The Winter Fortress

by Neal Bascomb

  Heisenberg disagreed. In his mind, the best design was still an open question. He claimed the dimensions of his latest machine, a sphere with alternating layers of uranium metal and heavy water, were “too small to yield absolutely certain values.” But he added that the company producing uranium metal for them was already casting it in plates, like he needed, rather than cubes, as Diebner demanded. Thus his experiments—and the heavy water they required—should be first in line. “This doesn’t rule out a subsequent cube experiment, if one is needed,” Heisenberg offered condescendingly.

  The tension in the room was palpable. Diebner had his supporters, including Harteck, who believed that Heisenberg was blind to the value of any experiment that did not originate from his own brain. Esau, who had appropriated heavy water from Heisenberg for Diebner’s latest experiment, said he needed to think further about whose work should be given precedence. Eventually both men received a share of heavy water and uranium to allow them to proceed with small-scale experiments, but both were left dissatisfied.

  General Leslie Groves was worried. And he was not a man to leave a worry to fester for long. The graduate of West Point and MIT was just shy of six feet tall, with a blocky head, a thick sweep of brown hair, and a barrel of a chest to accommodate his medals. Groves was known as a “doer, a driver, and a stickler for duty.” Charged with running the Manhattan Project, he was also regarded by some of his staff as the “biggest sonuvabitch” they had ever worked for: critical, abrasive, and egotistical. Those same people would have wanted nobody else to lead the American project to beat Germany to the bomb.

  As Groves saw it, there were two complementary ways to achieve that end: first, to accelerate the U.S. effort and, second, to slow down the enemy. For the former, he led a full-throttle campaign that employed tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, and workers and drew on hundreds of millions of dollars. In the hills of Tennessee, monumental plants were being built to separate the rare isotope U-235 from U-238 using two different methods. Beside the Columbia River in Washington State, construction had commenced on reactors that used two hundred tons of uranium moderated by twelve hundred tons of graphite. Working with their Canadian ally, the Americans were building a massive heavy water plant at a hydropower station in Trail, British Columbia. At the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, a small city of physicists was working to build a functioning fission bomb. All these efforts brought worry, but at least they were under Groves’s direct control.

  Slowing the enemy down was not. First, he had limited intelligence about German advances. Second, he did not have authority over operational forces or bombers to direct them to enemy targets. At the end of March, he learned—from a Swedish newspaper, no less—of the success of the British sabotage operation against Vemork in Norway, a plant that he had long known provided the German program with critical resources.

  Through the Army chief of staff, General George Marshall, and Field Marshal John Dill, the lead British military representative in Washington, Groves demanded to know the details of the operation. In April he was told that the plant would be inoperable for two years. Then, only days later, he was informed that this period had been reduced to one year.

  A short while after, Michael Perrin told him that the Germans would not realize the bomb before war’s end. Perrin, one of the leaders of the British Tube Alloys Committee, was on a visit to Washington at the time. “You might be right,” Groves replied. “But I don’t believe it.” Even if Perrin were correct, Groves knew that there were other dangers—one of which was a radioactive attack.

  From a detailed report produced by his scientists, he learned that if the Germans succeeded in starting a heavy water reactor, they could easily produce “colossal amounts” of radioactive substances that could be dropped over a city. Although the report concluded that there were challenges to creating an effective radioactive bomb, the Germans could, at the very least, “completely incapacitate” a city like London, requiring large sections of it to be evacuated.

  On the morning of June 24, 1943, Groves convened with Vannevar Bush, the blue-eyed, beanpole New Englander who served on the committee that oversaw the Manhattan Project. The two men went over the progress of the program, including the likelihood that they would have at least one bomb ready to be deployed by early 1945. They also reviewed a list of targets to be attacked in order to slow down the German project, targets pointed out with the help of British intelligence—and Leif Tronstad. These included Vemork and several German research centers. Groves and Bush agreed there was no sense in spending half a billion dollars to produce a bomb if they did not “strain every nerve on the countermeasure side.”

