POLSON - In the spring of 1940, a merchant marine by the name of Leonard Larsen left his wife and son in the family's apartment in Bergen, Norway, and returned to the high seas for another long hitch.

They never saw him again.

The SS Keret, a Norwegian cargo steamer, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on Aug. 23 in the North Atlantic and sank. Eighteen of the 23-man crew survived, but Leonard Larsen was not one of them.

His son, 13 years old at the time, remembers the look on his mother's face when they got word of his father's death. Frida Larsen had moved herself and her son to an island 20 miles outside of Bergen shortly after her husband left on his latest voyage.

They were eating dinner that August night; Frida had a view of the road leading up to their house from her seat at the table. Partway through the meal, she saw two of her brothers and a sister trudging up the road, unannounced.

"She knew right away" they were there to deliver bad news, her son says.

"Oh, no," he remembers his mother muttering when she spied them. She just sat there, staring out the window.

Their lives, and those of all Norwegians, had already been turned upside down. They were living on the island because on April 9, 1940 - just a few days after Leonard Larsen put out to sea - Hitler had ordered his troops to invade Norway.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," says Svend Larsen, now 82 years old. "It was 5 a.m., and the whole house just shook."

Hundreds of German planes buzzed the rooftops of Bergen, waking the coastal city.

Within 10 minutes, Larsen says, German troops were marching through the streets.

Unprepared for the attack, Norwegian troops fought Hitler's machine for two months.

"But there was nothing we could do," Larsen says. "They took over real quick."

Worried that Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, could become the object of bombing attacks as World War II expanded across Europe, Frida Larsen made the decision to take her son to Valestrand, a small community on the island where they had relatives.

And that's where Svend Larsen would join the Norwegian underground, as a 15-year-old boy fighting the Nazi occupation.

Before he was done - and before he was 18 - Larsen would be helping to blow up trains transporting German troops.

At first, says Larsen - who has been a Polson resident for nearly 30 years now - the Norwegian resistance was largely passive. Once Germany had taken over Norway, German troops tried to be friendly toward the natives.

Norwegians signaled their intent not to cooperate by attaching paper clips to their lapels.

"The paper clip became a symbol that we would stick together," Larsen says. "The Germans made it illegal to wear a paper clip, and the Gestapo would come and get you."

Undeterred, the Norwegians switched to coins with an "H" and a "7" on them that honored their king, Haakon VII. They turned the money into lapel pins and other jewelry.

Haakon had encouraged his cabinet to refuse Hitler's demand that Nazi sympathizer Vidkun Quisling - Norway's equivalent to our Benedict Arnold - be appointed prime minister of what would be a puppet German government.

"I am deeply affected by the responsibility laid on me if the German demand is rejected," Haakon told his cabinet. "The responsibility for the calamities that will befall people and country is indeed so grave that I dread to take it. It rests with the government to decide, but my position is clear. For my part, I cannot accept the German demands. It would conflict with all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norway."

Haakon worked to keep his people unified during the five-year Nazi occupation, doing so in exile from England, to which he and his cabinet had escaped shortly after the invasion.

Svend Larsen cut out the center of one of the "H-7" coins, soldering it to a pin and wearing it in his lapel.

"Then that became illegal," Larsen says. "I had friends put in concentration camps for wearing one."

Finally, he says, wearing a nisselue - a red ski cap - became the universal symbol for opposition to the Nazi occupation.

At that, the Germans gave up trying to make more symbols of the resistance illegal.

Meantime, the resistance movement grew less and less passive.

The Nazis launched their propaganda machine, took over newspapers and confiscated radios in an effort to control what Norwegians knew about the war erupting around the world.

When they came to Larsen's uncle's door, the uncle turned over a radio.

But he didn't tell them about the second one he'd hidden inside the wall of the bathroom in his house.

Larsen's aunt and uncle were heavily involved in the Norwegian underground. His aunt ran a beauty salon, "and if the Gestapo was after you," he says, "she'd change your hair, change your appearance - give your hair a different color, put glasses on you, whatever it took."

