The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber rumbled through the dark skies, her propellers clawing at the cold spring air. It was 28 March 1942—just two weeks after Starheim’s piratical band had spirited away the Galtesund from Norwegian waters. The roar of the aircraft’s twin Rolls-Royce Merlin engines made conversation all but impossible, not that Einar Skinnarland had anyone to talk to. He was alone in the Whitley’s bare hold, which reverberated to the beat of her engines.
The lone aircraft thundered onwards, the dark night her only protector. Armed with a single machine gun in the nose, and four in the tail, the Whitley was highly vulnerable to attack. And with a top speed of a little over 200 mph she was hardly able to outrun the Luftwaffe’s night fighters. The aircrew’s only hope was to flit through the night skies undetected.
Unbeknown to Skinnarland, this was only the second such SOE mission flown by the RAF into Norway. In the front turret the bomb aimer hunched over his sights, crouched directly below the nose-gunner. Tonight he had no high explosives to drop from the skies. Instead, his task, along with the Whitley’s navigator, was to locate Skinnarland’s intended drop zone, a point lying to the north of Lake Møs amidst a bewildering patchwork of snow, rock, ice, lake, frozen bog and mountain. The Hardangervidda stretched as far as the eye could see—Europe’s largest plateau, and seemingly a navigator’s worst nightmare.
Skinnarland was dressed in his brand new white jumpsuit, the thick padding of which kept him passably warm in the chill of the hold. Beside him lay his backpack, stuffed with his sleeping bag, emergency rations and thermos of tea. Deeper down were spare clothes, his fake papers, 20,000 kroner, and a camera with twenty-odd rolls of film—for spying on the Vemork plant.
Just to the rear of the Whitley’s bomb bay lay a large metal tube, packed full of weaponry: 2 Stens, 14 Lugers, 640 rounds of ammo and 20 commando fighting knives—arms for Operation Grouse. In truth, the prospect of combat didn’t discomfit Skinnarland greatly. But right now he was scared. It was plummeting through the bomb bay into the howling darkness—such an unnatural thing to do—that struck terror into him.
As Skinnarland steeled himself in the lonely hold, he was painfully aware of how unprepared he was for the coming jump. He kept repeating his trainer’s instructions: ‘Feet together and launch off gently. Relax every muscle when you hit the silk and when you land. Tuck up your legs and go down on your knees. Get rid of your chute as quickly as you can.’
At a few minutes prior to midnight, the aircraft’s dispatcher called him to action stations. There was a high-pitched whine from the hydraulics, and the bomb doors inched open. A sharp inrush of air filled the hold. Chilling. Below lay partly frozen lakes, glaciers laced with crevasses, giant boulders and perilous swamps. The dispatcher edged the weapons container further towards the hole in the floor, and as the jump light blinked green he heaved it into the empty night.
Skinnarland crept closer to the slab of howling darkness. He crouched down, and with a feeling like death he dangled his legs over the edge.
‘It’s just like a lavatory seat,’ yelled the dispatcher, ‘only I’m the one who pulls the chain!’
It was a brave attempt to take the edge off the tension, but somehow Skinnarland didn’t feel like laughing right now. The dispatcher dropped his arm sharply, signalling the moment to jump, but the Norwegian felt utterly frozen. Riveted to the spot. The dispatcher raised and lowered his arm again, with increased urgency. Still Skinnarland didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Stalemate.
The Whitley made several further passes over the drop zone, yet still Skinnarland remained glued to the Whitley’s cold steel. Finally, the dispatcher bent to his ear, yelling that they were short on fuel and that he was going to have to abort the drop.
‘We’re going back,’ he cried.
Skinnarland forced out a strangled reply: ‘No! I’m jumping!’
It was then that his mind flipped to something very special that he had stuffed deep in his backpack. It was a silver-plated spoon, decorated on its handle with the Houses of Parliament. It was a present for his mother, but if he didn’t jump she wouldn’t be getting it any time soon.
