by Neal Bascomb
Within a few days, Fehlis received notice to have the Gestapo arrest Eriksen. A former Norwegian Army officer, he was rounded up with over a thousand other officers, ostensibly for being a subversive threat within Norway. However, Eriksen was dragged from his home and sent to a German concentration camp for a very different reason: nobody refused a direct order from Terboven.
At Nilsbu, on the very same morning that Eriksen demanded Vemork be mothballed, Skinnarland tapped out a series of messages to Home Station. They detailed how, by June 1, the Germans had begun producing the “usual output” of heavy water again. The Såheim plant was now operational as well, with concentrations reaching 15.7 percent purity. Its engineers expected to begin delivering supplies in “finished condition” by October. The Notodden facility was also approaching startup. Skinnarland concluded: “We can arrange to reduce the output at Vemork, while Såheim and possibly Notodden can be hindered. Our men are willing but would like orders from you.”
By return message, Tronstad wanted to know how Skinnarland planned to slow the production and made it clear that no action should be taken without prior approval. Gunnar Syverstad was already contaminating the high-concentration cells with drops of cod-liver oil, reducing output by 1.5 kilograms a day. “With care,” Skinnarland answered by cipher message, “that can be reduced to one half without direct danger for our people.” Over the next two weeks, he suggested other ways to prevent the Germans from obtaining any more heavy water. Vemork was too well protected, but a small force, five men at most, could attack shipments to Oslo, whether they were by train or motorcar. His orders, however, were to watch and wait.
To sustain himself until the longer fall nights when the SOE could again drop supplies, Skinnarland hunted, fished, and collected wood. It was marvelous to spend so much time free in the mountains, but eventually the isolation began to press in on him. Although he needed to travel down to the Skindalen, Hamaren, and Hovden farms to obtain scarce extra food, recharge his wireless batteries, and collect any messages brought by Lillian Syverstad, he also went down for the company.
Some nights he slept over, then spent the next morning working in the fields to extend his visits with the families. They were his lifeline and his protection, too. Far from civilization, subsisting off the land, those secluded mountain farmers may not have known much about the world, but they were worldly wise when it came to underground work. Whenever a German patrol approached their lands, they always seemed to know far in advance and sent warning to Skinnarland at Nilsbu. Once all was clear, they brought word to him in the mountains that he could return to his cabin, and often stayed for a while with him. On occasion he would hunt with them; skilled as he was, they were far better. As he noted in his diary one night, “Olav killed a small buck. I shot a stone.”
During this period, Skinnarland also risked seeing his Bergen girlfriend, Gudveig, for the first time since he went underground. Over the past year, he had sent a few gifts by post: some reindeer meat, a knife whose reindeer-bone handle he had carved with an intricate design. In mid-August he hiked to the Haukeliseter mountain lodge, where, through a contact, he had invited Gudveig to meet him. In his diary, he simply wrote, “Gudveig came. Big fuss!” They spent almost a week together before Skinnarland had to return to his hideout.
He was still completely cut off from his family, and there was nothing he could do to help them when, on July 11, his father died. Einar dared not attend the funeral that took place a week later. The Gestapo was still looking for him, and it would have been an obvious opportunity to catch him. He did learn that his father had been comforted in his final hours by the news that his son was safe in the mountains, but it would have been better by far to have been at his side. Moreover, though Skinnarland knew his big brothers Olav and Torstein and his best friend Skogen, who had survived his Møllergata tortures, would never have accepted his surrender in exchange for their freedom from Grini, that did not soften his guilt.
None of them, including Skinnarland himself, could have known that what was transmitted from the old reindeer hunter’s cabin deep in the Norwegian wilds was being heard in the corridors of power in London and Washington, D.C.
On August 9, A. R. Boyle, chief of the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Intelligence, sent the SOE a note suggesting that Vemork be targeted again. He was receiving reports that the Germans were doing “everything required” to produce a “secret weapon” that used Vemork’s heavy water to win the war.