The uncle listened to BBC radio broadcasts every evening at 7, typed up news of the war - often, the news was bad in those early days - and that's how Svend Larsen initially got involved in the underground.

"The Germans had checkpoints set up all over, but they weren't too concerned with children," he explains. "Kids could move more freely. They'd let us ride our bikes through without stopping us."

Larsen would take the typed reports from his uncle, hide them in his pockets, and pedal through the checkpoints to distribute them.

At night, he and his friends sneaked into the car yards where Germans kept their vehicles.

"We'd get the grease caps off the bearings and pour sand in them," he says. "Or we'd pour sugar in their gas tanks. Sugar was scarce, but we'd do that when we had it. Their cars didn't get too far down the road with sugar in the tank."

They'd also occasionally be shot at by the Germans while on their midnight sprees. Looking back now, Larsen says, they were lucky to always get away.

"All we were doing is vandalism," he says. "But we were praised for it."

The Germans were also using Russian prisoners-of-war on chain gangs to build military installations.

"All the Germans fed them was water from cabbage that had been boiled over and over," Larsen says. "We used to sneak bread to them when they were working on the chain gangs. That was not looked on nicely, and we'd have to make a hasty retreat when the bullets started flying."

As time went on, the teenagers came to meet more people involved in the underground.

"There was a tendency to get more and more involved, more organized," Larsen says. "About 1943, that's when we really got involved in the more serious stuff."

Svend Larsen was 16 years old at the time.

The steel containers would come floating out of the sky, under parachutes, in the dead of night in the Matre Mountains, dropped there by the British.

Inside were rations, chocolates, cigarettes, ammunition, weapons.

Inside were explosives.

"We used plastic explosives with pencil detonators," Larsen says. "Ordinarily there was a little spot on the pencil you could squeeze, and it would release an acid that would eat through fine wires, and you'd have from 5 to 30 minutes before it went off, depending on the thickness of the wires."

They blew up utility poles to disrupt German communications, but eventually graduated - to railroads.

The trains were a complex operation, more so if they were passenger, and not freight, trains.

Each mission needed, Larsen says, "a good Norwegian" at the controls of the locomotive.

The engineer had to provide underground members with all sorts of information - railroad timetables, the location of cars carrying German troops or supplies, the distance from the locomotive to the cars, the speed at which they would be traveling.

"It was always done in the dark," Larsen says. The underground members would cross a fjord by boat - boats were the key to their successful escapes - and rig the explosives on the nearby tracks while guards kept watch for German troops.

"The adrenaline was flowing," Larsen says. "You had to have a detonator with a fast-burning fuse."

It all had to be timed perfectly, so that the locomotive would pass over the detonator and the explosion would occur at just the right moment back behind the train's engine, under just the right car.

"We didn't want to blow up good Norwegians," Larsen explains.

Eventually, the Germans wised up and quit segregating their troops in separate railroad cars. The troops were mixed in with Norwegian passengers after that, and the underground concentrated on only freight trains.

"Most everything we did was meant to harass the Germans, not kill them," Larsen says.

But the Norwegian underground did a pretty good job of it. There were more German soldiers stationed in Norway than in any other country during World War II, hundreds of thousands of them, a remarkable one German soldier for every eight Norwegian citizens.

"We tied up 30 German divisions for five years," Larsen says. "Not bad for a country of 3 million people."

Alpha.

The members of the resistance had code names, and that was Svend Larsen's.

"We had code names so that we couldn't give away anyone if we were arrested," he says. "The ones who were arrested were tortured heavily, to try to get to others in the group."

One of his friends, Larsen says, was returned to them minus his fingernails, which the Gestapo had pulled off with pliers one by one.

He was one of the lucky ones. Other underground members, Larsen says, were sent off to Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

"Some were adults, some were young like me," Larsen says. "The Gestapo would come at midnight, knock on your door, and take you. Some we never saw again."

