The Winter Fortress

by Neal Bascomb

  Jomar Brun picked up the ringing telephone. On the line was a University of Oslo student who introduced himself as Berg. He was calling from Rjukan. The Fox wanted to meet with the Master in person as soon as possible. Tronstad was in London. Berg asked if he could come to Vemork to discuss the matter with Brun, who lived on the same precipitous crag of rock as the plant itself.

  “I’ll see you in an hour,” Brun replied.

  After hanging up the phone, Brun rang the newly reinforced guard station on the suspension bridge and instructed the Germans manning the post to allow the visitor to pass. Shortly after, the student, a member of Milorg’s “export department,” arrived on foot. He told Brun to prepare to leave as soon as possible. Winston Churchill himself had asked that Brun be brought to London forthwith.

  Brun insisted that his wife, Tomy, accompany him. Further, he needed some time to collect as much intelligence as he could before departing. Berg agreed, remaining in Vemork to help orchestrate the Bruns’ travel to Oslo.

  Two days later, on October 24, Jomar and Tomy Brun crossed the suspension bridge and traveled by bus to Rjukan. Brun had told his bosses that he had a doctor’s appointment in the capital. He carried a heavy satchel of drawings, photographs, and documents, as well as two kilos of heavy water. With Berg, they took a ferry down Lake Tinnsjø, then a train to the capital. Berg led them to a safe house in the city and left. Their new handler, Gran, another Milorg exporter, was now in charge. Brun passed over his intelligence, and Gran told him it would be microphotographed and couriered separately.

  Along with additional blueprints and drawings, Brun had much to reveal. Vemork was no longer fortified by its natural defenses alone. Sappers had strung barbed wire over the fences around the plant and its penstocks. They had started to set land mines, booby traps, and alarm tripwires. Austrian troops numbering close to a hundred and armed with automatic weapons were now billeted in Rjukan, Vemork, and beside the Lake Møs dam. The suspension bridge over to Vemork was guarded around the clock. Electrical wires were being run to the plant’s rooftop to power searchlights, and antiaircraft guns were expected soon. The Gestapo was rumored to have moved into Rjukan, setting up at its best hotel.

  Gran gave the Bruns new passports and travel passes, and asked them to hand over to him their engraved wedding rings, in case they were arrested along the way. The night before they left for Sweden, there was an urgent knock on the safe-house door. Gran had been followed by the Gestapo and had lost their tail only narrowly. The safe house was no longer safe. He led the Bruns on a hasty run through the dark streets to a luxury apartment behind the Royal Palace. The next day, they took a northbound train from the city with a new handler, stayed overnight at a farm by the border, and then walked across an unguarded bridge into Sweden.

  At about the same time, Einar Skinnarland arrived in Oslo. With his own intelligence on Vemork’s new defenses, he corroborated the reports from Brun. While in the capital, Skinnarland learned that he could stop his nightly vigil out at Lake Langesjå. The boys would not be coming. That was all he was told.

  At 9:00 a.m. sharp the day after the Grouse team had left England, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Henniker entered a cold, corrugated-steel Nissen hut on the Bulford military base, eighty-five miles west of London on the Salisbury Plain. The thirty-six-year-old had a trim mustache and a face hardened by his war experiences in France. Inside the hut were men from two field companies of the Royal Engineers. Before they’d enlisted, these young men were mostly skilled tradesmen: mechanics, electricians, carpenters, cobblers, plumbers, and the like.

  Henniker told the sappers that he knew they were as “keen as mustard” for action, but that he had to make himself clear. There was a big, very dangerous, very secret mission ahead. If they failed in its objective, the Germans might well win the war within six months. He needed volunteers but said that anyone who wanted to decline, whether because they were recently married or had a child on the way or were simply not up to it, would face no shame, no questions. Henniker had reluctantly taken charge of the training and planning of the Vemork mission from Combined Operations. He had concerns that the RAF was not up to the challenge of navigating to the drop site; and, as a career military man, he did not much like the idea of his sappers hitting a target in uniform, then switching to civilian clothes to effect their escape. They should fight their way out like the soldiers they were. An order, his seething general informed him, was an order.

