Hal Jespersen’s World War II Tour of Norway, September 2026 [Part 1]
These are my (Hal’s) notes from a trip to Norway to study World War II: the German invasion, the occupation, and the resistance. I traveled with a British-based tour company, The Cultural Experience, for the first time. They entitled the tour “Shells Exploding at a Picnic.”
Since this is a lengthy report with lots of photos (iPhone 17 Pro Max), I have broken it into three parts:
Monday–Tuesday, August 31–September 1 — to Oslo
I flew United Airlines from San Francisco to Oslo, with a nine-hour layover in Munich. I left home mid-afternoon on Monday and arrived in Munich mid-morning on Tuesday aboard a very comfortable 777. The new EU Entry/Exit System imposed a one-hour process to get through immigration; the line to have passports machine-scanned, photographed, and fingerprinted moved quickly, but it was then fifty minutes of waiting for a human to repeat part of the process.
I took the S-Bahn train into Marienplatz and had lunch at the famous Hofbräuhaus, a sausage plate accompanied by oompah music. Afterward came a two-hour walking tour arranged through the tourist office, led by Dr. Victoria. Since this report is about Norway, I won’t document this German tour in much detail, but it was nicely done and the weather was great. We visited Marienplatz and its two city halls, St. Peter’s Church, the outdoor market with its delightful beer garden, and the Hofbräuhaus itself, where we discussed Bavarian food and drink. From there we went on to Max-Joseph-Platz and the Residenz (the traditional seat of the Bavarian kings), and the opera house, then to the Viscardigasse (or “Dodger’s Alley”), a narrow pedestrian alleyway where we discussed the Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler’s rise, and finally along the grand boulevard of Ludwigstrasse to the Theatine Church.
In 2024 I took a lengthy Munich tour that focused on the Third Reich, and I was happy to avoid revisiting a number of the same places today.
The Lufthansa flight left near eight and arrived at nine forty-five. It was a forty-minute Uber ride into downtown Oslo to the Clarion Hotel The Hub in the Sentrum district—a very long day of travel followed by a well-earned sleep.
Wednesday, September 2 — Oslo, Food Tour
I didn’t meet the TCE group until six, so I booked a Secret Food Tour for lunch; I try to do food tours like this in many foreign cities. In addition to interesting foods, they offer some modest cultural immersion. We met at Olaf Ryes Plass, about a mile’s walk from the hotel. The weather was beautifully sunny and cool, and the walk through the city was quiet and pleasant. (In my three days in Oslo I encountered very little traffic.)
Our guide was a young Turkish woman named Godze, or “G” as she called herself. Our first stop was the Godt Brøt bakery for a skillingsboller, a cinnamon bun with cardamom, surprisingly of German origin. It was sort of like a Cinnabon without the icing.
Next was Bønder i Byen, a shop specializing in local farm products, particularly for smørbrød, though what we had was smoked trout, like lox, in a delicious small salad with crusty homemade bread. From there we walked through a picturesque arts college, converted from a factory, with its own waterfall, and a vibrant student area.
At a modern food hall we stopped at Vulkanfisk for fiskekaker, a fish burger made from various chopped and reformed white fish. Still in the market, at Helt Vilt we had a reindeer stew made from a Sami recipe, along with dried sausage slices of reindeer, moose, and minke whale, accompanied by lingonberries, Brunost (Norwegian brown cheese), and aquavit jelly.
We passed through Blå, an artsy graffiti district, for a group photo, and finished at Haralds Vaffel with a thin waffle folded in half with brown cheese, raspberry jam, and sour cream. G said that these are so ubiquitous in Norway that if you were invited to a friend’s house and are not served a waffle, you would know those friends were actually your enemies.
In the lobby at five thirty, I met up with the group of seventeen guests and Alan Rooney, the tour manager. Five of the seventeen are Americans, and one is a Canadian. We were introduced to our tour guide, Norwegian Army Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Palle Ydstebø, which I believe is pronounced ISH-tah-bo. He was an engineer officer and is apparently well known because over the two weeks he was frequently greeted heartily by military personnel we encountered. Maybe it’s the great mustache. Palle gave us a very brief history of Norway, covering the Vikings, the religious civil wars, the Black Death, which killed forty percent of the population, and the history of the Norwegian army, followed by relations with Denmark and Sweden, independence, and on up through World War I, where the Norwegians were described as our “neutral ally.”
Dinner was in a restaurant a couple of blocks away—Kirkeristan Vertshus. Really good Norwegian meal; my choices were whale carpaccio and reindeer. If I had not known what these dishes were, there is a zero percent chance I could have identified either from appearance, smell, or taste.
Thursday, September 3 — Oslo, Akershus Fortress
A bountiful breakfast buffet welcomed us, and it was another beautiful weather day. We met at nine and took a city bus on a long ride to the most prosperous residential district of Oslo, the Bygdøy peninsula, to visit the Holocaust Senteret (Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies). Villa Grande was the traitor Vidkun Quisling’s residence, and outside stood a giant IBM Hollerith card artwork, symbolizing the mechanized nature of the Holocaust. Palle gave us a biography of Quisling. Historian Maria told us about the Jewish deportations—775 to Auschwitz—and modern reparations programs; sixty percent of Jews were evacuated to Sweden, and it took about twenty people to help each Jew escape. There is modern controversy about the resistance forces not having helped Jews enough, and Norwegians were not sympathetic to the Roma, having expelled many.
All the exhibits were quite wordy, with the text entirely in Norwegian, though Quisling’s bunker and escape tunnel do have some English translations. There was an exhibit about everyday racism in Norway, and Quisling’s quarters, ballroom, and other rooms were shown without their original fixtures. A bell from the SS Donau, the notorious slave ship that transported five hundred thirty-two Jews to imprisonment and death in 1942—only nine survived the journey—was also on display; the ship was later attacked and disabled in January 1945 by the famous resistance fighter Max Manus.