Germany's surrender in 1945 led to several more anxious hours in Norway.

"The Germans capitulated to the Allied Forces on May 8, but nothing was said about Norway," Larsen says. "We were very concerned, because in the later years of the war, the Germans had talked about evacuating from Germany to Norway. 'Festung Norwegen,' they called it - 'Castle Norway.' "

Members of the resistance headed into Norway's cities to take control of things such as police and radio stations. Larsen, his Sten gun in hand, was part of a group that stood guard at the telephone company.

"As the day progressed, we finally got word it was a total capitulation," Larsen says, "and we could breathe easier."

Larsen's education was largely interrupted during Germany's five-year occupation of Norway. He was 13 when it started and 18 when it finished.

He returned to high school after the war, and graduated when he was 21.

"After the war, it didn't matter if you'd been in the resistance for umpteen years," Larsen says. "There was conscription in Norway - in fact, there still is - and you had to do your military service."

In 1948, he was conscripted into the military, and scheduled to join the Allied occupation forces in Germany for his last six months.

On the day he was shipping out, Larsen was climbing into the back of a transport truck when the driver took off prematurely. He was thrown from the truck and broke his collarbone.

Five years of being shot at by Germans as he poured sugar in their gas tanks, sneaked bread to their prisoners of war, handled explosives and blown up trains, and not a scratch. Now, all of a sudden, he was in a hospital, in a cast that stretched from his waist to his neck.

"Because of that I didn't get to go to Germany," he says. "You X-ray it now, and it looks like they fixed it with baling wire."

Once he was discharged, Larsen pursued a longstanding interest in textiles. When there weren't enough applicants for the Norwegian Textile Research Institute, its director helped Larsen get into the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, England.

He graduated from there, then continued on in research, helping to develop the permanent crease, or pleat, in wool fabrics.

A friend told him the University of Wyoming, which has one of the biggest wool labs in the United States, was looking for someone with his background, and that brought Larsen to the United States in 1956.

He spent 25 years at Wyoming, and became an American citizen in 1977. He met his wife of 33 years, Ruth, during a Laramie snowstorm. She lived across the street, and they helped each other shovel their cars out after the storm.

Both had been married before. He brought a son to the marriage, she brought a son and a daughter, and the couple had another son together.

They came to Montana, where they had a chance to buy property in Big Arm from one of Ruth's relatives, after Svend retired in 1981.

They have six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, with a sixth on the way.

Svend Larsen last visited Norway in 2001.

Inga, the aunt who had operated the beauty salon, had died, and he and Ruth returned for her funeral.

"I'm not sure I'll ever go back again," Larsen says. "The draw is not there anymore. The uncles and aunts I was close to - as long as they were alive, there was a pull. I still have cousins there, but it's not the same."

His father's death at the hands of the Germans played a part in his joining the Norwegian underground, but not a huge one.

"Ruth and I have talked about the guilt I feel," Larsen says. "She told me, 'No, you can't feel guilty. You grew up seeing your Dad one month a year.' "

Leonard Larsen spent 11 months a year at sea, and "he really did not become a father figure to me," Svend says. "When he was killed, the emptiness didn't affect me the way it affected my mother."

Frida largely retreated into a shell for several years after the Germans torpedoed the SS Keret.

"She came through it after the war, though," Larsen says. "She started organizations for widows of seafarers, and became a noted artist. But even as late as 1946, '47, there were some Norwegian sailors who had been lost down around South America who were found and were coming home, and she thought Dad would be with them. She never gave up hope."

Frida died in 1977.

"I suppose the fact that they had killed my Dad made me want to get back at them somehow," Larsen says of the teenage years he spent in the underground, fighting the Germans who occupied his native land.

But mostly, he says, he was motivated by pride, by patriotism, by love of Norway.

Mostly, Svend Larsen says, he just wanted to be a good Norwegian.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.