by Ross Kemp
On 16 November, a massive fleet of 300 Flying Fortresses and Liberators roared off from the US bases in East Anglia and turned for Norway. Almost half of them split away from the main force to draw off the Luftwaffe fighters. The remaining 162 made a straight line for Vemork. The first wave of aircraft were 20 minutes early and, knowing that the Norwegian workers would not yet have left the plant for their lunch break, they made a circuit to kill time. This humane gesture was to prove costly. When the bombers returned the German gunners were waiting for them. Almost immediately the air was thick with smoke from the bombs, the steam in the cold air, the aircraft exhaust fumes and puffs of flak. From the outset, the plant was almost completely obscured and from 12,000 feet, it was more in hope than expectation that the Flying Fortresses and Liberators dropped 711 thousand-pound bombs and 201 five-hundred-pound bombs in just 45 minutes.
Almost all of the bombs missed the target and caused widespread devastation in the usually quiet and peaceful valley. The RAF photographs and the intelligence sources on the ground confirmed the planners’ worst fears. Far from destroying the plant and its heavy water stocks, Vemork had barely been scratched. Out of the 1,000 or so bombs dropped, only 18 landed on the site. Some of the power had been knocked out – but that was easily fixed – and several inconsequential outbuildings destroyed, but the operational capacity remained entirely unaffected. To add to the despair, an air-raid shelter full of women and children was hit. Twenty-two locals were killed in all. The Norwegian authorities back in London were enraged and a furious argument ensued that jeopardised future cooperation on vital missions – not least on how they might now proceed with a new plan to destroy Germany’s atomic capability.
In a further unwelcome consequence of the raid, the Germans decided that the heavy water was too vulnerable to be stored in Norway and they began making plans to move the operation to Germany. The intelligence caused panic in London and Washington and a blizzard of top secret memos blew down the corridors of power in both cities. The Germans planned to transport the heavy water to Hamburg, by train, ferry and then ship; the Allies planned to intercept and destroy it en route. Such was the urgency, the memos make clear, that likely reprisals on the local population were accepted as a price that would have to be paid for the destruction of the deadly cargo. On 7 February SWALLOW (Skinnarland) cabled London to report that the heavy water was going to be moved out of Vemork in the near future. The situation was now so critical that the news was immediately passed on to Churchill’s War Cabinet. Within an hour of sending his message, Skinnarland received an urgent message ordering him to organise an attack.
There was only one realistic candidate for the job: Knut Haukelid, the one member of the GUNNERSIDE party to remain in the area. Skinnarland tracked him down at his hideaway thirty miles away on the Hardanger. Under normal circumstances, Haukelid would have wanted several weeks to plan his attack down to the last detail, but time was not a luxury he enjoyed. To compound the challenges, the Germans had recently stepped up their sweeps of the area, hunting out the Resistance, and his journey back to the Rjukan area on 13 February was fraught with danger.
Skinnarland received hard information from his contacts that the heavy water was to be loaded onto a ferry, called Hydro, on the night of 20 February at the heavily guarded dock area at Mael, ten miles along the valley from Vemork. Haukelid’s plan was to blow up the ferry when it was over the deepest point of Lake Tinn. To do so, he would have to somehow find a way past the guards, get onto the ferry, lay the charges and escape before it set sail. The ferry was the principal link to the railway network and was frequently used by the locals. Many of them were certain to die if Haukelid was able to pull off his bold plan.
In the days leading up to the heavy water’s removal, dozens of Gestapo agents arrived in Rjukan to reinforce the army detachments and local police. Skinnarland’s agents, working inside Vemork, arranged the programme for loading the heavy water in such a way that it would leave on the Sunday ferry. On Sunday there was only one scheduled trip from Mael, which meant there was little chance of the Germans postponing its departure. What’s more, with most locals resting at home, it was likely there would be fewer casualties.
Haukelid built two rudimentary time-bombs using alarm clocks with traditional bells on top. The hope was that at the exact time he predicted that the ferry would be in the middle of the lake, the hammer would strike the alarm bell and detonate the charges. The risks were obvious – any heavy movement of the boat could set off the homemade devices at any time – but, given the haste and the urgency, there was no obvious alternative. On 18 February, Haukelid made a recce to Mael, bluffed his way onto the ferry and disappeared into the holds to work out where best to lay the explosives. He found his answer in a watertight compartment in the bow of the boat where crew members were highly unlikely to venture.