We bused back to the National Theatre, and spent the rest of the day on foot. The imposing Victoria Terrasse was originally apartments, and Ibsen stayed there; it later became the Ministry of Defense, and then the Nazi SD headquarters during the occupation. There was an unsuccessful British Mosquito bombing raid against the building on September 25, 1942, and a larger raid in December of 1944 killed seventy-nine civilians. We stopped at 7. juni-plassen (Plaza 7 June), named for June 7, 1905, the date the Storting declared the dissolution of the union with Sweden—also the date, in 1940, on which King Haakon VII left Norway for exile in England, and the date in 1945 on which he returned. There is a minimalist statue of Haakon VII there.
We had an hour for lunch on our own, and I found a pølse i brød (hot dog); Scandinavians love hot dogs, and that is my heritage. Then I went to a bakery for my favorite pastry, skolebrød (“school bread”), a Norwegian sweet bun filled with custard and topped with icing and coconut flakes.
At the Royal Palace, hundreds had gathered to pay their respects to King Harald V, who died last week. (Harald was the grandson of Haakon VII from World War II. His son is now King Haakon VIII.) The Karl Johan monument there is the only equestrian statue in Norway, depicting the king during the Sweden–Norway union. We had hoped to see a changing of the guard, but after waiting around for a while it did not go off as usually scheduled. On our way to the next stop, we passed a building identified as the Nobel Peace Center, a museum.
At Akershus Fortress, we stopped at the place where Quisling was shot by firing squad, facing the facility where many resistance fighters had been executed; the fortress was used as a prison during the occupation. Norway’s Resistance Museum (Hjemmefrontmuseum) inside the fortress was excellent, covering many details of the invasion and occupation with a wealth of maps, dioramas, and equipment, and its displays often had good English translations. Forty-five thousand Norwegians were imprisoned during the war, and about a quarter of them were sent to concentration camps in Germany or the occupied territories; about fourteen hundred of these prisoners died.
Outside the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum (Forsvarsmuseet) stands an NM-116 Panserjager, originally an American M24 Chaffee from World War II, along with a beefed-up M113 armored personnel carrier. The museum covers the full history of Norway’s military, starting from the Vikings and the Middle Ages, and is packed with equipment and weapons and models of fortresses and naval vessels. A few things that impressed me included a model of Bohus Fortress, a giant twelve-inch naval howitzer, and an artillery piece mounted on a sled—I would hate to stand behind it when it was being fired. There was also an artillery piece being towed by a single stuffed horse; an American Civil War gun a little larger than this one would normally have required a team of six horses. Other highlights were a model of the Dora I U-boat shelter at Trondheim, which we will see in person later in the week, a torpedo launching tube from a motor torpedo boat, hedgehog anti-U-boat explosives, and a German radio-controlled gliding bomb, the HS-293, nicknamed “Chase Me Charlie.” It looked rather like a V-1, but was dropped aerially.
It was a moderately long walk back to the hotel, and along the way we passed the beautiful harbor, highlighted by the modernistic opera house. I admired the Max Manus statue, placed right where he damaged a few German ships over the years by attaching limpet mines below their waterlines while floating by in a canoe. I had watched a modern movie about Max Manus and found it excellent.
The day closed with a six p.m. lecture by Palle on planning for Operation Weserübung—the German invasion of Norway in 1940. Afterward, we walked a few blocks to a small restaurant called Spor av Nord, and we had a nice meal with local choices. My main was fish cakes, which were like the content of the Vulkan Fish Burger, but fried instead of baked.
Friday, September 4 — Oslo, Oscarsborg Fortress
Scattered light rain fell this morning, but it did not affect our day. We took a regional bus forty-five minutes south to Drøbak, overlooking the narrowest point of the Oslofjord. We climbed the hill to the Kopås battery, built in 1898 with three 15 cm guns that were later replaced by 10.5 cm guns, all removed after the war and gone by the 1990s. The rocks were too slippery for me to explore the outer reaches, but there was one well-preserved bunker to see inside.
We then took a ten-minute ferry to Oscarsborg Festning, where our guide was “Old Eric.” The fortress supported eighty remote-detonated mines and a torpedo battery during the Cold War, until 1991, though the first fortification on the site dates to 1644. There is a monument to Colonel Birger Eriksen, who commanded on April 9. The fortress itself was built by the Swedes in 1853; the Germans pulverized it in a 1940 bombing, but it was rebuilt before the end of the war.
The museum displayed a map of the fortifications built across eastern Norway to guard against a feared nineteenth-century Swedish invasion. We saw an excellent animated map video of the sinking of the Blücher and the German aerial bombardment, as well as a 1:100 scale model of the cruiser Blücher, which carried 2,200 men aboard. Outside stood three heavy 28-centimeter Krupp (German) coastal defense guns, named Moses, Aron, and Josva.
We passed through a tunnel one hundred and eighty years old, where Norwegians sheltered during the battle without a single casualty. Nearby were nineteenth-century Armstrong muzzle loaders in immaculate brick gun positions, reminiscent to me of Fort Sumter.
A small bridge led to the adjoining island and the torpedo battery, built in 1901 with three launchers; two of its torpedoes were fired at the Blücher, and both struck three meters below the waterline. Inside, the equipment on display was mostly modern, dating from the Cold War era. We had lunch at a small restaurant on the island.
Today was an excellent excursion. Old Eric did a great job and the fortress is well worth visiting. Dinner at Cafe Skansen. Excellent salmon.