The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  Most military officers would have recoiled at this. Generals have no compunctions about ordering assaults in which thousands, even tens of thousands, die, but in that era they rarely talked about killing individual people; that was considered unseemly, even slimy, the province of assassins and spies. In his typically tactless way, however, Groves didn’t care. To his thinking, the scientists designing weapons for the Nazis were every bit as dangerous as the storm troopers wielding them, probably more. Killing them first seemed fair.

  Still, given the lingering stigma of assassination, Groves passed the idea up the chain of command to see what his superiors thought. The answer came back in February 1944: “Tell Groves to take care of his own dirty work.” If this was intended as a rebuke, it failed: all Groves absorbed was that no one had told him no. He wasn’t quite sold on assassination yet, but at least the option was on the table.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Ferry

  Although the air strike on the Vemork heavy-water plant failed to knock out the cells in the basement, the assault proved a success in the long run because it convinced the Germans that the Allies would keep attacking the plant over and over. Given that, why not produce heavy water somewhere safer? Nazi officials had already been sketching out plans for a D2O plant deep inside Germany, and the Vemork raid accelerated its development.

  In the meantime, Vemork still had fourteen tons of Juice on hand in various stages of concentration, Juice the Uranium Club needed for its research. So in early 1944 Vemork arranged to ship it all to Germany. Security was of course a concern, and after considering several routes, officials decided on a convoluted plan: The heavy water would leave Vemork via railroad, traveling until it reached a nearby fjord lake. It would then cross Lake Tinnsjö on a ferry, and connect with another railroad on its way to the North Sea. However complex logistically, it seemed the safest course.

  Inevitably, though, word of the plan leaked out to publisher Paul Rosbaud in Berlin, and the Griffin alerted British intelligence. The Allies obviously couldn’t allow so much heavy water to reach the Reich, but stopping it en route wouldn’t be easy. The two railroad legs of the journey would be heavily defended, as would the transit across the North Sea into Germany. The only vulnerable point seemed to be the trip across Lake Tinnsjö. The ferry there, the Hydro, was a commercial vessel and largely defenseless. A bomb placed belowdecks could easily sink it, and given the impressive depth of Tinnsjö, 1,300 feet, the sunken cargo would be irretrievable.

  There was just one problem. As a commercial ferry the Hydro would be carrying passengers, mostly local Norwegians, who would die in any attack. As soon as the Norwegian underground heard about the plan, they radioed London to protest. Was killing more innocent people necessary? London responded the next day, tellingly using the passive voice: “The matter has been considered, and it is decided that it is very important to destroy the Juice.” The Norwegians hardened their hearts; more of their countrymen would have to die.

  The mission began with a clandestine scouting trip. In mid-February 1944, a man in a dark blue suit boarded the Hydro just before its 10 a.m. launch. He stood on the upper deck cradling a violin case and smoking a pipe to keep warm. He proved rather undexterous for a musician, however: halfway through the trip he dropped his pipe down a grate and into the engine room in the bowels of the ferry. Acting sheepish, he crept down to retrieve it—and managed to reconnoiter the engines while he was there. On the way back up, he bumped into the ship’s engineer and struck up a conversation. The engineer was happy to chat—it was a sleepy job, with nothing much to do—and when the violinist confessed his fascination with ferries and gave the engineer a pinch of tobacco for his trouble, the engineer offered to give him a full tour, stem to stern. Delightful.

  Back on the observation deck, the violinist grabbed his instrument case, feeling for the heft of the gun inside. He spent the remainder of the trip mentally going over what he’d seen below. He was a veteran of the Gunnerside mission, and compared to the obstacles at Vemork, the Hydro seemed laughably easy to sabotage. Upon disembarking he reported the ship’s layout to the Norwegian underground, adding that the ferry passed over the deepest stretch of water thirty minutes after departing. Given the ship’s schedule and the vagaries of the boarding process, he estimated that blowing the Hydro at 10:45 a.m. would be ideal.

