Raiders (16 page)

The four men suffered heavy landings on very rough terrain.
The RAF had dropped them in the wrong place, ten miles from the prearranged landing zone.
‘It was fortunate that none of us was severely hurt when we landed,’ Poulsson recorded in his log.
‘The ground was just a mass of stones.’
The four immediately tore off their parachutes for fear that a strong rush of wind would
drag them over the rocky, broken land.
The wind had scattered the eight containers over a very wide area and after four hours of searching they decided to start again the following morning.
Had they been able to find the container with their skis and poles, they would have completed the search in a matter of minutes, but wading through heavy, wet snow in the dark they made little progress.
They passed the rest of the night in sleeping bags, sheltered from the biting wind in the lee of a large outcrop of rocks.
At first light, they resumed the search for the remaining containers, but without success.
The rocky, hilly terrain and deep snow combined to frustrate the men for two full days.
By the time they found the container with the skis, they were completely shattered.

The mountainside on which they had been mistakenly dropped lay ten miles to the west of where they wanted to be and roughly twenty miles from Vemork.
Poulsson chose to head for a hut known as Sandvatn at Grasfjell, which he knew from his childhood and was situated in an ideal location.
It was three miles from the designated landing zone for the gliders bringing in the Commandos and its remoteness made it highly unlikely that German patrols would discover them.
What’s more, the area around it was largely flat, making it excellent country for wireless communication.

Ordinarily, a ten-mile cross-country journey was a distance that expert skiers could take in their stride, but the GROUSE team were burdened by equipment weighing a third of a ton, including food provisions to last a month, bulky radio equipment, clothing,
spare ski equipment, first-aid materials, weaponry and ammunition.
Poulsson decided to take all their rations but bury roughly 150 pounds of the nonessentials to collect after the raid.
The difficulties of the march were compounded by damage sustained to their Primus stove during the parachute drop.
Heat for cooking and drying out clothes was essential in Arctic-type conditions and, without any available, the party were forced to drop their plan of walking in a roughly straight line over the mountains.
Instead, they would stay lower down, close to the lakes, where there were a number of huts they could use.

The weather had been kind to them but the day after they finally set out for Sandvatn, 21 October, a savage snowstorm burst over the Hardanger.
Unable to find a hut, they spent the first night in snowholes, but the storm continued to rage the following day.
Even without equipment the march would have been a slog, but with 500 pounds of kit it was a back-breaking experience.
Dividing their kit into eight loads of thirty kilos, the four men made the same journey twice a day to bring up all the equipment to the next overnight location, skiing through deep, wet snow.
Whenever they veered from their tracks, they sank up to their waists and soaked their clothing.
Long-distance Nordic skiing is an exhausting business in any event, but in the teeth of a powerful storm, pushing through wet snow and blizzard conditions when already exhausted, it pushes men to the limits of their endurance.
It is little wonder that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his fellow adventurers trained on Hardanger.
The temperatures, which can sink below minus
30 Celsius, coupled with the raging winds, were ideal preparation for polar expeditions – and even Amundsen experienced problems there.

GROUSE’s route was elongated further because the lakes and rivers were too treacherous to cross.
The early winter ice hadn’t hardened sufficiently and so they had no choice but to march round them.
Their rations were nowhere near adequate to give their bodies the energy required to cope with the combination of cold and physical exertion.
Each man’s daily quota consisted of a quarter of a slab of pemmican (dried meat mixed with fat and fruits), half a cup of groats, a few biscuits, a handful of flour, small quantities of butter, sugar and chocolate.
No one complained, however.
Quoting an old Norwegian saying, Poulsson wrote in his log: ‘A man who is a man goes on till he can do no more, and then he goes twice as far.’
On some days, the storm was so fierce that they could advance no more than a mile or two.
Poulsson’s predicament was made worse when he broke one of his ski sticks and found he had left his map behind.
Their only respite was provided by the warmth and shelter of the huts they found.

Back in London, the SOE planners, having heard nothing from Skinnarland or Haugland, had begun to fear the worst when finally, fifteen days after they had set out from the drop zone, the shattered advance party finally arrived at the Sandvatn hut.

‘In good weather it would have taken us a couple of days but because the snow was wet, the ground wasn’t frozen, the streams
and lakes were open (free of ice), it took us one hell of a long time with all that equipment,’ recalled Poulsson.
‘It was very tiring but because we moved from hut to hut our nights were fairly comfortable.
The problem was food.
We used up all our rations quickly and became very hungry indeed.’

Three weeks after taking off from Scotland, the W/T operator Haugland cabled London with a short message that offered only a few clues as to their ordeal.
‘Happy landing in spite of stones everywhere.
Sorry to keep you waiting for message.
Snow storm and fog forced us to go down valleys.
Four feet snow impossible with heavy equipment to cross mountains.’

Ravenously hungry and starting to show the first signs of malnutrition, the party understood the importance of finding extra provisions to supplement their modest rations.
To their delight, Haugland found a stray sheep and two lambs in a gulley.
‘We were very, very hungry at this time so we immediately killed one of the lambs and then skinned it on the floor of the hut,’ recalled Haugland.
‘We cut up the meat and put it into a big kettle with some dried peas .
.
.
It smelled delicious and we all sat down at the table eagerly.
But as one of the group (Poulsson) carried the kettle over to us, it dropped onto the floor.
We all immediately got down on our hands and knees and even though the floor was very dirty we filled our plates with what we could and ate every last bit.
It was delicious.’

