by Neal Bascomb
Four minutes after the explosion, the Hydro was lost to the lake.
The one lifeboat quickly became inundated with passengers. Fladmoe was drawn onboard, his soaked violin case in hand. So too was Eva Gulbrandsen. Others held on to the spread of debris left in the wake of the sinking ship, including suitcases and four half-empty drums of “potash lye.”
Those who had managed to free themselves from the ferry now struggled to get to shore before the ice-cold water overwhelmed them. Some local fishermen and farmers who had witnessed the disaster hurried out in rowboats, pulling so hard at their oars that their hands bled. Of the fifty-three people who boarded the ferry, twenty-seven survived, including the captain and four German soldiers. All eleven of the railcars sank to the bottom of Lake Tinnsjø, and the drums and flasks of heavy water went with them.
Rolf Sørlie spent most of Sunday bunkered down in a small hut on the Vidda. He did not dare rejoin Skinnarland at Nilsbu while it was daylight. Although exhausted from the night before, he stayed awake, fearing that German soldiers out on exercises might come across him. Ill at ease, he wondered what had become of the ferry: Had it sunk? Had there been loss of life? When the sun set, he started out. A fierce wind was blowing, and the cold seeped into his bones.
After several hours of skiing, his arms and legs burning from the strain, he reached the Hamaren farm. He had hoped to rest there, but it looked like there were visitors at the house, so he pushed on. The wind was now howling, but he could not stop. His arms were so weak, and he wasn’t sure he could continue on. He was plagued by the thought, What have I done? running over and over in his mind, knowing that if the sabotage was successful, Norwegians had paid with their lives. Just when there was no way he could move another step, the wind suddenly died down. For the first time he no longer felt he was being beaten by the gusts, and the momentary reprieve gave him renewed vigor.
At last, he looked ahead to see Nilsbu framed in the moonlight. As he neared the cabin, the door opened, and Skinnarland came out in the snow to greet him. Sørlie felt like he had come home. Skinnarland made him coffee and set out food. While he was eating, Sørlie told him about the night before. Skinnarland promised to go down to the Hamarens’ the next day to see if there was any news. Then Sørlie lay down. He was asleep in moments.
When he woke up the next morning, the cabin was empty. At the Hamarens’, Skinnarland learned that the Hydro had sunk, with all its precious cargo, and that the first reports were that fourteen Norwegians and four Germans had died. As soon as he returned to Nilsbu, he transmitted this information to Home Station. Now he and Sørlie needed to go into hiding farther away from Lake Møs. They carried with them the burden of what they had been asked to do.
On Monday morning, soon after Gunnar Syverstad reported to work, Bjarne Nilssen asked him to come down to his offices in Rjukan. He arrived there to find soldiers and Gestapo milling about the hallways. Nilssen wanted to know where Chief Engineer Larsen had gone: He was not at his home. He had not come into the office. Syverstad pleaded ignorance. Nilssen warned him that the Gestapo would soon be giving him a thorough interrogation.
Syverstad knew immediately that he needed to flee. After leaving Nilssen’s office, he ran into another engineer from Vemork who had already been questioned by an enraged Muggenthaler. Face flushed, the German had placed his gun on the table in front of the engineer and threatened him: “If you disappear, I will blow up your home with your wife in it.” Syverstad returned to his house, gathered his belongings, and said goodbye to his wife and two young children. He would have to get to Sweden before Muggenthaler came for him. When the Gestapo arrived, they found him already gone.
Knut Lier-Hansen remained in the town, few any the wiser that he had played a part in the ferry’s sinking. Two Gestapo officers showed up in Kjell Nielsen’s hospital room in Oslo. He was still recovering from his appendectomy, and told them that he knew nothing about the sabotage. After all, he had been in the hospital since Saturday. They did not question him any further. When the Gestapo interrogated John Berg, the watchman, he admitted that he had let three men onboard the night before the ferry’s departure. This was a common practice, he pleaded, since some passengers arrived early from the mountains and needed a warm place to rest. Berg said that he did not know the men, and his descriptions of them were indistinct at best.
