Birger Stromsheim was Ronneberg’s next choice for his team. With his broad face and curly blond hair, Stromsheim—at thirty-one, the grandfather of the group—was as honest as the day is long. His SOE file concluded that he was level-headed and ‘reliable as a rock’.
After ‘grandfather’ Stromsheim came Fredrik Kayser, a thin beanpole of a man who was another veteran of the war in Norway. He’d been shot at, suffered frostbite and put an axe through his own leg by accident, none of which had dampened his good humour or stopped him from fighting. He was unyielding and relentlessly cheerful under pressure, ideal qualities for what was coming.
After ‘cheery’ Kayser there was Kasper Idland, a veritable man mountain. Like many physically imposing individuals, Idland was something of a gentle giant. At school he’d been bullied terribly. Worried lest he would hurt someone, he hadn’t retaliated. But after one particularly bad day he’d asked his mother if it was all right to fight back. She’d told him it was. The next day he knocked down the two worst offenders. He was never bullied again.
Idland was a superb soldier, and he had what Ronneberg and Wilson prized above all else: an unshakeable loyalty. After ‘gentle giant’ Idland came the final member of the team—Hans ‘Chicken’ Storhaug, so named due to his thin, scraggy chicken’s neck. Storhaug was an expert in the back country, and he was familiar with the terrain stretching all the way to the Swedish border. He would be a vital asset during their escape—that’s if they made it in and out of Vemork alive.
Five good men and true; six with Ronneberg; ten—once they linked up with team Grouse; eleven, if Grouse One—Einar Skinnarland—should join their number. Eleven men on skis and equipped only with what arms and explosives they could carry across the ice-bound Norwegian wilderness: on these men rested the Allied efforts to stop Hitler from building the world’s first atomic weapon.
As with the Grouse and Freshman teams before them, Ronneberg’s force were rushed through specialist training, including a stint with a new and improved mock-up of the Vemork SH200 plant, at Brickendonbury Hall—Station XVII. They arrived at the grand country house to be shown to their dormitory. On each bed lay a kit bag, plus various equipment, including a brand new Colt .45.
Instinctively, each man went about checking the pistol’s action. Ronneberg cocked his Colt, but when he pulled the trigger there was a deafening crash and plaster dust drifted down from a hole in the wall. Two of the Station XVII staff came running to investigate.
‘What the hell is going on?’ one demanded.
Poker-faced, Ronneberg pointed to the hole in the wall. ‘I was just testing my weapon. It works perfectly.’
The Station XVII staffers glanced at each other, shaking their heads in exasperation. Where did they find these crazy Norwegians?
Ronneberg and his men would have one significant advantage over their predecessors. Just prior to the Freshman debacle, Jomar Brun—the bespectacled double agent at the Vemork plant—had been told to flee, lest he be swept up in the repercussions that would follow such an attack. Brun had recently arrived in Britain.
Working under an assumed name given him by the SOE—‘Dr Hagan’—he had been provided with a flat in London to house himself and his wife, who had fled to Britain with him. Dr Hagan was now the chief technical adviser for the coming mission. He’d brought with him a plethora of documents on the Vemork plant, from which the Gunnerside plan of attack could be polished and refined.
Wilson, meanwhile, was desperately seeking clear information on what von Falkenhorst might have learned from the Freshman captives. On 30 November he sent the following message: ‘Information urgently required about details of bombers and gliders which came down in mountains … Have some personnel escaped? Were aircraft destroyed by fire? Has part of equipment been caught by enemy?’
That message went to Swan, the code name for another resistance cell based to the north-west of the Vidda, in the region where the aircraft were believed to have crashed. With Grouse off the air, there was little point in trying to contact them, and in any case this was not their area. An answer came back from Swan a few days later.
‘[Bomber] crashed on mountainside all occupants of aircraft being killed. Of glider’s passengers 6 were killed in crash and 11 taken prisoner and shot. Other glider apparently made forced landing—8 killed and 9 taken prisoner and shot at German camp … Crews are described as “armed civilians.’”
What Wilson needed to know was whether the Freshman captives had been forced to talk, and if so what had they revealed. It was then that an SOE agent—Norwegian Kirkeby Jacobsen, code name Crow II—managed to escape from Gestapo custody. By sheer coincidence Crow II had been used to question five captured British soldiers. It turned out that they were the injured Sappers from one of the Freshman gliders.
When Crow II reached London Wilson had him debriefed by MI5 to check his bona fides. They came back with confirmation: ‘CROW reliable.’
Crow told Wilson that the Sappers had refused to divulge their objective, which was why he was forced to intercede on his captors’ behalf. The Gestapo hoped that the presence of a fellow SOE operative and good English speaker might convince the British captives to talk. The Germans already knew where the Sappers had been heading: they’d retrieved maps from the glider wreckage with Vemork ringed in blue. Now they sought the detail.
