The Winter Fortress

by Neal Bascomb

  The Horsa glider rocked back and forth, surged upwards, and plummeted down, its two pilots at the mercy of the towline. The sappers in the back were tossed about in their seats. The wooden fuselage creaked and groaned, threatening to rip apart at any moment. One minute of this terror followed another, and no prayer to God could make it stop. Then they lurched ahead one final time—and the icebound towline snapped. It was 12:11 a.m., November 20. Halifax A disappeared into the clouds, and the Horsa began a precipitous spin.

  The two Scottish pilots never had a chance. They already had very little control of their glider. In the dark, with scarce visibility and an unknown terrain, they were aiming blindly for their landing. The glider came down fast, the wind shrieking through the fuselage. Although strapped to their seats, the sappers in the back might as well have been riding on the back of a bucking bronco. Their equipment was flung through the air. The pilot called out, “Ditching Stations!” and the men hooked arms to brace for the landing. There was little hope that would do any good; they were essentially dropping through the sky in a wooden box. Soon after breaking loose from the Halifax, the glider crashed into the mountains. The pilots died instantly, the glider’s glass nose providing their bodies with no protection. Six sappers perished in the crash as well. Of the nine survivors, most were too badly injured to move. A few managed to crawl out into the snow. The glider’s wings had been sheared off, the fuselage broken apart. Their gear had spilled out all over the mountainside, and the subzero temperatures bit at their skin. They had absolutely no idea where they were.

  Flight Lieutenant Parkinson banked Halifax B to the east as he searched for his own glider, which had also broken loose. Earlier, they too had circled around the landing zone, in their case with their Rebecca device sending out its signal, but they had failed to zero in close enough on the target to release their tow. Running low on fuel, Parkinson aborted the operation and decided to return to Scotland. He experienced the same treacherous, thick layer of clouds, and at 11:40 he lost his glider near Egersund on the southwest coast. To better see where it might have landed, he lowered altitude.

  Crisscrossing over the valley, he and his crew tried to locate the glider in the darkness. Suddenly, they found themselves staring straight out at Hæstad Mountain. Pushing into full throttle, Parkinson attempted to maneuver the Halifax away but failed. The plane clipped the top of the mountain with terrible force, throwing the rear gunner from the aircraft. Still traveling at great speed, the Halifax hurtled over the summit, then across a plateau littered with huge stones that tore it apart over the course of eight hundred yards. The bodies of six more crew members, some eviscerated, others with their limbs ripped off, were scattered about the flaming wreckage.

  Four miles away, across the valley, Glider B rested on its side in steep mountain forest, its nose sheared off, its two pilots dead. Their success in landing in the dark and fog had saved the lives of all but one of the fifteen sappers. As the weather worsened, the fourteen surviving Royal Engineers tended to one another’s injuries as best they could, and wrapped their dead crew members in their sleeping bags.

  Lieutenant Alexander Allen sent a pair of his men to find help. They scrambled down the hillside. Through severe gusting winds and showers of ice and snow, they slipped and fell as they traversed the rough terrain. Finally they reached Helleland village. Trond Hovland, a man in his midthirties, answered the knock on his door. His father, Theodor, the local sheriff, joined him soon after. Neither spoke much English. The two sappers tried to explain that their plane had crashed. They asked for help and wanted to know how far they were from Sweden. Very far, they learned.

  Sheriff Hovland volunteered to organize a rescue party but said that he would also have to alert the German command in Egersund, ten miles away. It would be impossible to keep their help a secret. The two sappers agreed. They knew there was no way that they and their battered and half-frozen mates would manage an escape to Sweden now. They would have to surrender to the Germans.

  An hour later, several Norwegians and a patrol from the German garrison at Slettebø arrived at the house. One of the sappers remained under guard in a sitting room. The other led the patrol and its Norwegian guides into the mountains. At 5:30 a.m. they came upon the crash site of Glider B. Allen and the others had decided to surrender, even though they were heavily armed and could easily have surprised the dozen approaching Germans. The German lieutenant promised Allen, whose men were in uniform, that they would be classified as prisoners of war and that a doctor would tend to the injured. The sappers offered their captors cigarettes. The courtesy would not be returned.

