The Winter Fortress

by Neal Bascomb

  Haukelid and Sørlie had set the clocks to “ring” at noon to wake them up after their early Saturday morning visit to Diseth’s workshop. At the right minute, the strike hammers on the alarm clocks closed the electric circuit and off went the caps. These same type of caps would trigger the detonator fuses connected to the long, rust-colored sausage of Nobel 808 explosive they had rolled—almost nineteen pounds of it. Once the explosive was set in the forepeak of the Hydro, Haukelid figured it would blow a hole eleven feet square that should sink the ferry within four minutes. He based his calculations on his own engineering experience and on what he had learned at STS 17. Four minutes would give the passengers enough time to escape, either into lifeboats or into the water with life belts, but would not allow the ferry to reach shore.

  Settling back down into their beds, Haukelid and Sørlie went over again what was ahead. In a few short hours, when darkness fell, they would head down to Rjukan to meet the others. Then, after midnight, they would travel to Mæl to plant the explosives.

  Over in Vemork, Larsen and Syverstad were overseeing the hitching of a locomotive to two railcars loaded with forty-three four-hundred-liter drums and five fifty-liter flasks of “potash lye” (roughly four thousand gallons total). Dozens of soldiers with machine guns encircled the train, scanning the surrounding hillsides and valley for any threat. They had guarded the cars overnight under the glare of spotlights. In a couple of hours, the train would move down to Rjukan, where it would remain overnight at the station under similar guard until Sunday’s journey to Mæl.

  Before the train left Vemork, the local Norsk Hydro director, Bjarne Nilssen, came up from Rjukan to ensure that everything was in order. After he had inspected the shipment, Larsen asked him back to his office to fill out the necessary paperwork for the consignment. It had to be done today, Larsen explained, because he needed to take the day off tomorrow.

  While in Larsen’s office, Nilssen made a phone call to Norsk Hydro’s Notodden plant, requesting that a truck be waiting at Notodden railway station when the train arrived the next day. The man on the other end of the line asked where the truck was headed, and Nilssen replied that it was an “unnamed destination.” When he hung up, Larsen asked his boss why he had ordered the truck. Nilssen told him that the Germans wanted to send the highest concentrations of heavy water, which were in the five fifty-liter flasks, on a separate transport.

  The Nazis were clearly expecting an attack. If the ferry reached its destination at the southern end of Lake Tinnsjø and if the railcars made it the twenty miles to Notodden railway station, then the most valuable part of its shipment would disappear out of reach.

  28

  A 10:45 Alarm

  * * *

  SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Haukelid and Sørlie were in Rjukan, looking down from a bridge over the Måna River toward the town’s railway station. They could see two flat railcars laden with drums and flasks and drenched in light. Soldiers with machine guns were perched on top of the cargo, their breath steaming in the frigid cold, clearly following, to the letter, Falkenhorst’s advice after the first Vemork sabotage: “When you have a chest of jewels, you don’t walk around it. You plant yourself on the lid with a weapon in your hand.”

  The two saboteurs left their vantage spot on the bridge and threaded through the backstreets of Rjukan to a detached garage behind a house. The garage door was locked. A practiced thief by now, Haukelid jimmied it open easily. Inside they found an old car. The owner had offered the car to Lier-Hansen for the night and had been told that it would be best for him if it looked like it had been stolen.

  Lier-Hansen and a man named Olav, whom he had recruited as their driver, met them at the garage soon after. Then Larsen showed up, carrying a rucksack and skis for the journey to Sweden and looking altogether nervous. Syverstad was at Vemork, and Nielsen in an Oslo hospital, awaiting an appendectomy that his sister, a nurse there, had arranged for him to have on Sunday—the perfect alibi. Olav opened the choke of the car and then rotated the crank to turn over the engine. It sputtered and died. He tried again. This time, the engine did not even feign life. “You dumb brute!” Haukelid kicked the side of the car.

  It would be a tough eight-mile slog to Mæl in the cold and dark if they were not able to get the car started. And they could not be late: the closer it was to the train’s arrival, the more security they expected at Mæl station. They opened the hood and inspected the engine. The battery was fine. They had enough gas. The fuel pumps were clear of ice. Everything else looked in order. They tried a third time. Again, nothing. “I’m sorry,” Olav said, “but it won’t go.”

