by Neal Bascomb
Their quick actions prevented any roundups or intelligence leaks, but it did not take long for the Germans to find the bodies. Tronstad and Syverstad were dragged from the lake and brought to a nearby village to be inspected and photographed. The Germans then doused the bodies with petrol, set them on fire, and tossed the burned remains into a river. Skinnarland sent word to London of the tragic events, and Poulsson was put in charge of Operation Sunshine. He held the post until the end of the war, an end that Leif Tronstad did not see for himself.
The order to mobilize was given on May 8, 1945, the day Churchill declared victory over Germany from a balcony overlooking Whitehall to a throng of revelers. The forces throughout Norway, including deep in the heart of Telemark, went into action. After years of fighting as an underground army, they put on uniforms and simple armbands and took back Rjukan and the surrounding towns. They occupied Vemork and other power stations in the area, seized control of communication lines and key public buildings, and took responsibility for law and order, including the arrest of Norwegian traitors and SS officers. The soldiers in the German garrisons surrendered their weapons and went where they were told.
Similar scenes played out across Norway. The invaders numbered almost four hundred thousand, Milorg roughly forty thousand. There could have been an ugly fight, but there was none. At last Norway was free, and parties broke out in the streets of Oslo and throughout the country. That night, at the royal estate of Skaugum, Reichskommissar Terboven ate a sandwich and read an English detective novel. Then, resigned to follow Hitler in death, at 11:00 p.m. he entered a bunker, where he drank half a bottle of brandy and lit a five-meter fuse that led to a box of explosives. The fuse was calculated to burn for eight minutes and twenty seconds. At 11:30 sharp, the explosion sounded across the estate.
Heinrich Fehlis attempted to flee. He was arrested in Porsgrunn, a southern harbor town, wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht lieutenant. Before he could be interrogated and his identity revealed, he took poison and shot himself in the head. Other Gestapo officials, including Siegfried Fehmer, tried to slip away. They were caught and brought to trial for their crimes. Vidkun Quisling and General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst were also arrested and tried.
A month after the German surrender, his country secure, King Haakon VII stepped onto Norwegian territory: the pier in front of Oslo’s Town Hall. In spite of a steady drizzle, fifty thousand Norwegians cheered and waved flags to celebrate his return. Among those present to honor him were Colonel John Wilson and over a hundred members of Kompani Linge, most of them wearing helmets or badges that named their operations. Grouse and Gunnerside were well represented. “Many times it may have looked dark,” Haakon spoke soberly to the gathering. “But I never doubted Norway would get back her rights.”
On Midsummer’s Eve, June 23, 1945, a smaller but no less jubilant liberation celebration was underway at the Skinnarland hotel beside Lake Møs. The front of the hotel was decorated with silk parachutes, and there was an illustrated schedule for the three-day event. Over dinners of trout and reindeer steak and bottles of champagne, aquavit, and beer, those who fought in the resistance around Rjukan spoke of past battles and of their future, too.
Among the honored guests were the Hamarens, Hovdens, and Skindalens, Poulsson, Helberg, Haukelid, Kjelstrup, Sørlie, Lillian Syverstad, Ditlev Diseth, and Kjell Nielsen. Einar Skinnarland celebrated with his brothers Torstein and Olav and reunited with Gudveig. A few seats were left empty. Olav Skogen, who had survived his imprisonment at Dachau, had not yet returned to Rjukan. Leif Tronstad and Gunnar Syverstad never would.
A week after the celebration, on June 28, 187 members of Kompani Linge, with Poulsson and Rønneberg in the lead, paraded in uniform before King Haakon. Of their select unit, fifty-one had died during the war. The king paid tribute to the men and their clandestine work. The following day, Colonel Wilson disbanded the company, asking them to serve their country in peace as they had in war.
