Joachim Ronneberg was one of those rare beasts: a soft-spoken, modest individual, but also a born leader of men. He’d proved a natural at the kind of dark arts that the Linge Company commando school specialized in. At age twenty-two and with no prior military experience he’d completed his training, only to be made the Company’s newest instructor.
New recruits couldn’t believe that one so young was in charge of teaching them. Then they got to know him. Ronneberg was not a man most would choose to cross lightly.
‘Ronneberg was one of the most outstanding men we had,’ commented Colonel Charles Hampton, his boss at the SOE’S Glenmore training school. ‘He was well-balanced, unflappable, very, very intelligent and tremendously tough.’
Six foot three and steely-eyed, Ronneberg had escaped to Britain like so many of his compatriots on a fishing boat. He’d carried with him a strong sense of right and wrong—the moral compass that had compelled him to leave Norway and join the fight against Nazi Germany.
He was clear on what he had come to Britain for: ‘We felt that there was no sacrifice too great to get the Germans out … People must realise that peace and freedom have to be fought for every day.’
Ronneberg had been in Britain for eighteen months, and he’d started to view the island nation as his new, and much-loved, home. ‘I will never forget the welcome that the British showed us,’ Ronneberg would remark. ‘We never felt like guests in Britain, more like partners in the same cause … I always felt I had two homelands: one where I was born and one where I lived during the war.’
Joachim Ronneberg was just the kind of man that Wilson was looking for. The SOE needed ‘men of character who were prepared to adapt themselves and their views—even their orders at times—to other people and other considerations … Common sense and adaptability are the two main virtues required in anyone who is to work underground, assuming a deep and broad sense of loyalty, which is the basic essential.’
Ronneberg hailed from Alesund, on Norway’s rugged north-western coast. Growing up and working in the family fishing business, he was a natural over the mountains. There was a side of him that was intensely physical and thrilled to danger. At the SOE’s training school he’d proven particularly gifted at handling explosives and executing mock raids.
When Ronneberg travelled to London to be briefed by Wilson, he still knew practically nothing about Operation Gunnerside. All his commander at Glenmore had been able to tell him was that he was to choose five men to take on a mission about which he could give no further details.
Ronneberg towered a good eight inches over Wilson, but very quickly the two men found that they were seeing eye-to-eye. Wilson had once told the Linge Company recruits that he had ‘Viking blood’, though it had thinned over the years, just like his hair. In Ronneberg he figured he’d found the real thing.
‘So, where are we off to?’ Ronneberg asked, diving right in.
When he spoke, he seemed to do so with all of his body, his powerful shoulders and arms moving in rhythm to the beat of the words. It was as if a top athlete was limbering up for some incredible feat of human endurance. Wilson didn’t doubt what Ronneberg would be capable of, if only he could get him and his men in on the ground.
‘To Vemork,’ came the equally direct answer. ‘To blow up the plant there.’
Wilson proceeded to brief Ronneberg on the specifics of Operation Gunnerside. Then he took a very unusual step—one that reflected the high respect that he afforded the Norwegian, in spite of his youth. He explained about the Operation Freshman debacle, going well beyond Ronneberg’s need-to-know.
Wilson concluded with this: ‘One plane crashed, and one returned to base. Both the gliders are missing, and according to reports we have received the prisoners from at least one of the gliders were shot by the Germans, although they were all in uniform.’
That last bit of news—fresh in—had come as a real shock to those who had overseen Operation Freshman.
At first, Lieutenant Colonel Henneker had insisted that his men should be listed as missing in action. The families—including the wife of Bill Bray, who was due to give birth in just a few weeks’ time—were told that ‘it was by no means certain that the raiding party are killed, captured or wounded’. Some might still be at large. Their relatives were advised to ‘be patient and say nothing’.
But then reports had filtered in from the SOE office in Sweden, based upon reliable sources in Norway, confirming that three British aircraft had been forced down by bad weather. One had suffered a cataclysmic crash, with all aboard killed. A glider had crash-landed with several survivors. Those men had been rounded up, taken to a German camp and executed by firing squad that same day.
A second glider had also crash-landed. Some of the survivors at least had been taken in for questioning. Others were apparently shot. The situation was confused, but one thing did seem certain: Henneker’s conviction that the Germans would behave in a humane fashion towards the Freshman captives had been sorely misplaced.
