The Winter Fortress

by Neal Bascomb

  Each of them understood that the radio operator’s job was the most essential, and nobody felt the weight of this more than Haugland. The voice that carried through the darkness and distance, the voice that brought help, that rescued lives—that was what he was meant to be. He had always wanted to be a radio operator, an ambition fueled by a naval adventure novel he had read as a teenager, which featured a radioman saving his whole crew. After graduating high school in Rjukan, Haugland attended the Army’s signals course in Oslo. Operating a radio set in Morse had been like learning to play the piano. At first he was all thumbs, slow and clumsy, but after practice, practice, practice, he found that he was a virtuoso, tapping out dots and dashes without thinking.

  On graduation in 1939, he worked as a wireless operator on a three-thousand-ton merchant ship that traveled between Norway and Iceland. The war at sea was already underway, and Haugland listened to distant SOS distress signals from sinking ships, knowing that his own was too far away to be of any help. When Norway was invaded, Haugland found his skills in dire need, especially in the pitched battles at Narvik. A forward observer, he scrambled through the countryside, locating enemy troop and artillery positions and radioing them back to his commanders. He was constantly under fire, whether from mortars, incendiary bombs, or machine guns, and he witnessed the horrors they wrought. One night, as Haugland sheltered in a hastily dug trench, a man stumbled toward him, his chest riddled with bullets, one through his cheek. Other days, he passed bodies almost unrecognizable as human. Throughout, Haugland stayed at his wireless set. He was a fast radio operator, and he learned something a soldier only knows when tested: he was almost preternaturally cool under pressure. The worse things became, the more deliberate and calm he was.

  On the call to lay down arms, he felt a terrible blur of emotions: anger, hopelessness, confusion, sadness. Hitler now controlled Norway, and he was supposed to just accept it. In Oslo, he got a job in a radio factory. He was soon volunteering to build sets and establish wireless stations for the resistance. Several times the Gestapo and the state police arrested him. Each time, he talked himself out of the bind. But when an informant definitively gave him away, Haugland had to escape. The Germans put a one-thousand-kroner bounty on his head.

  Haugland joined Kompani Linge soon after he arrived in Britain. “Quiet, keen, hardworking and very intelligent,” his instructors at Stodham Park reported. “Full of courage and painstaking. Expert at Morse,” they said at Meoble. Haugland then attended STS 52, the specialized school for wireless operators, where his teachers said he should be instructing them. He ciphered codes and tapped in Morse faster than most, and he could build a radio from the sparest of material. He was deliberate in everything he did, causing some of his fellow students to quip that he was still making plans while the others finished the actual job. Nonetheless, his instructors reported, “Quick thinking and unfailing attention to detail . . . He has a well-reasoned course of action to meet each emergency.”

  Now, thirteen days into his first operation, Haugland had still not managed to get his radio to work, and it burned at him. Alone at the Reinar cabin, determined not to fail again, Haugland prepared his wireless set and antenna mast. This time, he had kept the set and its battery inside the cabin all night. When ready, he turned it on, hoping the shortwave signal would reach the English operators at Home Station, Grendon Hall, Northamptonshire.

  Straightaway he got reception, and then, an instant later, nothing. The battery, all thirty “Made in England” pounds of it, was dead. Its charge should have lasted a month. Not yet defeated, Haugland tried to recharge it with a hand generator, but the crank would barely budge because of its short handle. When it did, the insulation on the generator’s wires started to burn because it was not suited for such a large battery. There was no way around the fact that he needed a new one.

  Eventually Haugland’s teammates returned to the Reinar cabin. Helberg was worn out from a long trip through gusting winds to the farmhouse, and Poulsson and Kjelstrup had both narrowly escaped a deadly plunge into a half-frozen lake. Haugland shared with them the dismal news about the battery. The mood in the cabin was grim. In sixteen days, the moon would be in position for the operation against Vemork. Their team needed to be in place to reconnoiter the landing site, to provide weather reports and intelligence on the facility, and to receive the British sappers. They still had many miles to go, and they had no working radio.

