by Neal Bascomb
A thirty-minute, steep hillside trek from the shore of Lake Møs found Einar Skinnarland bunkered down in a small, dark cabin set beside a dribble of a stream. The cabin, nestled between boulders, was called Nilsbu, and was indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. In winter it was almost entirely buried in snow. In summer it was well hidden amid the heavy pine forest. If he lay flat on the floor, Skinnarland could almost touch every wall with his outstretched arms and legs. There was no place he felt safer. Two local families, the Hamarens and the Skindalens, were helping him, both in obtaining supplies and keeping an eye out for Germans.
Since he had left High Heaven, Skinnarland had largely been on his own at Nilsbu. He celebrated Christmas Eve with a “great steak and pancakes,” as he wrote in his diary. Otherwise, the days passed one after the other with only a jotted note about the change in weather: lots of fog, snow, and winds from the east and west. Tronstad had given him the option to flee to Sweden, but Skinnarland would not leave, not with his brother held hostage by the Germans, not with Jahren in prison, and all because of him. He would stay and do what he could to help the sabotage of Vemork. He understood that if the wrong person caught sight of him (and he was known well in the area), the Gestapo would surely be on to him.
On December 27, a telephone call to the Hamaren farm brought word from Rjukan that the Gestapo had seized Olav Skogen. Disheartened over the arrest of his friend, Skinnarland headed toward Lake Store Saure to inform the Swallow team. After several hours of skiing through a biting southwest wind, he finally arrived at Fetter. Inside, he found Jens-Anton Poulsson stirring a pot of stew: reindeer flank with cuts of intestine, windpipe, and fat; bits of fur floated on top. Skinnarland welcomed the meal nonetheless, and they invited him to stay as long as he wanted. With the moon phase at its end and the next chance of a drop a month away, the men could all use some company.
14
The Lonely, Dark War
* * *
ON JANUARY 6, 1943, Tronstad was working late at the Norwegian high command, Kingston House. Every once in a while, he glanced down the corridor toward the empty office of Lieutenant Commander Ernst Marstrander. A few days before, after landing Odd Starheim and forty other men on the Norwegian coast for the launch of Operation Carhampton, Marstrander’s ship hit a floating mine and sank. All hands perished. “We grow harder and harder,” Tronstad wrote in his diary, “and every adversity just steels us to make new efforts.”
Over the holidays, Tronstad had missed his family terribly. Bassa had written before Christmas, saying how difficult it would be to celebrate without him. A courier brought some recent photographs of her and the children, and Tronstad sent some coffee and hot chocolate. But he could not manage a letter expressing the grief caused by his absence from them. On December 29 Bassa sent another letter, pleading for him to write soon. “Do you think we’ll soon have peace?” she asked. “The best of life is gone . . . What we talked about in the past, I do not know, but now it is only of war and food.” Sidsel, now ten years old, followed with a letter of her own: “We’ve been mostly healthy, both Brother and me. We’re often skiing . . . We had a very pleasant Christmas, but certainly it would have been much better with you . . . You don’t know how tall I’ve become . . . We have a dog, with a foxlike head, a sheep’s body, and a monkey’s tail, and it’s very, very strange . . . Hearty greetings from Snoopi and Brother and Mother. We’ll meet again.”
At the start of the new year, Tronstad wrote back, telling his daughter that the photographs showed how “big and pretty” she had become and then, “I have it very good and hope to come home soon when this ugly war finally will end. You must not be afraid of anything. Keep your head high.” He promised her that he would keep fighting until Norway was free.
To cripple the Germans, Tronstad wanted to launch operations daily against them if he could. Carhampton promised to be a sizable blow against their ability to drain his country of its critical resources. Gunnerside would be an even greater strike. Although the bad weather across northern Europe continued to prevent a drop, forcing Swallow to endure the harsh Vidda for longer and allowing security at Vemork to tighten further, the additional time gave Rønneberg and his men weeks more to train. There was comfort in this, and one had to find comfort wherever and whenever the opportunity arose in this dark fight.