  Through the night, in the cigarette-smoke-filled RAF Operations Room at Wick airport, five miles southeast from its satellite field at Skitten, Henniker awaited news. The first sign that the mission was steering toward disaster came when Halifax A radioed that its glider had been released at sea. Henniker tried to scramble planes for a search, but none would be ready until morning. A flurry of messages followed. Confusion reigned as to where exactly the glider had broken off. Another transmission, this one from Halifax B, asked for a bearing on Wick. This plane’s location was unclear as well, though some determined it was over the North Sea. No further contact, however, was made with its crew.

  At 3:00 a.m. Halifax A landed. Cooper was driven immediately to Wick to give his report on the flight. He explained that he had radioed that his glider had been released off the Norwegian coast so as to throw off potential German patrols. At dawn, when the first search planes set out, the assembly in the Operations Room was convinced that the other Halifax must have crashed.

  There was still a chance that Glider B had made it to the landing site. “If Grouse does not call up, it will probably mean there is a party on,” an SOE message read. At noon, however, the Grouse agents reported by wireless. They had been ready at the site at the appointed hour. They had received a signal on their Eureka and had heard the sound of engines overhead, but no gliders had arrived.

  Late in the afternoon, Henniker paced the deserted Skitten airfield beside the lone Halifax that had returned. Its four propellers were still and quiet. Most of the search planes that had been sent out had come back. None had reported any sign of the other Halifax or its glider. Henniker had to accept the dark fate of his men and their mission. The only question now was how many of them were still alive. Some were sure to have been captured. Others might have escaped. It was possible.

  That same afternoon, on that blackest of days, Tronstad remained with Wilson in his Chiltern Court office. Reading through the Freshman messages, he could not help remembering the meeting with Henniker several days before the sappers had left, when the prospects for success had been so high. Now those plans were shattered. Operation Freshman was a disaster. Those aircrews were lost. Those brave young sappers, many of whom Tronstad had come to know at Brickendonbury Hall, were yet another terrible sacrifice in this awful war.

  In silence, Tronstad and Wilson contemplated the giant map of Norway on the wall. It was dotted with symbols of operations in progress by Kompani Linge. Some would go well. Others badly. That was the nature of things. Undaunted by the disaster of Freshman, the two men were determined to learn from it and to try the Vemork operation another way. There was no other choice: they needed to stop its production of heavy water or the threat of greater losses—unimaginable losses should the Nazis obtain a bomb—might become real.

  The two men could not know whether the Germans had discovered the sappers’ target. If they had, the risks for the next operation would multiply. The Nazis would crack down on any person in the area, putting Skinnarland and the entire Grouse team in jeopardy. Wilson made it clear to Tronstad that it was unlikely Lord Mountbatten would try to send another team of Royal Engineers after this tragedy. Which, they agreed, was for the best. A small group of commandos would have the best chance of slipping inside and destroying the plant, they decided. They should be Norwegian, comfortable with and able to navigate the winter terrain. They
would be dropped into the mountains by parachute, if possible by the next phase of the moon, to hit Vemork and get out.

  Their plan came quickly together that afternoon. Over the rest of the day, they set about mustering support for it. Wilson telephoned one of the officers in charge of Freshman at Combined Operations HQ. He expressed how sorry he was for how the mission had unfolded, then asked if the SOE could “take over the job.” There was no hesitation. “Thank God for that,” said the officer on the other end of the line.

