The Allied fear of a German nuclear or radiological strike did not disappear with the sinking of the SF Hydro. The worry was what Hitler’s Germany might achieve using the uranium and heavy water secured prior to the successes scored by Wilson’s warriors.
By May 1944—three months after Haukelid’s final, extraordinary actions—the British War Cabinet was urged to take action over such a threat menacing Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings. Counter-measures were prepared, including front-line teams to deploy with radiation detectors, aerial surveys to be mounted to give early warning of any such attack, plus dry-run rehearsals for dealing with any such scenario. Army doctors were briefed to be on the lookout for a new strain of ‘influenza’, which in truth was radiation poisoning.
Churchill demanded that action be taken to defend both front-line units and Britain’s cities, which became the remit of Operation Peppermint, but this had to be balanced with the fear of causing general panic amongst the public should the nuclear threat become widely known. The effect on morale of radiation poisoning was as feared as the long-term contamination and loss of life. Expert reports at the time dealing with the dangers of ‘military use of fission products by the enemy’ stressed the need for secrecy to prevent widespread panic.
By June 1944 the V1s had begun to rain down on London, in what became known as the ‘Robo-Blitz’. The V2 followed three months thereafter. While means were put in place to counter the V1 threat—ground-based anti-aircraft gun batteries, and fast fighter aircraft—no such defences were possible against the V2, which plummeted from the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere at speeds of over 5,000 kph. The only option was to hit the launch sites, but the Germans’ response to that was to develop mobile launchers.
The big question to those in the know was whether Hitler had developed the ultimate weapon—a V2 nuke. At the same time the British and Americans worried about the Russians’ nuclear ambitions, and how to ensure they seized Nazi Germany’s technology and scientists ahead of the Red Army. Indicative of the Russians’ ambitions in this field, in the autumn of 1944 they made several approaches to Niels Bohr in an effort to convince him to move to Moscow and carry on his scientific work there.
As British and American forces rolled into occupied Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill were warned of the grave danger of key German nuclear sites and expertise falling into Russian hands. Elite units were formed—the American Alsos Mission and the British Target Force—tasked with moving forward with front-line units to secure, or if necessary destroy and thus remove from Russian reach, German nuclear technology and know-how.
At the same time, the fear of a desperate last-gasp use of nuclear weapons or radiological devices persisted, amidst wide-spread reports of intense German activity in this field. The Allies were playing a difficult double game: they wanted to deter at all costs the Germans from using such weapons, while ensuring they captured their facilities intact and their experts alive.
On 5 March 1945 the British and Americans realized that the Germans’ Oranienburg uranium-refining facility would very likely fall into Russian hands. Senior commanders ordered a massive USAAF bombing raid to deny it to the Russians. On 15 March 1945 the Oranienburg plant was obliterated.
Churchill made it clear that all necessary measures were to be taken to ensure the Nazis’ secrets were secured by the Allies. When it became clear that the crucial Haigerloch and Hechigen areas—the site of the Germans’ newest research facilities and their suspected nuclear pile—were slated to fall to Free French forces, drastic measures were proposed.
In Operation Harborage, British and American forces would hook around ahead of the French front line to seize the area before the French were able to get there. Alsos, the American’s specialist unit, was charged to seize whatever technology, paper-work and expertise they could lay their hands on, and to blow up whatever remained.
Meanwhile, in Denmark, the very active resistance network alerted London to a new potential threat: the papers resulting from the long years of research by Niels Bohr were said to have been moved to Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. They might conceivably aid a last-gasp Nazi nuclear effort. In the same building key leaders of the Danish resistance, captured in recent raids, were incarcerated. If they talked, the 15,000-strong Danish resistance movement would be in grave jeopardy.
On 21 March 1945 a daring raid on Copenhagen, code-named Operation Carthage, was mounted, using an RAF Mosquito squadron. The daylight attack was flown at such low level that aircraft crashed into rooftops. But it proved spectacularly successful: the target building was turned into a raging inferno and the cells holding the Danish resistance leaders were blown open, with most managing to flee. Though civilians were also killed in the attack, and casualties amongst the Gestapo were lower than might have been expected (many happened to be attending a funeral), the last vestiges of Bohr’s potentially dangerous legacy had been laid to rest.
