IN MØLLERGATA 19, Olav Skogen lay quietly on his bed, the rainbow of bruises across his body throbbing with pain. Even though nine days and nights had passed since his torturers last came, he was on constant alert for their return. He knew their routine: They came at night. A door opening. The shuffle of footsteps down the corridor. The rattle of keys. Then the light in his cell would flicker on, the door thrown open, and they would be upon him.
On their last visit, March 1, four of them had taken him to Victoria Terrasse. The shouting began immediately: What did he know about the underground resistance in Rjukan? “What are you trying to hide?” They were in a murderous mood, and Skogen knew that something significant was at play. When he told them he knew nothing, their leader, a burly bear of a man, pulled back his fist and punched him in the face. The blow knocked him from his stool onto the floor, where he lay half-conscious. As they pulled him back to his feet, he promised himself yet again: Never a word.
Then they fitted a screw clamp to his right shin. When it dug into his bone and still he did not answer their questions, they tightened another on his left shin. He tried not to scream as the clamps tore into his flesh but could not help the guttural sounds that escaped his mouth. Silently to himself, he repeated the words he’d heard Churchill deliver in a radio address before the German Blitz, as if the British prime minister were speaking directly to him: This is your finest hour. When the punishment of his legs did not persuade him to talk, his torturers inflicted the same on his arms, which swelled like balloons. Then he passed out. A bucket of water poured over his head had the intended effect of waking him up. Then they kicked him in his sides until he passed out again. As he crept back to consciousness, he overheard the four Germans speaking about Vemork, about how the plant had been blown up and the saboteurs had yet to be found. A faint smile flickered across Skogen’s face before another kick lifted him from the floor. When he next awoke, he was back in his cell.
That night, March 10, still suffering from his injuries — one eye half-shut and his limbs swollen — he heard the familiar footfall. His torturers reeked of alcohol. “Until now you had first-degree and second-degree torture,” one told him. If he did not cooperate, the third degree would commence: ripping off his fingernails and breaking his bones. Continued resistance would see him hanging from the hook on the wall until he spoke or died, whichever happened first. Skogen was silent. “You’re not fit to be examined tonight,” another said. “But soon you will be well enough, and then we’ll come for you one last time.”
Never a word.
*
“Operation carried out with 100 percent success. High-concentration plant completely destroyed. Shots not exchanged since Germans did not realize anything. Germans do not appear to know whence the party came or whither they disappeared.”
On March 10, Tronstad had his long-awaited confirmation from Swallow. More messages followed to Home Station over the course of the day: news of Falkenhorst’s inspection at Vemork; a multitude of arrests in Rjukan; the information that only three of the party had been sighted — and only three were being hunted; and a note from those Swallow men who wanted a firm mandate to continue their work in Norway, Haukelid among them.
Tronstad was moved by this last request. Here were men who had already risked so much, and they wanted to stay and do more, no matter the inevitable crackdown after Gunnerside. He and Wilson sent a message of their own: “Heartiest congratulations on excellent work done. Decision to continue your work approved. Greetings from and to all.” Two days later he delivered his report to the SOE at Chiltern Court. His best estimate was that between six hundred and seven hundred kilograms of heavy water had been destroyed (four months’ worth of production) — and without an aerial bombing that would have caused considerable collateral damage. The Germans would need at least six months to reconstruct the high-concentration cells and an additional four to six months to return production to previous levels. In total, this would delay German heavy-water supplies by ten to fourteen months.
Tronstad sent the same report to Eric Welsh at SIS, writing in an attached note: “It’s justified to say the Germans have suffered a very serious setback of their project in utilizing the atomic energy for war or other purposes.” Sir John Anderson, his team at the British atomic program, and Winston Churchill were all informed of the same. The operation gave both the SOE and Kompani Linge a major victory, elevating their reputations.
This success was in stark contrast to the fortunes of Operation Carhampton. The Tromøsund never made it to Aberdeen. Odd Starheim had escaped some tight spots in the past, but this time Tronstad knew that he was probably dead. The RAF swept the North Sea but found no sign of the steamer. German newspapers celebrated its sinking: “England’s once-proud Navy is so depleted that she needs to steal ships from little Norway... but just as the pirates were jingling their ill-gotten golden reward in criminal pockets, the Nazi fighter planes came upon the scene and sent the gangsters and their prey to the bottom of the ocean.”
In his diary, Tronstad blamed the British for providing insufficient cover for the escaping ship. In other entries, he wrote, “We must accept these losses” — they showed the brave fight being put forward by Norway — “grim in our loneliness,” and that Norwegians had “sacrificed enough for a while.” He was most affected by the loss of Starheim, and kept a photograph of him, shoulders draped in his country’s flag, on his mantelpiece.
