When Waffen SS panzers rolled into the Ardennes in December 1944, one of the first American infantry units thrown into the breach at Malmedy was a battalion whose roster was filled almost entirely by Norwegians.
The 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) was a thousand-man unit of Norwegian nationals, ex-merchant seamen stranded by the occupation of Norway, and first- and second-generation Norwegian-American soldiers. Its men spoke Norwegian and wore a Viking longship patch in the blue and red of Norway’s flag.
On Dec. 17, 1944, just hours after SS troops gunned down more than 80 American prisoners in a field at Baugnez, Lt. Col. Harold D. Hansen led the 99th into Malmedy, Belgium, as the core of a hasty blocking force named Task Force Hansen. Over the next five days, the men dug in and absorbed heavy attacks by the 1st SS Panzer Division, the 11th Fallschirmjäger Division as well as German commandos in American uniforms led by the infamous Otto Skorzeny.
The northern shoulder of the Bulge held thanks to their efforts.
Origins of the Army’s Norwegian Battalion
The idea for the battalion began on New Year’s Day 1942 when Brigadier General Raymond E. Lee, then acting assistant chief of staff for intelligence, delivered a memorandum to Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall. He proposed that the Army drop its ban on foreign aliens in uniform and raise ethnic infantry units from the roughly 380,000 expatriates of Axis-occupied nations then in the United States, according to the Army Historical Foundation.
Lee argued such units would carry propaganda value and provide advance troops for landings on their former homelands. Then-Brig. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was among those who initially opposed the concept as un-American.
Marshall overruled him and authorized the creation of the new units. Five independent ethnic battalions followed, including the 1st Filipino, the 100th Japanese-American, the 101st Austrian, the 122nd Greek and finally the Norwegian 99th.
A May 9, 1942, War Department directive officially ordered the creation of the Norwegian-nationals battalion. The 99th was activated at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, on Aug. 15, 1942. It fielded 1,001 men, roughly 100 more than a standard battalion, since there was no parent regiment to supply support troops.
Recruits had to read, write and speak Norwegian. Priority went to Norwegian-born aliens already in uniform, with Norwegian-speaking U.S. citizens allowed to transfer in. Merchant seamen stranded worldwide after Germany’s April 1940 invasion of Norway filled out the ranks.
Training on Skis in the Colorado Rockies
By late September 1942, the battalion had moved to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. That December, it shipped to the Mountain Training Center at Camp Hale, Colorado.
At Camp Hale, the 99th trained alongside the newly formed 10th Mountain Division in skiing, mountaineering and winter combat. Soldiers carried nearly 100 pounds of gear on skis in the snowy mountains for days at a time. The unit even designed a ski-mounted carriage for heavy weapons that allowed it to take heavy firepower to altitudes regular infantry would find impossible.
The purpose of their training was to prepare for a potential invasion of German-occupied Norway, with the 99th as the Norwegian-speaking spearhead.
That plan never came to fruition as Allied strategy was oriented toward Southern Europe and France. Office of Strategic Services officers eventually visited Camp Hale in the summer of 1943 and recruited roughly 100 Norwegian speakers for a new Norwegian Special Operations Group.
Meanwhile, the rest of the battalion sailed to Scotland in September of that year aboard the SS Mexico. The men still held out hope that they would be the ones to liberate Norway from the Nazis.
In Britain, the 99th continued its training in Wiltshire and Wales, with a detachment posted to First Army headquarters in Bristol during the D-Day preparations. Allied commanders finally agreed that invading a country garrisoned by 400,000 Germans with little strategic value was not ideal, especially with D-Day on the horizon.
The Norway mission was indefinitely shelved and the Viking Battalion received new orders.
From Omaha Beach to the Ardennes
On the evening of June 22, 1944, just two weeks after D-Day, the battalion landed on Omaha Beach. It then moved into Cherbourg on June 30 and spent nine days clearing German holdouts. In late July it was briefly attached to the Provisional Ranger Group with the 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions.
Attached to the 2nd Armored Division in September, the battalion drove into Belgian Limburg alongside the “Hell on Wheels” tankers.
“This is the only damned infantry outfit in the world that tanks have to worry about keeping up with,” an officer of the 66th Armored Regiment said of the Norwegians.
In mid-October, the 99th attacked under the 30th Infantry Division to close the Aachen-Cologne Highway, the last German supply road into the encircled city. Nine days of building-by-building fighting at Würselen sealed the highway on Oct. 24 before Aachen fell, the first major German city captured by the Allies. The 99th lost 28 men killed and 45 wounded taking it. The battalion’s veterans called the battle “Nine Days in Hell.”
The 99th was on security duty near Liège, Belgium, when the Germans launched their Ardennes counteroffensive on Dec. 16, 1944. The next day, Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges pulled the battalion into Task Force Hansen with the 526th Armored Infantry Battalion and part of the 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion, bound for Malmedy to block the German spearhead.
Company B reached the town before midnight on Dec. 17 and linked up with engineers of the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion under Lt. Col. David Pergrin, who had stayed to block the roads with felled timber and mines.
