by Ross Kemp
In the wider scheme of the war, Bruneval was a very minor affair. The name was spoken over breakfast tables and in pubs around Britain in the days following the raid, but it was soon overtaken by events elsewhere and forgotten. One place where it hasn’t been forgotten – outside of the Parachute Regiment – is Bruneval itself. If you drive around the little village today you will pass along the Avenue du Colonel Rémy, Rue Lord Louis Mountbatten, Rue Roger Dumont and Rue Major Frost, but you won’t find the villa where Frost blew his whistle to launch the assault. The Germans knocked it down soon after the raid in the mistaken belief its presence had given away the Würzburg. The Rue Major Frost will lead you to the tree-lined rectangle of Le Presbytère farm and continues up to the site of the villa. The foundations of the building are still clearly visible and if you walk out towards the cliff you will come to a scruffy dirt circle. It was there that Flight Sergeant Cox and the sappers wrenched the Würzburg from its base while under heavy fire. And it was there, it can be said, that the glorious tradition of the Paras was born.
Operation Gunnerside
16 February 1943
IT WAS 2320 when, in rapid succession, five British-trained Commandos leapt from a Halifax bomber over the frozen wilderness of the Hardanger Vidda in the Telemark region of central southern Norway. Jumping from just 700 feet, their chutes billowed open and floated in a neat diagonal line through the moonlight towards the vast white expanse stretching out to all horizons. Somewhere in that frozen wilderness were four comrades who, for three months, had battled starvation and some of the harshest conditions on the planet as they waited and waited and waited . . . Finally, the raid was on. The saboteurs knew from the huge risks they had been asked to take that their objective was of great importance – an impression underlined by their carefully worded orders. What they didn’t know was that Prime Minister Churchill in London and President Roosevelt in Washington were anxiously monitoring their mission. Operation GUNNERSIDE was one of the most important raids of the Second World War. It wasn’t until after the conflict that they learned quite how important.
At the outbreak of the war, Albert Einstein was one of a very small handful of people in the world who understood the terrible potential of atomic power. To most scientists, even very eminent ones, the notion that a single bomb could annihilate an entire city was absurd. Churchill was extremely sceptical too, but it wasn’t long before he was persuaded of the dire threat it posed. London, the intelligence suggested, was the first target on Hitler’s list. The reasoning was obvious: destroy the British capital and the war was won. Britain would surrender and the United States would be unable to help launch an invasion of Europe.
A great number of Germany’s leading physicists – many of them Jews – had fled the Nazis for Britain and the United States, bringing with them warnings of the rapid advances being made to build an atomic weapon. So began frantic efforts by the Allies to beat Germany to the bomb. In the US the atomic research programme was known as ‘The Manhattan Project’ and no expenses were spared in its development. To their advantage, the Americans did now have many of the world’s leading experts in their field, following their flight from the Nazis, but they were months off the pace, years even, and it was going to take a lot of time, effort and resources to overhaul their German counterparts. For fear of causing widespread panic, strict secrecy blanketed this apocalyptic arms race. No more than a few dozen scientists, military chiefs and senior politicians were aware of its existence.
German scientists had been working on three different approaches to developing nuclear energy. At the start of the war, the one considered most likely to succeed involved the production of a liquid known as deuterium oxide or ‘heavy water’. The fluid was used as a moderator to slow the nuclear chain reaction in unenriched uranium. This was a laborious, costly process and the entire world’s stocks of the fluid could be found in a few canisters inside a heavily protected hydroelectric plant known as Vemork in an ice-bound valley deep in the interior of Nazi-occupied Norway. But minute by minute, splash after splash, the stock of this potentially deadly liquid was increasing and Germany was inching that bit nearer to building the most powerful weapon in the history of warfare.
