by Neal Bascomb
They continued to worm their way forward. Suddenly Rønneberg heard the sharp ping of metal. He went still. Behind him, Kayser had slipped, and his Colt .45 had fallen out of its shoulder holster. Although attached by a string to his body, the pistol had dropped far enough to hit a pipe. For a long spell, the two remained completely motionless, worried that the sound might have given them away. But the longer they waited, the more certain they were that the reverberating drum of Vemork’s machines had masked the noise. Kayser returned the pistol to its holster, and they continued ahead.
Twenty yards into the maze of pipes, Rønneberg arrived at a larger opening in the floor. He looked through it into a cavernous hall. After making sure there were no guards in the room, he slipped through the opening and dropped the fifteen feet to the floor. Remembering his parachute training, he collapsed into a roll to blunt the fall. Kayser came down after him.
They reached the room with the eighteen high-concentration cells. A sign on the double doors read: NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT ON BUSINESS. Colts drawn, Rønneberg and Kayser flung open the doors. The nightshift worker overseeing the plant, a portly, gray-haired Norwegian, swung around from his seat at the desk. Kayser was beside him in an instant. “Put your hands up,” he barked in Norwegian, his pistol barrel aimed straight at the worker’s chest.
The man did as ordered. Clearly scared, his eyes flicked back and forth between the two saboteurs. “Nothing will happen to you if you do as you’re told,” Kayser said as Rønneberg locked the doors of the room behind them. “We’re British soldiers.” The worker looked at the insignia on their uniforms. “What’s your name?” Kayser asked.
“Gustav Johansen.”
As Rønneberg got to work, Kayser kept guard over Johansen, dropping a few remarks about life in Britain to reinforce their cover. Rønneberg unpacked the explosives and fuses from his rucksack. The two rows of nine high-concentration cells on their wooden stands looked exactly like the replicas Tronstad and Rheam had assembled at Brickendonbury Hall. Each cell tank was fifty inches tall and ten inches in diameter and was made of stainless steel. A twisting snake of rubber tubes, electrical wires, and iron pipes ran out of the top.
Rønneberg did not need to know exactly how the cells worked—only how to blow them up. The eighteen sausages of Nobel 808, each twelve inches long, set out in front of him, would do the trick. They might only weigh ten pounds in total but they would bring about an almighty bang.
After putting on rubber gloves to avoid electrical shock, Rønneberg moved to the first cell and pressed the plastic explosive to its base. Once this was secure, he moved to the second, then the third, his movements almost automatic after so many hours practicing at Brickendonbury.
Hands still high, Johansen was becoming increasingly nervous as he watched Rønneberg’s work. Finally he blurted out, “Watch out. Otherwise it might explode!”
“That’s pretty much our intention,” Kayser replied drily.
Rønneberg had just finished fastening the ninth band of explosive to its cell when glass shattered behind him. He made a grab for his gun as he and Kayser turned swiftly in the direction of the threat.
Out in the plant yard monitoring the guard barracks, Haukelid glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes had passed since they broke through the railway gate. It felt like hours. He wondered if the demolition team had made it into the plant and if the operation was going according to plan. At any moment, a sentry could raise the alarm, bringing searchlights, sirens, and machine guns. All Haukelid could be certain of was what was around him. Darkness. The relentless drone of the generators. The barracks’ closed door. His eyes searched constantly for any sign of the guards who were patrolling the grounds. He had ampoules of chloroform at the ready to take them down. So far they had seen no one.
He was reminded of the first weeks in the fight for Norway. One hundred miles north of Oslo, he had been part of a group of Norwegian soldiers who surrounded a wooden house occupied by German soldiers. When they refused to surrender, Haukelid and the others in his party had opened fire on the structure. Its thin walls gave scarce protection, and the soldiers were soon dead to a man. Some dangled out of the broken windows. Others lay in pools of blood on the floor. War was ugly, and Haukelid knew that the guards in the barracks in front of him would not survive the barrage of his Tommy gun and grenades.
