When Waffen SS panzers rolled into the Ardennes in December 1944, one of many first American infantry models thrown into the breach at Malmedy was a battalion whose roster was stuffed virtually fully by Norwegians.
The 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) was a thousand-man unit of Norwegian nationals, ex-merchant seamen stranded by the occupation of Norway, and first- and second-generation Norwegian-American troopers. Its males spoke Norwegian and wore a Viking longship patch within the blue and purple of Norway’s flag.
On Dec. 17, 1944, simply hours after SS troops gunned down greater than 80 American prisoners in a area at Baugnez, Lt. Col. Harold D. Hansen led the 99th into Malmedy, Belgium, because the core of a hasty blocking power named Job Drive Hansen. Over the following 5 days, the lads dug in and absorbed heavy assaults by the first SS Panzer Division, the eleventh Fallschirmjäger Division in addition to German commandos in American uniforms led by the notorious Otto Skorzeny.
The northern shoulder of the Bulge held due to their efforts.
Origins of the Army’s Norwegian Battalion
The concept for the battalion started on New Yr’s Day 1942 when Brigadier Basic Raymond E. Lee, then appearing assistant chief of workers for intelligence, delivered a memorandum to Chief of Workers Gen. George C. Marshall. He proposed that the Army drop its ban on international aliens in uniform and lift ethnic infantry models from the roughly 380,000 expatriates of Axis-occupied nations then in the USA, in accordance with the Army Historic Basis.
Lee argued such models would carry propaganda worth and supply advance troops for landings on their former homelands. Then-Brig. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was amongst those that initially opposed the idea as un-American.
Marshall overruled him and licensed the creation of the brand new models. 5 impartial ethnic battalions adopted, together with the first Filipino, the a centesimal Japanese-American, the one hundred and first Austrian, the 122nd Greek and eventually the Norwegian 99th.
A Might 9, 1942, Warfare Division directive formally ordered the creation of the Norwegian-nationals battalion. The 99th was activated at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, on Aug. 15, 1942. It fielded 1,001 males, roughly 100 greater than a regular battalion, since there was no mother or father regiment to provide assist troops.
Recruits needed to learn, write and communicate Norwegian. Precedence went to Norwegian-born aliens already in uniform, with Norwegian-speaking U.S. residents allowed to switch in. Service provider seamen stranded worldwide after Germany’s April 1940 invasion of Norway stuffed out the ranks.
Coaching on Skis within the Colorado Rockies
By late September 1942, the battalion had moved to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. That December, it shipped to the Mountain Coaching Heart at Camp Hale, Colorado.
At Camp Hale, the 99th skilled alongside the newly shaped tenth Mountain Division in snowboarding, mountaineering and winter fight. Troopers carried almost 100 kilos of drugs on skis within the snowy mountains for days at a time. The unit even designed a ski-mounted carriage for heavy weapons that allowed it to take heavy firepower to altitudes common infantry would discover not possible.
The aim of their coaching was to organize for a possible invasion of German-occupied Norway, with the 99th because the Norwegian-speaking spearhead.
That plan by no means got here to fruition as Allied technique was oriented towards Southern Europe and France. Workplace of Strategic Companies officers finally visited Camp Hale in the summertime of 1943 and recruited roughly 100 Norwegian audio system for a brand new Norwegian Particular Operations Group.
In the meantime, the remainder of the battalion sailed to Scotland in September of that 12 months aboard the SS Mexico. The lads nonetheless held out hope that they’d be those to liberate Norway from the Nazis.
In Britain, the 99th continued its coaching in Wiltshire and Wales, with a detachment posted to First Army headquarters in Bristol in the course of the D-Day preparations. Allied commanders lastly agreed that invading a rustic garrisoned by 400,000 Germans with little strategic worth was not preferrred, particularly with D-Day on the horizon.
The Norway mission was indefinitely shelved and the Viking Battalion acquired new orders.
From Omaha Seaside to the Ardennes
On the night of June 22, 1944, simply two weeks after D-Day, the battalion landed on Omaha Seaside. It then moved into Cherbourg on June 30 and spent 9 days clearing German holdouts. In late July it was briefly hooked up to the Provisional Ranger Group with the 2nd and fifth Ranger Battalions.
Hooked up to the 2nd Armored Division in September, the battalion drove into Belgian Limburg alongside the “Hell on Wheels” tankers.
“That is the one damned infantry outfit on the planet that tanks have to fret about maintaining with,” an officer of the 66th Armored Regiment mentioned of the Norwegians.
In mid-October, the 99th attacked beneath the thirtieth Infantry Division to shut the Aachen-Cologne Freeway, the final German provide highway into the encircled metropolis. 9 days of building-by-building combating at Würselen sealed the freeway on Oct. 24 earlier than Aachen fell, the primary main German metropolis captured by the Allies. The 99th misplaced 28 males killed and 45 wounded taking it. The battalion’s veterans referred to as the battle “9 Days in Hell.”
The 99th was on safety responsibility close to Liège, Belgium, when the Germans launched their Ardennes counteroffensive on Dec. 16, 1944. The subsequent day, Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges pulled the battalion into Job Drive Hansen with the 526th Armored Infantry Battalion and a part of the 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion, sure for Malmedy to dam the German spearhead.
Firm B reached the city earlier than midnight on Dec. 17 and linked up with engineers of the 291st Engineer Fight Battalion beneath Lt. Col. David Pergrin, who had stayed to dam the roads with felled timber and mines.
