Poulsson’s pipe had long gone cold. Deployed to Norway for what had supposedly been a month-long mission, he’d run out of tobacco. But in truth, that was the least of his worries. As he surveyed the scene in their new redoubt—a bare hut known as the ‘Cousin’s Cabin’—he knew that his team’s situation was utterly desperate.
They’d been reduced to scratching in the snow for ‘reindeer moss’—the grey-green lichen that the reindeer herds graze on during the long winter months. Each of them was familiar with the moss, but not as a foodstuff: they’d used it as bedding during childhood camping trips.
The Norwegian wilderness harbours the largest reindeer herds in Europe. Poulsson reminded his men that in winter all those millions of animals survived pretty much on the moss alone. ‘It’s full of vitamins and minerals,’ he told them, in an effort to bolster their flagging spirits.
Certainly, it was eaten by the native Sami people of the Arctic, well boiled and mixed with berries, fish eggs or lard. But unfortunately Poulsson and his men had precious little to add to the tough, bitter lichen. It made a thin, sour soup that did little to satiate their hunger, and it was debatable whether cutting the wood to boil the lichen used up more energy than the lichen gave back.
The Cousin’s Cabin had actually been built by Poulsson, along with his cousin—hence the name. It lay amidst a ‘finger lakes’ region—an area crisscrossed by narrow spears of water, reaching across the land like the fingers of one hand. It was incredibly remote, wasn’t marked on any maps, and no trails passed near it—making it ideal if you wanted to disappear.
In a drawer in the table Poulsson had found the guestbook. He’d flicked through it, wistfully: there were the names of all his dear friends and family. Many still lived in and around Rjukan, thirty kilometres south-east of the isolated hut. But, for all their loved ones knew of their existence here, Poulsson and his fellows might as well have been on another planet.
The last few days had seen one near-disaster after another. It was ‘remarkable’, Poulsson noted in his diary, that they’d somehow escaped death or capture. Haugland had been in the woods scavenging for food when German soldiers appeared. He’d dived for cover, and the search patrol had missed him by bare metres. Poulsson and Kjelstrup had likewise narrowly evaded capture when out tracking reindeer.
But it was Helberg who’d had the closest brush: he’d headed for the Skinnarlands’ house just as the Gestapo had returned. Torstein Skinnarland was locked away in Grini concentration camp and his brother, Olav, had also been arrested, but the Gestapo were still on the hunt for Einar himself. Fortunately, a savage storm blew up, and Helberg was forced to turn back, so preventing him from stumbling into the clutches of the Gestapo.
Starving as these men were, they’d still had to carry all their weaponry, explosives, survival kit, heavy radio, the Eureka, plus batteries across the Vidda, to reach their new location. While laden down with the Eureka battery, Helberg had been caught in a blizzard. The man that Poulsson had hailed as being able to go on till he could do no more and then go twice as far, had finally buckled. As the weather worsened, he’d been forced to hide the battery in some woods and go to ground.
The winter of 1942-3 would be the worst in living memory. All four of the Grouse team were caught up in the storm that defeated Helberg. It blew into a monster—a snarling tempest that tore out of the dark heavens. There was no way any one of them could make it to the shelter of the Cousin’s Cabin. Instead, they were forced to burrow into the snow and curl up inside their sleeping bags.
‘We often had to crawl on all fours,’ Poulsson remarked of that storm.
At one juncture they had to shelter beneath one of their old parachutes, to fend off the driving snow. At another, Haugland was almost driven into a patch of open, freezing water. The wind was so powerful that it blew him across the ice, his skis seemingly incapable of getting enough grip to fight back. Had he tumbled in during such a storm, it would have been the death of him.
Finally, the tempest blew itself out. All four made it back to the Cousin’s Cabin more or less in one piece. They’d long exhausted the dog food—old, dried fish—that they’d scavenged from a farmhouse. Boiled, it had made a soup that had tasted delicious to men who were starving. In desperation they ate some salted reindeer meat that they’d discovered in a hut, but it turned out to be rotten. All went down with food poisoning.
Helberg had pushed himself too far. After eating the bad meat he developed oedema—a painful retention of fluid in the body, caused in this case by severe malnutrition. He put on twenty pounds. He was so bloated he couldn’t button his shirt properly and was forever having to pee. Yet, incredibly, he still tried to sally forth each day, gathering their kit together and desperately seeking food.
A mid-December radio message to the SOE home station gave a sense of their dire situation. ‘No contact. Charging of accumulator [battery] impossible. Current only about three hours. Send as little as possible. Draw home station’s attention to this.’
In extremis, Grouse had pretty much shut down.
