Wilhelm Mohr

Wilhelm Mohr. On World War II
deployed respectively to Royal Navy and Royal Air Force operational
control. In addition, elements of the Army were gathered in Scotland,
to support the growing resistance movement within occupied Norway.
Norway truly became an ally to Britain.
We can claim, with some pride, that the income from our merchant
fleet funded our share of the War effort. However, at the same time we
must recognise our good fortune that, during the period when Britain
stood alone, the battle of Britain had been won with no invasion taking
place.
My own luck was to be part of ’the Norses’ within Fighter Command.
This comprised of two squadrons, 331 and 332, totalling about
300 pilots and ground crew. Besides our training camp ’Little Norway’
in Canada, we also had two squadrons in Costal Command and
numerous crews in Bomber Command and ferry Command, as well as
crews on the ferry link to Sweden under the auspices of the civil airline
BAOC.
I was in my early twenties at the time, but vividly recall when, in May
1942, the two fighter squadrons were moved from Scotland and the
north of England to RAF Station North Weald near Epping. There we
were to meet our Wing Leader-to-be, David Scott-Malden, a classics
scholar from Winchester and King’s College and now proven in combat
from the Battle of Britain. He had been in part responsible for getting
us south and knew what was in store for us. It was he who really coached
us in the ways of the RAF and introduced us to the realms of aerial
combat that were to follow.
The Station Commander at one time, Douglas A. G. Morris (or
’Zulu’ as we called him) later gave an account of our association:
The Norses were possibly the easiest of all Allies to handle. Their sense of humour
– or sense of the ridiculous – and their reaction to any form of pomposity was easily
understood and accepted. They all spoke more or less fluent English, and when
British and Norwegians were together it was only by the different insignias on our
uniform that strangers could tell us apart (from Laddie Lucas’s Wings of War,
1985).
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