In May 1941, intelligence sources signalled that Germany had demanded a ten-times increase in Vemork’s heavy water production to 3,000 lb per year. By January 1942, production was ramped up to 10,000 lb per year. Churchill didn’t need the code-crackers at Bletchley Park to decipher the significance of the updates: Hitler was demanding rapid acceleration in the race to build the first atomic weapon. In June 1942, Churchill flew to New York to meet Roosevelt. Nuclear energy was high on the agenda of priority topics. The two leaders of the free world agreed that every effort should be made to thwart Germany’s bid to build the world’s first ‘super-explosive’. After the war, Churchill wrote: ‘We both felt painfully the dangers of doing nothing.’
Destroying the stocks of heavy water at Vemork was considered the most effective way of retarding Germany’s nuclear energy programme, but that was a great deal easier said than done.
An inside job was implausible. At that stage of the war, the Norwegian Resistance was no more than a fledgling operation with limited resources and very little offensive capability. There was also the problem of Vemork’s remote location. Roughly 150 miles from the coast, accessible only by one winding road, it sat on a steep, rocky slope of a narrow valley at the foot of the Hardanger Vidda, a beautiful but forbidding wilderness – the highest plateau in western Europe – where only the most experienced outdoorsman could survive for any significant length of time. The 3,500 square miles of terrain features barren, treeless, undulating moorland punctuated by hundreds of peaks, lakes, rivers, streams and marsh. In the summer, the Hardanger is a magnet for hillwalkers and nature lovers. In the winter, only the hardiest and most intrepid venture into its wind-blasted and frozen interior. When the Germans invaded Norway, they went around the Hardanger and they never advanced more than half a day’s march into it, for fear of being caught out by the volatile weather.
Bombing the plant was rejected on a number of grounds. Innocent lives were very likely to be lost and the hydroelectric plant, the principal centre of economic activity in the region, would be put out of action. What’s more, it was thought unlikely that an air raid would succeed in destroying the heavy water, which was stored under several storeys in the basement of the solidly constructed plant. But such was the urgency of the situation that there were even discussions about blowing the Møsvatn Dam at the head of the valley – a course of action that would have led to the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians, with no cast-iron guarantee that the heavy water stocks would be put beyond use. After endless series of meetings and streams of interdepartment ‘Top Secret’ memos, the planners reached the conclusion that the only plausible option was a ‘coup de main’ raid carried out by elite Commandos in a joint mission involving the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Combined Operations.
Established on Churchill’s order in the summer of 1940, SOE’s purpose was to wage guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines, to train and assist local resistance groups and carry out espionage and sabotage tasks – or, in Churchill’s words, the clandestine unit of highly trained irregulars was ‘to set Europe ablaze’. Many of the SOE operatives were refugees from the Nazi-occupied countries who, after completing their training, were reinserted into their homelands on specific missions. The work was amongst the most dangerous in the war.
In the early days, the organisation was not highly regarded within Whitehall. The ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, as it was dubbed, was thought to cause more trouble than its achievements were worth. Existing intelligence and espionage services, local resistance groups and governments-in-exile all had cause to complain about its activities. When SOE was first approached about plans for an attack on the Vemork hydroelectric plant, it saw an opportunity to establish its credentials and silence its many critics.
The ro
ugh plan was for an advance party of SOE-trained Norwegians to be dropped by parachute onto the Hardanger. They would live in the wild and act as a reconnaissance unit and reception committee for a force of British glider-borne Commandos. Their task was to find a suitable dropping zone in the rugged terrain, guide in the aircraft, lead the British troops to the plant and help them escape. Airborne operations were best undertaken under cover of darkness, which ruled out any missions in the summer months when there was near-permanent daylight. During the summer of 1942, the instructors of SOE’s Norwegian unit were ordered to pick a handful of exceptional recruits with the aim of dropping them into Norway as soon as the RAF considered the nights long enough for them to operate in relative safety.