Crow II outlined to the Sappers the less savoury methods used by the Gestapo. He explained that they wouldn’t be able to hold out for ever. They were crammed into a dark, damp, unsanitary cell, and they’d received no treatment for their injuries. They were highly vulnerable. If they didn’t agree to speak, they would be ‘worked on’. With time, they would reveal all: their mission, their means and their numbers, their local associates, and their planned escape route.
In light of Crow’s testimony, Wilson had to presume that General von Falkenhorst knew everything.
As if to confirm this, at dawn on 3 December 1942 air raid sirens echoed across the deep valley that houses Vemork. In truth, there was no bombing raid. Instead, the Germans used the blaring klaxon to keep the Rjukan residents indoors while they sealed off the town. Gestapo agents—supported by hundreds of regular troops—made house-to-house searches, rounding up dozens of ‘suspects’. In particular, they were hunting for the local team that had been charged with helping to guide the Freshman force in.
The mastermind of the Rjukan raid was Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, Hitler’s governor of Norway. A bespectacled, coldblooded former bank clerk, Terboven was an early acolyte of the Führer. When Terboven had married the secretary of his good friend, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler was the guest of honour at their wedding. In Norway Terboven had a personal security force of around 6,000 at his command, and his brutality swiftly alienated the Norwegian people.
Terboven’s apogee in terms of sheer cruelty was what became known as the ‘Telavag tragedy’. Telavag was a small village on Norway’s western coast. The inhabitants were found to have been hiding two men from the Linge Company. On 26 April 1942 German forces came to arrest those men, Gestapo officers rushing the loft where they were hiding out. There was a shootout, and two Gestapo officers were killed, including one infamous SS commander.
Terboven personally oversaw the reprisals. The villagers were forced to watch as their houses were torched, the boats in the local harbour sunk and their livestock killed. The men of the village were rounded up and either gunned down on the spot, or carted off to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in north-west Germany. Few would ever return. Even the women and children of Telavag were imprisoned, some until the end of the war.
As Terboven’s friend, Goebbels, had decreed, regarding the people of the occupied nations: ‘If they cannot learn to love us, they should at least fear us.’
The day after the Gestapo’s Rjukan raid, Terboven and von Falkenhorst paid a visit to the Vemork works. Speeches were given, and instructions issued about how security at the plant was to be beefed up. High-voltage wires would be mounted, running alongside the pipelines just above ground level. They would be perfect for electrocuting any would-be saboteurs. Further minefields would be strung across any possible approach routes, and the Skoland Marshes, the intended Freshman landing zone, were to be cordoned off under guard.
Maximum vigilance was required. ‘Our security teams must be mobile and capable of fighting within the plant,’ von Falkenhorst stressed. ‘They must be able to quickly pursue the enemy, overtake him in the course of his flight, and overpower him in hand-to-hand combat … The gangsters will choose precisely the most arduous approach route to infiltrate a facility, because that is where they expect to encounter the least protection and the flimsiest of barriers.’
The German general’s words revealed how deeply he had come to understand commando and SOE doctrine, and how much must have been wrung out of the Freshman captives. ‘The enemy spends weeks, even months, meticulously planning sabotage operations and spares no effort to assure their success. Consequently we too must resort to every conceivable means in order to thwart their plans …’
A third individual accompanied Terboven and von Falkenhorst: Obergruppenführer (SS General) Wilhelm Rediess, chief of the SS in Norway. Like Terboven, Rediess was a diehard Nazi. He was an advocate of the Lebensborn (‘Fount of Life’) programme, which promoted the breeding of ‘racially pure and healthy’ Aryan children, most often sired by SS troops. During his time, around 8,000 Lebensborn children would be born in Norway, making it second only to Germany in the number of such births.
Acting on Rediess’s orders, the Gestapo made a beeline for the Skinnarland residence on the shores of Lake Møs. The Skinnarland parents were in the midst of holding a party for one of their sons. The birthday celebrations were interrupted by the snarl of motorcycles arriving in their yard. Einar Skinnarland was absent, but Torstein was there. The Gestapo seized him, mistaking him for the ‘radio operator and resistance leader’ that they were after.
Reports on much of this reached Wilson’s ears. Even for him it was hugely daunting. First Musketoon, and now this: the fallout from Freshman could hardly have been worse. Wilson had feared all along that Freshman was a suicide mission. He had been right. Those brave and courageous Sappers had been sent to their deaths in a tragic waste of human life. But the wider costs—they might determine the fortunes of the entire war.
In spite of this Wilson had no choice but to continue. The former Scoutmaster had given his word that Vemork’s SH200 production would be stopped. He’d claimed this as an SOE operation, and Winston Churchill himself was keeping a watchful eye. The 17th of December was fast approaching: zero hour for Gunnerside.