Haukelid couldn’t carry out the raid on his own. He needed help to carry the explosives, he needed a driver and he needed lookouts. The three men chosen to help were confirmed patriots: Rolf Sørlie, a member of the Resistance, plus Alf Larsen and Knut Leir Hansen, who were both engineers at Vemork. Only Sørlie, of the four, would remain in the area. The rest would flee to Sweden.
While Haukelid was carrying out his recce, the Germans began to load the heavy water stocks onto the freight wagons amid the tightest security at Vemork. Under the bright glare of giant floodlights, one by one the thirty-nine drums were carefully stored and secured. Twenty-four hours later, the train pulled slowly into the Mael ferry port. At 0100 Haukelid and his three accomplices set out from Rjukan. Leaving Larsen at the car, the others completed the last stage by foot. Bravado and composure under pressure were the order of the day from here in. Striding into the port as if they were dockyard workers, they passed the guards standing by the freight wagons lit up by floodlights. Incredibly, there appeared to be no German on the boat or guarding the entry to it, and most of the crew were playing cards at the far end of the boat. They darted below deck where they were confronted by a crew member. Haukelid had no choice but to take a gamble. He told the man they were Jøssings on the run and needed somewhere to hide their belongings. Happily, the man nodded and let them through. Haukelid also now had the perfect excuse if he was discovered in the depths of the boat.
Haukelid and Sørlie descended to the third-class deck where they wriggled through a hole in the floor into the bottom of the vessel. It was pitch black and there was freezing cold water a foot deep, through which they were forced to crawl with no more than eighteen inches between the water and the deck above. Working by torchlight in the very confined space, Haukelid fastened the charges to the wall and set the alarm for 1045. A few millimetres separated the bell hammer from the detonator.
The three men slipped out of the dockyard and melted away into the night. Haukelid was sitting on a train to Oslo the following morning, nervously inspecting his watch as it ticked down to 1045. The following morning’s newspapers carried the news: the ferry had sunk at the deepest point of the lake, just as Haukelid had hoped. Skinnarland sent the following telegram to London: ‘The Ferry was sunk on Sunday. Unfortunately some people drowned. Our people are OK.’ A further telegram from SOE in Stockholm confirmed the news, stating that the 500-ton ferry had gone down in three minutes with the loss of eighteen lives, fourteen Norwegian and four German. Nineteen people were rescued from the icy waters.
News of Haukelid’s brilliant coup was greeted with joy in London and Washington. Hitler’s hopes of beating the Allies in the race to build an atomic bomb now lay 1,000 feet below the surface of Lake Tinn. With the Allies now in the ascendancy on the battlefield, the Führer’s last chance of victory had been sunk.
Buried in the bundle of SOE documents relating to the raid at the National Archives in Kew is a small, frayed memo dated 14 April 1943, which reads: ‘What rewards are to be given to these heroic men?’ The identity of the man asking the question is given away in the address: 10, Downing Street, Whitehall. It is signed off wi
th the initials ‘W.S.C.’ No one had followed the drama of the heavy water mission more closely than the Prime Minister, and no one was more eager to recognise the courage and skill of the young men who brought about such a happy ending to the saga. Rønneberg and Poulsson were duly rewarded with the Distinguished Service Order, the Military Cross was granted to Haugland, Idland and Haukelid, and the Military Medal to Helberg, Kjelstrup, Kayser, Storhaug and Strømsheim. Skinnarland was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal later in the war. When the full story of the Telemark raid emerged after the war, there were many who felt the eleven men deserved a great deal more.
Operation Chariot
27/28 March 1942
IT WAS SHORTLY before midnight when Lieutenant Nigel Tibbits left the bridge of HMS Campbeltown and went below to activate the fuses connected to the huge charge inside the watertight, cement casing built into the forward compartments of the old destroyer. Using long-delay pencil fuses, it was impossible to set an exact time, but the young naval demolition expert had no doubt that within six to ten hours, the four-and-a-half tons of explosive in the form of twenty-four depth charges would tear the ship to shreds – as well as anything else within the vicinity of its huge blast range. Whether her captain up on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Stephen ‘Sam’ Beattie, would succeed in guiding the ship onto the target was another matter. To do that, over the coming hour, the naval force would have to negotiate six miles of the Loire’s myriad of treacherous shoals and mudflats and survive the pounding barrage of one of the most heavily defended stretches of coast anywhere on the planet.