In a small, bare cell, numbered D2, at Møllergata 19, Olav Skogen waited for his torturers to come. Formerly an Oslo police station, the stout Romanesque structure, which looked like a half-flattened wedding cake, now served as the Gestapo prison. Again and again Skogen promised himself that he would not break. He was in the right, and his torturers would one day be judged for their crimes. He must never reveal what he knew and whom, nothing about Milorg or Rjukan or Swallow or Skinnarland. Not a single name would be wrung from him. Keeping his silence was the one fight left to him in this war. He knew it now. He accepted it. He would not break.
Two weeks before, he had gone to Bergen to review some contracts for Norsk Hydro. When he entered the office there, he was met with a pistol in the face. Taken away to a waiting car, he chastised himself for not having gone into hiding after the raids on Rjukan. He had been foolish and too bold by half.
At Bergen prison, a junior Gestapo officer tried to get him to confess his involvement in the underground resistance. “I’m not involved in any such illegal activities,” Skogen said.
The officer shrugged. “We have people who will get the information they are looking for.” With that, he sent him to stew in a cell.
Skogen knew what was ahead for him. In resistance circles, accounts of Gestapo torture were widespread. On his second night, staring out the window in his cell, he questioned whether he should kill himself with the pills Skinnarland had given him. It would be the best way to ensure the Germans got nothing from him, and he would save himself a lot of pain. Making his decision, he took out the pills sewn into his breast pocket, cupped them in his palm, then dropped them to the floor and crushed them underfoot. The Germans would have to kill him all by themselves.
The next day, New Year’s Eve, they brought him to Oslo, then into Møllergata 19. He was fingerprinted, photographed, and stripped of his belt and shoelaces. There was a brief first interrogation—a lot of bellowed threats, but no fists. “The arrest is a misunderstanding,” Skogen said. He was thrown into a cell and given chunks of stale bread to eat. Day after day he waited, but nobody came to his dark, lonely corner of the prison.
Then, on the night of January 11, the iron door of his cell swung open. He was handcuffed and driven through the deserted streets of Oslo to Victoria Terrasse. Guards led him up four flights of steps and into a room where several Gestapo were waiting for him. On the wall opposite the door hung a portrait of Hitler. Skogen was pushed down onto a stool near a desk. The lead interrogator, a bullnecked man with bushy eyebrows and a jaw that stuck out like it wanted to be punched, sat down behind the desk and asked in German, “Name?”
Skogen spoke German well enough, but they did not need to know this fact. “Interpreter?” he asked.
There were sighs. Then one of the Gestapo, who spoke Norwegian, began to translate for Bullneck. He asked if Skogen knew two names: Øystein Jahren and Einar Skinnarland.
“Yes,” Skogen said. They probably thought they had him already.
“From where?” Bullneck asked.
“Rjukan Sports Association,” Skogen said.
“That was the first lie!” Bullneck shouted, red in the face. He looked to the interpreter who translated.
Skogen said, “I don’t lie.”
Questions followed about Einar Skinnarland. Skogen pleaded ignorance. Soon after, a tall, athletically built German in a tracksuit came into the room, and the torture began. The men pushed up Skogen’s left pant leg and clamped a vise onto his lower leg. Its jaws were sharp half-moons of steel.
“Do you confess now?” Bullneck asked.
“I’ve nothing more to say,” Skogen said.
Tra
cksuit rotated the wingnut on the vise, squeezing Skogen’s leg between the two jaws.
“Do you now?” Bullneck asked.
Skogen grimaced and shook his head. Tracksuit tightened the vise. The half-moons dug into his shin and calf muscle, distorting the shape of his leg. He groaned.
“We won’t stop until we’ve squeezed the truth from you,” Bullneck said.
Again and again, Tracksuit rotated the vise’s screw. Skogen saw bright lights of pain, and his leg turned a violent shade of purple. Eventually he fell off the stool. The men then started in on him with rubber batons, striking his bare feet, legs, and back. Then he was lifted back onto the stool.
“Speak! Last chance!” Bullneck screamed.
Skogen shook his head. He would not speak. Not a word. This was his lonely war now. He would win it.