As the Mosquitoes pounded their target in Copenhagen, so US troops thrust deep into what was scheduled to be the Russian zone of occupation. Declaring ‘to hell with the Russians’, they seized approaching 1,000 tonnes of uranium ore, and shipped it out to the US ahead of the advancing Red Army. And on 22 April 1945 British and US forces forged ahead on Operation Harborage, overrunning the Hechigen and Haigerloch facilities on the fringes of the Black Forest.
Hidden in a cave beneath the ancient church at Haigerloch they discovered an atomic pile, consisting of a latticework of 664 cubes of uranium suspended in a heavy water chamber, plus a veritable labyrinth of associated laboratories. They also seized the cream of Germany’s nuclear establishment, including Otto Hahn, Kurt Diebner and Werner Heisenberg.
British and American nuclear experts calculated that the Haigerloch pile was lacking some 700 litres of heavy water, which would have allowed it to go critical’. This was approximately the amount sabotaged by Haukelid’s crude alarm-clock time bombs, when the SF Hydro was sent to the bottom of the Norwegian lake (taking into account the further refinement of the SH200 to 100 per cent pure deuterium oxide).
On 23 April 1945, US General Groves—the head of the Manhattan Project—was finally able to conclude that the actions of the Allies had removed ‘definitely any possibility of the Germans making any use of an atomic bomb in this war’.
Kurt Diebner, one of the most senior Uranverein scientists, had believed they would have enough SH200 for a working reactor by the end of 1943, so enabling the building of a Nazi nuclear weapon. He would subsequently write of the war years: ‘It was the elimination of German heavy water production in Norway that was the main factor in our failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor before the war ended.’ That reactor would have been their path to the bomb.
On 8 May 1945, even as the final signatures were being put to the deal under which Germany would surrender, British and American commanders were plotting a thrust into Czechoslovakia to overrun the Joachimsthal uranium mine. And in Norway some 50,000 resistance fighters—the Norwegian home forces, also known as the ‘Milorg’, and with Grouse and Gunnerside veterans amongst their number—took back control of their country from the German occupiers.
Late on the evening of the same day Reichskommissar Josef Terboven drained a bottle of brandy and lit the fuse to a heap of explosives, ending his life and his hated rule over the Norwegian people. Beside him was the body of SS General Wilhelm Rediess, who had shot himself dead shortly beforehand.
Few would lament their passing.
By the summer of 1945 ten of the Uranverein’s top scientists were installed at Farm Hall, a private country house near Cambridge. Unbeknown to them, the entire building was wired for sound, and all of their conversations were being recorded in an effort to ascertain if any of the Nazis’ nuclear secrets had escaped the British and American dragnets.
On 6 August the first of the atom bombs was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That evening the news was announced on the BBC. The former Uranverein scientists listened to the broadcast in disbelief, tinged with not a small degree of cynicism. Surely, they argued, this had to be Allied propaganda to force the Japanese to surrender. None amongst them was able to believe that the Allies had succeeded in building an atom bomb.
As reality began to sink in, they started to criticize the Allies for using such a terrible weapon, and to field their own excuses for not getting there first. Their laboratories were forever being bombed by the Allies. They had worked under too much pressure; those in charge were forever pressing for ‘immediate results’, which were impossible to achieve. They never had the supplies they needed—chiefly the heavy water—to make a weapon feasible.
As an official British government report, broadcast on the BBC to a grateful nation, would conclude of the German nuclear effort: ‘Germany’s use of the atomic bomb, which the War Cabinet with their inner knowledge had so much dreaded, was delayed. Before her researches were complete, she was a beaten nation.’
But in Norway there remained unfinished business: those who had died so that the Nazi nuclear dream might be vanquished still needed to be avenged. Across Norway, British and Norwegian officers working for the War Crimes Investigation Teams hunted for evidence, and the guilty. In the spring and summer of 1945 Norwegian Arne Bang-Andersen—a former policeman and resistance fighter—set about tracking down those Germans responsible for the Operation Freshman executions.
Over the following months, he and a team of British investigators managed to establish the fate of every single one of the missing Sappers. The survivors of the glider crashes had been killed as a direct result of Hitler’s Commando Order. Some—those more fortunate—had been shot. Others were executed with varying degrees of cruelty—by agonizing injections, strangulation or hanging, amongst other means. Some of the corpses had been thrown into mass graves, while others had been dumped at sea. Those bodies that could be were disinterred and reburied with full honours, and memorials were established to commemorate the Sappers’ sacrifice. As an official report into Operation Freshman concluded, it was a most gallant attempt that had failed.’