A few minutes after midnight, and by sheer force of will, Skinnarland made himself move. He shoved off with his hands, and moments later he plummeted into the coal-black abyss. He was hooked up to a static line attached to the Whitley’s hold. As he tumbled away from the aircraft the line dragged his chute from its pack.
It blossomed in the darkness above him, the chute’s cells filling with air. The canopy went rigid with a sharp crack, like a ship’s sail catching a gust of wind. A strong breeze whistled through the dark rigging. This was all very different from parachuting over the balmy calm of an English spring meadow in daylight, but at least now that he had jumped Skinnarland was starting to recover something of his equanimity.
The wind was blowing hard from the north-west, driving him towards a boulder-strewn hillside. He tried to follow his instructor’s advice, getting his knees together and bent, and preparing to roll with the impact. Still, he hit the rocky ground hard, his recently injured knee and then his back taking the brunt of the blow. He ended up concertinaed in a heap.
Gingerly, he tried to stand. He felt his backbone pop and fizz painfully. There was nothing he could do about that now. He began to quarter the terrain, searching for the containerload of weaponry. Unsurprisingly it was nowhere to be seen. He’d delayed the jump for a good twenty minutes, as he’d tried to pluck up the courage to go. It could have landed just about anywhere.
He glanced at the nearby Mount Gausta, his childhood playground and ski-run. It was silhouetted faintly in the dull moonlight. He figured he’d landed a good ten miles north of Lake Møs. Not a difficult journey under normal circumstances, but right now he had jolts of pain shooting through his lower back and a knee that was still tender from the recent surgery.
Skinnarland set off through the night, moving painfully slowly. He reached home just as the first rays of dawn illuminated the skies above Lake Møs. Only one person in his family knew where he had been: his brother, Torstein Skinnarland, a fellow member of the resistance. All the others—his mother and father included—greeted him as if he’d just been away for a spot of wilderness vacationing.
Doing his best to avoid any difficult questions about his injured back, he suddenly remembered the Houses of Parliament spoon. How would he explain that? You didn’t exactly find such things on the Hardangervidda! He would have to save it for sometime in the future, when his mother might be safely acquainted with his more maverick activities.
Right now his first priority was to secure that containerload of weaponry. Having rested and eaten, he set off on skis to link up with some fellow resistance fighters. Many hands make light work, and he was sure to need as much help as he could muster to track down the errant cargo. If he didn’t do so quickly, it would very likely get covered by the next snowfall, and be buried in a drift for the duration of the war.
On the very day that Skinnarland parachuted back into Norway, Wilson compiled a thick dossier of evidence to support an attack on Vemork. In a ‘Most Secret’ letter to Michael Perrin, a senior scientist at the British chemicals company ICI, now seconded to Tube Alloys, he laid out the stats on heavy water exports to the Reich, showing a six-fold increase since the German occupation began:
April to December 1940: |
240 kgs |
1941: |
300 kgs |
1st January to 6th March 1942: |
300 kgs |
He rounded off his letter thus: ‘I see no reason against your using this information for any purpose which is covered by the designation “Most Secret” … but perhaps it would be well if you did not disclose the source of the information.’ That source was, of course, double agent Jomar Brun.
That same day Wilson scheduled a meeting with Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, to discuss their key priority: ‘A raid on the Norsk Hydro plant with the object either of putting heavy water production out of action or preferably the … abstraction of the highly-concentrated fraction for removal to this country.’
That last part was a new twist entirely.
It was Professor Tronstad who had first proposed that Vemork’s SH200 might be stolen away, as opposed to blown up, in an effort to aid the Allies’ fledgling nuclear programme. Tronstad’s audacious plan—an act of maverick daring every bit the equal to the hijacking of the Galtesund—involved a flying boat landing on a stretch of water, possibly Lake Møs, to collect the SH200, which would have been seized by Skinnarland and his Grouse raiders.
Wilson thrilled to the idea of stealing the heavy water from under the noses of the Germans. He had a flair for the unconventional and the unthinkable. At war’s outbreak, he’d been appalled to learn that membership of Britain’s Civil Defence organization would be limited to those over the age of sixteen.