Tracksuit freed Skogen’s battered leg from the vise, and a shock of agony followed. Then Bullneck took a bamboo stick from the wall and struck him across the chest, back, and shoulders until he was out of breath. “Tell us what you know!” They punched him in the face. When he fell off the stool again, they dragged him across the floor by his hair. They beat him over and over with truncheons and sticks. He kept silent. After a time, the world backed away from him and he fainted. Giving up for the night, his torturers reported to their superiors on the floor below of the failure of their “enhanced interrogation.”
For three weeks now, the five surviving Royal Engineers from Operation Freshman had been held in solitary confinement at Grini. Having extracted the information he could from them, Fehlis ordered them shot. On January 19, they were told that they were to appear in front of a military commission before being sent to a prison camp in Germany. Instead, soldiers drove them a couple of hours north, through heavy snow and ice. They arrived at Trandum, a forested area the Gestapo used for executing political prisoners and dumping their bodies. The men were led blindfolded into the woods, each flanked by two Germans, then told to stop. They did not know it, but their feet were at the edge of a grave, dug earlier by their executioners.
Among them, in the same blue rollneck sweater and trousers that had been issued to him in Scotland, was Wallis Jackson. In the twenty-one-year-old’s pocket was a fine red-threaded handkerchief, obviously a gift from a loved one back home. The stomp of boots sounded around them. They heard a clank of rifles. On the call to fire, the execution squad shot the British soldiers, then buried them in the unmarked grave.
Huddled in his sleeping bag on yet another icy January morning in Fetter, Poulsson was watching the steam from his breath. The reindeer pelts hanging over the bare wooden planks failed to keep the cold at bay, and a thick layer of hoarfrost covered the ceiling and walls. At 7:30 a.m., while the others still slept, he climbed out of his sleeping bag. It was his turn to make breakfast. He lit the kerosene lamp and, sitting on a stool, fed slivers of birch into the stove. When the kindling was crackling, he added a couple of logs. The stove heated up. He placed on top a pot of porridge mixed with a paste made from reindeer bones ground and boiled for two days. While this cooked, he dressed. Then he grabbed the hatchet by the door and stepped outside.
A few feet from the cabin was an area that looked altogether like a slaughterhouse. Blood covered the snow, and there was a pile of frozen reindeer stomachs against the cabin wall. The half-digested moss in the guts was the men’s only source of vitamin C and carbohydrates. Poulsson cut off a chunk, then returned to the cabin. Already the frost on the walls and ceiling was beginning to melt. Water dripped on his face and collected in pools on the floor. He stirred the porridge, heated up the organ meat in another pot, and started on coffee. As this brewed, he called the others to the table.
They emerged from the half darkness, all grunts and groans. None of them had bathed in months, and only Haugland had kept up a shaving regime. With his rangy red beard and grimy face, Kjelstrup looked more beast than man.
They pulled on their clothes, and a couple of them made a quick escape outside in untied boots to relieve themselves. On their return they took their usual seats at the table: Poulsson near the kitchen counter, Haugland opposite him, Helberg and Kjelstrup squeezed together on one side, and Skinnarland across from them.
They spoke little as they ate their meal: porridge, loin with strips of suet, and offal. In the weeks since Poulsson had made his first kill, they had become connoisseurs of reindeer. By taste alone, they could distinguish an old bull from a calf from a yearling. They liked the first the best, for its rich taste. Eyelid fat and bone marrow were the finest of delicacies, and gørr—a soup made of the contents of a deer’s stomach, rich in moss, mixed with meat, blood, and water—was a favorite as well. Truthfully though, they were indiscriminate. They ate the heart, kidneys, liver, larynx, brain, tongue, tooth nerves, eyes, nose, every sliver of meat on the bones, and then the bones as well. Other than the hooves, horns, and pelts, nothing escaped their plates.
When dawn crept up through the east-facing window, they extinguished the lamp. After breakfast, Poulsson and Skinnarland headed outside to survey the weather. Northwest of Fetter, heavy gray clouds hung over the mountain peaks. “Murky weather,” Skinnarland said.
“No operation today,” Poulsson replied, knowing from experience that the clouds foretold there would be no flights from Britain.