HMS Campbeltown sat at the centre of the naval force, now in battle formation, steaming at fifteen knots towards the yawning mouth of the Loire estuary, twenty-five miles south of the Brittany peninsula. The gun crews were closed down in their positions, the eighty Commandos of Group Three, who had been kept out of sight below deck throughout the long crossing, put on their steel helmets and collected their weapons and equipment. On Campbeltown’s port and starboard sides, two columns of high-speed motor launches, carrying the Commando assault and demolition troops of Groups One and Two, bounced over the flat surface of the Atlantic. There were twelve of them in total and, though fast, their wooden hulls and the extra fuel they carried on deck made them vulnerable. The convoy was spearheaded by Motor Gun Boat 314, the HQ vessel, containing the two commanders of the raid, Commander Robert Ryder, who was in charge of the naval force, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Newman, leading the Commandos. Tucked in behind them, on either side, were two torpedo motor launches. Two other torpedo boats provided protection at the rear of the convoy. Twenty miles to the southwest, the crews of destroyers HMS Atherstone and HMS Tynedale who had escorted them from Falmouth waited in the darkness, on high alert for enemy patrols and U-boats.
They were still twelve miles off and no land could be sighted through the misty gloom when Ryder and Newman spotted gun flashes dead ahead to the northeast. A glance at the time told both men that the RAF had arrived over St Nazaire, according to plan. Soon the horizon was ablaze with tracer and searchlights. On all 18 vessels, the nerves of 611 men began to tighten and the banter faded to tense silence as they went to action stations.
As the convoy slid towards the estuary opening, they passed the eerie sight of the wreck of the troopship Lancastria lying on its side, sunk by German bombers two weeks after Dunkirk, with the loss of over 4,000 lives, in Britain’s worst ever maritime disaster. The time was 0025 and, moments later, they arrived at the buoy that marked the final positioning from which they would head into the Loire through the maze of natural obstacles hidden below the dark surface of the water. The operation had been timed to take place inside a tight window when an unusually high spring tide would allow the destroyer Campbeltown to make an alternative approach to St Nazaire, up the centre of the great river out of sight, if not out of range, of the many coastal gun installations.
The closer they moved to St Nazaire, the shallower the water became, increasing the risk of beaching on one of the many of the sandbanks lurking below. As they passed over the notorious Banc de Châtelier, all aboard the Campbeltown froze as they felt the destroyer scrape the seabed and wedge to a halt – not once but twice. The alarm of the men was matched by the relief they felt as each time she pulled clear and continued on her way, undetected by the crews of the many medium and heavy coastal guns pointing in their direction. The convoy was still over seven miles away – or forty minutes – and to the troops waiting below and the crews manning the vessels, it was surely only a matter of time before the German defences sprang into life and the battle erupted. But onwards they crept, inching ever closer to the giant dockyard and further away from the mighty coastal guns guarding the entrance to the estuary.
A light breeze carried the stench of the mudflats and seaweed through the cold air as the gunners stared down the barrels of an array of light armaments, including Bren, Lewis and Vickers guns, Oerlikons and other anti-aircraft cannon, each man waiting for the German onslaught. It was around 0100 when the first of the sixty-five Wellingtons and Whitleys of the diversionary bombing raid turned for home, thwarted by thick cloud and Churchill’s express orders not to endanger French civilians. They had dropped no more than half a dozen bombs, causing virtually no damage, and had succeeded only in arousing the suspicions of the German commander Kapitan zur See Karl-Conrad Mecke in charge of the port’s air defences. He ordered the AA gunners to hold fire, the searchlights to be switched off and all troops to be on high alert for a ‘landing’. The force was under two miles from the target when a German lookout on the coast reported the sighting of an inward-bound convoy, but his warnings were dismissed by all the commanders – except Mecke, who was convinced that there was ‘some devilry afoot’. By the time the drone of the last RAF bomber had faded away, the Germans were fully prepared for a seaborne attack. Every gunner was at his station with his armament depressed and angled to meet the potential threat heading up the estuary. All infantry units had been roused from their barracks and were heading towards the dockyard.