‘An absurd decision,’ he had written, as chief of the Scout Movement, and having already offered his Scouts and Rovers as signallers for the war effort. ‘Boys of 14 or even 12 could easily, and almost better, act as Messengers.’ Spiriting away the Nazis’ heavy water was just Wilson’s kind of thing.
There was a growing sense of urgency in the air at the SOE’s headquarters, and for good reason. Recently, a highly reputable source in Stockholm had reported that ‘the Germans are well under way with the manufacture of the uranium bomb of enormous power, which will blast everything … Through the power of one bomb a whole town can be levelled.’
Citing a ‘Most Secret Source’, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had added fuel to the fire, identifying the ‘intense interest of the Abwehr in German West Africa in general and the Belgian Congo in particular.’ The Abwehr was the German equivalent of the SIS, and several of its agents had been caught trying to get into the country, ‘in order to carry out espionage’.
From what the SIS could determine, the agents had been sent there to assess Allied troop movements, defensive positions, and to reconnoitre key aerodromes. The Germans were scoping out the possibility of their airborne forces seizing the country, and with it the world’s foremost supply of uranium.
To add weight to such concerns, Niels Bohr—the grandfather of atomic physics, now trapped in occupied Denmark—had got a report smuggled back to London, concerning a meeting he had had with his former student, Werner Heisenberg. During their discussions, Heisenberg—the leading light at the Uranverein—had admitted that an atomic bomb could be made, and that ‘we’re working on it’.
Adding impetus to this fearful sense of urgency, Einar Skinnarland was about to deliver his first report. In the third week of April 1942—less than a month after his return to Norway—Skinnarland made contact with the SOE. In his missive, he revealed that SH200 production had increased yet again, and was slated to rise still further.
The nuclear scientists at Tube Alloys pored over Skinnarland’s findings. Like Wilson, they recognized the need to take swift action, and they sent a note to Churchill’s War Cabinet. Carefully worded, but crystal clear in its thrust, it reflected their growing conviction that the Germans had to be working on a plutonium-powered nuclear weapon, as opposed to one based around uranium.
‘Element 94 [plutonium] would be as good as U-235 for military purposes, and since this element is best prepared in systems involving the use of heavy water … an attempt should, if possible, be made to stop the Norsk Hydro production.’
In time, plutonium would become the raw material of choice for an atom bomb. It is easier to make plutonium go ‘boom’, and cheaper to produce than weapons-grade uranium (U-235). Combining SH200 with plutonium was a sure route to the superbomb, and the Germans had clearly taken a number of significant steps down that road.
On 29 April the Tube Alloys luminaries penned a telegram to Wilson, entitled ‘Heavy Water’. ‘The entire production … is being taken by the Germans for scientific work of the highest importance. We are exceedingly interested to know to what address the supplies are being dispatched … I have been asked if there is any possibility of obtaining this information. Could you help?’
Of course, Wilson already had a sense of this. In June the previous year he’d learned that the SH200 was being shipped to the Berlin office of physicist Kurt Diebner, the head of the Uranverein. But that was fully ten months ago. With few, if any, SOE agents inside Germany, and none able to penetrate the Third Reich’s nuclear research programme, his best—his only—source of intelligence lay within the Vemork plant.
This was yet another request that would have to be radioed to Skinnarland: discover where the SH200 is being sent in Germany.
In correspondence flowing back and forth between SOE, Tube Alloys and their political taskmasters, all sides expressed the pressing need for secrecy. ‘This is, of course, an extremely secret matter’, a Tube Alloys letter to the War Office stressed. If word should leak out about Operation Grouse it would be a disaster, for such small-scale raids depended above all else on the element of surprise.
In the name of secrecy the Germans had adopted their own codeword for Vemork’s precious liquid: SH200. Wilson felt the need for an equivalent. ‘Would it not be best to have some code name for this particular subject?’ he suggested. A decision was taken: ‘Code name Lurgan had been allocated to SOE’s interest in deuterium oxide’—deuterium oxide being heavy water’s scientific name.