  As for the bomb, the underground planned to use Nobel 808 again, the same almond-scented explosive the Gunnerside team had used. This time, though, the commandos couldn’t just light a fuse and run; they would have to plant the bomb ahead of time and rig up a timer. The design they settled on consisted of detonators wired to an alarm clock with its bells removed. The saboteurs would sneak onboard the ferry the night before, wind the clock, and set the alarm. When it went off in the morning, the metal clapper would fly up and, with the bells missing, strike a brass contact instead. This would complete a circuit between the alarm clock and the detonators, sending a pulse of electricity into the Nobel 808. Boom. The only remaining question was the size of the hole. A large hole would sink the ship quickly but would doom everyone belowdecks to a watery grave. A small hole would save lives but might give the guards aboard a chance to salvage the heavy water. Balancing mercy and murder, the saboteurs decided to sink the ship in five minutes, which according to their calculations meant a hole twelve feet in circumference.

  A few days before the heavy water shipped out, workers at Vemork began decanting it into four dozen 400-liter drums labeled POTASH LYE. The manager overseeing the operation was in on the plot and knew that his involvement would likely cost him his life: after the sabotage, the Nazis would surely arrest and interrogate him. He did his job anyway, and managed to drag things out long enough to ensure that the barrels would board the Hydro on February 20, a Sunday, the morning when the fewest local people rode the ferry.

  From the saboteurs’ point of view, the weeks of preparation could not have gone more smoothly. But they paid for their early good luck with a series of catastrophes on the eve of the mission. The saboteur who’d scouted the Hydro had dressed as a violinist because a symphony orchestra was touring the area, and a stranger with a violin case wouldn’t attract much attention. But at a party on Saturday, February 19, one of the co-conspirators overheard a musician—a world-class violinist who’d accompanied the orchestra—mention his plans to ship out on the ferry the next morning. After choking on his drink, the conspirator tried persuading him to stick around and, um, see the sights. (The plateau isn’t that bleak—try the skiing!) No luck. The violinist had a concert in Oslo the next night and couldn’t stay. The conspirator, feeling wretched, could only nod. That same night, another conspirator’s mother announced her own plans to take the Sunday ferry, and he had just as little luck dissuading her. The son was tempted to tell her the truth, and wrestled hard with his conscience. But the mission was too important, and he stayed silent.

  A few hours before midnight, Nazi guards began loading the barrels of heavy water onto railroad cars at Vemork. A dozen soldiers with machine guns then climbed aboard, straddling the drums as an extra precaution. After reaching the lake, the guards uncoupled the cars at the ferry dock and stationed several klieg lights around them, along with more troops. They would load the cars onto the Hydro in the morning.

  In the meantime, the team of saboteurs was dealing with another crisis. Reaching the ferry docks at night wouldn’t be easy—they had to cross nine miles of craggy terrain. They would need a car to do so, and because cars were scarce during wartime, they’d made arrangements to “steal” the vehicle of a sympathetic local doctor. Unfortunately, the man was a better physician than a mechanic, and when the saboteurs broke into his garage just before midnight and inserted the key, all they heard was rur-ruur-ruuuuur. The engine wouldn’t turn over. They tried again, and heard the same dull dirge. Two of them jumped out at this point and popped open the hood. They tested the battery, the fuel pumps, the gas line, the spark plugs. Nothing: rur-ruur-ruuuuur. Aware of the minut
es slipping away, they became increasingly frustrated; one kicked the car and spat, “You dumb brute!” Finally, after an hour, they cracked open the carburetor and found enough sludge to choke a horse. After a hasty cleaning, which left them looking like chimneysweeps, they tried the key again—and the engine caught. They slammed the hood down, wrenched the car into gear, and raced down the icy roads to the docks.

  Upon arriving, they noticed the phalanx of troops surrounding the heavy-water drums. Incredibly, though, the Nazis had neglected to guard the ferry itself. Feeling their luck turning, three of the five saboteurs peeled off to approach the ship. Although the crunchy ice underfoot made them wince, boarding the vessel proved unnervingly easy: they simply tossed a rope over the side and pulled themselves up. Their luck continued inside, as the Hydro’s crew was celebrating Saturday night with a loud and well-lubricated game of poker. No one noticed the saboteurs as they slipped down into third-class and followed the route the violinist-scout had described. They’d just about reached the hatches that led to the lowest deck when another disaster befell them, and a guard stepped out of the shadows.