Those Germans responsible were duly brought to trial. They pleaded various defences and tried to blame each other in an effort to save their own skins: they were acting under orders; they were fearful of Gestapo reprisals. Regardless, all were sentenced to death or life imprisonment.
In May 1946 the trial of one of the senior officers, General Karl Maria von Behren, the commander of the area where the first glider crashed, got under way. Von Behren was found not guilty, but the overall architect of the killings would not get off so lightly. General von Falkenhorst stood trial in July 1946, charged with overarching responsibility for the Freshman murders, and that of the Musketoon captives.
Von Falkenhorst argued that he was acting on orders laid down by Hitler himself—the so-called ‘defence of superior orders’. Von Falkenhorst’s plea failed, for the Commando Order was judged to have been illegal, and he had in any case modified the order when passing it down to his officers. In late July 1946 von Falkenhorst was sentenced to death, but that was commuted to life in prison after a plea for clemency was heard. He was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in July 1953 and died in July 1968.
After the war the production of heavy water was resumed at Norsk Hydro’s Vemork facility, and in a sense the war over heavy water had one last skirmish to play out. The British government sought to restrict the countries to which the heavy water could be exported, keeping it well out of Russian—and even French—hands. It was feared that the French might sell the heavy water or related technologies to the Russians, or share it with them because of common political aspirations. That battle would rumble on for several years.
The Joachimsthal uranium mine, in Czechoslovakia, was overrun by Russian forces at war’s end. After the 1948 takeover by the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, prison camps were established in the town of Joachimsthal. Opponents of the new regime and its ever-closer links to Soviet Russia were forced to work in the uranium mines under brutal conditions. Life expectancy for those miners was forty-two years. Uranium mining ceased there in 1964.
Some commentators have argued that Nazi Germany failed to win the race for nuclear supremacy because the Uranverein scientists were on the wrong track—a heavy-water-based plutonium reactor was not the route to a nuclear weapon. This is incorrect. Of the two bombs dropped by the Americans on Japan, one—‘Fat Man’, unleashed over Nagasaki—was an implosion-based weapon with a solid plutonium core.
The plutonium to build the Fat Man bomb was produced in heavy water reactors, using heavy water from both American plants and the Canadian facility, in Trail, British Columbia. Heavy water remains an essential component in some types of reactors today, both those that produce nuclear power and those designed to produce raw materials for nuclear weapons. Heavy water is produced by Argentina, Russia, the USA, India, Pakistan, Canada, Iran and Norway, amongst other countries.
Some of the brave individuals portrayed in these pages sadly did not survive the war years. Odd Starheim—Agent Cheese—returned to Norway in 1943 as part of a commando operation to hijack another vessel, as he had with the Galtesund. Sadly that ship, the Tromosund, was sunk at sea by German warplanes with the loss of all lives. Likewise, Lief Tronstad—the Professor—would not survive the war. Sent into Norway late in the fighting, he would be killed in a shootout in a hut on the Hardangervidda.
All those who had made up the Grouse and Gunnerside teams did survive the war. For their actions in sabotaging the Vemork heavy water plant they were given the following honours, amongst others:
1. Second Lieutenant Jens Anton Poulsson—Distinguished Service Order (DSO)
2. Second Lieutenant Joachim Holmboe Rønneberg—DSO
3. Second Lieutenant Knut Magne Haugland—Military Cross (MC)
4. Second Lieutenant Kasper Idland—MC
5. Second Lieutenant Knut Anders Haukelid—MC
6. Sergeant Claus Urbye Helberg—Military Medal (MM)
7. Sergeant Arne Kjelstrup—MM
8. Sergeant Fredrik Thorbjørn Kayser—MM
9. Sergeant Hans Storhaug—MM
10. Sergeant Birger Edvan Martin Stromsheim—MM
Haukelid was also given a DSO for his actions sinking the SF Hydro ferry, and a memorial was established for those innocent Norwegians who had died in the ferry’s sinking. Einar Skinnarland was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and Captain and Professor Lief Tronstad was made an OBE (several months prior to his being killed in action). John Skinner Wilson was awarded an OBE, and also appointed to the chivalrous Order of St Olav by the Norwegian government. The Grouse and Gunnerside men were given an array of medals by the Norwegian government, and several other countries, after the war.