  Every single sapper stepped forward to volunteer. Their number included Wallis Jackson, a burly twenty-one-year-old, skilled with explosives and more than happy to knock some discipline into new recruits. He also spoke French and wrote gentle letters to his mother and three sisters back in Leeds. Beside Jackson stood Bill Bray, a former truck driver and taut line of a man, who was expecting his first child the following January.

  Henniker instructed them to tell anyone who asked that they were preparing for an endurance contest against American paratroopers. In their first week at Bulford, Jackson, Bray, and a few dozen other Royal Engineers marched, practiced shooting, slept on straw mats, and suffered through lectures on how to keep their feet healthy (two pairs of dry socks). Then they were shipped off to northern Wales, where, weighted down with rucksacks, they were sent on long treks through the mountains of Snowdonia, up at dawn, done at dusk. Then again. They slept huddled closely together, a mound of men sharing not enough blankets. At the summit of one mountain, Bray collapsed from exhaustion. His company rustled him back on his feet and split up his kit between them. Those who fell and did not get back up were bounced from the mission. Any questions about why such conditioning was needed, what the mission entailed, and where it would take place were answered only with, “You aren’t to know. Not yet.”

  Few had even heard of the mission’s codename: Operation Freshman. Henniker was troubled by the name because it struck at the core of his doubts over the plan. Combined Operations had decided to bring his sappers to their target by plane-towed gliders instead of dropping them by parachute. Although the Germans had used an armada of these silent gliders in their invasion of Belgium, most notably landing them inside Fort Eben-Emael, once considered impregnable, this was the first time the British had attempted their use in an operation. Henniker wanted to see his men do their job and get out alive. He was not interested in breaking new ground.

  Group Captain Tom Cooper, Henniker’s counterpart in the RAF, had selected the latest model of glider for the mission: the Horsa Mark I. Measuring sixty-five feet from tip to tail and eighty-five feet from wing to wing, the Horsa was constructed of a solid wooden frame with an arched, plywood outer shell. It resembled a coffin, some said. It could carry a payload of four tons within its narrow fuselage—a jeep or an artillery gun, for example. There were collapsible wooden seats for twenty-eight soldiers. The two-pilot cockpit contained a simple steering column and rudder bar, along with a compass and gauges for air speed and pressure, rate of climb/descent, and tow-cable angle (what pilots called the angle of the dangle).

  It was the duration of the dangle that troubled Cooper. His 38 Wing command typically flew two-engine Whitleys, and the glider pilots were practiced at being towed behind this aircraft. But Norway was a four-hundred-mile flight across the North Sea, and only the four-engine Halifax would be able to haul a glider that distance—and back, if needed. His crews would need training to fly Halifaxes, with and without gliders, and he would need to borrow these heavy bombers from other commands. Naturally, the planes he was provided with were far from being the pride of the RAF. Even if everything were to go smoothly on the flight, Cooper still worried over the dangers his crews faced in Norway. The pilots would have to land the fragile gliders at night, in unknown territory prone to tempestuous weather and uncertain terrain.

  Cooper voiced his concerns to Combined Operations, as did Colonel Wilson and Leif Tronstad, who were in charge of organizing the reception crew on the ground. The military planners weighed this risk, among others, against not destro
ying Vemork, and the decision was taken to use gliders.

  Combined Operations had settled on its tactical plan over a series of meetings in September and October. A nighttime bombing raid by the RAF offered bad odds of hitting the target and would likely kill many innocent civilians. An attack by Kompani Linge saboteurs was turned down because a successful demolition would demand hundreds of pounds of explosives, too much for a small force to carry. Further, the Norwegians were not considered sufficiently trained to blow up the power station and heavy water plant. Thus the British sappers were selected.

  Fifteen would suffice for the raid, but given that some might be killed before reaching the target, Combined Operations decided that two forces of fifteen would guarantee the task was done. After all, as the planners reported in one meeting, “In all probability there could only be one attempt at the Freshman objective and that must be successful.”