Another hunt on the Vidda began, focusing yet again on Lake Møs and the Skinnarland home, but the search for the saboteurs ended as fruitlessly as the one almost a year before. It seemed like they were chasing shadows.
Knut Haukelid was somewhere north of Oslo, in a cabin owned by a resistance member, when he read the headlines in the Monday-evening edition of the newspaper: “Railway Ferry Hydro Sunk in the Tinnsjø.” At 10:45 a.m. on Sunday morning, on the train from Kongsberg to Oslo, he had stared at his watch, picturing in his mind’s eye what was unfolding on the lake. The explosion. The ship keeling. More Norwegian lives added to the butcher’s bill to bring an end to Vemork’s heavy water. So much death and sacrifice. So much endured. Now he held the news in his hands: The Hydro was sunk with all its cargo. He had followed his orders, tough as they were to bear, to the very end.
With the help of the underground escape network, he and Alf Larsen crossed the border a few days later and made their way to the Swedish capital. In a hotel, he bathed and changed into new clothes. After many months in the Norwegian wilderness, Haukelid found it strange to sit in a restaurant and eat his fill or to pass shop windows piled high with merchandise. Soon after his arrival, he met with Bodil in an attempt to reconcile with her. But much—too much—separated them now, and he feared that their marriage was yet another casualty of the German invasion. After two weeks in Stockholm, Haukelid was ready to return to his resistance work. It was the only life that made sense to him.
On February 26, 1944, Tronstad returned to London from Scotland, arriving into Euston Station. On the way to his office, he passed a large apartment building cordoned off by police. It had suffered a direct hit twelve hours before during a renewed blitz by German bombers. Over the past few evenings, incendiary and explosive bombs had knocked the sides off buildings and leveled houses and shops. A school was hit in Tavistock Crescent, and a convent destroyed in Wimbledon—the nuns had to pick through the rubble to find their sisters. Across the city, hundreds were dead, and many more were left without homes.
That evening, Tronstad returned to his house, and through the night he listened to the fighters overhead and the crack of gunfire. He thought further about the sabotage of the Hydro, consoling himself with the thought that the operation had at least prevented another Allied bombing run against Vemork. The death toll from such an attack would have been far worse than that of the ferry bombing.
The truth was that many more were dying in London, every night. If the Germans had managed to build an atomic bomb, they would leave the British capital—and perhaps other cities too—a scorched ruin littered with innumerable dead. Tronstad understood that in war, leaders had to measure their decisions against such comparisons, whether on the field of battle or at the planning table. Still, when he read the names and ages of those who perished on the ferry, he felt terribly diminished.
Within days, Tronstad received final confirmation from Skinnarland’s spies that the entire shipment of Vemork’s heavy water—except for a few drums of nearly worthless concentrate—was at the bottom of Lake Tinnsjø. In his diary, he noted the closing of this “brave chapter” in the fight against the Germans. He would ask Winston Churchill to reward Haukelid and the others involved in the ferry mission. As for Vemork, when the war was over he hoped to rebuild the plant, make it better than before. Until then, he would content himself with the knowledge that his men had succeeded in destroying the Nazis’ source of heavy water—and potentially stopped them from realizing a weapon unlike any known before.
29
Victory
* * *
BY THE END of March 1944, Walther Gerlach, the head of
the Uranium Club, and Kurt Diebner, his administrative head, were under relentless assault, chiefly from the Allied air raids that were leveling one research center after the next. Only days before the sinking of the Hydro, waves of bombers had targeted the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, destroying many departments, save, by chance, the one devoted to physics. With no end to the raids in sight, Gerlach and Diebner began to evacuate their scientists and equipment to the south.
In a report sent to Göring on March 30, Gerlach detailed the state of his program, from advances in the ultracentrifuges that separated U-235, to their successes in uranium-machine design, to the new methods of concentrating heavy water. Because of the Allied attacks, supplies of the precious moderator were in a “precarious position,” but Gerlach was hopeful that significant investments in German plants would bring about a steady flow in the near future. Further, he stated, the attacks on Vemork’s supply made it clear that the Allies themselves placed the “utmost importance” on fission research as a path to obtaining new explosives. It was essential that his teams do the same.
