The four Norwegians had weathered the storm. Or at least, the first storm. Others had followed. And those were interspersed with periods of unseasonal warmth, in which the going became horribly wet. There seemed to be no happy medium on the Vidda: it was either a freezing, biting blizzard, or a soggy thaw. Clumps of snow stuck to their skis like chewing gum. Mostly they only had candle wax to lubricate the undersides, and it proved next to useless.
Poulsson had put them on a daily ration of a quarter of a slab of pemmican, four crackers, a smear of butter, a slice of cheese and a square of chocolate, plus a handful of oats. They were burning far more calories than they were eating, as they attempted to haul their supplies to the hut above the Skoland Marshes, their intended destination. Hunger gnawed at their stomachs.
To make matters worse they were forced to move in relay. Much of their equipment just couldn’t be left behind at the landing zone. They were carrying the one radio, the battery to power it (which alone weighed thirty pounds), the Eureka homing beacon, a hand-operated generator, weapons, survival kit and food. It was impossible to move all of that in one journey. So they would advance, dump what they were carrying, and retrace their steps for a second or third load.
It was backbreaking; soul-destroying.
Then they got lucky. On the third day of their leaden march they came across an abandoned farmhouse. They devoured the frozen meat and some old flour discovered in the kitchen. But, better still, they found an ancient-looking wood and canvas sledge. Upon examining it more closely Poulsson could barely believe it: his father had given him it as a child. Somehow, it had ended up here.
It was as if Providence had saved them in their hour of greatest need. This was deliverance. No longer would they need to move in relay. Over the next six days they pushed steadily onwards, their loads split between their packs and a heavily laden sledge. It was still tough going, but at last they were making real headway.
At one point Poulsson—leading—crashed through the skin of a half-frozen lake. Kjelstrup, lying prone on the thin ice, had to reach out a pole to their leader to help drag him free. Poulsson was soaked to the skin, and there was no easy way to dry out on the Vidda. They pushed onwards, the heavy sledge being dragged behind them and Poulsson feeling chilled to the bone.
Lips blistered. Exposed skin cracked and wept painfully. The four men were constantly wet and cold, and never able to get properly dry. Their feet, plodding through the damp snow of the valleys and across semi-frozen lakes, were permanently sodden. Even the wood of their skis became waterlogged, making each step a trial of endurance. Their leather boots began to fall apart. Each morning they would have to stitch them up with needle and thread. With wild beards, sunken eyes and emaciated looks, they began to resemble a band of desperadoes.
Wherever they found one, they made the Vidda’s hunting cabins their base for the night. In several Haugland had discovered fishing rods. These he expropriated and strapped to the sledge—donations for the war effort. One evening, thirteen days into their march, he cobbled together a mast for his radio using fishing rods bound end to end, so he could raise his antennae to a greater height. That should increase his chances of making contact with London.
They’d paused at another hunting hut, in the Reinar Valley. Here Poulsson had scribbled in his small diary: ‘We are fairly done in.’ Haugland was determined that now was the time for team Grouse to break radio silence. It would raise their spirits considerably, and they sure needed that right now.
For Haugland, learning to operate a radio and to send in Morse code had been like trying to learn to touch-type. At first he’d been all thumbs—making clumsy and snail-like progress. But with time he became a virtuoso. At war’s outbreak he’d been serving as the radio operator on a 3,000-tonne merchant ship. He’d tuned in—spellbound, horrified—to distant SOS signals, as ships were sunk in fierce sea battles, while all he could do was listen.
Later, at the SOE’s Special Training Station 52—its school for wireless operator agents—he’d been the star pupil. He could punch out Morse faster than most, and cipher codes with great aplomb. He could build a wireless set from the barest assortment of spare parts. In fact, his teachers had decided that he should be instructing them. Now, thirteen days into Operation Grouse, Haugland still had not made radio contact with London.
It irked him greatly.
At dawn—one of the best times of day for raising a signal—he fired up the shortwave system. Just as soon as he started tapping away at his key, he seemed to get reception. London was hearing him, after all. But just as quickly, the radio went dead. Haugland could see what had happened. Somehow, the huge and weighty battery that should have lasted a month had died—perhaps the intense cold of the Vidda had done for it. He tried charging the battery with the hand-held generator, but no joy. There was no way around it: the battery was kaput.
The mood in the hut was grim. In a little over two weeks the moon window would open, and the Freshman force was scheduled to fly in. But without a working radio they could provide zero intelligence to Wilson: no update on Vemork’s defences; no assessment of the Skoland Marshes as a landing zone; no weather reports; and, crucially, no reception party for when the Sappers dropped in.
It was now that Helberg stepped forward. Lake Møs was less than a dozen kilometres away. He would push ahead and track down the Skinnarlands—either Einar or Torstein—and seek help. If a replacement battery could be found, they could still rescue the mission.
As the lone skier set out, Poulsson scribbled in his diary: ‘Helberg proved the old saying: “A man who is a man goes on till he can do no more and then goes twice as far.’”
