Stalin authorized the building of a new laboratory to take charge of all nuclear research and placed it under the scientific direction of Igor Kurchatov. Work began in March 1943—just over a month after German troops surrendered at Stalingrad after a Soviet counteroffensive code-named "Uran"—meaning "Uranus" or "uranium"—which was, perhaps, not a coincidence.
FIFTEEN
"THE BEST COUP"
IN BRITAIN and the United States the overriding worry was how far the Germans had progressed. For some, every scientific advance by Allied scientists was double-edged. As Leo Szilard pointed out tirelessly, anything the Allies did, the Nazis could do too. On 22 June 1942 a worried Arthur Compton wrote from Chicago to Vannevar Bush that "we have just recognised how . . . a small heavy-water plant can quickly supply material for a high power plant for producing [fissionable material]. If the Germans know what we know—and we dare not discount their knowledge—they should be dropping fission bombs on us in 1943, a year before our bombs are planned to be ready."
The British were increasingly anxious about intelligence reports that the Nazis were stepping up production of heavy water at the Norsk-Hydro plant at Vemork, near Rjukan in occupied Norway. They knew that Jomar Brun, a member of the Norwegian resistance and an engineer at the plant, was feeding castor oil into the production process to ensure frequent breakdowns. However, realizing that local sabotage could not succeed forever, Churchill's war cabinet ordered the plant to be destroyed in an operation code-named "Freshman."
On the bitterly cold night of 19 November 1942, two four-engine RAF Halifax bombers, each towing a glider holding seventeen British commandos, took off for Norway's remote Hardanger Plateau. On the plateau a team of four British-trained Norwegian commandos—code-named "Grouse"—listened carefully for the sound of approaching aircraft engines. The team, led by Jens Anton Poulsson, accompanied by radioman Knut Haugland, Claus Helberg, and Arne Kjelstrup, had parachuted in a month earlier. Several times Haugland thought he heard through the headphones of his radio direction-finding equipment the buzzing that would announce Freshman's arrival. His comrades flashed signal lights into the sky, but no gliders floated silently in to land. Shortly before midnight, the Grouse team returned frustrated to their base-hut.
Radio messages from London soon told them that both gliders and one of the Halifaxes had crashed in sudden bad weather. The fate of the survivors would emerge only after the war. The glider that had been released by the surviving plane had crashed on a mountaintop near Stavanger, killing eight outright. The Germans quickly captured the nine survivors. They took four severely injured commandos first to the hospital and then to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation. Afterward, a German medical officer gave them a series of lethal injections. When they failed to die quickly enough, Gestapo men stamped on their throats. They then flung the four bodies into the sea. The five uninjured men were sent to Grini concentration camp north of Oslo. Two months later, in January 1943, the Germans tied the men's hands behind their backs with barbed wire and shot them.
The other glider and its mother Halifax crashed soon after crossing the Norwegian coastline. All aboard the plane died instantly, but on the glider only three were dead. Of the remaining fourteen, three were badly injured but the rest were in reasonable shape. Two commandos struggled through the deep snow to a farmhouse to beg for help. The frightened farmer, knowing the Germans would shortly arrive, refused, sending them instead to the local sheriff, who at once phoned the German authorities. The Germans quickly captured the men and executed them all a few hours later.
The total failure of Operation Freshman posed a stark dilemma to the British. Dare they hazard more men, especially now that the Germans had been alerted to British interest in the Rjukan area? Yet how could they allow German heavy water production to continue? They decided to try again, using Norwegian commandos familiar with the terrain, who would parachute in. The man selected to lead the new expedition—code-named "Gunnerside"—was Joachim Ronneberg, who had fled Norway after the German occupation. In early December 1942 he was training Norwegian resistance fighters at a Special Operations Executive (SOE) camp in the west of Scotland. He was ordered to pick five men to accompany him and to be ready in two weeks' time. The twenty-three-year-old Ronneberg appointed as his second-in-command Knut Haukelid, who had plotted unsuccessfully to kidnap the Norwegian puppet prime minister Vidkun Quisling, before himself escaping to Britain.*
Joachim Ronneberg
The team trained at a secret SOE school at Farm Hall, a country house near Cambridge, where, ironically, captured German nuclear scientists would one day be interned. Using microphotographs of blueprints of the Norsk-Hydro plant, smuggled out of Norway in fake toothpaste tubes, the British had reconstructed key parts of the plant, including wooden replicas of the eighteen cells that produced the heavy water. Unknown to the team, their training was being guided by Jomar Brun, the ingenious castor oil saboteur, also recently smuggled out of Norway on Churchill's express orders.