  A few hours later, Bush lunched at the White House with President Roosevelt. He outlined how they were “going very aggressively” and were on schedule for a January 1, 1945, delivery of a bomb. Roosevelt wanted to know where the Germans were. Bush answered that the Nazi scientists were “doing serious work on this before we were and that they might therefore be ahead of us.” However, “arrangements were under way” to hit the few German targets they had on their list.

  When Roosevelt gave his assent, Groves put his wrecking-ball force of will into seeing this was done.

  Earlier in the summer, Knut Haukelid was in the Oslo apartment of Trond Five, resistance leader and an old family friend, when there was a knock on the door. Trond went to open it, and Haukelid heard the distinctive voice of his own father, Bjørgulf. Quickly, he hid in the next room, sticking to one of the fundamental rules of illegal work: never make contact with family. As far as any of them knew, he was still in Britain. In almost two years, he had neither seen nor spoken with anybody in his family, including his wife, Bodil. Her involvement in the resistance had forced her to leave for Sweden in mid-March.

  Now that his father was only a few feet away, separated only by a door, Haukelid wanted to break the rules, to step into the room, to embrace his dad. They may not have always seen the world in the same way, but they were still father and son. Resisting the temptation, Haukelid remained hidden. After some brief words, Trond sent the surprise visitor away.

  Haukelid and Kjelstrup spent several weeks in the capital city, resting up and waiting for new identity cards in the names of Nasjonal Samling members. While there, they learned that Helberg had not in fact been killed while attempting to escape, and the happy news of his survival was sent to London. Their friend’s travails reinforced with them how careful they must be at all times—and that there should be no overnight stays in hotels.

  In June, they left Oslo to start their underground organization in earnest. They headed back to Vågslid on bikes bought on the black market, acting the part of tourists out for a summer ride and sleeping out in the woods, avoiding hotels.

  Their plan was to create a safe base of operations, then Haukelid would recruit several district commanders to lead their own cells and assemble resistance fighters. As these commanders would be the only ones to know of his existence, they had to be absolutely trustworthy. Once trained and armed, the underground organization would lie in wait, ready to carry out guerrilla attacks that would sap their enemy’s strength and inhibit their movement through the district’s important east–west corridor from Oslo to the North Sea.

  Haukelid and Kjelstrup built their base high in the mountains southwest of Vågslid, up from Lake Holme. They gathered moss-covered stones to make a double-walled cabin that would look like just another pile of stones from a distance, packing dirt and peat between the walls, making them impermeable to the wind. For the door and roof beams, they salvaged wood from an abandoned mine to the south. When they were hungry, they fished for trout in the lake. When tired, they lounged in the sun, glad to be free of the winter at last. Haukelid bought an elkhound puppy from a local farmer; they called him Bamse (Little Bear) and named their rising cabin after him, Bamsebu.

  Haukelid took a break from the construction to go and meet one of his new platoon commanders. Then he traveled on to a hamlet a few m
iles northeast of Dalen. On June 18, as planned, he met Skinnarland at the farmhouse of one of their contacts. Skinnarland was in a terrible state. Two weeks before, his baby niece had died, suffocated in her crib. Her father Olav, who was in Grini because of his connection to Einar, could not even attend her funeral. The loss was one tragedy too many for their elderly father, who was now on the verge of death himself, and there was no way Skinnarland could visit him with the Germans stationed so close to the dam. He had been living alone at Nilsbu, suffering from a cracked front tooth that caused him constant pain. Traveling as “Einar Hansson,” a life-insurance inspector, he had emerged from hiding to undergo several procedures with a dentist located outside Dalen. The one in Rjukan was sure to identify him—and potentially turn him in to the Gestapo.

