What I did on my Norwegian vacation ...

[uwe]

[Iome]

Looks fun, what did you shoot it down with?  ...or did you just crash into it at the airport with the Volvo?

[uwe]

 

It wasn't me!


And it's not a real Heinkel at all, it's a lovingly done movie prop for this film here, discarded (the Heinkel, not the film) after it was shot (the film, not the Heinkel):





Based on a true story of a German Heinkel 111 bomber pilot and an English naval observer Blackburn Skua



pilot (Luftwaffe played by German actors, Royal Fleet Airmen by English ones) first embroiled in a dog fight against each other who then both had to crash land in the deep freeze Norwegian wilderness (close to that hotel which retained the prop Heinkel) and actually had to work and live together to survive. The two pilots became friends, visiting each other after the war, the Englishman, Captain Partridge,



passing (of natural causes I hasten to add) in 1990, the German pilot, Horst Schopis (second from left, Partridge is beside him)



still alive today (a guest during the filming along with the English pilot's son) and 98 years old.



All in ze spirit of Völkerfreundschaft of course! That is both of them together with Mrs Partridge in 1977 when Schopis visited the Partridges for the first time:



Herr Partridge in the Fleet Air Arm Museum where his salvaged Blackburn Skua (which force-landed on ice and then sunk in the spring of 1940 to be retrieved in the mid-seventies and put on display as it looked on the bottom of the lake).





The real Heinkel in 1940



and what was left of it in 2002, it is in too difficult territory to salvage

[Highlander]

Ze Shiniest Jackboot award for ze most original holiday photos goes to...

Ya, it's ze Hornung family...



(You started it, you invaded Norway... )

[Chris P.]

Nice!

[uwe]

"You started it, you invaded Norway..."

Revisionism if I have ever seen it! We both started about the same time invading Norway, we just came in first and, initially at least, more lastingly!   You tried to pull that dirty WW I trick on us and cut us off from the North Sea so that we can starve in the Baltic. Not this time, I tell you, not this time ...  

We needed the Norwegian west and north coast so that our Tirpitz could operate freely. In its fjord, moored and anchored, a sitting duck ... And duck hunting you went, with some success. Little-known fact: To hide the Tirpitz from RAF attacks, they had huge fog machines in that fjord. But in the end, after crippling damage from mines planted by mini submarines, 32 Lancasters dealt the mercy kill ...



German battleships and Gibson basses have one thing in common: a thorough track record of failure!  

Speaking of failures: Much is always made about Scandinavian volunteers in the Waffen-SS,



but there was less than two hundred of them. The Norwegians (who gave the Wehrmacht a hard time in 1940, Norway took longer than France which had a larger army than Germany) were proud men and while German occupation of Norway was nowhere near as bad as the atrocities in the East they were not seduced.

[Dave W]

The Norwegians wasted almost no time putting Qusiling before a firing squad. That says a lot about their character.

[dadagoboi]

I recently saw 'Max Manus', good film about the Norwegian resistance.

[GonzoBass]

I found the Resistance Museum at Akershus Fortress in Oslo to be fascinating.
Took me over eight hours to get through it.

[Highlander]

Did someone mention Vikings...?