  They had already attempted to obtain cars from the two doctors in the town, who were the only ones allowed to operate vehicles during wartime. Neither car was in working order. The Germans had taken most of the rest.

  Once again, Haukelid and Olav combed the engine. This time they loosened the carburetor and found it clogged with soot. After a thorough cleaning, their hands and faces black, they tried again. Olav yanked on the choke, spun the handle, and at last the engine started. It was almost 1:00 a.m., an hour later than their planned departure time.

  The lone car moved south from Rjukan along the snow-covered road, its tire chains churning up a trail of murky white behind them. If they ran into any checkpoints they would have a tricky time talking their way free. Five men in a stolen car without travel permits in the middle of the night was bad enough; their weapons and bundle of explosives would see them shot, but only after they were tortured. The short ride to Mæl was made long by the dread they all felt. Haukelid knew that the responsibility of seeing that the charges were set rested with him, as the operation’s leader. From what Larsen had told him, they would not have another chance to hit the whole shipment once it was on the other side of Lake Tinnsjø.

  Roughly a mile from the ferry terminal, Haukelid told their driver to pull over on the side of the road and shut off the headlights. When the car stopped by a bank of trees, Haukelid handed Larsen a pistol. It did not settle easily in the engineer’s hands. “Wait for us,” Haukelid told him. If they were not back in two hours, he and Olav were to drive off, and he would have to get himself to Sweden. Then Haukelid turned to the driver. If shots were heard, he was to “get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.” All agreed. Haukelid, Sørlie, and Lier-Hansen got out of the car.

  “Good luck to you,” Larsen said before the doors closed. They would need luck, and plenty of it. Overhead, a half-moon hung in the clear sky, providing barely enough light to see their way to the station. The winter chill stung their skin, and the ice under their feet cracked and snapped with every step. If there was a keen-eared guard ahead, he would hear them coming long before they saw him. Indeed, for all the popping of ice, he might think an army was on the way.

  Moving slightly ahead of the others, Haukelid kept his eyes trained on the station, watching out for any movement. A single hanging lamp lit the gangway leading to the shadowed hulk of the Hydro. Otherwise there were no other lights. From what he could see, no soldiers patrolled the ground around the ferry. A few nights before, on reconnaissance, he had seen between fifteen and twenty men in the station house. They had rarely ventured out in the cold, but he figured they would be significantly more careful tonight, the night before the shipment arrived. If they were indeed keeping a closer watch, they were doing it discreetly.

  One hundred yards from the station, Haukelid waved for the others to stop and provide him with cover as he ventured closer. His pockets stuffed with grenades and alarm clocks, a Sten gun hidden under his parka, and a nineteen-pound pack of explosives wrapped around his neck and waist, he felt like some kind of lumbering giant. He spotted a handful of soldiers in the station house, but again, none outside. For all their defensive measures, the Germans had apparently not thought to protect the ferry the night before the transport.

  Gesturing for Sørlie and Lier-Hansen to follow, Haukelid crept along the dock toward the ferry. Again, no guards or looko
uts. Fear snaked up his spine. He did not trust that the Germans would be so foolish.

  Unchallenged, the three moved onto the ferry at last. Haukelid heard some faint voices below the main deck. Slowly, he continued down into the companionway. Near the door leading to the crew’s quarters, he listened closely. It sounded like the crew was in the middle of a heated game of poker. He stole forward, briefly catching sight of the Norwegian crew sitting around a long table, playing cards.

  He then came to the third-class passenger compartment. Now he needed to find a hatch below decks where they would place the explosives. While he and Sørlie searched for the hatch, Lier-Hansen provided cover. Just then, they heard the shuffle of feet down the passageway. Before they could hide, the watchman appeared in the compartment. If he called the alarm, they were lost. “Is that you, Knut?” the watchman asked.

