Behind the Book: Kopersund. 1942

The invasion of Norway doesn't get a lot of attention.  It was just another domino that fell before the Nazis in the early days of the war -- Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, Holland, Denmark… and then Norway.  Britain tried to protect it, but failed.  Sweden stayed neutral.  Finland was tied up with its own problems with Russia.  The Norwegians were on their own.

Norway was valuable -- iron ore, heavy water.  Its king, Haakon VII, escaped with his family for England, and many of his subjects got away too, to train and go back as undercover agents.  In my book, a woman who had been disfigured in the bombing of Narvik harbor is one of those expats who train in Scotland and return, and because she is so hard to look at, she becomes a valuable agent.  The Nazis, who had spent the thirties liquidating all the handicapped in their own country, would never take seriously such a hideous face.

Her first mission is to bring back an errant British scientist, who in an excess of boyish zeal talked himself onto an RAF bombing flight that crashed in the mountains.  What she doesn't know, though, is that he has been injured too.