Operation GROUSE was the name given to the advance party and it was to be led by Jens Anton Poulsson, a pipe-smoking, Norwegian Army cadet and expert mountaineer who grew up in the town of Rjukan, a mile or so from the Vemork plant. The three men he put forward to make up the team, Claus Helberg, Knut Haugland and Arne Kjelstrup, were also born in Rjukan. Helberg, a brilliant skier and man of adventure, had sat next to Poulsson in school. The families still lived there but their sons were under strict instructions not to make contact with them. Haugland, one of the best underground W/T operators of the war, had worked with the embryonic Norwegian Resistance but escaped to Britain after being arrested on several occasions. Kjelstrup, a plumber, was born in Rjukan but raised in the suburbs of Oslo. Short and powerful, he had shown during Germany’s Blitzkrieg invasion that he was not a man to shy away from a fight, even in the face of overwhelming odds. The four men would set up an operating base in one of the small wooden huts dotted over the Hardanger used by walkers, hunters, fishermen and skiers.
The men were SOE recruits of the Norwegian Independent Company who had passed through a number of top-secret Special Training Schools (STS) across Britain, learning the dark arts of irregular warfare. (The unit was also known as the Linge Company after Martin Linge, the Commando leader killed in Operation Archery.) By the time they had completed the intensive and gruelling series of courses, they had become masters in close combat, demolition and sabotage, silent killing, wireless operation, intelligence gathering, propaganda and training local resistance militia. At the Norwegians’ main base in the Highlands of Scotland, the men underwent training in outdoor survival in extreme conditions . . . but their instructors soon realised that there was not a great deal they could teach the Norsemen. The great majority of them were first-class outdoorsmen who since childhood had learned how to survive in the most exacting conditions nature can present.
Surviving in the wild was one challenge, but overcoming German defences and destroying the heavy water supplies was quite another. Einar Skinnarland, SOE’s agent in the Rjukan area with contacts inside Vemork, had cabled London to report that there were 20 German soldiers stationed at Vemork, 35 billeted in a nearby school, 100 more a ten-minute drive down the road at Rjukan and a further 20 in billets near his family home at the Møsvatn Dam at the head of the narrow, winding valley.
Skinnarland was told he would learn of GROUSE’s arrival through a concealed message on the BBC Norwegian Service on the night they were to be dropped in. The announcer would say ‘This is the latest news from London’ rather than the customary ‘This is the news from London.’
By the end of the summer, the GROUSE party were put on standby to depart. They had completed the advanced courses of the SOE training, received their orders and reached a peak of physical fitness. Having packed and repacked their equipment over and over, they waited to be summoned to Wick Airfield. As always in parachute operations, they were at the mercy of the weather. If it was too cloudy or windy, the RAF couldn’t drop them. On two separate occasions in a month, they pulled on their parachutes and boarded the aircraft, the adrenalin pumping hard as they flew over the coast of their homeland and stood over the hatch in the floor poised to leap, only to be told the drop had been cancelled. On the first occasion, thick cloud meant that they were unable to locate the drop zone; on the second, engine trouble and heavy anti-aircraft fire over the coast combined to thwart them. The intense frustration felt by the four men is evident from Poulsson’s blunt comments in his operational notes.
A third attempt was made at nightfall on 10 October 1942. Once again, the four young Norwegians stood in line as the RAF dispatcher pulled open the hatch and the freezing wind rushed through the floor. Below, the snowbound plateau glistened under the bright moon. At 2318, the dispatcher hurled out half a dozen containers of supplies and equipment. There was no turning back this time. The young Norwegians were going home. Poulsson was the first to leap, followed barely a heartbeat later by Haugland, Kjelstrup and Helberg. Moving at 200 miles an hour, it was important not to hesitate; a few seconds delay could mean separation from the rest of the group by hundreds of yards. The dispatcher tossed out the final two containers and slammed shut the hatch. The rear-gunner counted the silk chutes drifting in perfect symmetry towards the frozen landscape.
