From Grandad's pile of books.

This is an amazing story. It is true, and I can't do it justice, so have copied the text from the front and back flap here.

"This is the true story of the smallest and strangest campaign of the whole war. It took place on the north-east coast of Greenland, 600 miles beyond the Arctic Circle, cut off from the rest of the world by the frozen sea for all but six weeks of the year, a land of great beauty and of peace undisturbed through the ages.

Only thirty-four men were involved in it -- nineteen on one side, fifteen on the other; yet it had an effect and significance out of all proportion to its size. Its effect was on the battle of the Atlantic, which precipitated it; its significance lay in its perfect demonstration of the futility of war. For in this beautiful, remove Arctic setting, the passions of war were utterly out of place and could not be kindled. Here the attempt to make men kill one another broke down.

The north-east coast of Greenland is uninhabited except for a few solitary hunters and the radio operators who man four weather stations. The weather reports from these stations are of vital importance to Atlantic shipping. In wartime they were equally important to both sides, to the British convoys crossing the Atlantic and going to Russian, and to the German submarines which tried to intercept them. But afte the German occupation of Denmark, the Greenland stations stopped broadcasting in international code, and began to use ciphers known only to British and Americans; a reaction from the German side was inevitable.

Foreseeing this, the Danish Governor of Greenland established the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol. Its task was to patrol the coast by dog sledge and bring in the first possible news of any German landing, for communication to the British and Americans. Its beat was 500 miles of coast-line, as the crow flies; but ot patrol the shores of every fjord and island, it had to cover some 10,000 miles. The only men available for this formidable assignment were six Danes and three Norwegians who lived up there, and six Eskimo sledge-drivers and assistants.

As the Governor had foreseen, a German expedition reached the coast in the summer of 1942, established a base, and began to transmit weather reports in German code. The commander was a regular naval officer; under him there were eighteen men. It was not until the following spring that a member of the Sledge Patrol came upon a human footprint he could not account for and discovered the German ship frozen in in a well-concealed bay.

From that moment of contact, the most curious battle of the war was joined. The Germans were well armed with modern weapons, but they had no dogs and did not know how to drive them. The Danes, on the other hand, were masters of the arts of living and of travelling in the Arctic, but had no weapons more lethal than their hunting rifles.

With force ranged on one side against mobility on the other, the fight that ensued provides the strangest chapter in the history of the Arctic and one of the most exciting incidents of the war. But the strangest part of this battle was not the rapid changes in its fortunes; it was the reaction of the combatants, oblighed to fight in a land where no man had ever before died at the hand of another. It was impossible to convey to the Eskimos the idea of great nations at war, or to explain to them why they should shoot at another man because he was of a different European nation; to them an unfriendly man was an improbable a conception as a friendly bear. The Danes themselves, imbued with the Arctic tradition of human friendship, found it almost impossible to aim a gun at a fellow man and fire it. While the German commander, who years before the war had fallen under the spell of the Arctic, became uneasy about the role assigned to him and particularly about how his Nazi companions interpreted it.

When the Germans laid an ambush, captured dog teams from the Danes and learned to drive them, the tables seemed to have been effectively turned; but in the Arctic weapons and military strategy are not the decisive factors.

From setting out to tell a pure adventure story, David Howarth found himself trying to fathom the motives of the men embroiled in this drama, and to explain why they departed, as they did, from their conventional military roles. That he has not only set down correctly the facts of the story, as told to him by the participants on both sides, includind the German commander, but has correctly interpreted their thoughts and motives, is borne out by the assurance that all the main characters read and approved the manuscript before publication."