“Pack light. Don’t even bring a razor. We are leaving right now,” 1st Lt. Ray Helle of Company B said of the move, according to the 99th Infantry Battalion Educational Foundation’s records.
Company B dug in on top of a 15-foot railway embankment above the Rue de Falize underpass on the south edge of town. Just before dawn on Dec. 21, Skorzeny’s 150th SS Panzer Brigade came at them across open ground in captured American uniforms and vehicles. The lead Panther tank hit a mine at the underpass and burned, blocking the road. Parachute flares then popped overhead. The Germans were caught in the open.
Company B opened up from the top of the embankment with rifle, machine gun and mortar fire. The 118th Field Artillery Battalion, dug in on the hills north of the Warche River, fired proximity-fused shells, a new weapon that exploded in the air above the Germans and sprayed shrapnel downward. The attackers reached the base of the embankment and could go no further.
“The damned fools came across there yelling, ‘Surrender or die,'” Jim Humble of the 99th later told his son Lee in an account preserved by the 99th Infantry Battalion Educational Foundation.
The German force failed to dislodge the Americans, suffering heavy losses before being forced back. Skorzeny lost thousands of his elite troops in the Battle of the Bulge. The attack on Malmedy broke against Company B’s embankment, and the northern edge of the Bulge held.
After the Battle of the Bulge, the 99th was folded into the new 474th Infantry Regiment on Jan. 19, 1945, alongside veterans of the First Special Service Force and Ranger veterans from Anzio. Under Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army that April, the regiment hauled the Nazi gold and art hoard out of the Merkers salt mine.
Battalion medical personnel also visited Buchenwald four days after liberation.
“It was a real eye opener,” Dr. Raymond Minge, the battalion surgeon, wrote to his wife. “Any doubt I ever had as to the justification for sending American soldiers overseas was completely banished.”
Operation Rype
While the rest of the battalion fought across Europe, the 100 men the OSS had taken from Camp Hale in 1943 had been training for the mission the 99th was originally built for, Operation Rype.
In March 1945, Maj. William E. Colby, a 25-year-old Jedburgh officer who would one day run the CIA, led 35 of them aboard eight B-24 Liberators in Scotland. The plan was to jump into the Snåsa mountains of central Norway, link up with Norwegian resistance, and cut the Nordland Railway to trap 150,000 German troops retreating south.
Only four of the eight planes made their drops. One stick of five men landed in neutral Sweden and was interned. The men who did reach the frozen surface of Jævsjø Lake found their supply bundles scattered across 36 square miles of Norwegian forest, some with parachutes that failed to open. They skied the gear out and went to work.
On the night of March 25, Colby’s team blew a half-mile stretch of rail line. They did it again in late April, then again, dodging German ski patrols through sub-arctic terrain. Once, pursued by a larger force, they escaped by climbing a slope they nicknamed “Benzedrine Hill” after the stimulant tablets they swallowed to stay awake for 56 hours of skiing.
Operation Rype was, as Colby later put it in a memoir recovered from CIA files and published as “Skis and Daggers,” “the first and only combined ski-parachute operation ever mounted by the U.S. Army.”
It was also the only American combat operation carried out on Norwegian soil during World War II, conducted by men originally recruited to liberate the country from the Germans.
Disbandment, Honors and Lineage
On June 7, 1945, three years after the Army had raised them to invade their homeland, the 99th finally arrived in Oslo, assigned as honor guard for King Haakon VII’s return from five years of exile in London. The king designated them his honorary guards for life.
Attached to Task Force A, the battalion helped disarm the German garrison in Norway and repatriate tens of thousands of Soviet POWs and forced laborers. Along the way, the men of the 99th found time to look up relatives they hadn’t seen in years. Eighty-seven of them married Norwegian women and brought them home.
The battalion finally sailed for the United States in October 1945 and deactivated at Camp Miles Standish, Massachusetts, on Nov. 11.
The 99th spent 101 days in combat across five campaigns. Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe. Fifty-four soldiers were killed in action, 207 were wounded and six were missing. Its men earned 15 Silver Stars, 20 Bronze Stars and 305 Purple Hearts, with several men being wounded more than once.
The Army briefly reactivated the 99th at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in September 1956 when the 351st Infantry Regiment inactivated and the post’s infantry presence was cut to battalion strength. When the Army adopted its Pentomic reorganization in March 1958, the 99th was inactivated a final time, its lineage absorbed into the 2nd Battle Group of the 31st Infantry.
In 1952, the Army activated the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and built its Norway-aligned cadre around former 99th soldiers and OSS Norwegians, according to the U.S. Army. Today’s Green Berets and soldiers, who still train on skis in the winter mountains, trace part of their heritage back to the Viking Battalion.
Camp Hale, where the battalion learned to fight on skis, was designated a national monument in October 2022. The proclamation credited the 99th by name for their innovative engineering of the ski-mounted heavy weapons carriage that helped them during their training and in combat in Europe.