Diebner embarked on a new uranium-machine experiment while also pursuing his design of shaped charges for a fusion bomb. Harteck prodded IG Farben to move ahead with heavy water plants at Leuna. Heisenberg was still attempting a large new reactor, and other German scientists in the program continued with their research as well, all the while fleeing bombings, evading draft call-ups, and hauling their laboratories to hidden bunkers.
In mid-1944 Hitler, increasingly deluded and desperate, proclaimed Axis victory was imminent. “Very soon I shall use my triumphal weapons, and then the war will end gloriously . . . Then those gentlemen won’t know what hit them. This is the weapon of the future, and with it Germany’s future is likewise assured.” Few believed him. Germany was under assault from land, air, and sea. Allied forces drove their way to Berlin from the west, and the Russians pushed from the east. In July, a bomb run of 567 Flying Fortresses destroyed the Leuna works and with them the possibility of a renewed heavy water supply. Other attacks halted uranium production and U-235 separation. By the end of 1944, the best Diebner—or anybody he had called to nuclear research in 1939—could aim to build was a self-sustaining uranium machine.
The Allies knew it. In August, Colonel Boris Pash, a U.S. Army intelligence officer, found Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Collège de France in Paris. Joliot-Curie told Pash about his dealings with a number of German physicists, including one Dr. Kurt Diebner. Joliot-Curie believed the German program was far from advanced. That November, Pash and his boss, Dr. Samuel Goudsmit, discovered a bounty of secret papers in a Strasbourg hospital commandeered by the German atomic program. While American forces battled the Wehrmacht on the outskirts of the city, Goudsmit had soldiers haul away the files, and for four freezing days and nights, he and Pash read through them by candlelight, eating little, sleeping less. By the end, there was only one conclusion to draw: “Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable time.”
But at the start of 1945, with the war’s end inevitable, Gerlach and Diebner continued to hope that their work would have some impact. They crisscrossed Germany, often at risk of strafing runs by Allied planes, distributing supplies and directing experiments in a last-ditch effort to obtain at least a working uranium machine. In a rock-hewn wine cellar in Haigerloch, a hillside village in southwest Germany, Heisenberg had established a laboratory and constructed a lattice of uranium cubes submerged in heavy water, similar to the one set up by Diebner before the evacuation from Berlin. Using 1.5 tons of uranium and heavy water, the machine produced the highest level of neutron multiplication yet achieved. By Heisenberg’s calculations, he was sure to have a self-sustaining reactor if he could only obtain 50 percent more uranium and heavy water. He would get neither.
On June 15, 1944, Leif Tronstad was at home, looking out at a rain-soaked Hampstead Heath and drafting a plan for what he had coined Operation Sunshine. Since the Allied thrust into France just over a week before, it had become clear that there would be no invasion to free Norway. His countrymen would have to do it themselves. Tronstad, recently promoted to major, was determined to be on the ground. There was a danger that the Germans would implement a scorched-earth policy when they withdrew their 350,000 troops, as they had done when leaving Italy.
Wilson and Brun wanted him to stay in London, but he was not to be dissuaded. He had just finished a three-week course at Rheam’s STS 17 sabotage school, receiving high marks (“first class in all respects”). He would no longer send other men to fight in his stead.
Just before midnight, he heard a tremendous roar passing over his house. Moments later, an explosion. The jet-powered V-1 rocket attacks had begun. Day after day, hundreds of German missiles landed on the city. All the while, Tronstad continued with his strategizing for Operation Sunshine. By the end of July, he had his approval from General Hansteen and assembled his team. Jens-Anton Poulsson would lead one division, with his best friend Claus Helberg as radio operator. Arne Kjelstrup would be in charge of another. Einar Skinnarland, who was in Norway, would be Tronstad’s radio operator. A number of other Kompani Linge members, including Gunnar Syverstad, who had come to Britain for training after the ferry sabotage, would also join him. Tronstad would be in charge of protecting “the major industrial objectives” in the area, including its power stations, which supplied almost 60 percent of southern Norway’s electricity.