Wilson informed Tronstad that the plant was once again being considered for attack. Tronstad drafted a message to Skinnarland that gave precise instructions on where, how much, and at what rate to insert castor oil into the high-concentration plant cells to contaminate the heavy water in a way that could be naturally explained. Before the message could be sent by the Grendon Hall operators, however, Tronstad was informed that it would be placed in a file until further notice. Anderson was forbidding any “local action” until he achieved consensus between British and American military authorities on the best course forward. Now more than ever, Tronstad feared Vemork was on the “target list.”
Late in 1942, in a meeting between Norway’s General Wilhelm Hansteen and U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, the two men had come to an understanding that any Norwegian sites slated for destruction, whether by the RAF or by the U.S. Air Force, were to be sanctioned by the British Air Ministry and placed on a target list so that the Norwegian high command could advise for or against them.
As one of those who reviewed this list for his government, Tronstad knew that some targets were best hit by air. He himself had suggested that the Knaben molybdenum mines be put on the list for attack by the RAF, and this went ahead in March 1943. Herøya was different. Although the aluminum and magnesium plant was essential to the German war effort, Tronstad always considered the safest and most efficient way to cripple its production was by sabotage, not by a daylight bombing raid. On the target list, it was flagged as low priority, first because it was not yet running at full production and second because there was a commando operation in the works against it. Nonetheless, without warning, the Americans had launched their bombing raid in midsummer.
In the uproar that followed, Hansteen and Tronstad pushed for a monthly review of the target list and for more direct consultation on what sites should be designated for sabotage or bombing. Most pointedly, Tronstad used all his influence to push for Vemork’s exclusion from the list. According to his sources, it was unlikely the Nazis would realize a bomb within the next several years. Njål Hole, Tronstad’s young spy in Sweden, had shared recent conversations between Lise Meitner and some visiting German scientists that indicated their uranium machines were focused on producing energy, not bombs. A Norsk Hydro executive who had recently escaped to Britain confirmed this. From his many contacts with those same German scientists, he believed it unlikely that the Nazis considered heavy water to be “of vital importance to the prosecution of the war.” Tronstad thus believed that a bombing strike was incommensurate with the level of the threat. Instead, a straightforward contamination of the high-concentration cells by insiders at the plant was the most prudent way forward.
While Tronstad awaited a response to his lobbying efforts, another German program—on which he also provided intelligence—was struck by the Allies. On the night of August 18, bombers hit Peenemünde, on the Baltic Coast, the site of the Nazi V-1/V-2 rocket center. That same evening, Tronstad was at his desk, writing his daughter Sidsel a letter, a photograph of the ten-year-old in front of him. He asked how she liked the watch he sent, praised the writing of her recent letter (though admonishing her for some spelling mistakes), and asked after her younger brother Leif. But Tronstad dedicated most of the letter to explaining why he needed to be away from her: “We have to do everything for our land to make it free again. When we say ‘Our Fatherland,’ we don’t just mean the land, which is beautiful and we also love, but also everything else we love at home: mother, little boy and you, and all the other fathers
and mothers and children. I also mean all the wonderful memories from the time we ourselves were small, and from later when we had children of our own. Our home villages with the hills, mountains and forests, the lakes and ponds, rivers and streams, waterfall and fjords. The smell of new hay in summer, of birches in spring, of the sea, and the big forest, and even the biting winter cold. Everything . . . Norwegian songs and music and so much, much more. That’s our Fatherland and that’s what we have to struggle to get back.” His efforts to protect Vemork were one way Tronstad was fighting for the future of Norway, when the Germans were driven out. Two days after writing to Sidsel, he met with the Air Ministry, and as a result of that meeting, he believed he had won an agreement to shield Vemork and other sites in Norway and to prevent another Herøya from happening again.
Later that afternoon, however, Michael Perrin distributed a secret report stating that he and his fellow Tube Alloys members believed that the production at Vemork needed to be stopped, and in the opinion of British intelligence, a bombing attack was the only way to eliminate production in the long term. “I would propose,” Perrin concluded, “the Americans be informed of the position and asked whether they would take the matter up with the USAAF. In that case, it would probably be advisable that no decisions should, at present, be communicated by us to the Norwegian authorities.”