If it hadn’t been for Einar Skinnarland, the four might not have made it this far. Hunted by the Gestapo, Grouse One had been forced to join their number in hiding. Better fed, resolute and of unflinching good humour, Skinnarland’s very presence bolstered their spirits. He’d also brought with him what little food he had remaining, plus a freshly charged battery.
Helberg would write of his presence: ‘It was a pleasure to be with him … A matter of tremendous importance in circumstances so difficult as those we were in.’
After Skinnarland’s arrival, Haugland blipped up for a rare moment on the air. His messages had to be brief now, for the longer he was transmitting the more chance there was of being captured. The Germans had mobile D/F units out, trying to pinpoint the radio signals emanating from the Vidda. They had search aircraft in the skies, and rumour had it that D/F units were also fitted to those.
The Gestapo would certainly be able to hear team Grouse. They knew that enemy agents were transmitting from somewhere in the snowbound wilderness of the Vidda. They just needed to find the source of the signals.
‘Einar Skinnarland … was hunted by Gestapo …’ Haugland’s brief message read. ‘He escaped to the mountains and joined us … Einar and his connections have been of great value.’
They certainly had been of great value, but not for very much longer. In arresting Torstein and sending Einar Skinnarland to ground, the Gestapo had cut off the one source of food that Grouse had been reliant upon. Starvation and the foul weather had become their chief enemies now, and they appeared to be winning.
On 10 December matters took a slight turn for the better. Haugland discovered a Krag rifle, plus some ammunition in a hut. Poulsson seized the rifle with undisguised joy: with a long-range weapon like this it should be possible to hunt reindeer. ‘Just wait until there’s game in the area,’ he cried. The challenge would be finding the reindeer herds.
The very next day Poulsson set out with rifle in hand. But he seemed to be cursed by the weather. Fog had descended across the plateau like a thick soup. The higher Poulsson skied in search of the herds, the denser it became. He would never spot them in such godforsaken conditions. That evening he returned from scouring the Vidda empty handed, and to a dark hut reeking of hunger and of sickness.
Henceforth Poulsson set out daily, and daily he returned to four sets of expectant eyes, having failed to find anything. The Cousin’s Cabin was warmed by a wood-burning stove, but the birchwood had to be dug from under the snow. For how much longer would his men have the energy to do that, Poulsson wondered? If the fire in the hut died, so would they. They would freeze to death and no one would be any the wiser.
The date of Gunnerside’s insertion was fast approaching. Ronneberg and his team were scheduled to parachute into a flat patch of snow lying not far from the Cousin’s Cabin. But what did Poulsson have to offer them? Five sets of hands that were listless and sickly, and barely able to hold a weapon.
Were he and his team even capable of manning the landing zone, and steering Gunnerside in? Poulsson just didn’t know. And by no stretch of the imagination would they be able to ski thirty kilometres across the Vidda, to mount an assault on the Vemork plant. Indeed, he was worried if they could even hold out.
Either he tracked down some reindeer, and quickly, or they—and the mission—were finished.
In London, Wilson was facing his own problems. As further evidence emerged about Hitler’s apparent order to execute all captured saboteurs, those in high office baulked at sending in yet more raiders. Mountbatten—already unsettled by the fate of the Freshman captives—was deeply troubled. Could he in all conscience continue to send out saboteurs, in the knowledge that any taken captive would be tortured and shot?
Mountbatten wrote to the chiefs of staff, seeking guidance. One way or the other, he felt he needed to brief Churchill. Wilson’s riposte to all this was simple: Vemork was SOE business now. Having fully briefed Ronneberg on what he and his men were heading into, he felt absolved. In any case, the Vemork mission was far too important for any such considerations to come into play. Even if Gunnerside was a de facto suicide mission, the men concerned were more than willing.
A late December memo was circulated regarding the Freshman executions and Mountbatten’s worries. Any action connected with ‘the alleged executions of his troops in Norway, is dangerous until we have carried out operation GUNNERSIDE which … has the same objective.’ Mountbatten was to be asked to ‘delay any action until we have given the “all clear.’”
In other words, they could afford to be squeamish once Hitler’s nuclear programme had been stymied, and not before. And that meant Gunnerside had to go ahead come what may.
Spurred by such concerns, Wilson and Tronstad decided to bring the Gunnerside team further into their confidences. If they were to run such terrible risks, they should at least understand why. Tronstad showed a report to the Gunnerside men. It was marked with all the usual secrecy stamps, and addressed to the very highest in Allied command.
‘It’s the heavy water,’ Tronstad remarked darkly, flicking through the pages. Haukelid got a good look at the contents: the report had to do with splitting the atom. ‘It’s manufactured at Vemork, and can be used for some of the dirtiest work that can possibly be imagined.’ With it the Germans will ‘win the war’, Tronstad warned.