Meanwhile, still in Norway, the Grouse team was surviving high in the mountains while awaiting fresh orders from London. The failure of Operation Freshman had been, as Poulsson wrote in his diary, "a hard blow." Since then they had been pushed to their limits physically and emotionally, dodging German patrols, bivouacking in remote huts, and eating anything they could find—sometimes just "reindeer moss," the soft, green moss beneath the snow on which reindeers grazed and so acid as to be barely digestible even when boiled into a soup. Some of the men became almost too weak to stand, and their skin turned yellow. Poulsson's timely shooting of a reindeer on Christmas Eve probably saved them, providing protein and vitamins. They ate every part of the animal, including eyes, brains, and stomach. Even the reindeer moss, predigested in the animal's stomach, proved more palatable than the fresh. A message from London of a new operation heartened them, only for them to be disappointed again when, in January 1943, the pilot of the plane bringing the Gunnerside men aborted the mission after failing to locate the drop site in the shadowy, moonlit maze of the snowy mountains.
On 16 February a fresh message announced that the Gunnerside commandos were coming. The plane again missed the drop point, but the men parachuted anyway, landing on the Hardanger Plateau with containers of arms and explosives and packs containing skis and sledges. They buried their equipment in the snow and found a hut to shelter them while they worked out what to do. A map in the hut showed they were some miles from the rendezvous point, but three days of vicious snowstorms kept them pinned down.
Finally, on 23 February, skiing over the frozen terrain in their white camouflage suits, they spied the tiny dot of a distant figure. Ronneberg ordered Haukelid to ski ahead and investigate. Drawing nearer, pistol at the ready, he saw not one man but two, both heavily bearded. He was within fifteen yards before he recognized the ragged, wan-faced men with drooping shoulders as Claus Helberg and Arne Kjelstrup of Grouse and rushed forward to embrace them.
That night at Grouse's headquarters, a remote hut at Svensbu near Lake Saure, the commandos celebrated with a dinner of reindeer meat supplemented by chocolate and dried fruit brought by the new arrivals. The next morning, 24 February, they began to plan the attack. The location of the heavy water plant, on a lip of rock jutting from a three-thousand-foot mountain and five hundred feet above a river gorge, could hardly have been more impregnable. The only direct route across the gorge was a heavily guarded suspension bridge. The strategy agreed at Farm Hall was that the commandos should cross the gorge somewhere between Rjukan and Vemork and then follow the railway line that ran around the side of the mountain into the plant. First, though, they needed more detailed information. Ronneberg dispatched Claus Helberg to seek details of the latest German deployments from a contact in the Norwegian resistance and then to rendezvous with the main group later that day at another hut nearer the plant.
Helberg returned with important news: Amazing though it seemed, the railway line into the plant was unguarded. However, the critica
l question remained: Where could the men climb up and out of the river gorge onto the railway? Scrutinizing aerial photographs, they noticed bushes and trees growing up the side of the gorge at a single point. Ronneberg reckoned where plants could grow, men could climb, and he again sent Claus Helberg to reconnoiter. Slipping and sliding down into the ice-bound gorge at a safe distance from the plant, he crept along the frozen river at its base until he reached the bushes and identified "a somewhat passable way" up to the factory.
Ronneberg made his final preparations. He would lead a four-man assault team to break into the plant and destroy the heavy water cells. Haukelid would command a five-man support party. The tenth man—radio operator Knut Haugland—would remain concealed in a nearby hut to inform London of developments.