By early August, Norway was beginning to recover after the long occupation, and Bassa Tronstad was back at her rented house outside Oslo. Her husband’s remains had been recovered from the river and buried in late May in a moving ceremony at an Oslo cemetery. Now, she was trying to make sense of the loss. The circumstances of his death she knew, but she had many questions about his time in London and about what had brought him to return to Norway. It was then that Gerd Vold Hurum came to her door. After offering her condolences, Gerd presented Bassa with eight diaries. There was also a letter. The diaries would take days to read, but the farewell letter was short and direct, and told Bassa all she needed to know.
“Dearest Bassa . . . I have the honor to lead an important expedition home, which will be of great importance to Norway’s future. It is in line with the course I chose on April 9, 1940, to put all my effort and abilities toward our country’s welfare . . . The war is singing its last verse, and it requires every effort from all who would call themselves men. You will understand that, won’t you? We have had so many magical happy years, and my highest wish is to continue that happy life together. But should the Almighty have another course for me, know that my last thought was of you . . . Time is short, but if all will not go well, don’t feel sorry for me. I am completely happy and thankful for what I have had in life even though I very much would like to live to help Norway back to its feet.” He wished the best for Sidsel and Leif. He looked forward to seeing them all again. The letter was signed “Your beloved.”
In Farm Hall, a quiet country house outside Cambridge, ten Uranium Club scientists were waiting for a decision to be made about their fate. They had been held there since July 3, 1945, rounded up when the Nazi regime fell, along with their papers, laboratory equipment, and supplies of uranium and heavy water. Among them were Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, and Kurt Diebner. They spent their time reading in the library, tending the rose garden, playing bridge, and wondering if they would see their families again. Unbeknownst to them, every room in the house was bugged, and their every word was recorded on shellacked metal disks to be reviewed by British intelligence.
At 6:00 p.m. on August 6, 1945, a short BBC bulletin reported that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan by the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay. Major Terence Rittner, who was in charge of security at Farm Hall, went to Hahn’s room to inform him. As Rittner reported to his superiors, the man who discovered fission was “shattered” by the news and “felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” Rittner steadied him with a glass of gin.
The news staggered the other German scientists at Farm Hall as well. Their disbelief was followed by cynicism. Surely the Allies were bluffing the Japanese into surrender. Surely the Americans and the British were not able to build an atomic bomb. Their shock and doubts were soon answered by another BBC broadcast a few hours later: “Here is the news: It’s dominated by the tremendous achievement of Allied scientists—the production of an atomic bomb.”
Then followed a statement from Churchill: “The greatest destructive power devised by man went into action this morning . . . The bomb, dropped today on the Japanese war base of Hiroshima, was designed for a detonation equal to twenty-thousand tons of high-explosive . . . By God’s mercy British and American science outpaced all German efforts . . . The possession of these powers by the Germans at any time might have altered the result of the war . . . Every effort was made by our Intelligence Service and by the Air Force to locate in Germany anything resembling the plants which were being created in the United States. In the winter of 1942–43 most gallant attacks were made in Norway on two occasions by small parties of volunteers from the British Commandos and Norwegian forces, at very heavy loss of life, upon stores of what is called ‘heavy water,’ an element in one of the possible processes. The second of these two attacks was completely successful.” Churchill concluded, “This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflection in
the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension.”
The scientists launched into heated conversation. “They can only have done that if they have uranium isotope separation,” Hahn said.
Harteck countered, “That’s not absolutely necessary. If they let a uranium engine run, they separate [plutonium].”
“An extremely complicated business for they must have an engine which will run for a long time,” Hahn said. “If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second-raters.”
Heisenberg was still dumbfounded by the announcement. “Did they use the word ‘uranium’ in connection with this atomic bomb?” His fellow scientists responded: no.
Diebner interrupted: “We always thought we’d need two years for a bomb.”
Deep into the night, the ten men continued their conversation in the bugged dining hall. Some expressed horror at the use of such a bomb by the Allies. Others lamented how far behind their own program had been. They argued the science and mechanics of how exactly the bomb was produced—and the tremendous investment that must have been made by the Americans.