Having recovered their strength, the men set out on daily reconnaissance trips to locate a landing place for the Commandos’ gliders.
They found the ideal location – long, flat and free of
rocks and other obstructions – to the south of Møsvatn, roughly ten miles from Vemork.

On 15 November, Haugland cabled London with the news that the snow at the landing place was 30 cm deep and frozen hard.
If the weather stayed fine, he estimated that the march to Vemork would take the Commando force about five hours.
SOE and Combined Operations held a meeting in London the same day to discuss the first Allied glider-borne operation of the war.
They decided Operation FRESHMAN was to be launched in three days’ time, during the ‘moon period’, when the days either side of the full moon would offer good light for the RAF crews to pinpoint the landing zone.
SOE put GROUSE on standby to prepare for their arrival.
On the 18th, Churchill signed off a memo giving the operation the go-ahead.

The plan, in short, was for the Commandos to be led to the hydroelectric plant by GROUSE, fighting their way if necessary.
After overpowering the German garrison there, the demolition teams were to break into the basement and destroy the heavy water canisters, fight their way back out against any reinforcements that had arrived in the meantime, then escape on foot across hundreds of miles of some of the harshest terrain on the planet to the Swedish border – but without skis.
The wounded were to be given morphine and left behind.
Operation FRESHMAN wasn’t officially designated as a ‘suicide mission’, but that is effectively what it amounted to.
It was probably just as well the 34 Royal Engineers of the 1st Airborne Division
selected for the task were kept in the dark about their objective until the very last moment.

Even in ideal flying and landing conditions, glider operations were perilous, nerve-shredding affairs, dreaded by the troops – and there were few countries less enticing for a glider pilot than Norway with its rough terrain and challenging, changeable weather.
But at 1715 on 19 November, the conditions were as good and settled as could be hoped for and Haugland wired London a message to that effect.

The Royal Engineer paratroopers, heavily laden with weapons and equipment, filed out of the huts at Skitten Airfield near Wick and boarded the two Horsa gliders attached to Halifax bombers.
There were seventeen men squeezed into each of the unpowered wooden aircraft, plus two RAF crew sitting at very basic controls.
When they took off, just after six o’clock, the weather was fairly mild but the wind steadily picked up as they crossed the North Sea.
By the time they reached the Norwegian coast, the gliders were bouncing through strong turbulence.
One hundred miles inland, the GROUSE party waited anxiously at the landing zone, listening out for the rumble of the RAF bombers.
But they never came.

The details of the Commandos’ fate would not become clear until the end of the war, but when only one Halifax bomber returned, the operation planners feared the worst.
One of the gliders had crashed into a hillside at a place called Fyljesdal, close to the coast, after the towrope had frozen solid and snapped.
Eight of the men had died on impact, one had injured his spine
and was paralysed from the waist down, another had broken both his legs, one had shattered his jaw and a fourth had cracked his skull and had difficulty in breathing.
Shortly after the crash, two groups of Germans had arrived, one party of regular Wehrmacht soldiers and another of SS troops under the command of a Gestapo officer.

The dead men were dumped in shallow graves and the Germans refused to let the locals give them a proper burial.
The five uninjured men were taken to Grini Concentration Camp near Oslo where, after two months’ detention, they were taken into woods and executed.
A War Crimes trial at the war’s end revealed the gruesome fate suffered by the four badly injured British troops at the hands of the Gestapo.
Leaving one of them in the cell next door to listen to the torture of his comrades, the Nazi secret policemen battered the other three and strangled them with leather straps.
When the Commandos were close to death, their torturers stood on their chests and throats and then injected air into their bloodstreams.
All three died a slow death in agony.
The fourth man was shot in the back of the head.
Two of the torturers were sentenced to death for murder and the third was given life imprisonment.

The fate of the survivors in the second glider was equally disturbing, but the full details of the hours leading to their death have never emerged.
An SOE agent reported that
the glider crashed near a town called Egersund, killing two or three outright and wounding an unknown number of others.
After ‘interrogation’, all the survivors were shot.
The Halifax bomber towing the glider crashed into a mountainside after becoming separated, killing the six-man crew.

The catastrophe of Operation FRESHMAN was also a major setback for Allied efforts to wreck Germany’s atomic bomb programme.
A map, with Vemork circled in red, had been found at one of the FRESHMAN crash sites.
The Germans immediately set about strengthening the defences at the plant and sweeping the area for enemy agents.
The GROUSE party was forced to disappear deep into the Hardanger until the danger had passed.
SOE cabled them an urgent message, reading: ‘.
.
.
vitally necessary that you should preserve your safety.’
As a further precaution the name of their operation was changed from GROUSE to SWALLOW.

It was now close to a year since the rate of heavy water production at Vemork had been increased by 3,000 per cent.
No more time could be lost.
Just days after the FRESHMAN disaster, SOE decided to launch a second attempt.
This time it would be carried out by a small group of British-trained Norwegian Commandos disguised as British soldiers.
The operation would be code-named GUNNERSIDE.

The new plan was as simple as it was daunting.
A group of six men from the Linge Company was to be parachuted onto the Hardanger to team up with the Swallow/GROUSE party.
The ten men would ski to Vemork, break or fight their way into the plant, destroy the heavy water and then escape to Sweden.
Unlike their doomed comrades in FRESHMAN, at least this raiding party would have the benefit of skis – equipment that any Norwegian could have told the SOE planners was essential.