  “Yes,” Lier-Hansen said coolly, recognizing a man, John Berg, whom he knew from the Mæl Athletic Club. “With some friends.” Haukelid and Sørlie stepped forward. There was another tense moment as the watchman tried to reconcile why they were onboard in the middle of the night. “Hell, John,” Lier-Hansen said. Berg knew he was in the resistance. “We’re expecting a raid, and we have something to hide. Something illegal. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Berg said. “No problem.” He pointed out a hatch in the floor of the passageway that led below deck. “This won’t be the first time something’s been hidden below.”

  Lier-Hansen kept up the conversation with the watchman as Haukelid and Sørlie climbed down into the bilge. On their hands and knees, a flashlight to guide them, they sloshed through the ice-cold water until they reached the bow of the ferry. The low, dark space resembled a tomb. If the Germans came onboard and found them there, it might well be theirs. Sørlie held the light as Haukelid got to work.

  The minutes passed quickly as he delicately prepared the charges. He secured the explosives under the water on the corrugated-iron floor. The sausage of Nobel 808 was curled into an almost complete circle. Haukelid fixed two detonator fuses to both ends of the sausage. He drew the other ends out of the water and taped them together. Then he connected the electric detonator caps to these fuses and fixed them to the ribs of the ship. After connecting the two alarm clocks with their battery packets, he made sure that the wires leading from the clocks were not already electrified, then wound the alarm clocks, setting them to go off at 10:45 a.m. These were taped to the ribs of the ferry as well.

  Hands numb, eyes stinging from sweat, Haukelid began the most dangerous part of setting the charges, taping the wires from the alarm clocks to the detonator caps. With only a third of an inch separating the strike hammers on each alarm clock from the plates that would complete the circuit and trigger the detonator caps, Haukelid took great care. If he jarred the alarm clocks, if his hands slipped, if he lost his balance on the slick floor, disaster would strike—at nine thousand meters per second, the burn rate of the fuses. He and Sørlie would be dead before the thought so much as flashed across their minds.

  His hands remained steady, and he finished his work. Haukelid and Sørlie wriggled their way back over to the ladder and emerged through the hatch, dirty and soaked. Lier-Hansen and Berg were still talking away. Berg did not ask any questions about what had taken them so long—and Haukelid was not about to answer any. He simply shook Berg’s hand and thanked him for being a good Norwegian. Then the three men sneaked off the ferry and away into the night.

  They reached the car just a few minutes before their two-hour deadline and drove away a short distance before Olav stopped on the roadside. Sørlie got out. He was heading back into the mountains to reconnect with Skinnarland. After putting on his skis, he said his goodbyes to the others. “I’ll be back before long,” Haukelid promised. Then Sørlie disappeared into the woods. Olav drove the rest of them south toward Kongsberg, where they planned to board a train to the capital. Back on the ferry, the clocks ticked.

  On Sunday morning, February 20, at 8:00 a.m. sharp, whistles blew across the train station at Rjukan. The soldiers guarding the containers of heavy water settled into position on the two flatbed cars. The train was also hauling seven tanks of ammonia and two wagons of luggage, mostly Wehrmacht supplies, to the ferry.

  Never had a shipment from the town been so well protected. Soldiers were stationed all along the railway line as well to make sure there was no attack on the route to the docks.

  In his childhood home in Rjukan, Gunnar Syverstad was tending to his sick mother. She was supposed to be taking the 9:00 a.m. passenger train to Mæl, then the ferry to Notodden, to attend a hospital appointment. But the night before she had suddenly come down with terrible stomach pain and was now too weak to travel. She did not know that her son had added a generous amount of laxative to her dinner the night before.

  But dozens of other Rjukan residents—men, women, and children—as well as several others, including the visiting composer Arvid Fladmoe, were not hindered in boarding the passenger train and beginning their journey to Mæl and the ferry that waited there.

  At the Kongsberg station, a sixty-mile drive from Rjukan, Haukelid and Larsen bought two train tickets to Oslo. Olav had dropped them off roughly ten miles from the town, and they had skied the rest of the way through the forest. Lier-Hansen was supposed to be with them, but he decided at the last minute not to leave for Sweden. As they were waiting for the Oslo train to depart, a German troop train arrived from the east. Within minutes, the station was overflowing with soldiers.

