Jan Baalsrud was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway and moved with his family to Kolbotn in the early 1930s.

The morning after their blunder, on 29 March, their fishing boat Brattholm  – containing around 100 kilograms of explosives intended to destroy the air control tower – was attacked by a German vessel.

Baalsrud was the only commando to evade capture and, soaking wet and missing one sea boot, he escaped into a snow gully, where he shot and killed a German Gestapo officer with his pistol.

He spent the last several weeks tied on a stretcher, near death, as teams of Norwegian villagers dragged him up and down hills and snowy mountains.

Not long after that, Baalsrud was left on a high plateau, on a stretcher in the snow, where he was supposed to be collected by the Norwegian resistance.

Due to weather and German patrols in the town of Manndalen, Kåfjord, he was there for 27 days and was close to death for lack of food.

It was during this time, while he lay behind a snow wall built around a rock to shelter him, that Baalsrud amputated nine of his toes to stop the spread of gangrene.

Baalsrud spent seven months in a Swedish hospital in Boden before he was flown back to Britain in an RAF de Havilland Mosquito aircraft.

His ashes are buried in Manndalen, in a grave shared with Aslak Aslaksen Fossvoll (1900–1943), one of the local men who helped him escape to Sweden.

An annual remembrance march in Baalsrud's honour takes place on 25 July in Troms, where the participants follow his escape route for nine days.