“My name is Knut. That’s all you will learn. I have come from England and represent the King.” This is what Haukelid told yet another potential recruit. Governments may come and go, but King Haakon was the symbol of Norway’s struggle for freedom. “He wants you to set up and lead a military resistance group in your county . . . I shall instruct you about the organization. I shall give you what you need in the way of money, and I shall arrange for weapons to arrive by airplanes or by sea, at the time and place you want them.” Throughout September, their Bamsebu headquarters now built, he and Kjelstrup continued to develop underground cells throughout western Telemark. They stressed security above all else to their roughly seventy-five recruits: Use dead drops. Never put your commander into contact with a stranger. And “Remember: Keep your mouth shut.”
Traveling by bicycle, with high-quality fake papers and travel passes, they only rarely ran into trouble. Once, by a lakeside boathouse, Kjelstrup was confronted by a local sheriff and his deputy. The sheriff was a known Nazi sympathizer. When they demanded his papers, Haukelid, who had stayed out of sight, crept around the boathouse and readied to shoot the two policemen with his Colt pistol. Before it came to that, however, the officers let Kjelstrup pass.
They established a wireless station on a mountain farm, and the farmer agreed to the operator living there undercover—just another farmhand working the land. They also scouted German positions throughout the area and along the Haukeli Road, in preparation for the time when the Allies invaded Norway—or when their cells were called on for sabotage operations. British supplies were their most pressing need: their boots had holes in the soles and their clothes were threadbare. They could also do with tents, maps, compasses, rain gear, matches, shaving blades, cigarettes, rucksacks, and, as their drop list noted, “Six housewives.” Given that winter was approaching, they also requested food. Above all, they were desperate for weapons—sniper rifles, Sten and Bren guns, and Colt pistols—to train and arm their cells.
After midnight on September 22, the tail end of the first moonlit period in which the RAF could send a supply drop, Haukelid was alone at Bamsebu when he heard a plane. Barefoot and wearing only trousers, he ran out of the cabin with nothing but a single flashlight to signal the plane. When the sound of its engines faded, having sighted no parachutes, he hurried back into the cabin to dress. The plane came around again, and again he signaled frantically to the pilots. Still he saw no drop. Twice more he heard the hum of the aircraft’s engines. Then nothing. Frustrated, he returned to the cabin, fearing he would have to wait several more weeks for supplies.
A few days later, he was out at the edge of Lake Holme, pulling in fishing nets, when Kjelstrup returned from a visit to Skinnarland. “How’d it go?” he asked Haukelid.
“Go? Nothing’s happened here as far as I know.”
“London reported that a plane had been here and made a drop.”
Haukelid and Kjelstrup searched far and wide in the area around the cabin until they came upon two containers on the banks of the lake. Five others were half-submerged or had sunk completely in the water. After stripping down, they dove into the frigid water and began hauling them to shore.
On inspection, the weapons and most of the contents were fine, and only a share of the ammunition was ruined—a thousand rounds for their Krag rifles. That night, the men celebrated with a big dinner. For the first time in months they had more on their plates than they could ever eat: crackers, corned beef, chocolate, tinned fruit, jam, and raisins. The next morning, they feasted on more of the same.
But the full meals did nothing for the stiffness and swelling that had plagued Kjelstrup since the previous winter. A doctor in Oslo had diagnosed beriberi—a disease caused by the chronic lack of the vitamin thiamine—as a result of his eating only reindeer meat for such a long stretch of time. His teeth were a mess too, cracked and breaking from the same bad diet. Kjelstrup knew that he would not be able to endure another winter in the countryside. He decided to cross the Swedish border and move on to Britain.