  The trio dove for cover, but too late. The guard had seen them. They braced for an alarm.

  “Is that you, Knut?”

  The saboteurs peeked out, baffled. It turned out that the guard knew one of them; they went to the same athletic club.

  Scrambling for a cover story, Knut stood up and told the guard they were fleeing the Gestapo. “We’re expecting a raid, and we have something to hide,” he said. Could they store it below?

  “Why didn’t you say so,” the guard said, suddenly chipper. He pointed out the hatch. “This won’t be the first time something’s been hidden below.”

  While Knut stayed and distracted the guard, the other two saboteurs, still half stunned, lowered themselves into the bilge. They found a foot of cold, foul water down there and began splashing their way toward the bow. Planting the bomb there would cause the Hydro to pitch forward as she sank, pulling the screw and rudder out of the water and preventing her from steering for shore. They pulled the explosives from their rucksack, laid out a twelve-foot ring underwater, and carefully wired up the detonating caps, a ticklish job. After taping the clock to the steel ribs of the hull, they set the alarm and rejoined Knut and the guard, who were still gabbing. They finally slipped off the ship at 4 a.m.

  The day dawned cool and clear a few hours later, and a few hours after that, the Hydro pushed off at 10 a.m. The captain that day came from a nautical family; he had a brother who piloted ships across the Atlantic. The brother had been torpedoed twice already, and each time it happened the ferry captain thanked the stars above for his cushy job.

  At 10:45 he felt the Hydro lurch beneath him. At first he thought they’d run aground, but given the depth of Lake Tinnsjö, that was impossible. Perhaps they’d been torpedoed, he thought. But no, U-boats didn’t patrol fjords. Before he could puzzle the matter out, the ferry pitched forward precipitously. A minute later chaos erupted on deck as the railroad cars holding the heavy water snapped their restraints and crashed into the ship’s guardrails.

  Down below, the passengers in third class proved quicker on the uptake than the captain. “We’ve been bombed!” somebody cried. Water began gushing into the windowless hold, and a pipe soon burst, hissing steam. People scrambled over each other for the exit, until the lights on the ceiling flickered and cut out, making it impossible to see.

  The ferry sank perfectly on schedule, within five minutes. Only one lifeboat got launched, and of the fifty-three souls aboard, twenty-six drowned, including fourteen Norwegians. This brought the total body count for the Vemork missions—including the Freshman disaster and the aerial strike—to roughly ninety people over sixteen months.

  Thankfully, the saboteur’s mother was not among the victims. After hearing her plans and deciding that he couldn’t betray the mission, the son had dumped a whole bottle of laxative into her dinner. After a wretched night of “food poisoning,” she’d decided not to travel after all. The famous concert violinist did board the Hydro that morning, keen to get to Oslo. But he saved himself by leaping aboard the life raft. He even rescued his prized violin, which he found bobbing in the water.

  As for the manager at Vemork who’d overseen the transfer of the heavy water—and who would now come under heavy suspicion—he escaped unscathed as well. The Nazis made inquiries, to be sure, but found that he’d checked himself into a hospital the night before the bombing, clutching his side and moaning. He’d gone under the knife for an appendectomy, and the Nazis concluded he’d been innocent. What they didn’t know was that his sister, a nurse, also worked at the hospital and had arranged the whole thing. The surgery was a sham.

  Of the twenty-seven survivors floating in the lake that morning, a few were found clinging, ironically enough, to barrels of “potash lye.” (The barrels hadn’t been filled completely, and the air pockets inside kept them afloat.) The Nazis managed to salvage four of these drums, which contained the equivalent of thirty-two gallons of pure Juice. It was the last heavy water the Uranium Club would receive from Norway. The rest of it—paid for nearly ounce for ounce with human blood—sank to the bottom of the fjord.