But Tronstad knew, above all, that they had to carry on. He arranged the dispatch by sea and air of several teams of Kompani Linge agents to establish resistance networks with wireless radio stations in Oslo, Trondheim, Ålesund, and elsewhere — all in the expectation of a future Allied invasion. To provide for their security, he was also fighting a political war, pushing the high command and the SOE to keep these resistance cells independent instead of having a central Milorg command that would risk the entire network if it were infiltrated.
Using intelligence provided by the cells run by Tronstad, the RAF destroyed key structures at the Knaben mines, which provided molybdenum to the Germans, used in armor plating. Operation Granard saw the sinking of a cargo ship loaded with pyrite. And a mission named Mardonius was underway that planned to use limpet mines to blow up enemy troop and cargo ships in the Oslofjord.
All the while, Tronstad continued to develop his atomic-intelligence network. On March 15, he and Eric Welsh sat down with Victor Goldschmidt, a Swiss-born but Norwegian-educated professor who had recently fled Oslo for Britain. Goldschmidt offered some limited insights into the Nazi program and urged that Niels Bohr, who was Jewish, be brought to London as soon as possible. As one of the fathers of atomic physics, Bohr was too important to be left in occupied Denmark.
In fact, Goldschmidt’s proposal had been rebuffed by Bohr himself, but he’d insisted something be done to convince him. The Danish physicist, who believed he could best serve his country by remaining in Copenhagen, had also turned down Welsh and Tronstad when they had approached him earlier that year.
In the midst of this work, Tronstad hoped every day to hear news of Rønneberg and his men — to hear their “heartbeats” by wireless once they arrived in Sweden. With a hunt for the saboteurs now underway, they needed to hurry, just as those who had stayed behind needed to keep out of sight.
*
On March 13, the tenth day of their trek, Rønneberg and his men were just north of Lillehammer, still roughly a hundred miles from the Swedish border. Despite averaging twenty miles a day, they had moved more slowly than Rønneberg anticipated. The snow, the need to travel at night, and the difficulty crossing valleys and fording rivers had all cut at their pace. They were struggling to stay nourished, stealing food from cabins along the way to supplement the ten-day supply of rations they had brought for the journey.
Their muscles were exhausted from the persistent strain, and their skin chafed from the constant damp. Now they faced the heavily trafficked Gudbrandsdalen Valley that lay between them and the Swedish border. They set out before dawn to dodge any weekend skiers who might be staying in one of the several hotels in the area. As the sky grew light, two German Junkers shot past overhead. The men hoped they were mail planes traveling between Oslo and Trondheim. They could not be certain. A few hours later, they settled down in their sleeping bags, not quite yet out of the valley, and took turns keeping watch.
That evening, when they were preparing to get going again, Idland asked to speak with Rønneberg alone. Idland had been struggling to stay with the team, and there had indeed been some stretches of rough terrain that they would have traversed on skis if Idland had had the skill. “You must all speed up and get yourself to Sweden,” Idland said. “I’ll follow.” Rønneberg, who felt that Idland’s workhorse attitude more than compensated for any lapse in athletic ability, dismissed the idea. “Stop it now,” Rønneberg said. “You’re imagining things.” Idland tried to protest, but Rønneberg cut him off. They would arrive in Sweden together.
Under the light of the moon, they headed across Gudbrandsdalen. The roads were sheer ice so they kept to the fields, and there was little wind, but it was very cold. The thin straps of their rucksacks cut into their shoulders, and their legs ached after climbing the valley. After midnight, Rønneberg signaled them to stop, and they prepared beds in the woods, laying pine needles and heather on top of the snow. Then they wriggled into their custom sleeping bags, which were proving to be lifesavers.
Over the next seventy-two hours, the men tramped in a southeasterly direction, through woods and fields, often battling driving snow and sudden winds. They crossed a number of ski tracks, evidence that there was a lot of movement in the area, possibly German. They often struggled to navigate, unable to find points in the distance or in the dark to orient themselves on their maps. At these times, Rønneberg advanced on instinct, buttressed by his experience orienteering and the months of studying their escape. Perilously low on rations, they also sometimes ventured deliberately off course, desperate to find cabins with food stores. Often they found little or nothing.
Late on March 16, after a mistaken diversion down the wrong valley, they came to the Glomma, the largest river in Norway. To their shock, it was clear of ice. Rønneberg sent Storhaug, a native of the region, off to find a boat. The rest of the team took cover in a hay shed to wait for him.