In the early evening of 27 February, the commandos put on their British army uniforms. All were carrying "the death pill"—cyanide encapsulated in rubber and guaranteed to kill them in three seconds if captured. At 8 p.m. the nine men of the attack and support parties, weighed down by sixty-five-pound packs, skied out into the darkness. They slithered down onto the road leading from Rjukan to the plant, nearly colliding with buses carrying shift workers. Only by thrusting their ski sticks hard into the snow did they brake in time. The buses rumbled past and off into the night, leaving the intruders still undetected.
Descending to the bottom of the gorge was dangerous and difficult in the dark for men thrown off balance bv the movement of their heavy, unwieldy packs. Because there had been a slight thaw and the river-ice had thinned, their next worry was whether it would bear their weight as they crossed. Treading cautiously, Helberg found a strong enough area of ice for them to cross, then guided his comrades to the route he had discovered up out of the gorge. Grasping at snow-covered rocks, shrubs, and branches of birch with frozen fingers, by 11 p.m. the men were on the railway line, following it silently and in single file toward the factory.
At 11:30 p.m. they halted five hundred yards from the gate leading into the plant. From there they had a clear view of the suspension bridge, where, they knew, the guard would change at midnight. They waited for the change to take place and for the new guard to settle down, huddled in their guardhouse. At 12:30 p.m. the Norwegians advanced, moving cautiously at first for fear of land mines. Haukelid and the support party cut the padlocked iron chain on the gate, ran inside, and, well armed with tommy guns and sniper rifles as well as pistols, knives, and hand grenades, took up a position to provide covering fire if necessary.
Ronneberg and his demolition team slipped past them toward the building housing the heavy water cells. They found the steel door locked, but after a frantic search, Ronneberg and one of his men discovered a cable duct through which they could climb. It led them thirty yards over rusty pipes and tangled cables down to a semibasement room. Carefully opening a door in the room marked "no admittance except on business," they peered into the heavy water production chamber itself. An elderly watchman was sitting with his back to them.
The two commandos rushed inside. While Ronneberg secured the door from the inside, his comrade pointed his pistol at the watchman's head. He told him in Norwegian that they were British commandos on a mission to destroy the plant. So long as the watchman cooperated, he would not be harmed. Pulling on rubber gloves in case of electric shocks, Ronneberg began swiftly fastening explosive charges to each of the eighteen steel-clad, four-foot-high heavy water cells. Then the sudden sound of smashing glass in a skylight made him freeze. The face of another member of the demolition team appeared in the jagged opening. Unaware of the duct, he had broken the glass in a desperate bid to get inside.
Norsk-Hydro plant at Vemork, Norway
The commandos waited for alarms to sound, but, to their surprise, none did. Ronneberg hurriedly completed placing the charges. Just as he was about to ignite the fuses, the old watchman implored him to help him find his spectacles, pleading that he was almost blind without them. Touched by the man's desperation, Ronneberg sacrificed precious moments to find them. He was again just about to light the fuses when the sound of boots descending the steps from the floor above made him pause anew. It was the Norwegian night foreman, who gazed at the intruders in astonishment.
Hesitating no longer, Ronneberg lit the fuses. There were two sets: thirty-second fuses and, as backup in case they should fail, two-minute fuses. Shouting to the two employees to take cover higher in the building, the commandos rushed upstairs and out through the steel door, which they had unlocked with a key taken from the old watchman, pulling it shut behind them. They were just twenty yards from the building when the explosion came. To Haukelid, waiting in the shadows with the support team, it seemed "astonishingly small." Indeed the noise was so muted that several minutes passed before an unarmed German soldier came outside to take a look. After a cursory glance around the compound he returned, satisfied, to the warmth of the guardhouse.