Incredibly, Jomar Brun had brought something else out of Norway, along with his blueprints and papers; he’d carried with him two flasks of the precious liquid itself. Those two kilos of SH200 had been delivered into the hands of the experts at Tube Alloys. Urgent tests were carried out. No doubt about it, this was the real thing. Take this, combine it with plutonium and the right scientific know-how, and you could build a nuclear weapon.
In America, Stephenson met with Roosevelt. ‘What worries us more than anything is Niels Bohr,’ he told the President, ‘whose work is dangerously like atomic projects under way in the United States.’ He raised the risk of Bohr’s research in his Danish laboratory being harnessed to the Uranverein’s needs.
‘Could Bohr be whisked out from under the Nazi noses and brought to the Manhattan Project?’ Roosevelt asked.
‘It would have to be a British mission,’ Stephenson replied. Another one, and Vemork was yet to be destroyed. ‘Bohr is a stubborn pacifist. He does not believe his work … will benefit the German military … Nor is he likely to join an American enterprise which has as its sole objective the construction of a bomb.’ Bohr had good friends in Britain—fellow physicists that he trusted. They could reach out to him.
A microdotted letter was sent to Bohr. He retrieved the pinhead message in the privacy of his Copenhagen lab. He sent back a reply: he would not leave Denmark, even for Britain, and he would certainly not join any project to build an atomic bomb. In any case, ‘any immediate use of the marvellous discoveries of atomic physics is impracticable,’ he concluded.
But Bohr’s correspondence sounded an oddly contradictory note. He warned that the Germans—who treated him with kid gloves, for obvious reasons—were seeking more uranium and heavy water to build their atomic bombs. When word reached Churchill, Britain’s leader took a very dim view. Here he was in London preparing Operation Peppermint, an Anglo-American programme to defend the nations’ cities against a possible Nazi nuclear strike. In America, they were busy building radiation detection devices as part of that Anglo-American initiative.
Yet Bohr sat in his ivory tower preaching peace!
Bohr, Churchill fumed, came ‘very near the edge of mortal crimes’. Lindemann, Churchill’s chief scientific adviser, was equally worried. Germany ‘increases its demands for heavy water and metallic uranium,’ wrote Lindemann, ‘and German scientists now submit proposals for the use of chain reactions with slow neutrons for producing bombs.’
Lindemann proposed getting the SOE to plant an explosive device beneath Niels Bohr’s laboratory, where his cyclotrons whirred away, blowing all to smithereens.
But first things first: Vemork.
In Britain, the SH200 raiders had just received a massive fillip. Again, it had come from the amazing Jomar Brun. After Musketoon and now Freshman, it was clear that a force of just eleven men couldn’t fight their way into the plant. Only by stealth and surprise might Ronneberg and his team succeed, and Brun just happened to know of a hidden way to access the target.
On the side of the plant that faced the plunging gorge there was a small, man-sized hatch. It opened into a cable duct, one that ran across the ceiling of the hydrolysis plant. Brun had come across it only recently, largely by accident, when, after heavy snowfall, he’d been searching for an alternative way into the building. If it had been missed in the post-Freshman security shake-up, it might just offer a secret means to gain entry.
There was another advantage of sneaking in that way. ‘If you try and force the door to the basement,’ Tronstad advised the men, ‘you will likely trigger an alarm, which will result in a struggle with the German soldiers and many casualties. The killing of German soldiers will result in heavy reprisals … I therefore advise you to use the cable duct for entrance into the plant.’
There was one other juicy piece of intelligence, courtesy of Brun. Situated on the balconies that ran around the massive building were hydrogen burners. The plant workers called them ‘cannons’, because of the noises they made. When starting up, or if the flow of gas to the burners dropped, they would issue a small explosion, and sometimes even a large one.
Over time the German soldiers grew used to hearing such bangs. With luck, this might provide some cover for the Gunnerside force when their charges ripped apart the SH200 plant. At the very least it might buy them a little time.
Team Gunnerside’s three weeks of frenetic preparations were done now. Their assessment was glowing: ‘This was an excellent party in every way, and each member has a thorough knowledge of the target … Their demolitions work was exceedingly good and thorough and their Weapons Training outstanding. If the conditions are at all possible, they have every chance of carrying out the operation.’
Wilson felt heartened. The trouble now would prove to be the wild and tempestuous Vidda. The harshest winter anyone could remember held the Barren Mountain plateau in its savage grip, and the Operation Gunnerside flights kept getting cancelled.
The December moon window came and went. Wilson’s plan to strike on Christmas Eve had been sunk by the Vidda’s inclement climate. For both a well-fed and eager Gunnerside team, and for the starving men of team Grouse, the weather was the chief enemy now. Ronneberg and his men grew sick of the sight of RAF Tempsford, the ghost airfield.
It was as if the place was mocking them, for theirs had seemingly become a ghost mission.