“Pack mild. Do not even convey a razor. We’re leaving proper now,” 1st Lt. Ray Helle of Firm B mentioned of the transfer, in accordance with the 99th Infantry Battalion Academic Basis’s data.
Firm B dug in on high of a 15-foot railway embankment above the Rue de Falize underpass on the south fringe of city. Simply earlier than daybreak on Dec. 21, Skorzeny’s a hundred and fiftieth SS Panzer Brigade got here at them throughout open floor in captured American uniforms and autos. The lead Panther tank hit a mine on the underpass and burned, blocking the highway. Parachute flares then popped overhead. The Germans have been caught within the open.
Firm B opened up from the highest of the embankment with rifle, machine gun and mortar fireplace. The 118th Discipline Artillery Battalion, dug in on the hills north of the Warche River, fired proximity-fused shells, a brand new weapon that exploded within the air above the Germans and sprayed shrapnel downward. The attackers reached the bottom of the embankment and will go no additional.
“The damned fools got here throughout there yelling, ‘Give up or die,'” Jim Humble of the 99th later instructed his son Lee in an account preserved by the 99th Infantry Battalion Academic Basis.
The German power didn’t dislodge the Individuals, struggling heavy losses earlier than being compelled again. Skorzeny misplaced hundreds of his elite troops within the Battle of the Bulge. The assault on Malmedy broke in opposition to Firm B’s embankment, and the northern fringe of the Bulge held.
After the Battle of the Bulge, the 99th was folded into the brand new 474th Infantry Regiment on Jan. 19, 1945, alongside veterans of the First Particular Service Drive and Ranger veterans from Anzio. Beneath Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army that April, the regiment hauled the Nazi gold and artwork hoard out of the Merkers salt mine.
Battalion medical personnel additionally visited Buchenwald 4 days after liberation.
“It was an actual eye opener,” Dr. Raymond Minge, the battalion surgeon, wrote to his spouse. “Any doubt I ever had as to the justification for sending American troopers abroad was fully banished.”
Operation Rype
Whereas the remainder of the battalion fought throughout Europe, the 100 males the OSS had taken from Camp Hale in 1943 had been coaching for the mission the 99th was initially constructed for, Operation Rype.
In March 1945, Maj. William E. Colby, a 25-year-old Jedburgh officer who would in the future run the CIA, led 35 of them aboard eight B-24 Liberators in Scotland. The plan was to leap into the Snåsa mountains of central Norway, hyperlink up with Norwegian resistance, and lower the Nordland Railway to entice 150,000 German troops retreating south.
Solely 4 of the eight planes made their drops. One stick of 5 males landed in impartial Sweden and was interned. The lads who did attain the frozen floor of Jævsjø Lake discovered their provide bundles scattered throughout 36 sq. miles of Norwegian forest, some with parachutes that didn’t open. They skied the gear out and went to work.
On the evening of March 25, Colby’s workforce blew a half-mile stretch of rail line. They did it once more in late April, then once more, dodging German ski patrols by way of sub-arctic terrain. As soon as, pursued by a bigger power, they escaped by climbing a slope they nicknamed “Benzedrine Hill” after the stimulant tablets they swallowed to remain awake for 56 hours of snowboarding.
Operation Rype was, as Colby later put it in a memoir recovered from CIA information and revealed as “Skis and Daggers,” “the primary and solely mixed ski-parachute operation ever mounted by the U.S. Army.”
It was additionally the one American fight operation carried out on Norwegian soil throughout World Warfare II, performed by males initially recruited to liberate the nation from the Germans.
Disbandment, Honors and Lineage
On June 7, 1945, three years after the Army had raised them to invade their homeland, the 99th lastly arrived in Oslo, assigned as honor guard for King Haakon VII’s return from 5 years of exile in London. The king designated them his honorary guards for all times.
Hooked up to Job Drive A, the battalion helped disarm the German garrison in Norway and repatriate tens of hundreds of Soviet POWs and compelled laborers. Alongside the way in which, the lads of the 99th discovered time to lookup family they hadn’t seen in years. Eighty-seven of them married Norwegian ladies and introduced them house.
The battalion lastly sailed for the USA in October 1945 and deactivated at Camp Miles Standish, Massachusetts, on Nov. 11.
The 99th spent 101 days in fight throughout 5 campaigns. Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe. Fifty-four troopers have been killed in motion, 207 have been wounded and 6 have been lacking. Its males earned 15 Silver Stars, 20 Bronze Stars and 305 Purple Hearts, with a number of males being wounded greater than as soon as.
The Army briefly reactivated the 99th at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in September 1956 when the 351st Infantry Regiment inactivated and the publish’s infantry presence was lower to battalion energy. When the Army adopted its Pentomic reorganization in March 1958, the 99th was inactivated a last time, its lineage absorbed into the 2nd Battle Group of the thirty first Infantry.
In 1952, the Army activated the tenth Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and constructed its Norway-aligned cadre round former 99th troopers and OSS Norwegians, in accordance with the U.S. Army. At this time’s Inexperienced Berets and troopers, who nonetheless prepare on skis within the winter mountains, hint a part of their heritage again to the Viking Battalion.
Camp Hale, the place the battalion discovered to struggle on skis, was designated a nationwide monument in October 2022. The proclamation credited the 99th by title for his or her revolutionary engineering of the ski-mounted heavy weapons carriage that helped them throughout their coaching and in fight in Europe.