  After burying the battery, the men decided that one of them would go on ahead of the others to the Lake Møs dam, to seek help from Torstein Skinnarland. Helberg volunteered to go. That his countryman was up for the journey so soon after his trek to the farmhouse inspired Poulsson to write in his diary, “Helberg proved the old saying, ‘A man who’s a man goes on till he can do no more, then he goes twice as far.’” Even though the Grouse team had been ordered to not make contact with the Skinnarlands, Poulsson felt they had no choice. No radio: no mission.

  At the dam, Helberg found Torstein Skinnarland. The two did not personally know each other, but Einar had told his brother that they might soon have some friendly visitors in the area. Helberg only explained they were on a “special mission.” Torstein promised to provide a new battery, along with new boots and some food, but it would take time. Einar had some supplies like that hidden away, but Torstein did not know where they were. Helberg then departed.

  With new snowfall and a drop in temperature, conditions on the ground improved, and the other Grouse team members made quick progress east over the next two days. Helberg met them at a river crossing on his return from the dam.

  In the early hours of November 5, the Grouse team arrived at a cabin beside Lake Sand, three miles east of the Skoland marshes. Inside, the four—dirty, unshaven, and half-starved—collapsed from the strain. Their boots were in shambles, their sweaters shrunken and in tatters, and two of their rucksacks had been chewed up by dripping battery acid. They slept that night like the dead.

  The next day, Haugland started constructing his aerial antenna again. He lashed together two towers made from fishing poles, set them fifteen feet apart, and strung insulated copper wire between them. Then he nailed together several boards and secured these to the cabin wall. He strung the antenna from his wireless set through the corner of the cabin window, up the boards, and into the wire strung between the two towers. While he worked, Poulsson and Kjelstrup skied to the marsh to inspect the landing site, and Helberg left for the dam, hoping that Torstein had been able to secure a new battery for them.

  After dark on November 9, Haugland finally thought he had everything set to restart the radio—including a new battery supplied by Skinnarland. He had already coded his message, a jumble of seemingly random letters on the notepad in front of him. It needed to be short and quick because the Germans operated D/F (direction finding) radio stations that tuned in on broadcasts from Norway. If Haugland transmitted for too long, and two German stations were close enough, they might get a cross-bearing on their position. As a radio operator, Haugland knew that brevity and speed saved lives—his own among them.

  The new battery feeding in a steady current, Haugland powered up the wireless set. With his three team members watching closely, and his hand trembling from the cold and excitement, he sent out his identity call sign. He immediately received an answer in return. They had contact with Home Station. Poulsson and the others whooped in celebration as they congratulated the radioman.

  Haugland delivered his first message: “Happy landing in spite of stones everywhere. Sorry to keep you waiting. Snowstorm and fog forced us to go down valleys. Four feet of snow impossible with heavy equipment to cross mountains. Had to hurry on for reaching target area in time. Further information. Next message.”

  Grouse was in place for its mission and ready to guide the sappers to their target.

  9

  An Uncertain Fate

  * * *

  IN HIS FIFTH-FLOOR office in Kingston House South, bordering Hyde Park, Leif Tronstad
faced a mountain of paper—most of the sheets stamped TOP SECRET in red ink. Reports, minutes of meetings, wireless messages, and letters—they came at him in piles. Working quickly, he penciled his remarks on some of the documents and dictated answers to his secretary, Gerd Vold Hurum, for others, but mostly he delivered his replies via the two secure phone lines in his office. This method was faster, prevented misunderstandings, and cut down on further paperwork, all of which had to be filed in the huge steel safe behind his desk.

  Tronstad did not much care for the continuous deluge of paperwork, but he was thrilled at the sudden multitude of decoded messages from Grouse. A week before, the operators at Grendon Hall thought they had made contact with the team, although there was something amiss with the call sign. Tronstad sent a message: “We were very glad to hear you . . . We hope everything is all right with you.” There was no response. Fearing the worst, and breaking security protocol, he dispatched a courier to connect with Einar Skinnarland to see if he could get in touch with the men. Before that could be done, wireless contact was finally made. “Battery run down so forced to make contact with Tante Kjersti [Einar Skinnarland] . . . Fixed six kilometers from glider landing place,” read the message. “Enemy troops in area are Austrians. About ninety-two Germans in future. Operation still can be done with success. Telephone lines ought to be cut. Waiting for orders . . . Too much snow for cycling.”