  The SOE suggested bringing in the sappers via Catalina flying boat, giving them a chance to hit the target and then escape by plane. But the steep approach to the lakes, plus the fact that they might be frozen, ruled this out. Arriving by parachute was also discounted: To drop the sappers near the plant, the planes would have to fly too low, too close to Rjukan, risking detection. Worse, too many sappers might be injured on landing in the rugged terrain, and they might be too spread out to find one another promptly. Gliders, released at ten thousand feet, would land all the men together with all the equipment required for the operation. To reduce the risk of the party being discovered, the planners deemed it imperative that the operation proceed on the night of the drop.

  The plan took shape. The Grouse team would use lights to signal the two gliders, each carrying fifteen sappers, to land in the Skoland marshes. They would also employ the Eureka/Rebecca system, a new, untested technology that used radio signals to provide a homing beacon to planes. They would guide the sappers down the road on the north side of Vestfjord Valley to the plant, if possible by bicycle. At Vemork, the British troops would cross over the suspension bridge, neutralize the small number of guards, and place almost three hundred pounds of explosives to blow up the power station’s generators and the hydrogen plant. Once away from the plant, they were to separate into groups of two to three men and change into civilian clothes. Then they were to hike a two-hundred-mile route, often through populated territory, to Sweden. They would be equipped with maps, ten days of rations, and a few Norwegian catchphrases if they came across patrols. (“I’ve just been out buying stores for my mother.”)

  The new intelligence that had come in from Skinnarland and Brun, revealing an influx of soldiers and new fortifications at Vemork, prompted efforts to adapt the Combined Operations plan to reflect the situation on the ground. Suggestions were made to increase the force to 250 to 300 men or to launch a large-scale daylight bombing attack, best suited to the U.S. Bomber Command. But such changes would delay the operation by months. And a bombing raid in daylight hours would kill even more civilians than would a nighttime attack.

  Although the operation was clearly now more hazardous, Lord Mountbatten pushed Churchill to move forward with Operation Freshman as planned. “It is of great importance that [it] should take place at this time as greater difficulties will be experienced during subsequent moon periods,” Mountbatten advised. Given the threat of a German bomb, Sir John Anderson, a War Cabinet member and the ultimate authority on Tube Alloys, confirmed yet again to the operation’s planners that the mission was “of the highest priority.”

  At noon on November 2, Henniker brought his weary sappers by train to an unmarked station north of London. Awaiting them was a line of Humber Snipe automobiles. With curtains drawn over the windows, the cars took them to STS 17, the SOE’s industrial sabotage school in Brickendonbury Hall, a Jacobean manor that had most recently been a private preparatory school.

  If the British had one advantage to counter the unknowns of the weather and the landing site, it was their intelligence on the target itself. There to meet Henniker’s men for their stay at Brickendonbury Hall was Leif Tronstad. Thanks to the intelligence from Skinnarland and Brun, he was able to give the sappers blueprints of the buildings as well as photographs and drawings of the equipment to be targeted. He provided insight into where employees and security staff were at any given time, inside and outside Vemork. The sappers came to know virtually everything about the plant, down to the type of locks on the doors, the location of the keys, and the number of steps to reach the heavy water high-concentration plant on the basement floor. Major George Rheam, the British master of industrial sabotage, had even built a wooden mockup of the heavy water concentration cells for the sappers to practice on.

  There was just one problem. It had been more than two weeks since the Grouse team had left Britain, and Tronstad had heard nothing from them. Without the four young Norwegians, without regular radio contact, Operation Freshman was a no-go.

  Knut Haugland was cold, hungry, exhausted, and wet. His team members, skiing in a line behind him through the Songa Valley, suffered the same. Burdened by seventy pounds of equipment, Haugland often sank into the deep, heavy snow. The candle wax he had spread on his skis was proving useless; given the mild weather, the new snow clumped like gum to the bottoms, making the trek a snail’s slog. The limited amount of actual ski wax they had been equipped with had to be kept in reserve for the night of the sabotage operation.