When the December moon phase ended, they had spent two weeks skiing back and forth across the Vidda through heavy wet snow and snapping winds. They tracked reindeer, secured recharged batteries for the wireless set and the Eureka device, gathered more gear from their Songa Valley depot, and collected intelligence about Vemork. Sometimes they spent the night away from Fetter, breaking into cabins or, if caught out, sleeping in a hastily built snow cave. Through sources in Oslo, Skinnarland knew that Olav Skogen was being tortured and also that he had bravely remained silent. If it were otherwise, the Germans would have been scouring the Vidda by plane and ski patrol, hunting for them.
On January 16, when the new standby period came into effect, Tronstad sent a message: “Weather still bad but boys eager to join you.”
As they waited for the weather to change, one day blended into the next. They cut wood, hunted, cooked, and sat by the wireless, eager for news. By 4:00 p.m. each day, the sky darkening, they sat around the table for dinner. Poulsson had run out of pipe tobacco, so at least the air was clear of smoke. After eating, they retreated into their sleeping bags to endure another night of the raging storms that threatened to tear the cabin apart.
There were petty flares of temper. One man was accused of not keeping the cabin in order. Another didn’t get up early enough to cook breakfast. Yet another couldn’t get the damp wood to burn in the stove. Crowded into a small space, isolated from civilization, and always either cold, wet, tired, or hungry, the men could easily have let these conflicts escalate. Skinnarland’s presence helped. During the standby period, he alone could venture away from Fetter, and after miles of skiing he always seemed to come back in good cheer, often with a pat of butter or some dried apricots that he added to their reindeer stew for a change of flavor.
Without Poulsson, the team would have fallen apart. During the short days, he kept the men busy with chores, but it was the nights, which stretched for sixteen hours, that were the real danger. They could not sleep the whole time, and they had neither the kerosene nor the candles to keep the cabin lit all night to whittle, play cards, or the like.
One evening, to occupy them, Poulsson gave an interminably long and intricate discourse on the art of hunting. This inspired Kjelstrup to instruct everyone in the science of plumbing. Haugland followed with lectures on radios, Skinnarland with a lesson on building dams. Having explained how the different places on the Vidda got their names, Helberg then proved to be at least a second-class lyricist. His description of Kjelstrup had the cabin in stitches of laughter. “As number three in the gang / We have Arne, oh the devil / Expert in heating and sanitation / Hates frost and winter weather / But he knows what to do at night / Sleep
s with his balaclava on all right.” When they ran out of lecture subjects and poems, they talked about their lives at home, and their families. Instead of tearing them apart, the winter nights thus drew them closer together. Still, they could not stay there forever.
Through the window of a Halifax bomber, Haukelid spied at last the surf breaking against the Norwegian coastline. Jostled about in the fuselage, he kept his eyes trained on the view. He spotted a fishing boat and wondered if its captain heard the roar of the plane overhead—maybe the swinging of his lantern was to welcome them. To avoid German radar, the pilot flew low over the valleys toward Lake Store Saure. The forests and mountains were as clear under the bright moon as they were during the day. The navigator should have no trouble finding the drop site on this perfect night, January 23.
The Gunnerside team had stayed so long at Gaynes Hall that the staff there joked they might as well be part of the furniture. But for men who woke every morning not knowing whether today was the day, the joke had long ceased to be funny.
Haukelid had been on edge almost all the time. Every delay meant further suffering for Poulsson and his men. They would be out of rations and surviving on whatever they could hunt. He knew well the trials that the Vidda imposed on those who dared spend even a day there in the winter. His friends had been out there for months.
Rønneberg had used the time well. As a team, they had endlessly gone over the drawings and photographs of Vemork, and by the January moon phase could have drafted the architectural plans of the plant themselves. They knew the location of every window and access tunnel. They knew in which direction the doors opened and whether they were made of wood or steel, and they knew where they could climb in the plant without the supports or equipment giving way. They knew which fence wires were electrified, where the covering party should position themselves for the best field of fire while the demolition crew set the charges. Whenever a new question arose, a letter was dispatched to Tronstad.