  That evening, Wilson met with Major General Gubbins at 64 Baker Street, SOE headquarters, a few hundred yards away. At first his boss was skeptical, but Wilson persuaded him that he and Tronstad had a good plan—and the right men to execute it. Convinced, Gubbins immediately sent a letter to Mountbatten’s deputy: “We consider that we might now be able to attempt the operation ourselves on a smaller, but, we hope, effective scale by SOE methods before the end of the year . . . From the point of view of the scientists further delay might be dangerous.” Tronstad also met with his superior, General Wilhelm Hansteen, who recommended that he work closely with SOE to deal “with the same problem by other means.”

  That evening, Tronstad messaged Grouse: “Your work has been done magnificently. Change in weather meant gliders had to be released over 100 km from target. Operation cancelled for this moon period. We are planning to effect it with our own men next moon.”

  The following day, November 21, the BBC received an official German communiqué boasting about the elimination of the saboteurs. “During the night of 19th–20th November, two British bombers, each towing a glider, flew over southern Norway. One of the bombers and both the gliders were forced to land. The sabotage squads brought by them were engaged in combat and finished off to the very last man.” Tronstad was certain that the report was a lie but could not deny that it held more than a grain of truth.

  Mountbatten informed the prime minister of the mission’s outcome. Churchill, who knew too well the tragedies and setbacks of war, wrote a single word on the report: “Alas.”

  The German communication was indeed a lie, and it obscured the even uglier facts. After Lieutenant Allen surrendered, the fourteen sappers of Glider B, some too severely injured to walk, were brought down from the mountain and loaded onto two trucks. One of the men flashed a V sign to Sheriff Hovland before being driven off to Slettebø, ten miles away.

  Walther Schrottberger, the Wehrmacht captain in charge of the Slettebø garrison, did not know what to do with them. Clearly, his prisoners were British soldiers. Given that their khaki uniforms were without insignia, and given that explosives, radio transmitters, insulated wire shears, Norwegian kroner, and light machine guns were collected at the crash site, they were clearly saboteurs as well. Unwilling to decide the men’s fate, he rang his superior in Stavanger, Colonel Probst, who contacted his divisional head. According to the Kommandobefehl, “no quarter should be given” to any commandos. Hitler’s orders stated that enemy agents falling into the hands of the Wehrmacht were to be delivered “without delay” to the Security Service’s intelligence-gathering arm, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).

  While orders on how Schrottberger should handle the situation made their way through the chain of command, the Gestapo in Stavanger got word of the British prisoners. They sent SS Second Lieutenant Otto Petersen to the Slettebø garrison. Petersen, who was known by local Norwegians as the Red Devil, wanted the saboteurs placed in his custody. On orders from Probst, Schrottberger refused. Instead Petersen gave him an hour to interrogate the British. One after the other, the sappers were brought before the Gestapo officer, harangued, beaten, and threatened. They revealed only their names and ages.

  Then, in the late afternoon, Schrottberger and his squad of soldiers led them out the garrison gates to follow through on Hitler’s commando order. The sappers were brought north along the road from Slettebø. When they reached a sparsely forested valley pocked with boulders, they were spaced out along the road, two soldiers guarding each British prisoner.

  The first sapper was brought over to a slight hill beside some granite and concrete sheds. An execution squad came out from behind one of the sheds, fifteen feet away. They raised their rifles. “Feuer frei!” came their order, and a hail of bullets tore into the soldier. After he fell, the squad commander, armed with a pistol, put a final bullet in the soldier’s head. As the body was hauled away, the squad disappeared back behind the shed.

  The next prisoner was brought forward and this routine played out again. One prisoner pleaded for mercy, showing the Germans a picture of his wife and two children. They shot him anyway. Another, too injured to stand, was seated on a rock. Then killed in the same way. Bill Bray stood before the rifles, knowing he would never see his wife again nor meet his unborn child. Then the bullets came.

  Bodies still warm, the fourteen Royal Engineers were stripped to their underwear and brought to a beach where Polish prisoners of war buried them in a shallow trench of sand next to a line of concrete antitank barriers known as Hitler’s Teeth. The pilots and the sapper who had died when the glider crashed were tossed in the trench as well.

