by Tony Insall
Knowing how hazardous their task must be and how much hard thinking must be put into the administration and maintenance of these sources, I thought that you would like to know that the reports have achieved this high standard and that they are of the greatest value.
I would be grateful if my congratulations could be conveyed to the staff concerned at your headquarters, and if possible to the sources concerned.
Torp showed this letter to Prime Minister Nygaardsvold and Foreign Minister Lie.26
The break-up of Lyra in June 1944, when the Germans captured a list of station contacts, was mentioned in Chapter 8. These events had a very disruptive effect on coast-watching operations throughout the north. Vali, a station which was being set up in Hammerfest, just north of the location of Lyra, lost several agents to the Germans. It never got on the air. Several other stations such as Mu and Vidar were temporarily closed down. Concern about the German investigations was also the reason why Libra, in Kvitnes, declined to become involved in the rescue of Dean Arne Fjellbu (see Chapter 1). Many of Ida’s contacts were also arrested. One of them was Karl Rasmussen, who had helped Raaby to obtain his job as an assistant cashier. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Tromsø, and committed suicide by jumping out of a third-floor window. When the German investigation reached Tromsø and some of the Johansen family were arrested, SIS was worried that the whole of their organisation in northern Norway was in jeopardy. This would have been extremely damaging to their continued coverage of Tirpitz. Fortunately, those arrested did not divulge the information the Germans wanted. Several replacement stations were set up relatively quickly.
The contribution of Aslaug
Following Raaby’s departure for Sweden in May, it was necessary to set up another station to take over coverage of Tirpitz. This was Venus II, in Moen, on the Målselv river south of Tromsø. Though a long way from the Altafjord, it was operated by two telegraphists in close touch with their colleagues in Alta, who provided them with a stream of valuable intelligence. This worked effectively until it was raided by the Germans following a successful direction finding operation.†† The gap in coverage was very brief. In preparation for another air attack on Tirpitz, SIS needed to arrange further reporting of her anchorage. Anton Arild and Knut Moe were dropped by parachute in early September. It was intended that they should camp out in the open, in the snow on the mountainside above the fjord. Unfortunately, much of their equipment, including their tent and sleeping bags, was lost during the drop.27 Nonetheless they made light of these difficulties and their station Aslaug came on the air with their first report on 13 September. This was just in time. Two days later a force of twenty-seven Lancasters, operating from Russia, dropped a series of enormous six-ton Tallboy bombs on Tirpitz. Despite the hindrance of a smokescreen, one Tallboy hit Tirpitz on the foredeck just behind the bow, causing extensive damage. Aslaug reported on this on 20 September. Knut Moe was known to the Germans from his previous work and was still being hunted, and there were nearly 30,000 Germans troops based in the neighbourhood. Nonetheless, he and Arild visited Alta at night to gather further intelligence. They provided detailed damage reporting, which significantly supplemented the rather patchy indications then available from Ultra.28 The following is a good example:
1 October. We have been in Kåfjord and visited our source. He sees ‘T’ every day and is known as a solid and reliable man.‡‡ Damage is as follows: she got a direct hit on the starboard side which made a hole from the bow towards the stern seventeen metres along. The hole is both above and below the water line and is so large that motor boats could go in. Neither the turrets nor forepart of the ship is under water, neither have they been under water, but just after the attack the ship had a list to starboard and the fore part of the ship was low in the water. How much it was difficult to see because of the fog.§§ Ship is now on an even keel but it is still down by the head.29
When Admiral Karl Dönitz was informed that it would take nine months before Tirpitz would become seaworthy again, he decided that the battleship would no longer be used as a warship. Instead, ‘Tirpitz would be used merely as a floating battery in defence of northern Norway.’30 The Germans were beginning to prepare their evacuation from the northern part of Norway, so it was necessary for her to be moved south. She was patched up and, on 15 October, limped slowly out of the Altafjord and down to an anchorage at Håkøya, an island close to Tromsø. Shortly after her arrival, the berth chosen was found to be unsuitable owing to varying depths under the hull. However, a change was considered to be too difficult, so it was decided to fill up the main hollow under the midships section until there would be only six feet of water under the keel at low water. This work was started on 1 November, but had not been completed by the time she was sunk.31