  Haukelid managed to comfort Skinnarland, and for the next few nights they tried to forget that they were men on the run. “Bonzo was waiting—very nice meeting,” Skinnarland wrote on the eighteenth in his abbreviated diary. “Big party with eggnog cream—very stately,” he dashed off the next day. “Began at the dentist—fun and games,” was his entry for the day following that. On one of the days they spent together, Haukelid showed Skinnarland a list of Norwegian girls’ names he had found in a book. The names had gone out of fashion long before, but Haukelid liked one in particular: Kirvil. If he ever had a daughter, he said, he would name her that. For a moment, Skinnarland thought of the future too, one in which he might have a wife, children, a whole life beyond this one. He promised Haukelid that if he had a daughter, he would name her Kirvil as well. Shortly after, Haukelid returned to Bamsebu. Skinnarland remained for almost two weeks and several more procedures at the dentist’s.

  After one such appointment, as he came back to his hut up from Lake Møs, Jon Hovden, a farmer who was one of his main pillars of support, visited him. Lillian Syverstad had delivered a note from her brother Gunnar for Hovden to give to him. The news contained in the note, Skinnarland knew upon reading it, would have to be sent to London straightaway.

  On July 8, Tronstad received the disturbing message from Skinnarland: “Vemork reckons on delivering heavy water from about August 15.” Wilson asked him to get confirmation on the report. John Anderson and the War Cabinet would need to be alerted.

  Until that point, Gunnerside had been an unqualified success. Their target had been destroyed. Not a shot was fired. There had been no major reprisals. Every single member of the team had escaped to safety, their identities unknown to the Germans. Tronstad could not have dreamed of a better outcome. Praise had come from every quarter, from the Norwegian high command to Churchill himself, who had asked plainly, “What rewards are to be given to these heroic men?” The success had raised the profile of the SOE and its Kompani Linge, giving them more opportunities for future missions in Norway.

  If Skinnarland’s report were true, the Germans would have full production back online much sooner than Tronstad had originally thought. Gunnerside may have set back supplies of German heavy water by two tons, half of what they needed for a working reactor, but Tronstad knew any renewed deliveries to Berlin would not be tolerated, particularly after recent statements secreted out from Niels Bohr. After two German physicists visited his lab in Copenhagen, the Danish physicist stated that he believed atom bombs were practicable in the immediate future, particularly if there was enough heavy water on hand to manufacture the necessary ingredients. When asked if heavy water production was “war-important” and whether such plants should be destroyed, Bohr answered yes to both questions. Coming from Bohr, one of the fathers of atomic physics who was soon to be secreted out of Denmark at last, this declaration put the bull’s-eye back on Vemork.

  Tronstad sent orders to Skinnarland to investigate progress at the plant. On July 19, Tronstad wrote a lengthy report to SOE on how to “tackle the juice issue” again, as he described it in his diary. More than anything, he wanted to prevent a massive bombing run on the plant like the Americans were urging. He doubted such a bombardment would destroy the basement-level high-concentration plant, which was protected by tons of steel and concrete overhead. Also, such an attack would almost certainly inflict enormous collateral damage, both in terms of the lives of the everyday Norwegians living around the plant, and on the postwar Norwegian economy. Further, he had doubts that the Germans were pursuing the bomb with the fervor suggested by Bohr’s statement. From what Brun had gleaned from his time at Vemork, not to mention recent intelligence Tronstad and Welsh had received from their moles in Sweden, Norway, and Germany, the chances of the Nazis developing a “devil machine” were limited.

  In his report, Tronstad advised caution but also gave various options to stop production at Vemork and slow the Nazi atomic effort. They could destroy one of the dams that provided water to its power generators. They could target the transport of heavy water from Vemork to Germany. They could sabotage the high-concentration plant from within. They could hit sites in Berlin where experimental work was taking place or from where it was managed. He even provided the addresses. He did not include a bombing run on Vemork or on the other two plants at Såheim and Notodden, which were either already producing heavy water or were soon to be.

