Commerce and War
In 1939, the Norwegian military was downsized and Riiser-Larssen was among those officers finding themselves out of work. However, he was quickly offered a new job by the shipping company Fred. Olsen & Co. as manager of its newly formed airline, DNL. He invited some former naval pilots to join the airline and soon made it the most successful in Norway. In 1946, DNL would be one of the four Scandinavian airlines merged to create the present-day Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS).
When Nazi Germany invaded Norway in 1940, Riiser-Larsen rejoined the Royal Norwegian Navy Air Service. However, both the Norwegian Army and Royal Norwegian Navy Air Services were quickly overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht before he saw combat. Instead, he accompanied the Norwegian cabinet and military leaders into exile in London, before moving on to Toronto, Canada, to become the first commander of the Norwegian air forces' training camp, "Little Norway".
At the beginning of 1941, Riiser-Larsen returned to London to take up the post of Commander in Chief of the Naval Air Service; then of the Combined Arms Air Force; and finally, in 1944, of the fully amalgamated Royal Norwegian Air Force. By the end of the war, however, many of the pilots under his command had become critical of his leadership. He resigned, bitterly, from the Air Force in 1946.
Read more about this topic: Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen
Famous quotes containing the words commerce and, commerce and/or war:
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
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“Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.”
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“What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elderstalk squirts, charged with rose water?”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)