Aslaug reported her departure, and when Egil Lindberg, from station Vidar, confirmed that she had arrived in Tromsø shortly afterwards, SIS instructed Arild and Moe to close the Aslaug station and return to Britain via Sweden. Both were later awarded the DSC.32
The sinking of Tirpitz
Once Tirpitz had moved back to Tromsø, the ship was once again within range of RAF bombers operating from Britain. She was attacked by Lancasters from 9 and 617 squadrons on 29 October. Low cloud over the target hampered their attack and the ship was not hit, though a near miss damaged one of the engines and caused some flooding. A further attempt was made on 12 November by aircraft from the same squadrons. This time, the weather was fine and clear. German defences were not prepared. Although the smokescreen units had been moved from Kåfjord to Tromsø, they were not ready on the day of the attack. Nor was there any German fighter protection, although this was repeatedly requested from the moment it became clear that another attack was being launched. There have been conflicting accounts of the reasons for this, but it seems likely that poor communications were the main contributory cause. Additionally, GC&CS noted that German aircraft at Bardufoss airfield (where an entire fighter group was based) had been at cockpit readiness since 0826, shortly after the first Lancaster was reported to be in the area. They were prevented from taking off for an hour, first because Lancasters were flying over their base, and then because of the possibility that the airfield itself was a target for the RAF. The first fighter did not take off until 0925, barely fifteen minutes before the attack started. So the Lancasters were able to make their attack without interference. They achieved several direct hits and Tirpitz capsized; 971 seamen, about half of the crew, were killed.33
Egil Lindberg was operating his station Vidar from the attic above the mortuary where dead German sailors were being brought in. He sent the following message: ‘12 November. Tirpitz capsized after a series of hits. Part of the ship’s side and the keel are above the water.’ He noted afterwards that the telegram took only two minutes to send, but the searching Germans very soon arrived in the area with three direction finding vehicles.34
The capsized wreck of the Tirpitz. © NHM
Reactions and consequences
Once the Lancasters started landing and the news of Tirpitz’s sinking had been confirmed, Air Marshal Harris immediately informed Churchill in Paris. Churchill was quick to congratulate him, and to inform both Stalin and Roosevelt. He further commented to Roosevelt that ‘it is a great relief to us to get this brute where we have long wanted her’.
The main immediate consequence of the sinking of the Tirpitz was that the navy was at last able to release a number of ships for deployment to the Far East. The author of the SOE Norwegian section history, who was understandably partial, noted that another consequence was that SIS had to forego its stranglehold on priorities, and SOE operations became of equal importance. Because by this time Shetland was carrying out almost all of SIS’s operations, this equality of priority did not make much of a change to allocation of transport resources, and came too late to provide much benefit to most SOE operations.35
After the end of the war Admiral Otto Ciliax, the Commander in Chief of the German Navy in Norway, s
aid ‘of the measures Great Britain took … in Norway, the most effective were the air attacks … against convoys … The enemy appears to have obtained news … from agents and a very effective communications system’.36 While SIS certainly played a valuable role in reporting on convoy movements, presumably Ciliax was not aware of their achievements against his warships, and particularly Tirpitz.
Notes
1 Salmon, Britain and Norway in the Second World War, pp. 125–126.
2 Patrick Bishop, Target Tirpitz: X-craft, Agents and Dambusters – The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship (London: Harper Press, 2012), p. xxvi.
3 TNA, PREM 3/191/1.
4 TNA, HS 2/179.
5 TNA, HS 2/141.
6 The most balanced account of Pound’s decision to order the convoy to disperse, based on the intelligence which he then had available, is probably contained in Hinsley, Vol. 2, pp. 214–223. See also Jonathan Dimbleby, The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies won the War (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 289–312.