With each slowly passing minute, the gnawing fear in him grew that something might have gone wrong. Every man in the covering party had his gun primed to fire or his grenade pin set to be pulled, as they waited for the demolition team to finish the job.
With the butt of his gun, Strømsheim knocked a few more pieces of glass out of the broken window. Still recovering from the surprise, Rønneberg ran to help. Strømsheim and Idland had decided to force their way into the high-concentration room—and only narrowly missed being shot by their own compatriots in the process.
Rønneberg hurried to help clear the glass so Strømsheim could enter. In his rush, he cut the fingers on his right hand on a shard of glass. He told Idland to stay outside and block the light shining from the broken window. The guards would surely come running if they saw it.
Then Rønneberg and Strømsheim resumed setting the explosives to the cells. Working together, they finished quickly, then double-checked that everything was in place before securing the 120-centimeter-long fuses to the charges. When these were lit, they would burn at a rate of one centimeter a second, which would give them exactly two minutes to get clear of the room.
Strømsheim suggested they use a pair of thirty-second fuses to ignite the explosives, to ensure that nobody snuffed out the bomb after they left. “We can light the two-minute ones first and see that everything is okay,” Rønneberg said. “Then we each strike the short ones and get out.” Strømsheim agreed.
As they set about fixing the thirty-centimeter fuses, Johansen broke their concentration: “Where are my glasses? I must have them.” Rønneberg glanced at the man. Johansen continued: replacement glasses would be very hard to come by because of the war; he must be allowed to look for his. There was a brief moment when the ridiculousness of the request struck the saboteurs. So many had suffered, had risked their lives—or indeed, lost them—in order for them to reach this critical moment, and now they were being asked about spectacles.
Rønneberg rose and searched the desk. He found the glasses case and passed it to Johansen, then returned to his task, attaching the fuses with insulation tape. His right glove was soaked with blood from where the window glass had cut him.
“But the glasses aren’t in the case,” Johansen whined.
Rønneberg turned to the man, clearly irritated. “Where the hell are they then?”
“They were there,” Johansen pointed to the desk, “when you came in.”
Rønneberg once again crossed to the desk and found the glasses wedged between the pages of Johansen’s logbook. Johansen thanked him meekly.
Close to finishing their work, Rønneberg told Strømsheim to unlock and open the exterior basement door so they could make a quick exit. Johansen pointed out the key on his lanyard, and Strømsheim took it and disappeared from the room. At the same time, Kayser hauled Johansen out of the room to get clear from the blast. As the three crossed the large hall, they heard footfalls coming down the interior stairwell. A German guard?
Kayser and Strømsheim leveled their pistols toward the stairwell. A moment later, they found themselves aiming their guns not at a German guard but at the night foreman, a stunned Olav Ingebretsen, who flung his hands up and whelped in surprise. While Kayser guarded the two hostages, Strømsheim opened the basement door slightly. A rush of cold air blew inside.
In the high-concentration room, Rønneberg made one final check of the chain of explosives. Almost forty-five minutes had passed since they first entered by the railway gate. They were pressing their luck. Confident that the explosives were properly set, he tore off his bloodied gloves and dropped a British parachute badge on the floor. Then he took out a
box of matches and, with a quick flick of his wrist, struck a light.
He brought the flame first to the two-minute fuses, then to the thirty-second fuses. Then he barked at Idland, who was still standing outside blocking the window, to get clear. Rønneberg dashed into the hall, counting down the seconds in his head. To the two prisoners, he said, “Up the stairs. Then lie down and keep your mouths open until you hear the bang. Or you’ll blow out your eardrums.”
As the Vemork workers raced up the stairs, the three saboteurs pushed through the basement-level steel door. Kayser flung it closed behind him, and the men sprinted away from the plant. Idland joined them on their run.
They were twenty yards away when they heard a muffled boom and saw flames burst through the shattered windows of the high-concentration room. Alive with the thrill that they had done the job, they made their escape toward the railway line.