For a time, they played the blame game. They had had too few staff. Not enough support or supplies, chiefly not enough heavy water. There was too much infighting among their scientists, not enough cooperation. They concentrated too much on uranium machines and moderators, too little on isotope separation. The meeting with Speer in June 1942 had ended any hope of an industrial program. The “official people,” Diebner said, “were only interested in immediate results.” Their institutes were smashed by bombing runs. They never had the chance.
They also debated the morality of using a weapon of such devastating power and whether or not they had ever intended to produce one. Some, like Heisenberg, were already putting together the framework of their own defense, conveniently justifying the failure of their efforts as a calculated strategy to keep Hitler from obtaining the bomb.
Epilogue
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ON JANUARY 3, 1946, the ten Uranium Club scientists were released, free to return to Germany and to their scientific pursuits. In the years and decades afterward, they gave many interviews, wrote their memoirs, and contributed to biographies and other books about their war work. These were added to the thousands of secret reports, letters, and papers gathered up after the collapse of the Third Reich.
Many histories have been written.
At the start of 1942, the Germans and the Allies were roughly neck and neck in terms of their atomic theory and research. Then the Americans pushed ahead with the Manhattan Project, while German Army Ordnance, and then Speer, backed away from committing to such an expansive program.
R. V. Jones, a leading British intelligence officer whose war work focused on combating German technology, wrote, “A bad experiment on one side or the other was often the cause of divergence.” If the Germans had not ruled out graphite as a moderator so early, would they have been the first to realize a self-sustaining reactor? Might this have convinced officials to allocate resources to an atomic bomb instead of to the V-1 and V-2 program? Should they have invested more time and effort into U-235 isotope separation instead of a heavy water reactor to produce plutonium for a bomb?
Some historians have concluded that the campaign against Vemork’s supply, from cod-liver oil contamination by Brun and others, to Operation Gunnerside, to the American bombing raid, to the sinking of the D/F Hydro, was all for nothing. But if the Germans had fashioned a self-sustaining reactor with heavy water, what then? Diebner had believed he would have enough heavy water by the end of 1943 for a reactor. He would not have stopped there. “The obliteration of deuterium production in Norway,” he wrote later in his memoir, “is one of the major reasons why Germany never obtained one.”
Making history was never the aim of the Norwegian saboteurs, nor of the British sappers who were sent before them. After the war, the sacrifice of the British Royal Engineers and RAF crews of the ill-fated Operation Freshman was not forgotten. Thirty-seven bodies were recovered and buried at gravesites in Norway. Bill Bray’s headstone reads, “To live in the hearts of those that loved me is not to die.” The four sappers killed in Stavanger, whose bodies were dumped into the sea, were honored with a memorial close to where they died. Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” was read in English and in Norwegian translation at the ceremony: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning, / We will remember them.” Memorials were also established for the Norwegian men, women, and children who perished in the American bombing raid at Vemork and in the sinking of the Hydro.
As time went on, those who had participated in the heavy water sabotages were pinned with medals from many grateful nations: Norway, Great Britain, Denmark, France, and the United States of America. But whenever they were asked about their most significant, defining action during the war, most of them mentioned operations other than Vemork.
For Joachim Rønneberg and Birger Strømsheim, they were most proud of Fieldfare, the operation they launched in March 1944 to prepare for the destruction of German supply lines in the Romsdal Valley, culminating in the blowing up of a key railway bridge. Knut Haugland thought his work setting up wireless radio links with London was his greatest achievement. Jens-Anton Poulsson considered his actions in Operation Sunshine the most important of his war against the Germans. It could be argued that Leif Tronstad would similarly have downplayed Vemork, had he lived, particularly since his diaries mention “the juice” only a couple of dozen times, among the many other operations he planned that fill their pages. Despite their feeling that their other operations during the German occupation deserved as much, if not more, attention, it was the commandos’ actions against Vemork that attracted the most accolades. They were Norwegian heroes, international heroes.