  Heinrich Fehlis was incensed at the executions of the British soldiers. He wanted all Wehrmacht officers involved brought up on charges, and a damning note was sent to his chief in Berlin. “Towing aircraft’s crew is military, including one Negro; all dead. There were seventeen men, probably agents . . . Glider’s crew was in possession of large sums of Norwegian currency. Unfortunately, the military authorities executed the survivors, so explanation scarcely is possible.” Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, was alerted to the lost intelligence opportunity as well.

  When it became known, on November 21, that there were nine survivors of a second glider crash, Fehlis wanted to make sure that every bit of intelligence was wrung from them. The thirty-six-year-old lieutenant colonel, with a lantern jaw and thin, bloodless lips, was known for his rigid efficiency and even temper. He had none of the charm of his Gestapo bloodhound, Siegfried Fehmer, and his subordinates only knew he was angry when the saber scar on his left cheek turned livid. For a man of his young age, Fehlis held extraordinary power over life and death in Norway, and he meant to use it.

  Born in the industrial city of Wuppertal, he was one of four children. Their father had died from injuries sustained in World War I. Fehlis studied law, and joined Hitler’s Brown Shirt paramilitary arm in 1933. From the start, he made sure that his superiors knew how devout he was to the cause. He renounced any ties to the Catholic Church. His wife, who had borne him only a single child despite numerous visits to various doctors, was a disappointment; after apologizing for her to the SS, Fehlis joined their Lebensborn association, where he bred with “racially pure and healthy women” to strengthen the Aryan race. His personnel file read: “Overall race impression: very good, Nordic; appearance: very correct and according to SS-standards. Very quiet and secure, ambitious, reliable, and good at negotiations.”

  In Norway, Fehlis was head of German security services, including the Gestapo, Kripo (criminal police), and the SD. Although close to Terboven, he was also charged with spying on him for their masters in Germany.

  Only General Falkenhorst seemed to not be in favor of Fehlis’s meteoric rise. The grizzled Wehrmacht veteran made it clear that he found the young man too immature. Now Fehlis would see that Falkenhorst’s army would not interfere in the investigation. Pressured from Berlin, the general notified his troops that the saboteurs were to be delivered directly to the SS for thorough interrogation. Fehlis was told that five saboteurs from the second downed glider were in good enough shape for questioning. He ordered them brought to Oslo, along with everything collected at the crash site. The other four survivors of the crash, he said, could be executed forthwith.

  James Cairncross, Paul Farrell, Trevor Masters, and Eric Smith—all in their twenties, all married, apart from the boisterous Cairncross—were unsure of when, or if, they would be brought to a hospital. It was now Monday, Novemb
er 23, and they were still in a Stavanger prison cell, lying on stretchers and in considerable pain. After the crash landing of Glider A, they had spent the night on the mountain, suffering from their injuries as well as frostbite and exposure. In the morning, several in their party left to find help. Descending a steep hillside, they came to a farm. A group of Norwegians, including a doctor, came up to assist them. The sappers learned that they were on the northern side of Lysefjord, ninety miles southwest of Vemork and hundreds more to the Swedish border. On hearing the news, they were unable to conceal their anguish.

  A German patrol, and several Gestapo, arrived at the crash site soon after, weapons drawn. They thoroughly searched the glider, then brought the nine surviving sappers down to a coastal patrol ship. This took them across the fjord to the prison at Stavanger. The injured four were separated from the others. A Luftwaffe doctor, Dr. Fritz Seeling, visited them but left before tending to their cracked skulls, broken ribs, and shattered legs and arms. Then they were left to wait.

  On Monday afternoon, Seeling returned to the cell, this time with a Gestapo officer. It was Petersen, the Red Devil. The doctor carried some syringes and bottles labeled Typhus. Petersen told Cairncross and his mates that the doctor was going to inoculate them. Given the extent of their injuries, a typhus shot was the last thing they needed, but they were too weak and in too much pain to resist. The doctor delivered the injections, then he and Petersen left.