Meanwhile, the nine commandos regrouped outside the plant and embraced. They retraced their path back along the railway track and reached the bottom of the gorge before the wailing of air-raid sirens, the signal for general mobilization in the Rjukan area, announced that the Germans had finally realized what had happened. Once again luck was with them. The Germans had installed powerful floodlights to illuminate the gorge, but in the confusion no one could find the switch. The commandos slipped away into the darkness, some to ski to safety in neutral Sweden, others to hide out in the mountains, all to survive to fight another day.
Despite the muted sound of the explosion, their attack had been entirely successful; the heavy water cells were wrecked, and nearly half a ton of the precious liquid had leaked away. The commander of the German occupying forces in Norway, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, summoned to inspect the damage, conceded that "the English bandits performed the finest coup I have seen in this war."
*Vidkun Quisling was the origin of the word quisling to describe a person collaborating with an enemy occupier.
SIXTEEN
BEAUTIFUL AND SAVAGE COUNTRY
LESLIE GROVES met Robert Oppenheimer for the first time in October 1942 at Berkeley during his initial inspection tour of the key laboratories. They could not have been more different—Groves the supremely practical human bulldozer and Oppenheimer the intellectual sophisticate. Nevertheless, Groves took to the thirty-eight-year-old scientist, recognizing a man who could penetrate a problem swiftly and would give of himself unstintingly. Soon after, Groves invited Oppenheimer, then leading a small team of theoretical physicists set up by Arthur Compton at Berkeley to look at bomb design, to Washington. Groves asked his views on the type of laboratory needed to design and build the bomb. Oppenheimer suggested that, rather than choosing an existing location like the University of Chicago, the laboratory should be built in a remote place where scientists could work freely but securely.
Groves agreed and began doggedly seeking a suitable site. His criteria were not easy to satisfy: The location had to be isolated but still accessible by car, train, and plane, with a good, year-round climate and enough power and water. New Mexico seemed promising, and initial surveys suggested potentially suitable locations near Albuquerque. Groves arrived on an inspection tour, accompanied by Oppenheimer. The first site they visited was hemmed in on three sides by high cliffs, which Oppenheimer argued would depress the workforce. Knowing the region well from vacations at Perro Caliente, his ranch near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—named by the Spanish conquis-tadores for the bloodred glow that stained them at sunset—he recommended a site facing them and about thirty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe belonging to the Los Alamos Ranch School.
The school lay on a seven-thousand-foot-high mesa—a tableland formed by the flattened cone of a long-extinct volcano—whose red- and gold-striped walls plunged to the Rio Grande Valley below. The valley was pure desert except for a fecund strip along the water's edge, dotted with Indian villages. Across the valley Oppenheimer's snow-tipped Sangre de Cristo Mountains swept skyward. To the west lay
the slopes of the green-domed Jemez Hills. The mesa itself was covered with sweet-scented, long-needled pine trees. Groves and Oppenheimer arrived in November 1942 as light snow was falling, dusting the trees. Despite the weather, the schoolboys and their masters were out on the playing fields in shorts. Looking around, Groves noted the school's neat buildings of wood and stone, which could be used to house people until more accommodations could be built. The mesa itself was riven with deep canyons, suitable for containing special laboratories. A narrow, rutted mountain road connected the site with the highway to Santa Fe. According to one of Groves's party, he announced, "This is the place." Barely a week later, the War Department ordered the purchase of nearly fifty thousand acres there. It was, Oppenheimer wrote to a colleague, "a lovely spot."
Otowi Bridge leading to Los Alamos, New Mexico
Robert Oppenheimer had not been Groves's immediate choice as director of the new laboratory. He had first reviewed the more obvious candidates. Despite their initial prickly encounter, he already regarded Ernest Lawrence as an outstanding experimental physicist but did not believe Lawrence could be spared from the work on electromagnetic separation of U-235 at Berkeley. Arthur Compton was also highly competent but was at full stretch running the Met Lab at Chicago. The chemist Harold Urey at Columbia University, the discoverer of deuterium, was a possibility but, in Groves's view, too weak a personality. Oppenheimer was, Groves concluded, the best man available.
Before the Fallout Page 26