Wilson held little back from Ronneberg. He pointed to the fate of the Musketoon captives before Freshman, who were also feared to have been murdered. Indeed, reports received from Stockholm suggested that all British forces sent to carry out acts of sabotage were to be ‘shot out of hand, whether in uniform or not’.
Wilson warned Ronneberg that he and his men would likely suffer a similar fate, should they be taken prisoner. And their chances of capture were high. Post-Freshman, any element of surprise was almost certainly gone: the German defenders at Vemork would be alert to any attack.
‘You have a fifty-fifty chance of doing the job, and only a fair chance of escaping,’ Tronstad explained, bleakly.
Ronneberg and his men were to be given suicide capsules, so if capture did threaten they could kill themselves. Wilson’s stark orders left little to the imagination on that front. ‘Two “L” pills of potassium cyanide are to be carried by each man. Any man about to be taken prisoner will take his own life.’
Wilson moved on to the one positive aspect of Operation Gunnerside: he had conjured up a cunning plan. Ronneberg’s force would hit the plant on Christmas Eve, the one day of the year when he figured the guards at Vemork might be inclined to drop their vigilance.
‘The raid has to be carried out before the Germans can build up their defences still more,’ Wilson concluded. ‘And that means there’s no time to lose.’
Ronneberg and his men were to fly in on 17 December—giving themselves a week to link up with Grouse, acclimatize, and familiarize themselves with the target. To hit that timescale they had just three short weeks to prepare.
Ronneberg seemed utterly unfazed by what Wilson had told him. He replied that he was ready. ‘We didn’t think about whether it was dangerous or not,’ Ronneberg would remark. ‘The most important decision you made during the whole war was the day you decided to leave Norway to report for duty. You concentrated on the job and not on the risks.’
He’d already chosen his team, going for ‘strong, physically fit men with a good sense of humour who would smile their way through the most demanding of situations.’ They were suited to a mission that would demand stamina, guts, determination, snow craft and survival skills in equal measure.
Ronneberg had chosen as his deputy one of the most battle-hardened men in the entire Linge Company: Knut Haukelid. Haukelid was twenty-nine years of age, comparatively old for a Linge Company recruit. He had a twin sister, Sigrid, who was a rare beauty. Discovered by a Hollywood producer, she had become a famous actress known as the ‘siren of the fjords’.
Sigrid shared her twin brother’s fervent anti-Nazi views, but not his looks: there was nothing immediately striking about Haukelid. Five foot ten, he had a massive chest and muscled shoulders beneath wavy blond hair. It was the eyes that had it. In the blink of an eyelid Haukelid’s piercing blue gaze could switch from joker to hunter to lone survivor, as the need arose.
Knut and Sigrid Haukelid had been born in the USA. Their father—a civil engineer—had emigrated in 1905, seeking work. But a year after the twins were born, the family moved back to Norway, where their father established an engineering business. From the very start, Knut—dyslexic, but intellectually gifted—hated school. He found the droning teachers boring, and the slight stutter he suffered as a child only served to tighten the classroom screw.
He rebelled, turning to pranks. Once he released a live snake in class, earning yet another detention. The one place where he truly seemed to come alive was the wild. His parents owned a lodge on the Vidda, and young Knut would spend every spare hour there, hunting, fishing, camping and skiing with his grandfather, Knut Sr. During evenings around the campfire Knut Sr. would regale him with tales of old: of wood trolls, dwarves and elves ruling the wild.
Knut Jr. loved those stories. He believed in the trolls especially. The only thing he seemed to be more attached to was his childhood teddy bear, Bonzo. That name—‘Bonzo’—would become both his childhood nickname and his code name within the SOE.
In his teenage years Bonzo devoured novels by the American authors Steinbeck and Hemingway, whose universal themes of love, war, loss and injustice spoke to him powerfully. Something of a lost soul or searcher, he travelled to America in his late teens, seeking to ‘find himself’ in the nation so compellingly portrayed in Steinbeck’s and Hemingway’s prose.
He took a job labouring on a rural farmstead. He loved the outdoor, physical life. But he rebelled against the farmer’s puritanical ways. One evening at dinner he offered to say grace. He proceeded to sing a song in Norwegian not remotely connected to God. Once he was done, he tucked in with gusto, relishing the sheer irreverence of the moment.