On hearing a faint thud in the distance, Haukelid and Poulsson looked at each other. “Is that what we came here for?” Poulsson asked. From the light now streaming from the basement of the plant, it was clear that the windows had been blown out, but that was no guarantee the sabotage was complete. Then again, they whispered to each other, their eyes now trained back on the barracks, the high-concentration room was housed inside thick concrete walls, and the explosion would have been muted by the wind and the drone of the power station. But they were expecting something more forceful. Had something gone wrong?
In that instant of doubt, the barracks door opened, casting an arc of light onto the snow. A guard stood in the doorway for a few seconds, looking left and right, before stepping out into the cold. He wore a heavy coat but was unarmed and had no helmet. Even so, Poulsson cocked his Tommy gun for the first time that night, and Haukelid placed his index finger through the ring of a grenade’s safety pin.
Both waited to see what the guard would do next.
At a slow walk, seemingly not in the least alarmed, the guard crossed the fifty yards between the barracks and the hydrogen plant. He gazed up at the plant building, then at the surrounding area. If he saw the light coming from the broken basement windows, he did not react. Seconds later, he returned to the barracks and closed the door behind him. Perhaps he had taken the noise to be a land mine set off by a wild animal or by a fall of thawing snow.
Haukelid knew that the demolition team could have already retreated to the railway line through the hole they had cut in the fence. There was no sign of them now, but enough time had passed for them to get away. He was about to tell Poulsson that they should fall back, when the barracks door swung open again.
This time the guard came out wearing a steel helmet and carrying a rifle. Advancing from the barracks, he shone the flashlight beam close to where Haukelid and Poulsson were positioned. Poulsson brought his finger to the trigger and took aim. The guard was only fifteen yards away. A single shot would take him down and might even go unnoticed. The guard swept his light in an arc and slowly approached their hiding place behind the storage tanks.
Poulsson looked back at Haukelid, his expression clear: Shall I fire? Haukelid shook his head sharply and whispered, “No.” They were not to kill unless absolutely necessary. Until that beam of light exposed them, they would wait. The guard swung around again, the beam creeping across the snow, almost touching their feet. Poulsson drew a tight bead on the man with his submachine gun. Then the guard turned on his heel. Glancing once again about the grounds, he returned to the barracks.
Haukelid and Poulsson waited another minute, then bounded toward the railway gate to rendezvous with the others.
On reaching it, they heard a voice call out from the darkness: “Piccadilly!” They would have answered with the matching code phrase, “Leicester Square,” but before they could speak they were already upon Kjelstrup and Helberg.
“Piccadilly,” Kjelstrup urged, his training ingrained.
“For God’s sake, shut up,” Haukelid and Poulsson said together with a laugh, jubilant that they had made it this far. Helberg told them that Rønneberg, Kayser, Strømsheim, Idland, and Storhaug were already moving back down the railway track. Haukelid closed the gate and looped the chain in place. Hiding the direction of their retreat from the Germans—even for a few seconds—might make all the difference.
The four were a couple of hundred yards down the track when the first sirens sounded. The alarm caused their steps to quicken, and soon after they caught up with Rønneberg and the others. They all shook hands and pounded one another on the back. The mission was a success, without a single bullet fired or grenade thrown. They could hardly believe it themselves.
But there was no time to celebrate. Sirens now sounding throughout the valley, they flung themselves into the gorge, hurtling down the southern wall with little thought to avoiding injury. They simply wanted to get away. Helberg found a slope that was slightly less steep than the one they had ascended, and they hopped and scrambled from ledge to ledge through the banks of heavy, wet snow. There were still some stretches they needed to climb, but mostly they exercised a controlled fall down into the gorge.
As he moved, Rønneberg thought through their chances of escape. Since the men had neither crossed the bridge nor retreated up the penstocks, the guards might believe they were still inside the plant. Once they discovered their footprints or found the broken padlock, they would know differently. How much of a head start would they have? Would the Germans have dogs? When would troops arrive from Rjukan? Where would they be stationed? On the northern side of the valley? At the foot of the Krossobanen? Why had the plant’s searchlights not yet been turned on? Without answers to these questions, all they could do was move as fast as possible, and as far away from Vemork as possible, before the manhunt started.
