One day a newspaperman, Erik Seidenfaden, 30-year-old editor on Copenhagen's rich, conservative Politiken, son of a Copenhagen police commissioner, took off from a Danish airport in a chartered plane and turned his nose northward over the grey waters of the Kattegat toward Norway. Reporter Seidenfaden, like many another Dane, was curious about a long line of Nazi warships, mine sweepers, transports which had been steaming slowly through the Great Belt all day.
It was a risky flight to take, for a fleet at sea in wartime would be glad to have its escort planes shoot down any air snooper. But perhaps, flying in the distance, Seidenfaden's plane was taken for one of the escort. He overtook the Nazi vanguard near the Norwegian coast, swooped down in time to see the first units of the Nazi fleet moving into Oslo Fjord.
Journalist Seidenfaden used his head. He landed in Oslo, headed for the nearest wireless office, and put his news on the air. A few hours later he escaped to Stockholm. His dispatch was the first definite information that the German fleet was moving on Norway. Luck, enterprise and brains, the three ingredients of newspaper beats, last week had given Erik Seidenfaden the first beat of the new war in the north. Mysterious Invasion. At 9:15 p.m.
E. S. T. the first unconfirmed news reached the U. S. from Associated Press in Oslo that "foreign warships" were attacking Norway. Copenhagen was silent; so was Amsterdam, transmission centre for foreign news ever since World War II began.
At 11:36 p.m. E. S. T., a New York Times correspondent, Svend Cartensen, wirelessed a cryptic announcement that German troops had invaded Denmark.
At 11:38 Verner Forchammer flashed the same news by cable to Hearst's International News Service. Then the Danish wireless fell abruptly silent, Danish cables went dead. Nazi soldiers had occupied Copenhagen.
Forty-eight minutes later a similar report from Stockholm via a British news service, Exchange Telegraph, finally reached the U. S. Forty-nine minutes later the British Broadcasting Corp. gave early risers in Britain alarming reports of Denmark's invasion. For confirmation, BBC quoted the New York Times.
Men on the Spot. For the next few days the chief problem of correspondents was to winnow truth from fable in untold rumors (flourishing in Sweden in particular) of expeditions, battles, disasters.
From the shores of the Skagerrak Swedes heard terrific explosions—depth charges, torpedoings, air bombings. Rumor fathered a mythical sea fight in the Skagerrak between battle fleets (see p. 19}.
No one knew who invented the tale that British troops had landed in Norway and recaptured three coastal cities.
One veteran newsman who was not misled was white-haired Leland Stowe, correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. Rejected last fall by the New York Herald Tribune because at 39 he was "too old to cover a war," Newsman Stowe went to Finland for Colonel Frank Knox's paper, sent back some of the most able, eloquent dispatches of that war.
Last week found Leland Stowe in Oslo.