For such a ship-owner, the war was not merely a source of patriotic indignation, but to as great, or a greater, extent, a source of real pain. There was nothing Wilhelmsen did not know about his ships, nothing; he had been involved in discussions about new vessels with the shipbuilders, he inspected the ships himself as soon as they docked at Oslo’s Filipstad Wharf, he knew every captain, every chief engineer on board the boats that were now being bombed, torpedoed, sunk on the high seas. Which is why Jonas Wergeland depicted Wilhelm Wilhelmsen on the bridge of a sinking ship, and replayed this shot again and again, to denote the twenty-six times during the war when Wilhelmsen was lost at sea in his thoughts. The filming of this scene had been a tough enough job in itself, involving a gruelling shoot down at a place called Verdens Ende, Norway’s very own World’s End on the tip of the Tjøme peninsula, not far from Wilhelmsen’s hometown of Tønsberg. Despite the NRK management’s worries about the expense, Jonas had organized the building of a set representing the last visible part of a sinking ship, the bridge upon which Wilhelmsen stood — although of course ships seldom sunk in such a way that the bridge was the last thing to be seen, but it was meant to be symbolic, and not one viewer complained. Actor Normann Vaage said later that he almost drowned during the shoot, because Jonas was never satisfied and Vaage had to put up with being sunk into the waves again and again. ‘Stop moaning, Vaage,’ Wergeland had shouted at him. ‘We’re at World’s End, remember!’
There is nothing so terrible, so ghastly, so disillusioning, so tragic, as a sinking ship. During the war the Wilhelm Wilhelmsen shipping line lost twenty-six ships, a whole string of ‘T’s which disappeared into the deep, and it was not only boats that were wiped out, it was words: Tenerife, Tortugas, Tancred, Touraine — and, not least, Thermopylae — they were legends that went to the bottom, whole epics: an Argos with all of its tales. And the main point of the programme was that Wilhelm Wilhelmsen took the tragedy of all this as personally as if he himself had been on board and gone down with each ship. Which is why Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was shown in that recurring shot, standing stiffly to attention in his captain’s uniform while the water slowly engulfed him; sequences with a primitive, almost brutal rhythm to them, accompanied by the discordant strains of an organ; sailors who had survived had described how the most infernal noise was heard as the air was squeezed out of the different sized valves when the boat went under — several times Jonas was put in mind of his first composition, the piano piece ‘Dragon Sacrifice’. By dint of such devices he created an effect that had viewers hanging on for dear life to their Stressless chairs, to save being sucked down into the deep themselves. Jonas Wergeland was in his element on this shoot, chasing the suggestion that only pictures can create, ships sinking again and again, and at the same time drawing on all his images of the war, that sore point in Norwegian history — an era in which the people of Norway took such an insatiable interest. Jonas Wergeland did not wish to manipulate but merely to underpin the viewers’ imaginations, and in so doing he helped them to see more than pictures on a screen; instead it was as if they sat in darkened rooms dreaming the whole thing up for themselves. ‘To be honest, I’ve never really done anything but Radio Theatre,’ Jonas Wergeland remarked on more than one occasion.
They say that during the war, when the Wilhelmsen fleet was being run from London, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went to the office as usual, had his black Cadillac sent to collect him every day from the mansion on Trosterudveien, a house which Jonas and Ørn were to take stock of a good twenty years later, and was driven to No. 20 Tollbodgaten, where he stepped through the heavy oak doors and said good morning to the caretaker before hurrying up to the first floor, past ‘The Three Graces’, and letting himself in to his office. What he did up there, in a room lined with old paintings of sailing ships, no one knows. But Jonas Wergeland knew what went on in there. Because during the war Wilhelm Wilhelmsen was neither in Trosterudveien nor in Tollbodgaten, he was at sea, he was on board all of his ships, every single one of them; he was in several places at once and every time he heard that a ship had gone down, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went down too. Why? Because he was still the Captain. When the Tudor was torpedoed, Wilhelmsen was not in Norway; he was somewhere northwest of Cape Finisterre, on board the Tudor. Wilhelmsen went down with his ship. When the Triton was torpedoed northeast of the Azores, Wilhelmsen was on board; when the Taurus was bombed off Montrose in Scotland, Wilhelmsen sank along with it, and when the Talabot — a name which aroused even stronger feelings in the Captain, because not only had the Talabot been the first of the T-boats, but Wilhelm Wilhelmsen had actually served as an ordinary seaman on that ship — so when, after a heroic crossing from Alexandria, this second Talabot was set ablaze by bombs in the harbour at Valletta on Malta and thereafter partially sunk in order to prevent its cargo of munitions from exploding, Wilhelm Wilhelmsen went down with the ship. It is not true to say that Wilhelmsen spent the war sitting behind a desk; in his thoughts he spent every day, his whole life in fact, on the bridge. WW, a quadruple V-sign: We Will Win. This was what Jonas wanted to show, and showed in such a way that even the most hard-bitten Norwegian could not help but be moved.
After this programme — which, to Jonas’s surprise, was never criticized for its pathos — NRK received masses of thank-you letters from seamen, surviving war veterans. They thanked Jonas Wergeland for so clearly illustrating a fact which people in Norway had, for over half a century, blocked out: what a debt not only the nation, but the whole world, owed to those seamen. In Norway it was the sailors who made the biggest sacrifice during the war. Almost half of all Norwegian casualties were seamen. They were like Leonidas’s soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae, they helped to thwart a far superior force. No one can overestimate the contribution made by the Norwegian merchant fleet to the defeat of the Axis powers, and it is easy to see why the lines tracing the routes followed by the Wilhelmsen fleet and other shipping companies reminded some people of the diagrams of battles in historical atlases. What Churchill said about the RAF is equally true of the Norwegian seamen: Never was so much owed by so many to so few.
Talleyrand, Tabor, Tarifa, Trafalgar — a heroic poem, an epos. Those words beginning with ‘T’ — recited as scene followed scene — were the names of boats, all of which sank, went down, during the war. Jonas closed the programme with a clip from a documentary that showed the launching, four years after the end of the war, of the Thermopylae II, which was actually built at the Akers Mek yard in Oslo. ‘What a triumph,’ wrote one old wartime seaman. ‘Like witnessing a resurrection.’
Axel, on the other hand, was scathing in his criticism of this programme. Three quarters of an hour on Wilhelmsen and not one word about aquavit. Outrageous.
And if I might add my three ha’pence worth, in retrospect I cannot help thinking of the resemblance between the shots of Wilhelmsen on the bridge of a sinking ship and the photographs taken of Jonas Wergeland just after the murder of Margrete Boeck, and indeed as he looked in the courtroom, standing there with an air of defiance mixed with quiet grief and cool dignity, as if he, Jonas Wergeland, were also in the midst of a terrible shipwreck.