On August 27, he finished his farewell letter to Bassa, to be given to her in the event of his death. Although he was returning to Norway at last, she could not know that he was there. Tronstad gave Gerd Vold Hurum, his faithful secretary, the small key to his office safe. “Please take care of my diaries,” he said. Overwhelmed with emotion, she accepted the key. “When the war’s over,” he continued, “you must go and meet my family.” With that, he left Kingston House, his office of almost four years.
At long last, on October 5, Tronstad returned to Norway, dropping by parachute into the Vidda. His “long exile” was over. When the other parachutists assembled, Tronstad called for a toast, and they drank whiskey from their metal flasks. Then they pitched their tents.
Over the next five months, Tronstad recruited a small army of Milorg resistance fighters that ultimately numbered twenty-two hundred men. His headquarters were a ten-foot-wide hut buried in the deep snow near Lake Møs. As the commander of Operation Sunshine, he skied back and forth across Telemark and the neighboring regions, from Kongsberg to the east, Notodden to the south, Rjukan to the north, and Rauland to the west, coordinating with London and Milorg and making sure that the two worked seamlessly together. He met secretly with management at Norsk Hydro and other Norwegian companies to ensure they were onboard when the time came to eject the Germans.
Poulsson, Kjelstrup, and others set up separate bases of operation; Haukelid and his band of fighters joined the operation as well. They coordinated drops of arms and supplies, trained resistance cells in firearms and explosives, and performed small-scale sabotages on arms dumps. They also infiltrated power stations, dams, and industrial plants, teaching the workers how to thwart any German attempts to destroy their buildings, including how to implode the roofs so that the precious machinery inside remained operable once the debris was cleared.
Tronstad ate, slept, hunted, and skied beside his men. Most of them had thought highly of him while he was their boss in London. In the wilds of the Telemark, their loyalty and respect deepened into something greater still.
By spring 1945, the time for action looked imminent. Nazi Germany was collapsing, and the march into Berlin would soon cut off the head of the snake. Throughout Norway, the sabotage of railway transports, ports, ships, and communication lines was hobbling the Wehrmacht and obstructing the removal of its troops to reinforce their defenses inside Germany itself. On the night of March 11, Tronstad and two of his men, Syverstad and Jon Landsverk, were interrogating Torgeir Longnvik, a Nazi-appointed Norwegian sheriff. Tronstad wanted to know about his
activities and those of other Nazi sympathizers, and they wanted to prevent him from informing the Gestapo about their underground activities in the district of Rauland. They debated whether or not to kill him, and Tronstad decided that Haukelid should hold him prisoner at Bamsebu.
Skinnarland had helped to capture Longnvik and erased the tracks to their location, a two-room cabin in the countryside not far from Lake Møs. When this was done, he left for a rendezvous at a neighboring farm. Tronstad finished his questioning of Longnvik and was getting ready to leave to join Skinnarland when suddenly the door to the hut burst open. The sheriff’s brother, Johans, entered with a gun and started shooting. Syverstad was struck in the head and, falling backward, knocked Landsverk out of the line of fire. Tronstad tried to rush Johans Longnvik, and in the bitter fight that followed two more shots rang out.
Tronstad dropped to the floor, killed either by the bullets fired by Johans or by the blows of a rifle Torgeir Longnvik had grabbed in the melee. The brothers escaped, locking the door from the outside. Finally Landsverk freed himself from the cabin and rushed to find Skinnarland. When the two returned to the hut, Syverstad was near death; there was no saving him. Looking from Tronstad’s disfigured face to Syverstad’s, Skinnarland was deeply shaken. All that blood. Then he collected himself. The sheriff would be back, with Germans.
Skinnarland and Landsverk moved quickly. They packed up all the papers and equipment, anything that might lead to other arrests. By the time they finished, Syverstad, who like Tronstad was married and the father of two young children, was dead. They carried the bodies down to the lake on sledges, cut a hole in the ice, and sank them before the Germans could take them. Then they left to alert the others, including Haukelid, warning that any attempt to avenge the killings might bring about a war with the local German garrison, a fight that Milorg was not ready to have.