The two said their farewells at the end of September, and Kjelstrup cycled away. A couple of weeks and some snowfalls later, Haukelid shuttered up Bamsebu. A heavy rucksack on his back, he set off on foot toward Lake Møs with his elkhound by his side. On the way, he realized that the snow was much deeper than it had been around Bamsebu, and he found himself trudging through waist-deep banks. He was forced to spend one night out in the mountains, sleeping in a clearing under a boulder with Bamse. The next day, it took twelve hours to hike a distance that should have taken a quarter of that time. As he approached Nilsbu, half hidden in fog, he was especially relieved to see that there was no shovel on the cabin roof, which would have been a warning signal telling him to keep away.
Skinnarland welcomed him—and Bamse—into the cabin. The two men planned to spend the winter together. It was good to have someone to rely on—not to mention the company—through the long, dark months. They settled into their new routine and continued to supply London with intelligence on heavy water production at Vemork. They were ready to slow or stop it if they were called upon to do so. But a call to action did not come.
“The powers that be wish us to consider whether we can have another go at the Vemork plant,” wrote one SOE deputy to another on October 5, 1943. Those “powers” were Anderson and his American counterpart, General Groves, who believed his scientists would have a working bomb in twelve to eighteen months, and the Germans might not be far behind. And even if they were not close to having a bomb, they might still be in a position to inflict a radioactive attack on London or another major city. Whatever “another go” entailed, the two SOE deputies decided over a series of correspondence, the Norwegians must be excluded from any involvement because of their clear opposition to any attack.
Using intelligence provided by Skinnarland, Wilson and his British staff drew up a report with three options: (1) internal interference with production; (2) coup-de-main attacks along the lines of Gunnerside; and (3) aerial bombing. The first was deemed only a temporary solution. The second was a long shot given the new defenses at the plant. The third, if carried out during a daylight precision attack, likely offered “the best and most effective course.” Armed with the report, Anderson proposed a bombing raid on Vemork to the chief of the air staff, Sir Charles Portal. Portal passed the target dossier to the commander of the American Eighth Air Force, General Ira Eaker, who was already well aware of the target.
From his base at the Wycombe Abbey, an hour’s drive west of London, Eaker governed a force of 185,000 men and four thousand planes. His mandate was to pummel Germany into submission, chiefly by destroying i
ts ability to fight. The cigar-chomping, soft-spoken American, who early in his command told the RAF, “We’ll bomb them by day. You bomb them by night. We’ll hit them right around the clock,” doubted the importance of the target and resisted the mission.
Groves continued to press for the attack through General George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, and the senior British representative in Washington, Field Marshal Sir John Greer Dill. On October 22, Eaker complied, informing his men, “When the weather favors attacks on Norway, [Vemork] should be destroyed.”
Throughout all these machinations, Tronstad and the Norwegian high command were left outside the circle. They were told that their efforts to influence the target list had been successful, that there was a star next to Vemork’s name, indicating it was to be attacked “in a special way, and therefore should not be bombed.” Everyone from Eric Welsh to the RAF reassured Tronstad that nothing would be done without telling him first.
On November 11, 1943, at a joint meeting between the British and Norwegian high command, Tronstad pitched a new policy toward industrial targets in his country, one that, given the state of the war, “should be changed as far as possible from the offensive and destructive to the defensive and preservative.” The same deputy who had delivered to Anderson the recommendation to bomb Vemork without a mind to the Norwegians now promised Tronstad that he would take up the case with the chiefs of staff. This was quite simply a lie.
24
Cowboy Run
* * *
AT 3:00 A.M. on November 16, 1943, when the duty sergeant roused pilot Owen Roane from his bed, Station 139, the massive U.S. airbase by the North Sea coast, was already alive with the preparations for an impending mission. Orders from the Eighth Air Force command, over a hundred miles to the southwest, had come into the base by Teletype, identifying the target, the weather prospects, the force needed, and the plan of attack. The operations officer, Major John “Jack” Kidd, and his staff had been working since the field order arrived. They determined bomb tonnages, fuel loads, routes, zero hour for launch, and which groups and squadrons would participate in the assault.