After a few hours, Storhaug returned: he had located a boat they could steal. In the dark morning hours of the seventeenth, they rowed across the Glomma, then sent the boat drifting downstream. A miserable, frost-ridden rest in their sleeping bags followed. In the morning, they continued their journey, giving a group of lumberjacks a wide berth, then crossing through a confusing tangle of woods, roads, and streams that for hours left them at a loss as to their position. The heavy snow made each step a labor.
They broke into the cabin of someone Storhaug knew to be a Nazi sympathizer, convinced he would have a rich supply of food. He was wrong; the cabin was unsupplied. Again, they slept outside in damp sleeping bags and sweat-soaked clothes, but they were too ruined by exhaustion and hunger to care. Rønneberg dreamed of tables groaning under the weight of platters of food.
They woke up in a blanket of fog. It was fifteen days since they had set out from Lake Skrykken, and they were fewer than twenty miles from the Swedish border. After a time, they approached a road that cut through a long, open field. Crossing it now would expose them in broad daylight. They would have waited until dark, but they had too few rations and they were so close to reaching Sweden and safety. Rønneberg instructed the men to stay low and move quickly. Then, “All right, let’s go.”
The team skied as fast as their legs would carry them across the field, feeling like they were in the middle of an assault, eyes darting left and right, watching out for any trucks or cars. They reached the road, their breath heavy in the air. After checking that nobody was coming from either direction, they crossed over. Then they hurried through the other side of the field, their backs exposed to the road. Within minutes, hearts thumping in their chests, they were into the woods and able to slow down as they passed through a half-frozen marsh.
In the midafternoon, sun blazing down, they finally took a long rest. They shed their shirts and boots, spread out their sleeping bags to dry, and ate what was left of their food.
“Guys,” Idland said. “When we get to London, I don’t want to see your bloody faces for fourteen days. I’m completely sick of you.” The others smiled and laughed, at ease for the first time in weeks. They were so close to safety now.
As night fell, they moved through some low country pocked with stone-ridden ravines, thickets, and gnarled, twisted trees. It was tough going, and orientation was difficult as well, but there were no Germans in sight. At 8:15 p.m., March 18, they finally passed Border Marker No. 106 into Sweden. Then they built an open fire, settled themselves down around it, and burned the final map. Afterward, they crawled into their sleeping bags, shattered with relief and exhaustion.
In the morning, they buried everything that marked them as soldiers, including their guns. Wearing civilian clothes, they had to hike twelve miles over the border before they found a patrol to surrender to. Their cover story was that they had escaped from a German prison where they had been held for underground activity. If the Swedes believed their story, the five would be brought to a refugee camp, from where they could reach out to Norwegian officials connected to SOE.
*
When Knut Haukelid was a little boy, he believed that there were trolls living in the Norwegian countryside, far from prying eyes. Now, barely a day’s journey from the mountains and lakes where he’d spent so much of his youth, he and Kjelstrup were just like those trolls, hiding high above the treeline in a thin-walled hut.
But it was not a carefree life. In truth, they were starving. It was not just hunger pangs they suffered but the kind of deprivation that left the body weak and the mind empty of purpose. They knew that they needed to hunt but also that the attempt, if unsuccessful, would sap what little strength they had left. Scraping his plate of crumbs after another paltry meal one night, Kjelstrup said, “When this war is over, I’ll spend all my money on food.” Haukelid looked at his friend’s cheeks sunken under his red beard. Badly weakened after months on the Vidda, Kjelstrup was in a bad way.
Over two weeks had passed since they left Skårbu. They had trudged west across fifty miles, hauling a sled laden with weapons, radio equipment, and other gear, until they arrived at a lakeside cabin on the grounds that encompassed the Haukeliseter mountain lodge. Haukelid’s cousins lived three hours away in the small farming village of Vågslid, and they had stocked the place with canned food and oats. From it, Haukelid and Kjelstrup planned on launching an underground resistance cell in the area.
Soon after their arrival, they heard that the local magistrate was on the lookout for the Vemork saboteurs, aided by several German patrols, so they headed southwest to a mountain hut in the neighboring district to lie low. They ran through their rations quickly, and their early hunts for reindeer were unsuccessful. With his ski pole, Haukelid had skewered a scrawny squirrel stuck in a snowdrift, but it took almost as much effort to skin and cook as it provided in nourishment. They took to eating raw any small animals they trapped or shot. When they were not dreaming of food, they were dreaming of firewood. The best they could find were juniper bushes buried in the snow or small birch trees, which took half the day to collect and get back to their hut.