Hours later Helberg reached the Lake Møs dam and tracked down Torstein Skinnarland, who worked there. Torstein had been warned by his brother to expect friendly company. He confirmed to Helberg that his brother had some stores—including a precious battery—hidden away on the Vidda, in preparation for the Grouse team’s arrival.
They parted, agreeing to link up once the Skinnarland brothers had got the battery—plus some extra food supplies—sorted. On his way back to the hut, Helberg met up with the rest of the Grouse party. The temperature had dropped and there had been a fresh fall of snow. The going was easier, and they decided to press onwards.
Early on 5 November—sixteen days after they’d dropped into the Vidda—Poulsson and his men reached their intended destination, the small Sandvatn hut, above the Skoland Marshes. It lay in a remote bowl of snow-blown land, with few high peaks in the immediate area. It was the kind of place four men could remain undetected, and the open terrain should be good for making radio contact.
Despite the improved weather, they were utterly spent. Greyfaced, emaciated, their clothing hanging in tatters, their boots in ruins, they slept the sleep of the dead, relieved that they had at least made it thus far. Even Poulsson’s childhood sledge had found the journey too much: en route the wood had begun to warp and crack under the strain.
The following morning a hungry Poulsson and Kjelstrup set out on skis to recce the marshy terrain around the shores of Lake Møs—the would-be glider landing zone. By now, the four men were pretty much out of rations. Helberg set forth alone for the Møs Dam, to check if the replacement battery was ready, and to scavenge food. Haugland stayed at their Sandvatn ‘home’, to set about building a new and improved radio antenna.
First he lashed together two fishing-rod radio masts—each like the frame of a tepee—and between them he strung a length of insulated copper wire. Next he threaded the radio’s signal cable out through one corner of the hut window and attached it to the copper wire, which hung between the two towers like a washing line. If anything could raise a signal to London, this should.
All he needed now was a source of power: the elusive battery.
In London, Wilson was feeling distinctly edgy: more than two weeks and still not a word from Grouse. Only silence. Dwell on the issue, and the possibilities were endless. Radio problems: that was the most likely. The weather: atrocious over the Vidda, by all reports. The enemy: perhaps Poulsson and his men had been betrayed by a ‘quisling’, as local Nazi sympathizers were known, and caught.
If that were the case, it didn’t bear thinking about. The SS and Gestapo had ways to make just about any man talk. They all did, eventually. If any of the Grouse team had been taken alive before they could swallow their fast-acting cyanide capsules, Operation Freshman would be blown.
At times like these, Wilson had a way of calming the inner storm. When confronted with what he termed a ‘ticklish situation’, he would take himself back to his schooldays at Glenalmond. In his mind’s eye he would hear the comforting, musical rumble of the Almond River—his bedroom was on the north side of the school, overlooking the water—as it gushed under graceful boughs and around polished boulders. It served to centre him.
‘This gave me the strength and the will to carry out whatever was required,’ Wilson remarked. And if the sounds of the Almond didn’t do the trick, he’d transport himself into the nearby glen, where the gentle rustle of the leaves served to soothe troubled thoughts. Over the past two weeks he’d been spending a lot of time at Glenalmond, at least in his inner thoughts.
Just a few days earlier Wilson had received a long report from Einar Skinnarland, detailing the most recent defences put in place at Vemork and the local weather conditions. ‘There is at present a German guard of about forty men and auxiliaries … twenty-five are ordinary Austrian soldiers, and about fifteen German sappers … Vemork is barred by barbed wire and possibly land mines … Personnel of the guard equipped with standard rifles and hand grenades … Snow on mountains and most of the mountain lakes are frozen over.’
This was useful, but Wilson needed a direct and instantaneous radio link. He needed bang-up-to-date intelligence on Vemork’s defences, and in much greater detail. Skinnarland’s intel came by courier, so it was days and sometimes weeks old. Most crucially, he needed a team to whom he could radio through a warning that the Freshman force was in the air, and to ready the landing zone.
Yet there was still no word from Grouse. Despite the Glenalmond effect, the situation was nerve-racking. On 8 November Wilson sent an encrypted telegram to the SOE office in Stockholm. He needed a message sent by courier to Einar Skinnarland, asking him to seek out the Grouse team and determine their fortunes.
‘We have been unable … to establish proper wireless communications with party and for urgent and important operational reasons we must, repeat must, be in touch with them at the earliest possible opportunity.’
Wilson didn’t know how quickly the message could be got through to Skinnarland, and a reply fed back to London. It was inconceivable to green-light Freshman without having a team on the ground to guide the force in. If Grouse had failed, then Freshman would have to be abandoned, at least until Wilson could raise and insert a replacement team. And, with the best will in the world, there just wasn’t the time.
A month ago the Tube Alloys experts had warned of the seemingly unthinkable—that Britain should prepare for a Nazi attack employing ‘fission products’, the by-products of a working nuclear reactor engineered into a crude radiation bomb.
‘Precautions should be taken to avoid a surprise attack. This could be done by the regular operation of suitable methods of detection … routine tests should be carried out in large towns … Special precautions to preserve secrecy would have to be taken.’