  After conferring with Combined Operations, Tronstad and Wilson sent back a list of questions to be answered, ending their message, “Stick to it and good luck.” Over the next few days, a steady stream of messages reported that Grouse’s Eureka was in working order and that the landing site was in a perfect place, out of sight of the Germans and on “nice, flat ground approximately 700 yards long. No trees or stones.” Further, they signaled, “Engineer Brun” had disappeared with his wife. Grouse obviously had good intelligence.

  On November 12, Tronstad walked from his office to a South Kensington hotel, a short distance away, where he met up with Eric Welsh. Together, they knocked on the door of a room registered to a Dr. Sverre Hagen and his wife. Brun, who had been given this alias by the British spy agency, answered with Tomy at his side. After a warm greeting, the three men sat down to discuss Vemork. In late August, Kurt Diebner had personally visited Norsk Hydro headquarters and had made it clear that “all necessary measures” were to be taken for “the fastest execution of the work.” Throughout September, the plant expansion had continued, and the first of the catalytic exchange units was installed in the sixth stage of the cascade. Heavy water plants were also being installed at Såheim and Notodden.

  Brun also told Tronstad and Welsh about a revealing conversation he had had with Hans Suess, one of the scientists assisting Harteck in the Vemork upgrade, just a couple of weeks before his escape. Confident that Suess was anti-Nazi, Brun had asked him about the German interest in heavy water. Suess revealed that they needed five tons as a neutron moderator for a uranium machine but said that none of their research was of any “immediate application” in the war. Rather, it was a long-range project, most likely for peaceful purposes.

  While Brun said that he believed Suess was being honest, the German physicist was either wishful in his thinking or uninformed about the breadth of the Nazi program. The fact that Diebner, an Army Ordnance scientist charged with making weapons, was so closely involved signaled that the project was unlikely limited to peaceful purposes. Vemork had delivered roughly fifteen hundred kilograms of heavy water to his “quinine factory.” He needed three thousand kilograms more for his uranium machine. In a year, with full production, he would have it.

  This could not be allowed to pass, Tronstad said. Plans were already in motion to blow up Vemork. He needed Brun to provide additional drawings and details in the next couple of days. These would be passed to the British commandos preparing for the raid. Despite Tronstad’s misgivings about destroying a plant he had helped to build, the more Tube Alloys told him about their own atomic research efforts, of “super bombs” that would equal “1,000 tons of TNT,” the more Tronstad knew the Germans needed to be stopped.

  While this mission developed, Tronstad was involved in scores of other operations, from the recently launched Bittern, which sought to assassinate certain Norwegian Nazis and informers, to the planning of Carhampton, a plan hatched by Odd Starheim to seize a convoy of merchant vessels. Many in Kompani Linge were also now engaged in missions similar to Grouse. They prepared sabotage operations, set up wireless transmission sites, and established underground resistance cells throughout Norway. The list of mission names read like an ornithologist’s dream: Chaffinch, Cockerel, Crow, Feather, Hawk, Heron, Lark, Mallard, Partridge, Penguin, Pheasant, Raven, Swan, Thrush—among others.

  There was much to worry about, but Tronstad was comforted at least by the news that his family was well. In October, Bassa had written to him: “The little boy is quite something. He is thrilling, beautiful and enchanting . . . Sidsel is a sweet and kind girl.” As for herself, Bassa said, “Everything is fine and well,” though she wondered, “Do you think the war will end before Christmas? We so long for peace.” Then she asked him to send her news of his work and life and said how she looked forward to “the time we will see each other again.” Her letter must have crossed paths with his own, as he had penned a note only days before. “I am well, as well as humanly possible away from you and the children.” He told her how he spent long days doing “interesting work” that had nothing to do with his former profession, and then finished, “Live quiet and secluded. Don’t be afraid for me, dear friend. I will manage and expect to find you all again . . . I miss you dearly . . . Trust in us. We will be coming soon. Sustain yourself until then.”