Over the late spring and early summer further reports were filed by Skinnarland, some secreted as microdots hidden inside toothpaste tubes. Wilson’s intelligence pipeline had begun to pump information—from Jomar Brun, the inside man; via Skinnarland, the conduit; to Professor Tronstad, the in-house expert and analyst; and on to Wilson himself, the man of action.
Photographs, diagrams and minutely detailed sketches of the Vemork plant—all were reduced to images that could be hidden inside a full stop, and sent to London. Wilson made sure that Churchill was kept abreast of the key developments on heavy water, now referred to as ‘Lurgan’ in all correspondence. The British prime minister was planning a crucial trip to the USA, and top of his agenda were nuclear weapons.
On 17 June 1942 Churchill boarded a Boeing flying boat for what was possibly the single most important meeting of the war. His final destination would be Hyde Park, in New York, where he and Roosevelt had much to discuss. The four-engine Boeing 318 Clipper was one of the largest aircraft of the time, and it was specifically designed for transatlantic flights. Typically, Churchill was the first head of government to make such a crossing by aircraft, and he had good reasons to take such a risk right now.
As the 150-foot wingspan behemoth crawled into the air above the midnight waters of Stranraer, the issue of the race to build the first atomic bomb lay heavily on Churchill’s mind. He knew that Britain alone could never win such a contest with Nazi Germany. He needed America to come on board the nuclear train.
Of course, there was a great deal on his mind during the long flight. In spite of America’s entry into the war, all was not going well. In North Africa, General Rommel’s panzer divisions pummelled Allied forces; German U-boats hounded the Atlantic convoys shipping vital war materiel from the USA to Britain; the American military had still not fully recovered from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; much of London had been devastated in the Blitz; and Western Europe languished under Hitler’s iron fist.
France, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia all lay under Nazi Germany’s dominion, with fascist Italy as their partners in aggression. But uppermost in Churchill’s mind was one burning question: how far ahead of the Allies were the Germans in the nuclear field, and what could be done to stop them?
‘We both felt painfully the dangers of doing nothing,’ Churchill would later write, the ‘we’ referring to his good friend Roosevelt. ‘We knew what efforts the Germans were making to procure supplies of heavy water—a sinister term, eerie, unnatural, which began to creep into our secret papers. What if the enemy should get the atomic bomb before we did! We could not run the mortal risk of being outstripped in this awful sphere.’
From Frederick Lindemann, his scientific adviser, Churchill understood that he could, should he so wish, use heavy water as ice cubes to chill his whisky, to water his flower borders at Chartwell, and even give it to his grandchildren to drink. It was as harmless to humans as ordinary water. But combine it with plutonium, and it was another matter entirely.
After a long flight—travelling with the sun seemed to ‘slow’ the passage of time—involving two luncheons at six-hour intervals, the Clipper arrived in Washington, landing on the Potomac River. The following morning a military aircraft whisked Churchill to Hyde Park, from where he was driven around the Roosevelt family estate by the President.
Intense discussions on the nuclear issue ensued. Both men had been briefed extensively regarding the state of their own nuclear programmes, and the belief—universal amongst the Allies—that Nazi Germany was significantly more advanced. One eminent US scientists had declared recently: ‘Nobody can tell … whether we shall be ready before German bombs wipe out American cities.’
In truth, if and when Hitler secured a nuclear weapon London doubtless would be his first target. If he could devastate the British capital at a stroke, succeeding where the might of the Luftwaffe had failed, the war would be a giant step closer to being won. In the face of such brute, implacable power Britain would be forced to surrender, and America, deprived of a springboard from which to launch the liberation of Europe, would be hamstrung.
Both leaders knew of the role played by the SH200 in Vemork. Since a large supply of heavy water was unavailable to the Allies, they had no option but to work with an alternative moderator, and graphite was their favoured option. But if Britain and America combined forces, a bomb could be built in the US, while suitable heavy water plants might be constructed in Canada, which had ample hydroelectric potential.