By the last week of March, Haukelid and Kjelstrup were in parlous shape and knew they had to get back to Vågslid for food. Then they would travel onward to Lake Møs. After leaving Skårbu, Skinnarland and Haugland had intended to move on to Nilsbu. There, Haugland planned on teaching Skinnarland how to code and transmit wireless messages so he could operate his own radio station in the area.
Haukelid and Kjelstrup left for Vågslid on a gray, foggy morning. They skied down from their hut, then headed east through the mountains until they reached Haukeli Road, which had been hewn out of the rough rock with pickaxes some decades before.
In the late afternoon they reached Haukelid’s uncle’s farm outside Vågslid. Haukelid waited by the side of the road while Kjelstrup went up to get bread and other provisions. Haukelid was too well known in the area to risk exposure. As he waited, an ominous feeling came over him. Trusting his instincts, he retreated behind a mountain birch. Moments later, two German soldiers carrying rifles came around the hill and walked toward his position. Crouched low, Haukelid gripped the handle of the pistol tucked into his belt. The soldiers passed within five feet of him, but did not detect his presence. Nor did they notice his ski tracks on the road.
At the farm, Kjelstrup did not receive a warm welcome. Haukelid’s cousin passed him four loaves of bread and urged him to get away. A huge sweep of troops had descended on the district. “It’s not safe in the village,” the cousin said. “It’s forbidden to go between farms, and the Germans are patrolling the road every hour.” Kjelstrup left and descended toward the road on his skis. As he rounded the bend, he spotted several soldiers on patrol. He braked abruptly and ducked down in the snow, hoping that Haukelid was out of sight. They had unwittingly entered a trap.
*
After reports pointed to the Hardangervidda as the base for the Vemork saboteurs, a manhunt was launched on March 24, and Fehlis himself established temporary headquarters south of Rjukan. No effort was to be spared in rounding up those responsible for the attack and anyone who supported them. Fehlis sent an army to accomplish the task: thousands of Wehrmacht infantry, hundreds of German and Norwegian police, Gestapo investigators, and SS shock troops, and, finally, dozens of Jagdkommando platoons. These were elite soldiers who specialized in destroying guerrilla groups where they lived and operated. Numbering close to eight thousand men in total, Fehlis’s army was aided by locals who knew the countryside and was supported by roving patrols of Fi-156 Storch spotter planes.
A Norwegian hunter named Kristiansen had, after an outing on the plateau, returned to his village with English chocolate and a tale about the well-armed soldiers who had taken him hostage on the Vidda. The police chief had arrested him and passed him on to the Gestapo for interrogation. Patrols had uncovered evidence to corroborate his account. According to their interviews, “Seven men were seen on skis on the Hardangervidda, going toward Rjukan. Two were in civilian clothes; five in uniform; and carrying, among other things, submachine guns. All had white camouflage clothing on.” Reports stated that a cabin on Lake Skrykken had been broken into, and that “tracks of five pairs of skis and a sled were seen running from Rjukan and avoiding inhabited areas” after the attack.
If enemy commandos and the Norwegian resistance were persuaded that the Vidda was an ideal base for their operations, then Fehlis intended to prove otherwise. His troops circled the barren plateau like a noose, then he launched his raid. Troops scoured the countryside, searching every farmhouse and cabin for the fugitives or their supporters. They were also on the lookout for illegal weapons, explosives, radios, newspapers, and other contraband. Travel within the Vidda was banned, and anyone found wandering in the region would be arrested immediately. Any dwellings used for resistance purposes would be immediately burned. In his operational orders, Fehlis warned his men that the agents were heavily armed and would use any means to escape. They should search buildings in force and be prepared for ambushes. Every effort should be made to bring them in alive so they could be interrogated, but if they refused to surrender then they should be shot.
Although the Vidda was his key target, Fehlis knew that he could not limit his search to the plateau. In Rjukan and surrounding towns, roadblocks were established. Travel, even on foot, was restricted to those with passes. Curfews were imposed, and posters informed residents that anyone who violated the new restrictions would be “shot without warning.” Further, Fehlis ordered intensive searches in the neighboring regions to the south and west of Lake Møs. Intelligence had revealed that these areas were hotbeds of resistance. He ordered his troops to flush out those hiding in the mountains so that they would be snared on the roads, which were easily patrolled. Another force was sent to the Swedish border, in case the fugitives were headed in that direction.
It took weeks to assemble his army, but Fehlis used the men to full effect. The Vemork sabotage and the burgeoning resistance movement must be dealt with, and he was the one to deal with them. Terboven and Falkenhorst were paying attention, and Berlin surely awaited news of his success.