Beyond the medals and memorials, the war marked the men of Grouse and Gunnerside in other ways, sometimes dark ones. They had seen friends die. Some had become killers. All of them had lived under the constant threat of discovery and death. At times in the years after the peace, they woke up in the middle of the night, imagining the enemy at the door, reaching for guns that were not there. Einar Skinnarland’s children knew well not to approach their father suddenly. Some instincts never fade. A few of them turned to alcohol to dull memories they never asked for. Many simply sought solace in the place where they had once struggled to survive. The “smallness of being a human being in nature” settled Rønneberg. “You could sit down on a stone and let your thoughts fly away.” Knut Haugland spent 101 days in 1947 as the radio operator on the Kon-Tiki, a simple raft that crossed the Pacific Ocean with only a six-man crew. Beyond offering great adventure, the journey exorcised his own demons. What nature and time could not mend, their friendship supported them through. Until the end of their lives, Kompani Linge members gathered often to share experiences that few others could understand.
Knut Haukelid dedicated his war memoir to his father, who had died in 1944 as a result of the deprivations he endured as a prisoner at Møllergata, and then at Grini. The dedication read, “He died without knowing why . . .” Although he was arrested for having illegal radio equipment in his warehouse, the truth was that Bjørgulf was targeted because of his son’s actions, all of which Knut had had to keep hidden from him.
Skinnarland did not fight for accolades, nor for the pile of medals he received, which he kept in a drawer of junk in his basement. The deaths of Tronstad and Syverstad weighed heavily on him. Only in his last years did Skinnarland revisit his war diary and the long string of telegrams he had sent from the Vidda, and only then did he allow himself some pride over what he had endured for the sake of his country—and the world. He shared this with his family, among them his daughter, Kirvil. He and Haukelid, who ultimately reconciled with his wife, Bodil, both kept the promise they had made each other in the summer of 1943 by naming their daughters such.
Finally
, Rønneberg, the leader of Gunnerside and the last surviving saboteur, who was ninety-six years old in 2016, often spoke eloquently about why he braved the North Sea to be trained in Britain and why he then returned, twice, by parachute, to Norway. “You have to fight for your freedom,” he said. “And for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It’s like a glass boat; it’s easy to break. It’s easy to lose.”
Acknowledgments
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Now and again readers ask how long it takes me to research and write a book. I ballpark it at three years, depending on the availability of sources and narrative complexity. That amount of time sounds right to some folks, quick to others. The truth is, however, each of my books would have taken many more years if not for the community of people who contribute to the finished work. And the quality would have been far, far diminished without them.
First, I would like to applaud my research assistants who spearheaded my efforts in Norway (Windy Kester and Arne Holsen) and Germany (Almut Schoenfeld). They were tireless in helping me comb through archives and in tracking down individuals to interview.
Before I began my research, all but one of the saboteurs (Joachim Rønneberg) had passed away. I had the benefit of their recollections in numerous interviews, memoirs, and diaries, but even this bounty did not provide the kind of rich portrait I hoped to paint of each of them. Fortunately, their families offered to speak with me, sharing family lore as well as a number of documents that have never before been seen. A big thanks to the Haukelids (Kirvil, Bjørgulf, and Knut), Skinnarlands (Marielle, Kirvil, Ron, Inger-Berit Bakke), Hauglands (Trond, Torfinn, Torill), Poulssons (Unni, Mia), Tronstads (Leif Jr., Sidsel), and Finn Sørlie. In particular, I’d like to send my appreciation to Leif Tronstad Jr., who shared many, many hours of his time and family papers with me, as well as reading the final draft of the book. Also to Marielle Skinnarland for her generous attention to my exhaustive list of questions. And to the Hauglands, who put me up in their cabin outside Vemork and took me on a cross-country ski tour of the area (and even offered some of their father’s gear for me to use). I also appreciate the insight of former Kompani Linge member Ragnar Ulstein and a handful of Norwegians who know this story well and provided much guidance to me, including Bjørn Iversen, Svein Vetle Trae, Berit Nøkleby, Asgeir Ueland, and Tor Nicolaysen. In particular, Svein Vetle offered me a wonderful weekend at his cabin, not to mention the maps for this book.