Churchill argued that the two beacons of the free world needed to ‘pool our information, work together on equal terms, and share the result, if any, equally between us.’ Roosevelt agreed wholeheartedly. The two leaders cut a deal to collaborate. But at the same time they realized the pressing need to sabotage the German nuclear programme at every possible turn.
Somehow, Germany’s two-year lead in the nuclear field had to be cut. The Allies needed time and breathing space to pull ahead of the Reich. Crucial to that was heavy water: it was the only raw material being used to make the Nazi bomb that was conceivably within the Allies’ reach. It was crucial to cut the supply of SH200: by doing so, they might regain crucial time lost to Germany.
Churchill flew back to London and ordered that the Vemork plant be hit as soon as possible. The great man had spoken, and he had done so with the full weight of the American president behind him. The War Cabinet decreed that ‘the very highest priority be allotted to this target’. A 3 July memo raised the prospect of an attack, suggesting: ‘It might be a flying boat project.’ It was left to Combined Operations HQ’s department of Raid Planners to come up with a plan.
Wilson was the foremost proponent of hitting Vemork, but he felt the first twinges of alarm now. In a ‘Most Secret’ 29 July memo, he reiterated that heavy water was ‘regarded as a most highly secret matter’. If a commando-style raid was in the offing, it went against the advice from the experts. Tube Alloys had cautioned against doing anything ‘that might attract the enemy’s attention to the fact that we are aware of the significance of the Vemork works’.
It was the age-old conundrum. If a raid were launched and failed, the enemy would be forewarned and forearmed. In his 29 July memo Wilson stressed that the SOE had ‘a party who could make an attempt to cut the pipeline at VEMORK … It is a difficult project, but one worth undertaking.’ By ‘a party’ he meant Skinnarland and his Grouse force—four further SOE operators who were scheduled to join him.
Wilson argued skilfully that Vemork was SOE business and should remain so. Writing of the need to destroy both the existing heavy water and its means of production, he stated: ‘The application of this product to H.E. [high explosives] is both Churchill’s and Hitler’s secret weapon, and bands of scientists are engaged in a race for the final result … It is vitally necessary that the greatest secrecy should be preserved, and unfortunately many people appear to have been dabbling in this highly dangerous subject.’
As the summer 1942 heat hit London, Wilson and Tronstad held a crunch meeting with the movers and shakers at Combined Operations and Tube Alloys, to talk through options. Several possible means of attack were mooted:
1. Local sabotage, using those already employed at the plant.
2. Sending in an SOE sabotage party.
3. Sending in a commando force using flying boats for both insertion and extraction.
4. Sending in a ‘suicide squad’—one that had no chance of escape.
5. RAF bombing.
Option one was pretty much a non-starter: if it failed, their key intelligence asset—Jomar Brun, the inside man at Vemork—would be severely compromised. Option five had some merit, in that the suggestion now was to bomb the Norvann dam situated high above the Vemork works. It would doubtless have a cataclysmic impact on the plant below, but would very likely ‘prove fatal to the whole population in the valley’. The risk of collateral damage was unacceptably high.
Wilson argued that options three and four were pretty much one and the same thing: a commando force was a suicide squad; they would stand little if any chance of escape. Colonel Robert Neville, chief planner at Combined Operations, tended to agree, but still he favoured such an assault. Several dozen commandos could overpower whatever defences the Germans might have in place, and put Vemork out of action for the duration of the war.
Wilson and Tronstad remained convinced that the Grouse force needed to be used, in a small-scale guerrilla-style attack. With Skinnarland on the ground, and four others poised for their insertion, it was the option that made the greatest sense, they argued. A small force of Norwegians would stand by far the best chance of getting into the plant without being noticed, and of making a getaway.
For now at least, Wilson appeared to have got his way. Vemork would remain chiefly an SOE operation, with Skinnarland and party being the means to effect the vital mission. Fortunately, the Operation Grouse team was in the final stages of their intensive training.
And the man that Wilson intended to lead them figured that they were ready to strike.