The Winter Fortress

by Neal Bascomb

  Part V

  25

  Nothing Without Sacrifice

  * * *

  ON THE DAY of the American bomb attack, Leif Tronstad was where he felt most at home in his exile: in Scotland. He was staying at STS 26, checking in on his men and taking part in a week of commando training. It was a nice reprieve from the corridors of the high command, where he sometimes felt he spent more time navigating bureaucracy than fighting for Norway. He passed the afternoon setting off small explosive charges, the sun shining brilliantly on the hard-packed snow. For the first time in a long time, he felt carefree and happy.

  Back at Drumintoul Lodge in the early evening, he heard a radio report about a U.S. Air Force run over Norway. There were no specifics. In his diary that night, he simply wrote, “Hope that the Norwegian losses have been small and that this devilry will end soon.” Over the next few days, he learned the full story.

  The Allies had broken their word. Without consulting the Norwegian government, they had sent a fleet of bombers to strike Vemork. Many civilians had died. Much needless destruction had been wrought, especially on the nitrate plant in Rjukan. That site had never appeared on any target list and only produced fertilizer for Norwegian agriculture. Hardest to accept was the fact that the primary target, the heavy water plant, had not even been damaged, just as Tronstad had warned it would not be. The whole situation—the betrayal, the needless death, and his own powerlessness to stop it—left Tronstad deeply embittered. But he was not one to wallow in such an emotion. He wanted reassurance that nothing like this would happen again.

  In London, Jomar Brun took the news personally. Furious, heartbroken, and ridden with guilt that he had somehow played a part in the raid, he protested to the Norwegian and British governments and tendered a letter of resignation to the Directorate of Tube Alloys. “On leaving Norway about one year ago,” he wrote, “I thought I would be able to contribute to the Allied war effort, at the same time helping to spare Norwegian lives and property. I now understand my mission was in vain.”

  When Tronstad returned from Scotland, he calmed Brun and persuaded him not to resign. Then he got to work, rallying General Hansteen and the Norwegian foreign minister to protest to the British and American authorities. Investigations were started and apologies given, but no offer was made to seek Norwegian approval in advance of any future strikes. The Allies made clear that they needed a free hand to wage war against the Germans.

  Tronstad learned that the decision to bomb Vemork came from outside the typical target-list channels; in fact, the highest Allied authorities had mandated the attack. They felt that even if the Germans were unable to manage a fission bomb like the ones the Allies were developing, they might still produce radioactive weapons that could ruin entire cities. Unless and until they had clear, unequivocal intelligence that the Germans were no longer pursuing fission research, then the Allies had to act with unflinching resolve.

  From messages received in December from Njål Hole, Tronstad knew the Germans had not abandoned the atomic field. Their studies and experiments continued, and they were still eager to produce heavy water. There were further reports from Germany that Hitler was heralding “secret weapons,” soon to be loosed on the world. One of them, from a Reuters correspondent who interviewed several fugitives from Germany, warned of a Nazi bomb “filled with explosive gases of fantastically high destructive power . . . that will be used against Britain soon.” To remind himself of what he was fighting, Tronstad tucked the article into his diary.

  Allied intelligence soon learned of reports that Norsk Hydro had “decided to abandon entirely the production of heavy water.” This unconfirmed intelligence failed to appease Tronstad. The Americans had demonstrated that they were willing to launch huge raids on Vemork to halt production. Now, he warned, even if Vemork was shuttered, the Germans might dismantle the high-concentration plant and recommence production elsewhere—somewhere unknown to the Allies. If he had been allowed to move forward with the castor-oil sabotage, they could have slowed production almost to a standstill without arousing suspicion.

  Struggling emotionally with the aftermath of the raid, Tronstad also had to suffer through another Christmas away from his family. Although he knew that Bassa was holding strong in his absence, her letters throughout the year spoke about the effect of that absence on all of them. In one, she wrote, “It was a heavy time for me after you were gone, and I still have the most terrible nightmares in my sleep, so it has probably left a deep mark.” She feared for him too: “It’s as if you are living only half a life in this way. The children are growing up without you, it’s so sad, our little boy is so funny, he will be a big boy when you get home.”