  By coincidence, as Tronstad’s list of options for a second attack on Vemork’s heavy water was being circulated within the SOE, he and his men were presented with British awards recognizing their service in the initial attack. On July 21, at Chiltern Court, they assembled in uniform. On behalf of King George VI, Lord Selborne, the minister of economic warfare who oversaw the SOE, awarded Rønneberg and Poulsson the Distinguished Service Order, and the others present (Helberg, Idland, Kayser, Storhaug, and Strømsheim) were given the Military Cross or Military Medal. Tronstad received the Order of the British Empire.

  Later, Selborne hosted a dinner for them all at the Ritz Hotel. Appropriately, they were served grouse, gnawing at the bones until they were picked clean. There was much to reflect on—their struggles on the Vidda, the tense moments during and after the sabotage—but still more to laugh over. They recalled their time at a Stockholm hospital, where a pair of Swedish nurses had deloused and scrubbed them clean. Then, once freed from the camp, they had attended La Traviata at the Stockholm opera house like proper civilized people. After the dinner, Tronstad took the men out on the town, the merry group singing songs as they made their way up Piccadilly. Tronstad said nothing of what he had learned from Skinnarland. He did not want to sour the evening.

  Not seventy-two hours later, an armada of American heavy bombers from the Eighth Air Force division roared through the clear blue sky over southern Norway. Because of fog over Germany, the bombers had been diverted from a run over Hamburg. Instead they set out to hit several industrial targets in Norway, including the massive new Norsk Hydro aluminum plant at Herøya. They dropped over 1,650 bombs, leveling the area and killing fifty-five people, mostly local workers. Tronstad feared Vemork might be next.

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  Target List

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  ON AUGUST 4 Bjarne Eriksen rushed to Rjukan after his visit to the rubble-and-casualty-strewn site of the Allied bombing raid on Herøya. Subsequent to the attack, Vemork had been shut down. The raid had also destroyed the Norsk Hydro fertilizer plant adjacent to the aluminum plant. No more fertilizer production meant no need for ammonia and, therefore, no need to run Vemork’s hydrogen plant. At the administrative building in Rjukan, Eriksen faced a host of Nazi officials who demanded he restart the plant solely in order to continue its heavy water production. Eriksen refused, and like the lawyer he was, laid out his objections point by point.

  First, heavy water had minor commercial significance for Norsk Hydro—not least because the Germans had never paid one krone for the supply since the invasion. Second, if they continued to run Vemork’s hydrogen plant to feed the cascades of the heavy water, the volatile hydrogen gas produced would have to be released into the air, which was clearly dangerous. Third, he could not understand the need to restart, since he had repeatedl
y been told that heavy water was not important for German war purposes but only for scientific investigations. Fourth, and principally, deuterium production increased the risk of an Allied aerial bombing, putting a great number of lives in danger, not to mention an industrial site of inestimable value to his company as well as to Norwegian agriculture and exports.

  Despite Eriksen’s arguments, Terboven’s representative at the meeting, a Dr. Albrecht, was unmoved. He insisted that the production of deuterium be brought up to full speed, and then accelerated further. In June 199 kilograms of heavy water, a record for Vemork, had been tapped from its rebuilt high-concentration plant. July had missed that mark, not least because of the Herøya bombing. Albrecht made clear that Terboven expected August to yield record production levels. Eriksen replied that “personal conviction” led him to insist not only that heavy water production not be restarted any time soon, but that production be permanently halted. He would recommend the same to his board of directors.

  Eriksen had a mixed history as a patriot. Before the invasion, he had leaked to the French spy Jacques Allier that there was a German interest in Vemork. On the other hand, he had encouraged King Haakon to resign after the April 1940 invasion because of “practical politics” and had signed a twenty-five-thousand-kroner check to the Nasjonal Samling Party on behalf of his company soon after. Now he was standing up to the Germans again.

  Albrecht was not impressed. He had orders to see that “the greatest possible output of SH-200 be maintained regardless of the risk involved.” One last time, he asked Eriksen if he was sure he wanted to continue to object. Eriksen said that he would and that he was “fully prepared to accept the consequences.” So be it, Albrecht responded. His country’s demands would be enforced, whether Eriksen was in charge or not.