Fresh intelligence from Vemork fuelled such concerns. That autumn Kurt Diebner, the chief of the Uranverein, had paid a personal visit to Norsk Hydro. He’d made it clear that all necessary measures’ were to be taken to ensure that the rate of heavy water production was boosted. Work was well under way to introduce a new type of catalytic exchange’ technology, designed to massively boost production.
One of the scientists working at Vemork was an Austrian, Dr Hans Suess. Having discovered that he was secretly anti-Nazi, Jomar Brun—Vemork’s inside man—lured Dr Suess into a series of candid conversations, asking exactly what lay behind the Germans’ urgent demands for heavy water? Dr Suess’s reply was revealing: the Uranverein needed five tonnes of SH200 as the moderator in their ‘uranium machine’.
Time was fast running out. In fact, this was a ticking time bomb. The Allies were anticipating a nuclear attack on their cities. Britain—the SOE—had to act, and fast. What in the name of God had happened to Grouse?
In the Sandvatn hut, Haugland hoped very much that their fortunes were turning. At nightfall on 9 November 1942—three weeks after their insertion onto the Vidda—he made his final preparations. He glanced out of the hut window. In the faint moonlight his fishing-rod radio towers glistened eerily. Before him on the hut’s crude wooden table lay a replacement battery, courtesy of the ‘magician’—Einar Skinnarland.
But would it work? Would the radio power up properly and the message get through? Only one way to tell.
On a notepad Haugland had scribbled a seemingly random series of letters: his cipher message. The SOE taught its wireless operators to use the ‘poem code’. Both sender and receiver had before them the same poem. Certain words were selected from the verses, and these would be used to formulate the code. All the receiver needed to know was which the chosen words were, and they would be communicated by an indicator group of letters set at the start of the message.
At first, radio operators tended to pick easily remembered verses: Shakespeare was an obvious choice. But such classics proved too obvious to the Germans, who were intercepting messages and trying to break the code. The Grouse team would settle upon a far harder poem to crack: a piece of verse popular only in Norway, and written in Norwegian. ‘Fjellsangen’ was actually the ‘anthem’ of Gjest Bårdsen, one of the most notorious outlaws, jailbreakers, and, subsequently, authors, in Norwegian history.
In 1939 a hugely popular biopic had been made in Norway telling Bårdsen’s life story. ‘Fjellsangen’ was its theme song. For Poulsson, Helberg, Kjelstrup and Haugland—four fugitive raiders, hiding out in the snowbound wastes of the Vidda—it was a peculiarly apposite choice for their poem code. In English Fjellsangen translates as ‘The Mountain Song’.
Haugland reached for his Morse key. Behind him stood his three fellow SOE operators, watching him like hawks. Haugland noticed that oddly for him—a man who’d proved cool under fire so many times—his hand was shaking. He powered up the radio. It came to life, no problem. He tapped out his identity call sign, and listened.
Almost instantly, a series of bleeps pulsed through his headphones, telling him that he had contact with the SOE home station, at Grendon Underwood. Behind him, his three fellow mountain men practically danced with joy. Smiling faintly, Haugland bent further over his cipher pad as his hand began its delicate dance with the Morse key.
‘Happy landing in spite of stones everywhere,’ he tapped. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting for message. Snowstorm, fog forced us to go down valleys. Four feet snow impossible with heavy equipment … Had to hurry on for reaching target area in time.’
His second message outlined what they had learned about Vemork: ‘Important news: after Glomfjord sabotage German sentries sent to industrial centres … Forty-four Germans arrived area of Rjukan … German engineer troops just finished the tunnel along the water pipelines … Later message about what we need get from glider.’
Grouse had arrived. They were in place and on the air.
The following morning they struck doubly lucky. Haugland and Helberg came across a sheep that had got trapped amidst some rocks. They killed it and brought it home for the pot. Poulsson, who fancied himself something of a cook, boiled the head over the wood-fired stove, adding some tinned peas and whatever else he could lay his hands on. The others were staring at his back, salivating. They even set a cloth on the table.
Outside the wind howled, driving gusts of snow against the window. Yet another storm had hit the Vidda, but no one inside the Sandvatn hut seemed to mind. All thoughts were focused on the coming feast. The single candle lighting the hut flickered as the wind beat against the walls. Poulsson turned from the stove, stew pot gripped in hand. He took a step towards the table, tripped on a reindeer skin rug on the floor, and the precious meal went flying.
With barely a moment’s hesitation the four got onto hands and knees and spooned up the stew from the floorboards. When they had finished eating only a few gnawed bones remained. Kjelstrup had complained continuously about having ‘hair in my soup’, which had the rest in fits of laughter.
Poulsson recorded in his diary: ‘The chaps were not too amused.’ Regardless, they went to bed that night with blissfully full stomachs.
In an excited-looking scrawl on the transcription of Haugland’s radio message, Wilson had written: ‘Ask for full list of extra equipment needed.’ It made sense to fly in any supplies requested by team Grouse with the Freshman force, and as soon as possible.
From Haugland’s radio messages, it was clear that Vemork was being further reinforced and strengthened against an attack.
If London could get the gliders in, the time to strike was now.