  Tronstad feared the same, and wondered in what other ways the war had changed him. In one letter to Bassa, he wrote, “It is my fervent wish that the two of us will find our way through this darkness and come together again in life in an open and trusting way as before.” All the suffering was the price they had to pay. Just before Christmas, he wrote, “We get nothing without sacrifice in this world . . . and perhaps least of all freedom and independence.” It was the nature of his own contribution that troubled Tronstad the most. While he sent his boys, one after another, into danger—and often to their deaths—he himself always stayed behind. “It is hard to spend my time quietly here to determine other people’s life and death,” he lamented in his diary. He wanted to be in Norway, bringing the fight to the Germans on the ground.

  Throughout November and December 1943, as Allied bombers pummeled Germany night and day, Kurt Diebner and his crew of young physicists continued doggedly to work on the assembly of uranium machines. For their G-III experiment, his team constructed a hollow sphere out of tons of paraffin wax and poured 592 kilograms of heavy water at room temperature into it. Then they fitted 106 uranium cubes to thin metal wires (eight or nine cubes to each wire) and secured the wires to a lid, each cube in the lattice an equal distance apart. The whole arrangement was lowered into the heavy water by a winch. The machine showed impressive results.

  The Gottow team then repeated the experiment, using the same sphere and the same heavy water, but this time with 240 uranium cubes. The design was efficient enough to be assembled in a day, and the results showed a neutron increase of 106 percent. As Diebner reported to his fellow physicists, “Given the relatively small size of this apparatus, these neutron increase values are extremely large.” Straightaway his team began building out the third iteration of the strung-cube design.

  His success came at an opportune moment: the constellation of officials involved in overseeing the atomic group—Speer and Göring among them—were about to oust Abraham Esau as head of the program. It was true that under Esau there had been a number of advancements, from Diebner’s cube design to Harteck’s ultracentrifuge work, to Erich Bagge’s U-235 enrichment using an “isotope sluice,” to numerous theoretical papers by a host of physicists that laid the groundwork for practical progress. But there was still no working reactor, nor any prospect of a bomb.

  Furthermore, the program continued to lack a steady supply of that essential moderator, heavy water, despite much experimentation and the establishment of pilot plants to produce it. Building a full-scale plant at Leuna was dogged by high costs and protracted negotiations with IG Farben. The recent Allied bombing on Vemork made clear the mistake they had made by relying on the Norwegian supply.

  Göring sent Esau his official marching orders on December 2. His replacement was Walther Gerlach, a scientist who had made his name studying subatomic magnetic fields. Gerlach taught experimental physics at the University of Munich and had spent most of the war working on torpedo fuse design for the navy. Tall, with a narrow, beak-nosed face, Gerlach was well liked among German physicists and was considered to be a soft, yet deft, hand at navigating the channels of power. Some thought him a curious choice, most likely to push the program only as a way of saving the scientists involved from the frontlines.

  They were soon to dis
cover that he had ambition. Indeed, he planned to be “the emperor of physics.” Although he was not a member of the Nazi Party, Gerlach was a militarist who wanted to see Hitler remain in power. By late 1943, he felt doubtful that Germany would be victorious in the war, but he was sure that if they possessed a working reactor or a bomb, they could secure whatever peace-treaty terms they wanted. As he told one of Speer’s deputies, “In my opinion, any politician in possession of such a device can get anything he likes.”

  Prior to his official appointment on January 1, 1944, Gerlach met with Diebner several times. He recognized that the Army Ordnance physicist was showing the most progress in his experiments and reassured him that he would be given whatever resources he needed to succeed in his efforts. In addition, Gerlach promised to appoint Diebner as his administrative assistant and return him to his office at Harnack House, the headquarters of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Gerlach was not interested in appeasing the feelings of all parties as Esau had been. Heisenberg, who continued to resist the superiority of Diebner’s cube design over his plates, would simply have to adjust.

