{"id":9931,"date":"2010-12-09T23:55:15","date_gmt":"2010-12-10T05:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9931"},"modified":"2010-12-09T17:22:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-09T23:22:34","slug":"max-manus-wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9931","title":{"rendered":"Norway’s Favorite Son"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today would have been the 96th birthday of one of World War II’s great unsung (at least in the US) heroes – Max Manus<\/a>.\u00a0 I’m not sure if McGyver had a real-life model, but if he did, it may have been Manus.<\/p>\n

Born in Bergen in 1914, Manus had quite a life before the war, galavanting about the jungles of Latin America for some years (his father, a Norwegian businessman, had spent many years in Spanish-speaking countries on both sides of the Atlantic; he’s changed his name to “Manus” from “Magnusson” to fit in better; Max’s full name was the very un-Nordic “Maximo Guillermo Manus”), adventures that later became the subject of a book published in Norway and translated into English.<\/p>\n

From there, at age 25, he transitioned to the motti <\/em>of Finland, volunteering to fight against the Soviets during Finland’s Talvesota, <\/em>the “Winter War<\/a>“.\u00a0 But on\u00a0on April 9, hearing news of the German invasion of Norway<\/a>, \u00a0gathering a company of 130 men around him to fight on in the interior until resistance ended.<\/p>\n

Manus quickly connected with the resistance –\u00a0 serving mainly as a weapons collector as well as printing illicit counterpropaganda newspapers – until his group was betrayed and Manus was arrested by the Gestapo<\/em>.\u00a0 He escaped with the aid of a sympathetic doctor, and escaped to Sweden.\u00a0 There, he was approached by the British “Special Operations Executive” (SOE), and escaped across the USSR, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and thence across the ocean to the USA.\u00a0 Hitchhiking to Canada to join Norway’s small army in exile, he returned to Scotland in 1941 for more training with the SOE.<\/p>\n

There, recognized for his combat experience, coolness under fire and mechanical aptitude, he was recuited into the elite – the Lignekompaniet<\/em>, the exile army’s Commando unit.\u00a0 Trained in sabotage, close combat and parachuting, Manus and a small team of saboteurs were air-dropped into the woods near Oslo.<\/p>\n

There, Manus spent the rest of the war making life hell for the occupiers.\u00a0 His specialty was sinking ships – big merchant ships needed by the Germans for supplying their garrison and hauling much-needed goods back to Germany from Norway.\u00a0 In 1945 alone, using home-made magnetic mines and a few homemade torpedos, he sank two large cargo ships, as well as many smaller bombings and the killings of not a few German officers and Gestapo agents.\u00a0 There’s an excellent accounting of his wartime record here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the war ended and the royal family returned, Manus was rewarded by being put in charge of King Haakon’s security detail.\u00a0 He spent the rest of his life – until 1996 – running a variety of businesses, indulging his wanderlust, and eventually living in Spain.\u00a0 He apparnently suffered from nightmares and a bit of a drinking problem; his years in the (literal) cold took their toll.<\/p>\n

But he was one of the great heroes of World War II.\u00a0\u00a0 Big enough to get his own movie:
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Today would have been the 96th birthday of one of World War II’s great unsung (at least in the US) heroes – Max Manus.\u00a0 I’m not sure if McGyver had a real-life model, but if he did, it may have been Manus. Born in Bergen in 1914, Manus had quite a life before the war, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-ww2-fact-and-myth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9931"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15975,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9931\/revisions\/15975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}