At 0122, the blinding beams of two large searchlights, one from either bank, were turned on, lighting up the entire British flotilla in a flash. Sporadic fire opened up from the shore, but there was confusion amongst the German defenders. Surely ‘Fortress St Nazaire’ could not be under attack? And the destroyer at the heart of the convoy not only looked distinctly German, it was flying the German Ensign.
As the Germans dallied, Commander Ryder’s German-speaking signalman bought the raiders a few more precious minutes. Answering the naval light signal to identify themselves, the signalman sent a long reply by Morse code: ‘Have Urgent signal. Two damaged ships in company. Request permission to proceed without delay.’ A second request to identify themselves from a separate signalling station delayed the inevitable a few more seconds. To the disbelief of the British commanders, by the time the German defences realised they had been duped, the raiders were under a mile from their target.
At 0128, Beattie ordered the red, white and black Ensign of the Third Reich to be hauled down and the White Ensign to be broken out. Battle was officially commenced. The German response was one of uncontained fury. A devastating barrage from every gun in the harbour opened up on the British flotilla. Campbeltown, her guns blazing, surged at full speed through the maelstrom. ‘All hell was let loose’ is the phrase that crops up over and over in the eyewitness testimonies of those fortunate enough to survive it. Operation CHARIOT, by far the most hazardous raid undertaken by Combined Operations, had reached its critical moment. They had two hours to achieve their strategically vital objective. It would come to be known as ‘the greatest raid of all’, but a great many of those who took part in it would not live to tell the story. Of the 611 sailors and Commandos who had set sail from the Cornish coast 36 hours earlier, only 242 of them would make the return journey.
St Nazaire was one of five major ports on the Atlantic coast of Vichy France which the Axis powers converted into U-boat
bases to wage a deadly underwater war against the Royal Navy and the Allied merchant convoys. By the end of 1941, Brest, Bordeaux, Lorient, La Rochelle and St Nazaire had been so heavily fortified that they were almost invulnerable to attack from sea or air. The U-boat pens were encased in concrete so thick that, in the very unlikely event that the RAF were able to land a dozen 500-lb bombs right on top of them, the high explosive would cause only minor damage. The success of Germany’s U-boats against the Allied convoys in the Atlantic threatened to starve Britain out of the war and deny her armed forces the raw materials and resources necessary to defend the last free corner of western Europe. But, in the late summer of 1941, when the strategists from all three services first sat down to discuss a proposed assault on St Nazaire, the U-boat pens were not the main subject of discussion. This was partly because the planners knew that German subs could use the other bases on the coast, and partly because the solidly built pens, deep inside the harbour, would be very difficult to destroy. But, principally, the pens were treated as a target of secondary importance for the simple reason that St Nazaire raised the spectre of a much greater threat to the British war effort – the Tirpitz.
The largest and most powerful battleship in Europe and the pride of Germany’s Kriegsmarine, Tirpitz had recently completed her sea trials, and was ready to enter the Atlantic and Arctic to wreak havoc amongst Allied convoys already struggling under sustained attacks by the U-boats. Churchill referred to Tirpitz as ‘the beast’ with good reason. The bare statistics of her specifications were enough to send a shudder down the spine of even the saltiest Royal Navy captain. With an overall length of just under 800 feet and displacing over 50,000 tons when fully laden, she had a maximum speed of 30 knots and could outrun the fastest destroyers, the whippets of the high seas. With a range of 9,000 miles, she could remain out at sea for long periods of time. The thickness of her armour, especially around her belt and turrets, made her virtually unsinkable by conventional shelling. Armed with eight 15-inch guns and twelve 5.9-inch guns, plus dozens of AA guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes and four reconnaissance flying boats, her armament was so powerful that the Admiralty determined that two battleships and an aircraft carrier would be needed to defeat her. These capital ships needed a significant fleet of cruisers and destroyers to protect them, meaning that the mere threat of Tirpitz venturing out of port was sufficient to tie up a huge amount of naval assets. ‘The destruction, or even the crippling, of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the present time,’ said Churchill. ‘No other target is comparable to it. The entire naval situation throughout the world would be altered.’