  On December 11, 1943, Diebner headed to Norway to remedy the continued roadblocks with heavy water. At Norsk Hydro headquarters in Oslo, he called a meeting with Axel Aubert, the seventy-year-old director general, who had resumed his position after his successor’s arrest. Although the same stand led to the arrest of Eriksen, Aubert now told Diebner that Norsk Hydro was discontinuing heavy water production completely, as they could not “expose the company’s workers to further attack, nor invest another fortune in rebuilding a plant that would be lost in the event of a new air raid.”

  Diebner agreed with him. If production continued, the Allies would likely attack Vemork again. He wanted to move the plant’s high-concentration equipment—including all existing stocks of heavy water at every level of concentration—to Germany, where a new plant would be constructed. Aubert tried to argue against this—surely it was better they store everything in Norway until after the war. However, Diebner was determined. He needed approval from Berlin but was confident it would be granted. Then, when a new plant was built, he would have all the moderator he required for a reactor to produce plutonium.

  At the same time, Diebner was forging a second path toward a completely different type of atomic explosive. Through December and into the new year, he devoted a team of scientists and engineers at the Army Ordnance Research Department to it. Almost a decade before, physicists had shown that when two deuterium atoms collided at high speeds, pulses of energy were released. At Kummersdorf, some German scientists had perfected the shaped charges that could bring about these collisions at very high temperatures. Diebner and his team began putting together a series of experiments that would squeeze deuterium atoms together through the use of explosive shock waves inside a hollow silver ball, their goal being to trigger a fusion reaction—and create a bomb. One way or another, Diebner aimed to give Germany the weapon it needed to reverse its failing fortunes against the Allies.

  “We are sending all our friends our best wishes for a Happy Christmas,” Skinnarland tapped out in Morse, following with special greetings to Kjelstrup, Poulsson, and Helberg. They soon received a reply: “All your friends here send you best wishes for the new year with the hope that we can soon meet again.” Bunkered down at Bamsebu, they tried to find what cheer they could. They made a little Christmas tree from some spruce branches, ate reindeer, and played the handful of records they had nabbed along with a gramophone, Haukelid’s gray elkhound at their feet. They tried to get a signal to find some holiday music, draining a little of their precious battery supply, but the best they could do was a BBC broadcast of Big Ben striking its chimes at midnight on New Year’s Eve, heralding 1944.

  The two men had much to reflect upon as 1943 came to an end. Skinnarland had lost his father and niece that year. Although the Gestapo had finally released his brother Olav, Torstein remained at Grini. Skogen had been sent to a prison camp in Germany in early October. His fate was unknown.

  Haukelid was somber too. He had learned through Milorg that his father had been arrested in late September and taken to the torture chambers at Møllergata 19. Bjørgulf Haukelid knew a lot about his son’s activity before he had left for Britain, but he knew nothing about the wireless sets secreted in one of his company’s storerooms in Oslo, which were discovered during a raid. Haukelid hid the sets there in 1941, thinking it best not to say anything to his father. Now he feared the Gestapo would inflict even worse torture on him, assuming that he was lying when he said he didn’t know anything about the radios.

  After the New Year, Haukelid continued to build his underground resistance network and Skinnarland to collect intelligence on Vemork. The two men, though now as close as brothers, made an odd couple. Emotional and intemperate, Haukelid was quick to act. Skinnarland was reserved by nature, patient and deliberative, always planning things out before making a move.

  Their differences, and their living so closely together in a ten-by-ten-foot cabin, bred tension. One evening, tired of Skinnarland playing the same record for the hundredth time, Haukelid took it off the gramophone and broke it into a dozen pieces. Skinnarland’s response was to do the same with Haukelid’s favorite. Another day, Haukelid returned after a long, unsuccessful hunt, hungry and vexed. He’d thought the conditions perfect for stalking a herd and yet still he came home empty-handed. “I don’t understand it, it’s supposed to be best in thick fog,” Haukelid complained. “Then you can creep up quite close to them without their seeing anything.”

