They Don't Make Them Like This Anymore

Knut Haugland, Sailor on Kon-Tiki, Dies at 92 :


"...By the time Mr. Haugland met Thor Heyerdahl, the future leader of the Kon-Tiki expedition, in a British paramilitary training camp during the war, he had already experienced enough danger to last a lifetime. A 101-day voyage from Peru to Polynesia on the open ocean aboard a balsa raft would have been the ultimate test of courage and endurance for most men, but for Mr. Haugland it was more like an adventure vacation.

As a radio engineer, Mr. Haugland had fought the invading Nazis at the battle of Narvik in 1940 and then, while pretending to be a typical worker at an Oslo radio factory, took a leading role in the anti-Nazi resistance, training radio operators and setting up secret transmitters.

Twice he was captured and escaped, once by back-flipping over a snow bank and running off into the woods before his guards could use their weapons. A third time, surrounded by the Gestapo at a maternity hospital in Oslo where he had set up a transmitter in a chimney, he shot his way to freedom with a pistol."

THEN he went a-sailing with a guy named Thor. One bad dude.
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