  Haugland navigated around birch trees and the rugged, boulder-pocked terrain, sticking close to the banks of rivers and small lakes. In the full of winter, he could have easily skied straight across them, but on this morning of October 24, the ice was not yet completely frozen. In the few patches he thought they could cross, the surface water on the ice left their boots and socks drenched. After an advance of a few miles, Haugland and the others stopped, emptied their rucksacks, and took a short break to eat. Poulsson had rationed them each a quarter slab of pemmican, four crackers, a little spread of butter, a cut of cheese, a piece of chocolate, and a handful of oats and flour—for the day. The pemmican, a pressed mix of powdered dried game, melted fat, and dried fruit, was treasured above all. Altogether, they were probably burning twice as many calories as they were eating each day. Their rest over, the four returned to their morning starting point, this time with empty rucksacks, and retrieved the other half of their equipment and food, another seventy pounds each. This they hauled across the countryside, retracing their tracks in what at times felt like Sisyphean labor. A slight misdirection of their skis and they would sink to their waists.

  Their intended departure from the drop site had been delayed by a day due to a terrible storm. Through the night of October 21, the four hunkered down inside their tents, surrounded by their eight containers, as a blizzard raged. They awakened to four feet of damp snow and a forty-five-mile trek ahead. In ideal conditions, they could have skied this distance in a couple of days. But even after leaving unessential supplies in a depot dug into the snow, they still had 560 pounds to carry, including one wireless set, two batteries, the Eureka beacon, a hand generator, field equipment, weapons, and food stores. Divided by four, this was 140 pounds for each of them, impossible to haul unless they split it into two journeys. With the double-backing, their journey would be 135 miles, and the condition of the snow was far from ideal.

  At the end of their third day of trekking, having advanced only eight miles from their drop site, they came across an abandoned farmhouse beside Lake Songa, where they found some flour and frozen meat. They built a fire, melted snow in a pot, and then softened the meat in the boiling water. For the first time in almost a week, they feasted until their bellies were full. Set by the crackling fire, their wet socks, boots, and clothes steamed as they dried out. Better still, they found a welcome surprise in the cabin: an old wood-and-canvas sledge Poulsson’s father had given him as a child. During the invasion, Norwegian forces had borrowed it, and it had somehow ended up at the farmhouse.

  Over the next six days, the team made slow, steady pro
gress east, their supplies split between their rucksacks and the sledge. No longer would they need to make the double journey. But it was still tough going. At one point, Poulsson fell through the surface of a half-frozen lake, and Kjelstrup, his body stretched flat on thin ice, had to pull him free with a pole. Poulsson also developed a pus-filled boil on his left hand, and had to carry his arm in a sling when not on skis. At night, the men continued to break into cabins for shelter, but none held the same booty as the farmhouse. They devoured their pemmican, sometimes cold, sometimes mixed with oats or flour in a hot gruel, but they were always left wanting more.

  As one day followed the next, the four grew thin and their beards scraggly, their cheeks and lips blistered from the constant wind, cold, and toil. They were almost always wet, as their clothes never dried completely at night. Their skis, not wholly impermeable, grew heavy as logs. Their Canadian boots became so frayed, they had to take an awl and yarn to them each morning to keep them from falling apart altogether. Had it not been for all their hard training in Scotland, they would already have given up.

  As they traveled, Haugland confiscated enough fishing rods from the cabins they sheltered in to construct a mast for the antenna. One night, attempting to fire up his wireless set, it short-circuited. Too late did he notice that the set was covered in condensation from being brought into the warm cabin out of the severe cold. Next time, he would wait for the set to dry out inside before starting it up.

  By October 30, seven miles southwest of the Skoland marshes, Poulsson scribbled in his small diary, “We are fairly done in.” They settled into a small hunter’s hut at a place called Reinar and decided on a course forward. Helberg offered to return to the farmhouse alone to steal more of its stores. Poulsson and Kjelstrup would find the easiest path ahead to the marshes, and Haugland would try to reach London by wireless yet again.