  “Indeed—and without your seeing them,” Skinnarland said, unsympathetic. “Everyone knows it’s impossible to find deer in a fog. You only scare them away.”

  “Do you think I don’t know where they are?” Haukelid said.

  Skinnarland gave him a quizzical look. “Only a fool goes out shooting in a fog.”

  “Oh, go to hell!” Haukelid shouted. He stormed out of the cabin and spent most of the night fuming in the snow.

  Despite these squabbles, both were committed patriots who loved life in the mountains and were tough enough and skilled enough to endure the worst of conditions. While Haukelid could be volatile, Skinnarland’s equanimity served as a balance. More than anything, they trusted each other with their survival.

  On January 29, 1944, Skinnarland received an urgent message from Tronstad. He had just received some troubling intelligence from Stockholm, and he needed Skinnarland to confirm its accuracy. “It is reported that the heavy-water appliances at Vemork are to be dismantled and transported to Germany. If it is true, are there any possibilities of preventing the transport? It is a matter of great importance.”

  That same day at Vemork, construction engineer Rolf Sørlie was helping the war effort by dragging his feet with respect to the plant’s rebuilding. In the afternoon, he was visited by Thor Viten, a Milorg leader in Rjukan. Sørlie felt excited by the visit: maybe his chance had come at last.

  Although the American raid had cost a number of lives, Sørlie and many others in Rjukan understood the need for it. Clearly, the Germans were keenly invested in what Vemork was producing, and in wartime, one hit the enemy where it hurt most. There was also talk that Nazi scientists were using heavy water as a catalyst for splitting the atom and, potentially, creating a bomb. These rumors were fed by a number of sensational articles in Swedish newspapers smuggled into the country, which described Vemork as a “secret weapon forge” for the creation of “a single atomic bomb to lay London flat.”

  Like Sørlie, most of the workers tasked with the reconstruction believed that the sooner they completed the job, the sooner the Allies would send another wave of bombers. The next run might target the dam at Lake Møs, flooding Rjukan in less than an hour, which would be a catastrophe. The new German antiaircraft batteries and torpedo nets at the dam only reinforced this fear. As a result, none of the local workers were interested in finishing the rebuilding. While such passive resistance was important, Sørlie wanted to be
part of the bigger struggle, like his friend Helberg. Editing a few illegal newspapers, hiding some radios, passing along a little intelligence—these were no longer enough for him. He wanted to be trained. He wanted to fight. He had never allowed his physical disability to keep him from adventures out in the woods when he was a boy. It wouldn’t stop him now.

  Viten told Sørlie to come up to Lake Møs with him and bring his skis. After work, they took a bus up to the lake, then started across its frozen surface. The wind blew with such force that Sørlie had to turn his head to the side to draw breath. Keen to show Viten that he could handle himself as well as anybody in the mountains, Sørlie fought to keep up.

  After a few miles, they reached the Hamarens’ farm. There they enjoyed a satisfying meal before being brought to a cabin a couple of hundred yards away to spend the night. Neither the Hamarens, nor Viten, explained to Sørlie why he was there, but he suspected it was to meet Einar Skinnarland, whom he knew to be in hiding in the area. In the early-morning hours, his suspicions proved correct when Skinnarland arrived at the cabin. He wanted to know if a recent message he had received from London was true: Were the Germans planning on disassembling the high-concentration plant and moving it out of the country? Sørlie confirmed that this was the case, but that first they would be shipping out the existing stocks of heavy water. Skinnarland urged Sørlie to find out as much as he could about the impending transport: they might need to stop it. Later that morning, Sørlie headed back to Rjukan, the journey made easier by his excitement at finally being part of an important mission. Little did he know that he would be returning to the farm much sooner than anticipated.