  CHAPTER 38

  Sharks

  If there was one thing that drove Boris Pash crazy it was sitting around doing nothing, and for the first few months of Operation Shark, he did nothing but nothing. After being yanked off the Oppenheimer case, Pash was summoned to Washington in the fall of 1943 and put in charge of the Alsos mission. As one of his first official acts, he grew a trim line of whiskers across his upper lip; perhaps this mustache de guerre reminded him of his Russian Revolution days. The first Alsos assignment would take place in Italy, and preparation for it ruined Pash’s Thanksgiving holiday. But two years to the day after Pearl Harbor, the forty-two-year-old coach kissed his wife Lydia goodbye (she reportedly hated the mustache) and flew off to fight in his third war.

  Direct flights to Europe didn’t exist then, so Pash and his crew of thirteen military personnel and six scientists had to hop the Trampoline to Victory across the ocean: Miami, Puerto Rico, British Guiana, Brazil, French West Africa, Marrakesh, and so on. It took eight long days, but Pash’s crew arrived in Naples on December 15 in fine fettle. “The morale of the members of the mission is excellent,” he boasted to Washington. It helped that the crew had adopted a snazzy logo: a Greek α on a blue background, with a red lightning bolt streaking across; the α represented both Alsos and atom, while the lightning represented fission.

  Priority number one in Italy was tracking down Edoardo Amaldi, the former assistant of Enrico Fermi who used to race him down the hallway with irradiated samples. Given Amaldi’s scientific credentials and the close ties between Italy and Germany, it seemed likely that the Uranium Club had been in contact with him in Rome. Pash needed to find out what Amaldi knew. Perhaps he’d even worked jointly with the Germans on a fascist atomic bomb.

  Pash was eager to start hunting scientists, but the Alsos mission soon got caught on several snags. One was their own fault. As a bastard unit, unattached to any larger group, Alsos needed to borrow vehicles and supplies from other divisions to reach Rome. Some units might have been willing to help, but Pash pointedly declined to explain why he needed the gear, citing the secrecy of his mission. He resorted to bluster instead, which worked fine on privates but not on officers, who wanted to know what the hell he was up to. A standoff ensued, and the general in charge of the area, Pash said, “flatly stated that he would not do anything for us unless we told him the whole story.” Pash refused.

  It soon became clear that the road to Rome was barred anyway. The Italian campaign had started off promising enough for the Allies. They’d conquered Sicily in July 1943, and shortly afterward the Italian government had deposed and imprisoned Benito Mussolini. (Nazi paratroopers later rescued him and smuggled him to Germany.) Allied forces then invaded the southern Italian mainland, from which point they hoped to shinny up the
peninsula into Europe proper and threaten the underbelly of Germany. Unfortunately, Hitler could see this gambit as clearly as the Allies, and after Mussolini’s arrest, tens of thousands of Nazi troops—each one cursing the name of Italy—poured into the Boot to fortify the place. The ascending Allied and descending Axis armies eventually crashed together eighty miles south of Rome, with much of the fighting centered around the ancient mountaintop monastery of Monte Cassino, where 55,000 Allied troops would eventually sacrifice their lives.

  This quagmire left the Alsos crew stranded in Naples, a gritty town in the best of times and especially depressing during the winter of 1943–44. The food was rotten, most buildings lacked power and running water, and the only benefit of the constant drizzle was that it suppressed the dry, choking dust that otherwise coated everything in a white film. An outbreak of typhus required spraying the region with DDT. An outbreak of syphilis then decimated the troops, causing staff shortages and forcing army health officers to nail Burma Shave–like PSAs to trees along the roads. (“Girls who take boarders / bring social disorders. / Take a pro[phylactic].” And “A happy guy / a fool was he. / Forgot his pro, / now has VD.”) As a result of all this, New Year’s Day passed in a malaise of inaction for Alsos, as did the first weeks of January. Trying to be productive, Pash and his scientists—some of whom reportedly posed as correspondents for National Geographic—began hunting down physicists around Naples, hoping they’d heard rumors of what Amaldi was up to. They knew nothing, and interviewing them proved futile. The mission’s “excellent” morale began to plummet, especially when—having nothing else to do—technical personnel were assigned menial chores like KP. Here they were, elite scientists on a top-secret mission, one that could save the world from an atomic Hitler—and how did they spend their days? Peeling potatoes.