The four men suffered heavy landings on very rough terrain. The RAF had dropped them in the wrong place, ten miles from the prearranged landing zone. ‘It was fortunate that none of us was severely hurt when we landed,’ Poulsson recorded in his log. ‘The ground was just a mass of stones.’ The four immediately tore off their parachutes for fear that a strong rush of wind would drag them over the rocky, broken land. The wind had scattered the eight containers over a very wide area and after four hours of searching they decided to start again the following morning. Had they been able to find the container with their skis and poles, they would have completed the search in a matter of minutes, but wading through heavy, wet snow in the dark they made little progress. They passed the rest of the night in sleeping bags, sheltered from the biting wind in the lee of a large outcrop of rocks. At first light, they resumed the search for the remaining containers, but without success. The rocky, hilly terrain and deep snow combined to frustrate the men for two full days. By the time they found the container with the skis, they were completely shattered.
The mountainside on which they had been mistakenly dropped lay ten miles to the west of where they wanted to be and roughly twenty miles from Vemork. Poulsson chose to head for a hut known as Sandvatn at Grasfjell, which he knew from his childhood and was situated in an ideal location. It was three miles from the designated landing zone for the gliders bringing in the Commandos and its remoteness made it highly unlikely that German patrols would discover them. What’s more, the area around it was largely flat, making it excellent country for wireless communication.
Ordinarily, a ten-mile cross-country journey was a distance that expert skiers could take in their stride, but the GROUSE team were burdened by equipment weighing a third of a ton, including food provisions to last a month, bulky radio equipment, clothing, spare ski equipment, first-aid materials, weaponry and ammunition. Poulsson decided to take all their rations but bury roughly 150 pounds of the nonessentials to collect after the raid. The difficulties of the march were compounded by damage sustained to their Primus stove during the parachute drop. Heat for cooking and drying out clothes was essential in Arctic-type conditions and, without any available, the party were forced to drop their plan of walking in a roughly straight line over the mountains. Instead, they would stay lower down, close to the lakes, where there were a number of huts they could use.
The weather had been kind to them but the day after they finally set out for Sandvatn, 21 October, a savage snowstorm burst over the Hardanger. Unable to find a hut, they spent the first night in snowholes, but the storm continued to rage the following day. Even without equipment the march would have been a slog, but with 500 pounds of kit it was a back-breaking experience. Dividing their kit into eight loads of thirty kilos, the four men made the same journey twice a day to bring up all the equipment to the next overnight location, skiing through deep, wet snow. Whenever they veered from their tracks, they sank up to their waists and soaked their clothing. Long-dist
ance Nordic skiing is an exhausting business in any event, but in the teeth of a powerful storm, pushing through wet snow and blizzard conditions when already exhausted, it pushes men to the limits of their endurance. It is little wonder that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his fellow adventurers trained on Hardanger. The temperatures, which can sink below minus 30 Celsius, coupled with the raging winds, were ideal preparation for polar expeditions – and even Amundsen experienced problems there.
GROUSE’s route was elongated further because the lakes and rivers were too treacherous to cross. The early winter ice hadn’t hardened sufficiently and so they had no choice but to march round them. Their rations were nowhere near adequate to give their bodies the energy required to cope with the combination of cold and physical exertion. Each man’s daily quota consisted of a quarter of a slab of pemmican (dried meat mixed with fat and fruits), half a cup of groats, a few biscuits, a handful of flour, small quantities of butter, sugar and chocolate. No one complained, however. Quoting an old Norwegian saying, Poulsson wrote in his log: ‘A man who is a man goes on till he can do no more, and then he goes twice as far.’ On some days, the storm was so fierce that they could advance no more than a mile or two. Poulsson’s predicament was made worse when he broke one of his ski sticks and found he had left his map behind. Their only respite was provided by the warmth and shelter of the huts they found.
Back in London, the SOE planners, having heard nothing from Skinnarland or Haugland, had begun to fear the worst when finally, fifteen days after they had set out from the drop zone, the shattered advance party finally arrived at the Sandvatn hut.
‘In good weather it would have taken us a couple of days but because the snow was wet, the ground wasn’t frozen, the streams and lakes were open (free of ice), it took us one hell of a long time with all that equipment,’ recalled Poulsson. ‘It was very tiring but because we moved from hut to hut our nights were fairly comfortable. The problem was food. We used up all our rations quickly and became very hungry indeed.’