought his way with his pistol from the attic down to the cellar, and from there out into the backyard, where he disappeared over the hospital wall with a hail of bullets after him."

The crew of the Kon Tiki were an extraordinary group of men.