  Haukelid knew they would be fine if they stayed calm. Then Larsen seized his arm. “That’s the chief of the Rjukan Gestapo,” he said, watching Muggenthaler step from the train. “And I’m not supposed to leave town.” The two men hurried to the lavatories, and Larsen locked himself inside a stall, where he remained until the train with Muggenthaler onboard departed and they were able to board their own train.

  Up on the hillside overlooking Mæl, Lier-Hansen watched the freight train come down the line on time. Over the next hour at the dock, the train wagons and flat cars were shifted onto the Hydro and locked into place. Then the passengers began to arrive. The clerk checked their tickets before they crossed the gangway and took their seats. Those with the cheapest seats were seated farthest from the main deck. Lier-Hansen checked his watch frequently. A few minutes after ten o’clock, the scheduled departure time, the dockworkers cast free the mooring lines, and the Hydro moved away from the pier, its propellers stirring up the placid waters of Lake Tinnsjø behind it.

  It was a cold but clear morning, and the sun shone brightly overhead. Captain Erling Sørensen had made this crossing hundreds of times. He came from a family of ship captains. His brother had been torpedoed—twice—while plying the North Atlantic. On Lake Tinnsjø, one did not worry about such things. Up on the bridge, Sørensen directed the Hydro toward the center of the lake.

  Just before 10:45 a.m., Sørensen stepped out of the wheelhouse to make a note in the logbook. Below deck, the thirty-eight passengers were passing their time in the saloon and other compartments. Some played cards, others were engaged in conversation or were quietly reading their books. An elderly woman thumbed through a photo album. In the engine room, three crew members were eating a late breakfast, taking a break from the cold. Except for the presence of eight German soldiers keeping careful watch over two of the railcars, all was normal.

  As Sørensen descended from the bridge, a sharp crack sounded below deck, and the ferry shuddered. If they had not been in the middle of the deep lake, he might have figured they had run aground. But no, this was something different altogether. Running back up the steps, he saw smoke blanketing the deck. “Steer toward land!” he shouted to the helmsman. Before the ferry could change course, it began to keel violently. In the compartments below, terror struck the passengers. The lights went out, and water poured across the floor. Hot steam hissed through cracked pipes. The third-class saloon lacked portholes and was almost pitch black. “A
bomb!” one of the passengers shrieked. “We’ve been bombed!” Everyone struggled to find the door.

  On the bridge, Sørensen knew the ferry was lost. The bow was under water, and they were nowhere near the shore. He shouted for the passengers to get into the lifeboats and, with a member of his crew, managed to release one of the boats. Some of the passengers were already hurling themselves into the water. Then he told his helmsman to abandon ship and took over the bridge. He swung the wheel to direct the Hydro to the right, but it continued to list to port. One crew member was almost crushed between two tilting railway cars.

  Passengers fled from their compartments onto the main deck. Some managed to find life belts before jumping into the water. Others simply took off their thick coats and leaped overboard, Arvid Fladmoe among them. Those who could not swim faced a Hobson’s choice between the sinking ship and the treacherously cold water. Down in third class, the passengers finally found the door and their way out but were confused in the darkness about which way to go. Water poured down the passageway in a torrent.

  One young woman named Eva Gulbrandsen struck a porthole with her fists, hoping to crawl through it to the light above. The glass was too strong to break. A man ran past, and she asked him for help, but he was in a panic. “I can’t help myself. I can’t even swim.” Screams and cries for help rang out in every direction. The floor underneath their feet steepened into a slide. At last Eva made it to the upper deck. She stripped off her wool coat and climbed over the railing. Still in her heavy boots, she sprang from the ship.

  Sørensen scrambled out of the wheelhouse. The bow was now completely submerged, and at the stern, the propellers spun higher and higher out of the water. The ferry now tilted so far to one side that he could almost crawl across the starboard side of the hull. At that moment, there was another huge bang, and he saw the eleven railcars break free and pitch into the lake. He had only seconds now before the whole ferry sank, and he would go down with it if he did not move quickly. He jumped.