7 TNA, HS 8/785.
8 TNA, HS 2/202–203.
9 NHM, SOE 35a, TITLE reports.
10 Hinsley, Vol. 2, p. 526.
11 NHM, SIS progress reports.
12 Roderick Bailey, Forgotten Voices of the Victoria Cross (London: Ebury Press, 2011), pp. 201–202.
13 TNA, ADM 223/87.
14 Hinsley, Vol. 3 part 1, p. 261–262.
15 NHM, FO.II 8.5 Daea 0006.
16 Hinsley, Vol. 2, pp. 529–530.
17 Ulstein, Vol. 2, p. 182.
18 NHM, Progress report for September 1943. Ulstein, Vol. 2, pp. 181–182.
19 TNA, HW 19/331.
20 Ulstein, Vol. 2, p. 37.
21 NHM, SIS progress reports.
22 TNA, ADM 223/87.
23 Hinsley, Vol. 3, part 1, pp. 275–276.
24 NHM, FO. II 8.5 Daeb 0004.
25 NHM, FO.II 8.2 E5.4 E5.4
26 Rørholt, p. 260.
27 NHM, FO.II 8.5 Daeb 0001.
28 Ulstein, Vol. 3, pp. 68–69.
29 TNA, ADM 223/87.
30 Bishop, p. 340.
31 TNA, HW 11/36.
32 NHM, FO.II 8.5 Daeb 00001.
33 TNA, ADM 223/51. Report on the sinking of Tirpitz.
34 NHM, FO.II. 8.5 – Daea 0006.
35 TNA, HS 7/174.
36 Hinsley, Vol. 3 part 2, p. 495.
* The navy continued to develop the idea, which emerged as a midget submarine codenamed Welman. It was twenty feet long, with a one-man crew, a range of thirty miles and a 560lb warhead. However, the Welman was not considered very suitable, not least because it lacked a periscope and provided only very limited visibility. It was only used once operationally, in an attack on a floating dock in Bergen harbour in November 1943. This was not successful. Mountbatten, director of combined operations, nearly drowned when testing one in a London reservoir and arrived late and soaking for a meeting with Churchill at Chequers. See Foot, SOE, p. 89.
† After the war, a Gestapo officer revealed that the German officer responsible for security in Trondheimfjord, Moller, had committed suicide as a result of the investigation which followed.
‡ The original Lark deployment had been disrupted when Nygaard and his wireless operator Hansen were arrested in December 1943. See Chapter 5.
§ This was not the only effective attack by X-craft in Norway. In April 1944, one penetrated Bergen harbour and sank a 7,500-ton merchant ship.
¶ The citation for this is contained in the appendix.
|| His training and wartime experience made Raaby well qualified to work as a radio operator on the Kon-Tiki expedition.
** Presumably arranged through MI9.
†† The wireless operators were Aslaug and Olaf Ellefsen, a married couple. Aslaug was pregnant when the station was raided, and while her husband escaped to Sweden, she was captured. The Germans never discovered that Aslaug was herself a very capable operator. She was sent to Oslo and gave birth to their son in captivity.
‡‡ That is, Tirpitz.
§§ From fires and German smoke generators.
CHAPTER 12
SOE SABOTAGE AND DISRUPTING THE U-BOATS
1944: DIVERSIFICATION OF OPERATIONS
I would like to thank you for the valuable and gallant assistance which your organisation has rendered to the anti-U-boat effort, particularly in Norway.
LETTER TO GUBBINS FROM VICE-ADMIRAL JACK MANSFIELD, ASSISTANT CHIEF OF THE NAVAL STAFF, U-BOATS AND TRADE, 14 JUNE 1945.1
The anti-U-boat campaign
Although SOE had first become involved in the campaign against them as early as February 1943, no significant sabotage attempts were made against U-boat targets in Norway until August 1944. This was surprisingly late, given how much damage U-boats had already inflicted in the Battle of the Atlantic. It took time for an effective campaign to be developed. In early 1943, British knowledge of German equipment and methods was fairly limited, so early planning was quite broad-brush and rudimentary. What targets or types of targets would offer the best chance of affecting the U-boat campaign as a whole? Thought was given to interfering with supply bottlenecks, and attacking key personnel, with a view to eliminating them. The Admiralty helped to refine SOE’s thinking. They doubted that the interruption of utility services to U-boat bases would have much effect. They were most interested in interference with torpedoes and batteries, food and fuel oil – and direct attacks on submarine crews. ‘It is considered that interference with the amenities provided for submarine crews would have a serious effect on their morale. The assassination of Admiral Dönitz and/or the blowing up of his headquarters in Lorient in France would profoundly affect the morale of U-boat crews and the efficiency of U-boat operations.’2 (In the event, of course, neither of these ambitions was achieved.) The initial reaction of SOE was that torpedoes would be too well protected, and that interference with batteries and attacks on oil supplies and key men in the submarine campaign could do the greatest damage.