There was one potential upside right now: much of what Wilson had learned from the field had come from Haugland, team Grouse’s radio operator. In the midst of the German crackdown (Razzia) Poulsson and his men had risked breaking their silence to ensure that Wilson fully understood what they were up against.
In freezing conditions in a remote hut in the depths of the snowbound Vidda, Haugland crouched over his cipher key, finger tap-tapping away. ‘On account of glider landing the Germans have carried out extensive raids in … Telemark … In Rjukan over 100 Gestapo and troops. State of emergency … Germans … appear to know that Vemork was to be attacked with Norwegian help.’
Detailing developments at the Vemork works itself, Haugland signalled: ‘A.A. guns 20 mm. Searchlights … Gestapo continuing investigations … Rediess, Falkenhorst and Terboven have all inspected. Machine gun placed on roof of hydrogen factory.’
But for their dedication to the mission the Grouse team was suffering. As he hunched over his Morse key, working by candlelight alone, and in a hut in which condensation froze to icy tentacles on the inside of the walls, Haugland’s hands were frozen right through. Yet he knew that he couldn’t risk wearing gloves, for that would alter his radio ‘signature’, and that in turn could spell disaster.
Those who beavered away at the SOE’s home station grew intimately familiar with a field agent’s Morse signature. It was one of the ways in which they could triple-check that a message was genuine. One operator would cut his dots shorter than another, or prolong his dashes, and his or her ‘fingerprint’ was recorded in their file. If it changed, that might signify that the Gestapo had taken over a radio station and was using it to send disinformation to try to entrap others.
Such risks were very real, and Wilson was hyper alert to them. Earlier that month a fellow Norwegian radio operator—code name Lark—who was being hunted by the Gestapo, had suddenly gone off the air. Days later he apparently came up on his regular sked, but his signature had changed markedly. He’d sent the following message:
‘Lost five figure code. Therefore use only the phrase from now on: “Not until the Norwegian flag waves”. Number 3217. That’s all.’
The message was riddled with errors. The ‘phrase’—Lark’s prearranged emergency communications sentence—should have read: ‘Not until the Norwegian flag flies over Berlin.’ It was both incorrect and incomplete. The number ‘3217’ wasn’t even Lark’s correct operator code.
‘The assumption is the operator, if he was our man, was doing everything he could to indicate that his message was being sent under duress,’ Wilson concluded. Sure enough, he duly received a report confirming that Lark had been arrested and tortured, and his radio station taken over by the Gestapo. Heaven forbid that Haugland and the Grouse team should suffer a similar fate.
In mid December Haugland apparently sent a message in the middle of the night, but the signal didn’t seem to match his signature, at least not to those who decoded it. Alarm bells began to ring. With the Razzia in full swing, had the Gestapo swooped on team Grouse and taken over their radio station?
The signaller decoding the message was seated in a comparatively cosy room in a quaint English village—a very different kind of environment from the Vidda in mid December. He ran through a series of checks, to all of which he received the correct answer. Then he fired off the final security question—the response to which had to be something that no Gestapo agent might ever guess at.
‘What did you see walking down the Strand in the early hours of January 1st, 1941?’
Stiff fingers tapped out a reply. ‘To Colonel. Three, repeat three pink elephants.’
In his Chiltern Court office—Wilson slept just a few paces along the corridor, and was permanently on call—the former Scoutmaster grunted with satisfaction. His radio operators were instructed to bypass all normal security channels if need be, and to come to him direct. Any message prefaced with ‘To Colonel’ was for his immediate attention, no matter what time of day or night it might be.
Wilson had been woken from his sleep and warned of the fear that Grouse had been captured and broken. Personally, he’d doubted it. Haugland’s ‘pink elephants’ answer had proved him right. ‘The German … mentality could never have cracked so frivolous an exchange,’ Wilson remarked. In truth, Haugland had sent the message while bundled up in his sleeping bag, and with bare hand tapping at his Morse key. His fingertips were so frozen that his ‘signature’ had changed.
But still Wilson was worried. He needed Grouse more than ever. He needed them to feed back vital intelligence to London and to guide team Gunnerside in. And this time he would need them to provide almost half of the force that was to hit the Vemork plant. Yet as Christmas 1942 approached Grouse was being hunted as never before, and it wasn’t just the Gestapo, the SS and scores of German troops who sought to finish them.
As Wilson knew full well, his men had run out of supplies. Due to the terrible weather conditions over the Vidda, it had been impossible to fly any resupply airdrops, which was a widespread problem that winter.
‘The requests from the field for … stores were continuous and not half of them could be met,’ commented Wilson. ‘Every effort was made to give … a reason when supplies could not be sent, but this was not always possible … Tobacco, coffee and chocolate were always in short supply. Many regard these as luxuries. To men living on mountain tops they were essentials.’
Cold and starvation stalked the men of team Grouse, pushing them to the most extreme measures in an effort to survive.