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While vague and wishful stories out of Stockholm insisted that Germany's lines of communication with Oslo had been cut by a British fleet, Veteran Stowe spent four days in Oslo (with Warren Irvin of National Broadcasting Co., Christian Science Monitor's Edmund Stevens) and watched five more Nazi transports nose their way up Oslo Fjord.
German military authorities let Correspondent Stowe send one dispatch out of Oslo by radio. (Next day the official Moscow radio quoted his story.) Then Leland Stowe fled the city. From Göteborg, Sweden, at week's end he reported his escape, reported from his own observation that German columns were pushing out from Oslo in all directions. In Stockholm, two days later, he told the whole fantastic story of Norway's occupation (see p. 22).
Also on the scene of the invasion was U. P.'s Peter C. Rhodes, who had been sent to the iron-ore port of Narvik, witnessed the German landing, then got across the Swedish border to report it from Abisko, 40 miles away. Not so lucky was Giles Romilly, correspondent for the London Daily Express, also in Narvik. A British subject, nephew by marriage of Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, Correspondent Romilly was clapped under arrest, kept prisoner in the Hotel Royal, while the Nazi press made fun of him in Germany.
He was not the only newsman taken into custody by Nazis. In Berlin when the invasion began were five Danish correspondents, three Norwegians. The Foreign Office succeeded in rounding up four Danes and one Norwegian, interned them in the Kaiserhof Hotel till the show was over.