Planning in Norway was also restricted by the lack of any specific information which could be of operational value. In March 1943, a meeting to assess prospects in both Norway and Denmark concluded that there were no targets in either country for which completed plans existed. There were thought to be approximately fifteen submarines lying in bases in Trondheim, Bergen and Narvik but German security was, not surprisingly, so tight that it was impossible to get near them. Various other possibilities were considered over the next few months – factories manufacturing batteries in Oslo or near the naval base in Horten; interference with small coastal vessels carrying torpedoes from the factory at Horten to their bases; more specific information about the locations of U-boats and their crews which might enable some of them to be attacked and finally the feasibility of attacking repair bases in Bergen and Trondheim if they proved to be less closely guarded. None of these proved to be immediately viable. It was not until August 1944 that the first serious attack was made.*
SOE’s campaign against U-boats in Norway was given added importance when the flotillas based in France moved there after the Allied invasion, leaving Norway as the only base on the Atlantic coast capable of continuing U-boat warfare. The Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee (ANCC) noted evidence of German intentions both to remain in Norway and to extend U-boat operations following the deployment to Norway of Condors and other large reconnaissance aircraft capable of mounting shipping patrols. They also took into account that during the previous few months, significant additional supplies of fuel had been sent there. It was calculated that by the end of April 1944, there was a stock of some 150,000 tons of all types of fuel which was widely dispersed and well defended.3
This nonetheless represented a weak point on which SOE could concentrate. On 17 August 1944, Milorg blew up the oil storage depot at Son, on the Oslofjord, destroying 4,700 tons of diesel and special fuel for U-boats. The depot burned for five days. In the course of the next few months there were another thirty attacks, which
destroyed millions of litres of oil of different types, mainly by using explosives, but sometimes by contamination. Perhaps the most spectacular was the destruction of Shell storage facilities in Oslo, containing 360,000 litres of fuel oil, by the Linge Company in January 1945, while a local Milorg group used sugar to contaminate 100,000 litres in Honeføss in September 1944. Two successful attacks were also made against factories producing concentrated sulphuric acid (used in batteries) near Lysaker in July and September 1944.4 Commander Firth, responsible for the Admiralty’s campaign against U-boats, was very complimentary about the effect of these operations. At a meeting to discuss the campaign in Norway, he asked about the possibility of making attacks on the bases themselves in Bergen and Trondheim – and also Horten, a transit port where U-boats carried out final checks, testing and in some cases deep dives before departure. Wilson explained that the bases were all closely guarded and that SOE could not do anything by direct attack against the pens in Bergen and Trondheim. However, he noted that Sønsteby, the leader of the Oslo gang, was back in Oslo and was paying particular attention to Horten. This led to a remarkable piece of sabotage by Hjalmar Berge, who worked in the torpedo store there. He planted explosives which on 21 January 1945 blew up 184 torpedo warheads and fifty-three tons of charges and other U-boat stores, as well as barracks and workshops, killing one German and injuring several others. SOE noted proudly that as a result, the Germans had only five live torpedoes left in south-east Norway at the end of the war.5 Berge, who took refuge in Sweden, was awarded the King’s medal for courage.6
In view of the impracticality of arranging direct SOE attacks against U-boat bases, Firth raised the feasibility of concentrated bombing of Laksevåg in Bergen and Nyhavna in Trondheim, though air experts present were not hopeful of success. They were largely right. As already highlighted, the attack in October 1944 did little damage to the Bergen base, but caused plenty of civilian casualties, many of them in Holen primary school, close to Laksevåg. A further attack in January 1945 by Lancasters, using the same enormous Tallboys which had sunk the Tirpitz, damaged only one of the six heavily reinforced U-boat pens. Consideration was given to attacks on subsidiary bases, such as Kristiansand. Wilson pointed out that SOE had not been able to work up any local organisation there because of the SIS embargo on SOE activities. The record of the meeting noted somewhat acidly that this comment ‘attracted the usual remarks’.7