The Shetland Bus: a tale of wartime courage, two communities and enduring connections

5 MINUTE READ

 

Imagine you’re on a small, wooden fishing boat, pitching and rolling in the biting wind and foul weather of the North Sea. It’s the dead of winter, in the depths of World War II. You can’t see any lights and you have only a compass to guide the way. The sea is black and merciless. The threat of German patrol boats, aircraft or U-boats is constant. Below deck, your boat carries weapons, agents for the Norwegian Resistance and a stubborn spark of hope. On the return leg, it’s Norwegian refugees, fleeing the Nazi regime, their lives in your hands. 

But this isn’t fiction. This was the Shetland Bus, a small but vital secret wartime operation that ran between Norway and the Shetland Isles of Scotland.

And for Bill Moore, this is more than a story. It’s part of his family’s living history. Bill, born and bred in Shetland, is a volunteer and trustee at the Scalloway Museum, on the west coast of Mainland, the largest island in Shetland. It’s his job to help keep the Shetland Bus memory alive. 

His father, Jack Moore, was part of the Shetland Bus, working hard behind the scenes to keep it going. “My father was involved in the maintenance of the boats from 1942, when the Shetland Bus moved from Lunna to Scalloway. Lunna was a remote part of northeast Mainland where secrecy was easy but maintenance was all but impossible. 

Scalloway was heavily defended – there was almost a British military person here for every inhabitant,” Bill explains. “My father wasn’t in the operations – that was carried out almost exclusively by Norwegians – but he had the engineering business here in Scalloway so he and his men worked together with Norwegian engineers and carpenters for the rest of the war to keep the fleet going.”

Jack’s role became even more personal in 1946, when he and Bill’s sister, then just six years old and ill with measles, were asked to introduce The King’s Christmas Day speech in a live broadcast from Lerwick, heard across the world. “My sister told the story of how she had no Christmas tree that year, in 1946 but she had one every year during the war because the Norwegians always brought one from Norway.” This small detail is a powerful reminder of the deep connections forged between Shetland and Norway during the war.

What was the Shetland Bus?

“The first thing to understand is that the Shetland Bus is nothing to do with buses,” says Bill. “It’s all about boats.” The name sounds misleading, but as Bill explains: “It helps if you think of it as a contraction of ‘the Shetland bus service,’ because it was a series of daring operations carried out throughout World War II between Shetland and German-occupied Norway.”

The Shetland Bus was a clandestine link between Britain and Norway. At its core were innocent-looking Norwegian fishing boats manned by Norwegians who ran Norwegian and British agents, weapons and supplies to the Norwegian Resistance and brought refugees out.

“Norwegians who were endeavouring to escape from Norway would speak about ‘taking the Shetland Bus’, and that was a sort of code for escape,” says Bill.

Who were the Shetland Gang?

Today, Norwegians call the young men who risked their lives to run the bus Shetlandsgjengen, ‘the Shetland Gang’. 

“That’s a far better moniker because that really describes them,” Bill says. “They weren’t officially part of the traditional organised military services. They were a lot of young Norwegians, and in the beginning, they were an undisciplined but highly motivated lot.”

Unlike the 500 members of the Norwegian Air Force based at Sullom Voe where the oil terminal now stands and the 200 sailors in the Norwegian Navy Naval flotilla based in Lerwick at the time, the Shetland Gang, who numbered no more than 80 at any one time. They  were not officially part of any organized naval or military services. 

Rather, they were in Shetland as part of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret operation he set up in 1940 to gather intelligence and build up the resistance in occupied countries. SOE’s role was to harass the enemy in any way possible – it’s easy to understand why it was nicknamed ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’ and ‘The Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare’ – and often using unconventional means; the Shetland Bus was the transport means.

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“But” explains Bill, “the Gang were just young Norwegians, many in their early twenties, fishermen, small-scale farmers, just ordinary lads from similar walks of life as the Shetlanders. They fitted in well here.”

Bill describes the warmth between locals and the Shetland Gang: “When they came here to Scalloway, these young lads had a social life with dances and various social activities. It made all the difference. They didn’t feel isolated like they did when they were based at Lunna, which was very remote. They became part of village life, part of the family, really, and this is how they’re remembered. The only difference was the language.”

At least 800 Norwegians were based in Shetland during the war, split between Lerwick, Sullom Voe and Scalloway, and with those strong ties, it’s little surprise that there were about 25 marriages between Shetlanders and Norwegians. “Some families still live here, some in Norway,” says Bill. “The connections remain strong. Astrid Larsen, the daughter of Leif Andreas Larsen – the all-time hero of the Shetland Gang – visits regularly.”

Shetlands-Larsen, as the Norwegian hero became known, completed more than 50 Shetland Bus operations, surviving brutal weather, enemy attacks and even sinkings. He ended up with more British medals than anyone else in World War II. In his home city of Bergen, Norway, Larsen’s statue stands tall in the city’s famous harbour, surrounded by the ancient wharves, fish market, boats and throngs of tourists. 

The perils of crossing

Surviving 50 crossings is something of a miracle. “They went from Shetland to the far south of Norway, right up to Tromsø in the Arctic,” Bill explains. “Remember these were fishing boats. They only did about seven or eight knots, so it would take four to five days to reach the high Arctic, and they only had a compass. All these operations had to be done in winter because they needed darkness to conceal the fact that they had crossed the North Sea.”

The risks were staggering. If captured, the crews weren’t treated as prisoners of war but as pirates and spies subject to execution for treason. “44 men from the Shetland Gang were lost,” Bill says. “Of those, nearly half were captured and executed.”

How to find out more about the Shetland Bus story

The Shetland Bus story isn’t just in the past. It’s alive in Shetland’s people, its landscapes and its memories. A memorial in Scalloway stands as a tribute, built from stones from the Norwegian villages of the men who died.

“Nowadays, everyone is aware of the Shetland Bus,” Bill says. “But at the time, most people didn’t know. One old lady in the village recently told me she thought the fishing boats were just going back and forth to Scotland.”

The best place to dive deeper into this remarkable story is the Scalloway Museum, where Bill himself helps tell it. The museum covers all aspects of Scalloway’s history from pre-history up to World War II. 

“The museum is definitely the best source of information,” Bill says, “but we concentrate on the Shetland Bus because it’s a story that largely unfolded here in the village.” 

The moving story of the Shetland Bus is embedded in the landscape of the beautiful Shetland Islands, where basalt cliffs, Europe’s highest density of otters and centuries of folklore collide. 

Walk in the footsteps of the Shetland Gang on GeoCultura’s Shetland Holidays: 6-Day Wildlife & Geology Tour.