ON JANUARY 3, 1946, the ten Uranium Club scientists were released, free to return to Germany and to their scientific pursuits. In the years and decades afterward, they gave many interviews, wrote their memoirs, and contributed to biographies and other books about their war work. These were added to the thousands of secret reports, letters, and papers gathered up after the collapse of the Third Reich.
Many histories have been written.
At the start of 1942, the Germans and the Allies were roughly neck and neck in terms of their atomic theory and research. Then the Americans pushed ahead with the Manhattan Project, while German Army Ordnance, and then Speer, backed away from committing to such an expansive program.
R. V. Jones, a leading British intelligence officer whose war work focused on combating German technology, wrote, “A bad experiment on one side or the other was often the cause of divergence.” If the Germans had not ruled out graphite as a moderator so early, would they have been the first to realize a self-sustaining reactor? Might this have convinced officials to allocate resources to an atomic bomb instead of to the V-1 and V-2 program? Should they have invested more time and effort into U-235 isotope separation instead of a heavy water reactor to produce plutonium for a bomb?
Some historians have concluded that the campaign against Vemork’s supply, from cod-liver oil contamination by Brun and others, to Operation Gunnerside, to the American bombing raid, to the sinking of the D/F Hydro, was all for nothing. But if the Germans had fashioned a self-sustaining reactor with heavy water, what then? Diebner had believed he would have enough heavy water by the end of 1943 for a reactor. He would not have stopped there. “The obliteration of deuterium production in Norway,” he wrote later in his memoir, “is one of the major reasons why Germany never obtained one.”
Making history was never the aim of the Norwegian saboteurs, nor of the British sappers who were sent before them. After the war, the sacrifice of the British Royal Engineers and RAF crews of the ill-fated Operation Freshman was not forgotten. Thirty-seven bodies were recovered and buried at gravesites in Norway. Bill Bray’s headstone reads, “To live in the hearts of those that loved me is not to die.” The four sappers killed in Stavanger, whose bodies were dumped into the sea, were honored with a memorial close to where they died. Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” was read in English and in Norwegian translation at the ceremony: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning, / We will remember them.” Memorials were also established for the Norwegian men, women, and children who perished in the American bombing raid at Vemork and in the sinking of the Hydro.
As time went on, those who had participated in the heavy water sabotages were pinned with medals from many grateful nations: Norway, Great Britain, Denmark, France, and the United States of America. But whenever they were asked about their most significant, defining action during the war, most of them mentioned operations other than Vemork.
For Joachim Rønneberg and Birger Strømsheim, they were most proud of Fieldfare, the operation they launched in March 1944 to prepare for the destruction of German supply lines in the Romsdal Valley, culminating in the blowing up of a key railway bridge. Knut Haugland thought his work setting up wireless radio links with London was his greatest achievement. Jens-Anton Poulsson considered his actions in Operation Sunshine the most important of his war against the Germans. It could be argued that Leif Tronstad would similarly have downplayed Vemork, had he lived, particularly since his diaries mention “the juice” only a couple of dozen times, among the many other operations he planned that fill their pages. Despite their feeling that their other operations during the German occupation deserved as much, if not more, attention, it was the commandos’ actions against Vemork that attracted the most accolades. They were Norwegian heroes, international heroes.
Beyond the medals and memorials, the war marked the men of Grouse and Gunnerside in other ways, sometimes dark ones. They had seen friends die. Some had become killers. All of them had lived under the constant threat of discovery and death. At times in the years after the peace, they woke up in the middle of the night, imagining the enemy at the door, reaching for guns that were not there. Einar Skinnarland’s children knew well not to approach their father suddenly. Some instincts never fade. A few of them turned to alcohol to dull memories they never asked for. Many simply sought solace in the place where they had once struggled to survive. The “smallness of being a human being in nature” settled Rønneberg. “You could sit down on a stone and let your thoughts fly away.” Knut Haugland spent 101 days in 1947 as the radio operator on the Kon-Tiki, a simple raft that crossed the Pacific Ocean with only a six-man crew. Beyond offering great adventure, the journey exorcised his own demons. What nature and time could not mend, their friendship supported them through. Until the end of their lives, Kompani Linge members gathered often to share experiences that few others could understand.
Knut Haukelid dedicated his war memoir to his father, who had died in 1944 as a result of the deprivations he endured as a prisoner at Møllergata, and then at Grini. The dedication read, “He died without knowing why...” Although he was arrested for having illegal radio equipment in his warehouse, the truth was that Bjørgulf was targeted because of his son’s actions, all of which Knut had had to keep hidden from him.
Skinnarland did not fight for accolades, nor for the pile of medals he received, which he kept in a drawer of junk in his basement. The deaths of Tronstad and Syverstad weighed heavily on him. Only in his last years did Skinnarland revisit his war diary and the long string of telegrams he had sent from the Vidda, and only then did he allow himself some pride over what he had endured for the sake of his country — and the world. He shared this with his family, among them his daughter, Kirvil. He and Haukelid, who ultimately reconciled with his wife, Bodil, both kept the promise they had made each other in the summer of 1943 by naming their daughters such.
Finally, Rønneberg, the leader of Gunnerside and the last surviving saboteur, who was ninety-six years old in 2016, often spoke eloquently about why he braved the North Sea to be trained in Britain and why he then returned, twice, by parachute, to Norway. “You have to fight for your freedom,” he said. “And for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It’s like a glass boat; it’s easy to break. It’s easy to lose.”
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