Those who had taken part in Operation Musketoon were also awarded their share of honours—Captains Graeme Black and Joe Houghton included. They were supposed to pick them up once they had been released from whatever POW camp they had been held in. But, since none would survive captivity, these awards were all made posthumously.
The Special Operations Executive itself fell victim to the immediate post-war years. On 15 January 1946 it was formally disbanded, the argument being that the SOE’s revolutionary, distinctive and ruthless form or warfare-espionage may have been justified in the war years, but there was no role for such an outfit in peacetime. As the subsequent strife-torn decades would prove, this decision was doubtless somewhat premature.
After Gunnerside, Joachim Ronneberg had deployed to other missions in the Norwegian wilderness. Post-war he involved himself in broadcasting, becoming known as ‘the Voice of Norway’. A television and radio producer, he also gave extensive lectures, including to the Norwegian Army and elite units of the British military. He is the only member of the Grouse and Gunnerside teams still alive at the time of writing.
Jens Poulsson served with the Norwegian resistance post-Gunnerside, recruiting and training extensively. After the war he served in the Norwegian Army, rising to the rank of colonel and becoming an expert in mountain warfare and Arctic survival. He settled in an area equidistant between Oslo and Rjukan, remaining a keen outdoorsman despite his advancing years. He died in February 2010, aged ninety-one, and his funeral was attended by the Norwegian king.
After the Vemork sabotage Claus Helberg returned to the Hardangervidda, serving as a radio operator and instructor in the Norwegian resistance. Post-war he became a prominent figure in Norway’s tourism industry, and was an intimate of Scandinavian royalty and the political class. He never lost his love of the outdoors, and was something of a living legend in Norway. His death in March 2003 was mourned throughout the country.
Knut Haugland served out much of the war post-Gunnerside in Norway, working as a superlative radio operator. He played a pivotal role in several high-profile sabotage operations, escaping capture by the skin of his teeth on more than one occasion. After the war Haugland served in the Norwegian Army, and was chosen to take part in the famed Kon-Tiki expedition, led by Thor Heyerdahl in 1947. Six men sailed 6,000 kilometres on a thirteen-metre balsa wood raft, from South America to Polynesia, to prove theories about the global migration of early humankind. Haugland died in December 2009 aged ninety-two.
Knut Haukelid rejoined the Norwegian resistance after the SF Hydro sinking, and served with them for the remainder of the conflict. After the war he joined the Norwegian Army, rising to the rank of major in the Telemark Infantry Regiment. He later became a lieutenant colonel in the Home Guard of Greater Oslo. Haukelid reconciled with his wife, Bodil. He died in 1994.
Einar Skinnarland remained in the Hardangervidda following the SF Hydro sinking, working with the resistance. Post-war he emigrated to the USA, working as an engineer on construction projects around the world. He died in Toronto, in 2002. Modest to a fault, he rarely displayed any of his medals from the war years, keeping them locked away for posterity. One souvenir he did treasure from his time with the SOE was the case that had contained the suicide pill that he had carried with him during the long years of conflict.
After the war, John Skinner Wilson reverted to his role as a leading light in the Scouting movement. He would declare of his time at the SOE: ‘These years marked a very special era in my life … this experience, varied as it was, gave a fresh impetus to my subsequent Scout work … I found that I had proved myself in a new and entirely different role and that at a comparatively advanced age.’ He continued to play a very active role in SOE and Linge Company reunions until the day he died, at age eighty-two, whereupon a delegation from Norway attended his funeral.
‘To those of us privileged enough to serve under him, the one quality which shone out was his utter integrity,’ one of the Linge Company veterans would write of Wilson:
It was this which undoubtedly led our Norwegian comrades to accept and trust him in a way seldom given by soldiers of one nation to a commander of another … The success of SOE operations in Norway … bear testimony to his wisdom and vision, not to mention the long hours of work he put in and to his mastery of detail of every operation. His influence on men going into the field was tremendous … A man of another generation who had all the best Victorian virtues and few of their vices, he was an inspiration to us all.’