  On November 15, at 11:30 a.m., Tronstad joined Wilson, Henniker, and several others at Chiltern Court to go over the plan for Operation Freshman one last time. He delivered the latest messages from Grouse: they suggested the sappers bring snowshoes but said that even under bad conditions the march to Vemork should not take more than five hours. The team would cut the telephone line between the Lake Møs dam and Rjukan on the night of the operation. There were two guards at the door to the hydrogen plant, and the sappers would have no trouble overpowering them. Finally, if reinforcements came from Rjukan, the suspension bridge could easily be held. Henniker said that he would need only two guides from Grouse on the approach to the plant and that he would provide them British battle dress (so that, if captured, they would not be implicated as Norwegians). Their role would end before the Royal Engineers went across the suspension bridge. The other Grouse men were to operate the wireless and destroy the Eureka beacon, a technology the British did not want to fall into German hands.

  Overall, the mood of the meeting was positive. Toward its close, Tronstad presented diagrams of the plant. He said he understood the mission’s importance but worried that destroying all the power station’s generators would hurt the livelihoods of most of the Norwegians in Rjukan and eliminate the fertilizer supplies his country desperately needed. Instead, he sketched out a plan to save two of the twelve generators, which would have the same effect on heavy water production but keep Vemork alive as a hydrogen plant. Henniker offered to raise the point with his superiors, but time was running short for making changes to the plan.

  Tronstad was sure he had been given a polite brushoff by these “handsome and undoubtedly brave soldiers,” as he wrote in his diary that night. However, he was undeterred, and he prepared a report, which did help him achieve the exclusion of two generators from the planned demolition. In it, he wrote, “Good policy for destruction of plants in Norway is namely to do just as much damage as strictly necessary—to prevent the Germans from winning the war—and nothing more.”­

  In a dark, windowless corner of the cabin on Lake Sand, Poulsson tended a huge pot of boiling sheep’s-head stew on the wood-fire stove. He fancied himself a bit of a cook, so he had added some canned peas and whatever else he could find in their stores to improve the
flavor. Not that the others would complain, he knew, as all of them were starving. The boys had even set a cloth over the table.

  Earlier that day, Haugland and Helberg were on their way back to the cabin when they came across a sheep that had strayed from its flock and become caught in some rocks. They killed it, then carried it back to the cabin over their shoulders. After skinning and chopping it up, Poulsson prepared the stew.

  Finally, Poulsson called the others to the table; their feast was ready, and the smell wafting from the pot made everyone’s mouths water. Outside, the wind howled, driving snowflakes into the cabin through the breaks in the walls. They could barely see one another in the flickering light of the single candle.

  On his way to the table with the huge pot in hand, Poulsson slipped on one of the reindeer pelts on the floor. The weight of the stew tipped him off balance. As he fell, the stew spilled across the floor, sheep’s head and all. Everyone looked at it, then at their cook. Without a word, the four got down on their knees. They scooped up whatever they could onto their plates. In the end, there was nothing but picked-over bones and a string of jokes from Kjelstrup about having “hair in my soup.” To a man, they still thought it delicious. They went to bed with full stomachs.

  In the three days leading up to November 18, the start of the full moon phase, the Grouse team remained busy. They scouted the route down to the target. From a hidden position on the opposite side of Vemork, they monitored the guards on the bridge.

  Helberg continued to venture back and forth from Lake Møs for supplies and batteries. One evening, on his way to meet Torstein Skinnarland, he found Einar Skinnarland instead. Helberg did not reveal the names of the others on the Grouse team, and Skinnarland knew better than to press. He simply offered his compatriots any additional help they might need in the days ahead, whether supplies or intelligence on Vemork. He quickly became part of the Grouse team.