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My grandfather, Rolf Markan was 14 when the British moved into Iceland. In 1940 he was employed to build barracks for the British troops. The British were building facilities all over Iceland because of its strategic positioning in the middle of the Atlantic. Later in the war, the Americans moved into Iceland. They were not nearly as popular as the British, as they did most of their work themselves and didn’t bring employment like the British had done. It was during the British occupation that my grandfather learned to speak English.

In 1943, when he was 17 he left home. He travelled to Norway where he signed up as a deckhand on a rescue vessel. It was a converted merchant navy vessel called the ‘Akershus’ after the famous fort in Oslo. It employed a 17-18 man crew and 23 sailors from the British navy, among whom, 7 were deep and shallow-sea divers. They were based in Cowes in the Isle of White for 14 months just after the Normandy landings in 1943. They were sent out on rescue operations, including one where they had to rescue an aircraft which had crashed after take off from an aircraft carrier.

One of the things Rolf remembers best about his experiences was seeing and hearing the V2 rockets, which were launched from France and aimed at London. He recollects the strange whistling noise that they made.

One of the jobs they had to do was salvage many of the debris from the D-day landings. One of the things they had to salvage was an enormous floating concrete platform, which the tanks rolled across to get up the beaches. One of the things he remembers vividly was when their ship discovered a German U-boat. All the Germans aboard it had died, though the thing he remembers most clearly was the futuristic design of it and the comfortable living quarters.

The equipment aboard the Akershus was very complicated and there was a dedicated workshop to deal with the specialist divers’ equipment. Rolf had more English than the other deck-hands, so he was put in-charge of the winch to lower and raise divers. Among the other things the Akershus had to remove from the sea were live mines.

After the war he remembers seeing Dresden which had been levelled in an enormous allied bombing raid towards the end of the war.

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