When Haukelid returned to Norway he remained something of a rebel without a cause, but that cause was coming. Still a wanderer, he travelled to Berlin to study. One night he was confronted by a drunken Nazi Party zealot, spouting vile prejudice and invective. Haukelid flattened the man with one punch.
He returned to Norway, but the Nazis’ blind hatred followed him there. When the Germans invaded, Haukelid volunteered to fight. He was given a rifle and thirty rounds of ammunition—it was all the Norwegian Army officer could spare from their paltry supplies.
‘There are plenty of Germans at Klekken village,’ the officer advised Haukelid and his fellow volunteers.
They commandeered a truck and set out, fighting hard for several days, but the Germans brought in armour and Haukelid found himself on the retreat. As he left the area, he saw entire villages in flames. The German troops were torching any settlement where they encountered resistance. It was a brutal warning: fight, and we will burn you out of your homes.
‘We swore that we would never give in,’ Haukelid would later write of this time, ‘not even if the Germans won the war.’
Haukelid and his fellows retreated to the back country, where their local knowledge should lend them an advantage. They were pursued through the sweeping valley of Valdres, in central southern Norway. With no air cover and no anti-tank weaponry, Haukelid and his brothers in arms were reduced to sniping at German armour with their small calibre Krag rifles.
At the head of the valley lay the thickly forested Tonsaasen gorge. From the high ground and in thick forest cover Haukelid and his fellows hurled Molotov cocktails—glass bottles filled with petrol, and plugged with burning rags. They managed to torch twelve of the monster tanks. Trapped, the German soldiers panicked, retreating a good twenty miles down the valley.
Haukelid and his fellow fighters seized prisoners and much weaponry. ‘But the Germans seemed to have unlimited forces,’ Haukelid would write of this time. ‘At last we were with our backs to the snow-covered high mountains.’
Haukelid and some others escaped. They decided to head for Oslo. En route they took a ferry across the Mjosa Lake. On-board they discovered a man wearing the uniform of the Hird, Quisling’s Nazi guards. When the ferry reached the middle of the lake, Haukelid approached the man. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he announced, offering a handshake. The Hird man reached out, and Haukelid and his fellows lifted him over the rail and into the water. Only his cap was left floating.
The captain of the ferry came aft to investigate. When he found out what had happened, he remarked: ‘Excellent. Full speed ahead!’
Haukelid still had faith in the ancient creatures of the wild. He believed the trolls would never let his country be ruled by the Germans. But there was worse to come. After he escaped to Britain, his house was ransacked and his wife and mother were arrested by the Gestapo. His hatred of the enemy deepened, becoming deeply personal.
By now Haukelid was at the SOE’s so-called ‘gangster school’, a name that he concluded was ‘undoubtedly right’. The motto of the gangster school was: never give the enemy half a chance. It was drilled into trainees day and night. Haukelid was taught to fight hard, fast and dirty: ‘If you’ve got the enemy down, kick him to death.’
Haukelid didn’t so much as flinch. ‘We, who came from a small oppressed country, gladly resorted to every method which could injure the enemy, for the underdog cannot afford to carry on war according to the rules of the stronger party.’
None other than Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins would write of Haukelid:
Knut is first and foremost a hunter, a man who knows and loves the wild, who is a part of it, whose every sense is observant; next he is a philosopher, a man who has seen all sides of life … and has come by his own experiences to a sense of values reminiscent of the Greek philosophers.
Thirdly, and lastly, he is a man of action who faces directly any situation that comes to him, with the confidence that there must be a solution … and that he will find it. Warmhearted, cool-headed—there is no better combination in peace or war.
Ronneberg had one worry about Haukelid: he was a through-and-through rebel, willing to break the rules simply for the hell of it. He was also several years older than Ronneberg and far more experienced in guerrilla warfare. The Gunnerside leader wondered how a rebellious Bonzo would take to being under his command. Only time would tell.
Haukelid concluded of his SOE gangster school training: ‘It is incredible what a man can do with a handful of explosives placed at the right place at the right time—he can halt an army or devastate the machinery on which a whole community depends.’ With Operation Gunnerside, Bonzo was about to be called upon to do just that.
Only now, the fortunes of the entire world would turn around the forthcoming mission.