When they reached the valley floor, they encountered deep pools of water on the surface of the ice bridge across the Måna River. Helberg crossed first. The others followed. By the time they were over, their boots were soaked.
They reached the other side of the gorge and began their ascent, clutching at whatever they could find—a root, a boulder, a tree—to pull themselves up. Once again their clothes stuck to the sweat on their bodies. Their throats ached with thirst, but still they climbed.
As they reached the road, they turned to see flashlights moving along the railway line, roughly 150 yards from Vemork. The direction of their escape was known. They would have to move, and faster still.
Back at Vemork, Alf Larsen, the chief engineer, stepped over the steel door that had been blasted off its hinges and shone his flashlight around the high-concentration room. Everything lay in ruins. The two rows of heavy water cells—what was left of them—stood at an awkward angle on the floor, their wooden stands in splinters. The pumps were broken, the walls were scorched, the windows were shattered, and the network of tubes overhead was a twisted wreck. Shrapnel had sliced through the copper pipes of the cooling system, and water was spraying the whole room.
Half an hour before, the thirty-two-year-old engineer, who had replaced Jomar Brun after his mysterious disappearance, had just finished a long game of cards in one of the worker houses between the plant and the suspension bridge when he heard the explosion. It was exactly 1:15 a.m. He rang the hydrogen plant, and a few moments later he was on the line with Olav Ingebretsen. Still catching his breath, the night foreman had explained that three men broke into the plant and took him and Johansen prisoner. They spoke Norwegian—“normal like we do”—but were wearing British uniforms. “They blasted the plant into the air,” Ingebretsen told him.
As the sirens blared in the background, Larsen rang Norsk Hydro’s plant director in Rjukan, Bjarne Nilssen, and informed him of the events. Nilssen said that he would drive up to the plant straightaway after alerting the local German army commander and SS officer. The minute he hung up, Larsen headed to the plant himself.
Now Larsen, drenched through from the shower of water, stepped across the debris-strewn floor to a row of high-concentration cells and bent down to inspec
t the damage. All nine of the steel-jacketed cells were in shreds. The other row was the same. All the precious heavy water inside the eighteen cells had poured out and swirled down the room’s drains. Whoever these saboteurs were, they knew exactly what to destroy, and they had done their work well.
Part IV
19
The Most Splendid Coup
* * *
THE NINE SABOTEURS ducked behind a bank of plowed snow as a car rushed past from the direction of Rjukan. The car disappeared around the bend, and they set across the road, which had become little more than an icy stream in the thaw. Just as the last of them made it to the far side, another car came barreling down the road. They jumped into the ditch to escape its headlights. Trucks full of soldiers were sure to follow.
After locating their supply depot, they once again donned their white camouflage suits and collected their gear, then skied along the icy power-line track toward Rjukan. Poulsson and Helberg led the way. Both local boys, they were thinking about their families in town. What would the Nazis do in retaliation for the operation? How easy it would be to slip into Rjukan, sit down for a meal with their parents and siblings, protect them if needed. Nobody knew they had participated in the sabotage. They had not been seen. Putting these dreams away, they skied on, toward the Krossobanen.
The sirens continued to sound, and a truck sped past on the road below. Down in Rjukan, the beehive of Germans was stirring. If they so much as suspected that the saboteurs were making their escape under the funicular, they would be caught. They could not risk coming onto the Ryes Road beside the base station. Roughly a mile and a half down the power-line track, they took off their skis, hoisted them onto their shoulders, and headed into the woods. After a short hike, they came to the steep, zigzagging road. Weary from the long operation and weighed down by their gear, they still had a half-mile vertical climb to reach the Vidda. It was already past 2:00 a.m., and they wanted to be at the top of Vestfjord Valley and away before dawn in five hours. Each switchback on the path was a fifteen-minute slog. The men trudged in single file, each trying to follow in the footprints of the man in front. On some stretches, the path was slick. On others, they sank into the snow. At each bend, they took a short break and then forged ahead.
