On 22 September 1943 at Kåfjord, North Norway, Lieutenant Place, commanding Midget Submarine X.7, and another lieutenant (Donald Cameron) commanding Midget Submarine X.6, carried out a most daring and successful attack on the German Battleship Tirpitz.
Flying from an airfield at Yagodnik, near Arkhangelsk on the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia, they attacked the German battleship Tirpitz in the Kaa Fjord.
During the Second World War, the German battleship Tirpitz used Kåfjord as a harbour, and she was damaged there by British aircraft and by Royal Navy midget submarines in Operation Source.
Before the construction of the North Cape Tunnel on the European route E69 highway, Kåfjord was the southern terminus of the ferry route between the mainland and the town of Honningsvåg on the island of Magerøya.
Kåfjord, Alta | Kåfjord |
Their bodies were buried in graves just outside the Kåfjord Church graveyard in the village of Kåfjord in Alta, but their heads were sent on to the Anatomisk Institute at the Kong Medical Frederiks University in Oslo, where they were kept for more than a century as part of the university's skull collections.