Raiders (19 page)

The next few minutes were to be critical.
It was imperative they put as much distance between them and the plant as possible before the alarm was raised.
Clambering to the foot of the gorge as quickly as they could without risking a fall, they found the Måna was flowing much faster than it had been just a couple of hours earlier and the ice was that much more unstable as they dashed across.
Hauling themselves up the icy bank towards the main road, the party froze on the spot when the eerie wail of the plant’s alarms broke the night’s silence.
Grabbing their skis and poles, the nine men melted into the darkness of the woods at the foot of the slope before them.

Walking switchback rather than straight up the steep slope, several kilometres and hours of draining marching lay ahead of them, but with every German soldier in the region pouring into Vemork, they had all the motivation they needed to press on without delay.
Their route followed the open area beneath the
cable car used by sun-starved locals in the winter to get onto the plateau above the town.
It was the only plausible route, but there was a danger that the plant’s searchlights might reveal them, and the Commandos were surprised that the lights had not been turned on immediately.
An even greater worry was that the Germans would turn on the cable car and dispatch troops to the top, but that fear was never realised either.
At 0500, after three hours’ backbreaking marching, they dragged their weary bodies the final few steps onto the plateau above.

‘It was a beautiful morning as we watched the sun rise,’ recalled Rønneberg.
‘The sky was lit up in a lovely red colour and we sat there in silence eating chocolate and raisins .
.
.
We were all very, very happy.
Although we said nothing as we sat there I think we all felt great pride.
But we also spared a thought for our British friends who died in the gliders disaster .
.
.
From now on our struggle was with Norwegian nature.’

The next stage of the escape was to head for a hut owned by a Rjukan shopkeeper at a remote location called Langsja where they would rest up before heading back to the Svensbu hut.
The wind howled over the Hardanger as they set off and, having not slept for the better part of two days, it was a major effort to drag their aching limbs against the force of ever-strengthening gusts.
They made it to the hut with no more than an hour to spare before another violent blizzard burst over the plateau.
Although they were unable to press on, the fresh snow did at least cover their tracks from the cable car and force the Germans to spread their troops over Telemark’s vast wilderness.

In the valley below, the Germans were struggling to understand how the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Vemork had been breached and its precious contents destroyed without so much as a shot being fired.
General Wilhelm Rediess, the head of the Gestapo in Norway, urged reprisals against the local population after inspecting the damage, despite conceding that the raid had, in all probability, been a British operation.
General von Falkenhorst, commander of German forces in Norway, overruled him on the grounds that it had been a military act.
Von Falkenhorst, an old-fashioned Wehrmacht officer with a distaste for the practices of the Gestapo, was in open admiration of the raiders, describing the attack as ‘the most splendid coup I have seen in this war’.
He was later dismissed from his post for refusing to implement the policies of the Nazi Reichskommissar Josef Terboven who, amongst other brutal acts, had ordered savage reprisals against the villagers of Televåg for sheltering two Norwegian officers.

After a good night’s rest and revitalised by some hot food and drink, the GUNNERSIDE party set out the following morning into the snowstorm for Svensbu.
It was tough going and it wasn’t until 2130 that they finally arrived.
At the start of what would turn out to be a heart-stopping personal adventure, Helberg peeled off to return to the Fjosbudalen hut to collect the civilian clothes and faked Norwegian identity documents he would need over the coming months.
The plan was to meet the rest of the team at Svensbu, but there was no sign of him over the next two days and his comrades feared for his safety.

At this point, the eleven men of the operation (including
Skinnarland, the local SOE agent) were to split into three separate groups.
Five of the GUNNERSIDE party – Rønneberg, Idland, Kayser, Strømsheim and Storhaug – were to make a 400-kilometre journey to the Swedish border.
Haukelid and Kjelstrup were to stay in the Hardanger, wait for the German searches to pass and then team up with the Resistance.
Poulsson and Helberg were to head to Oslo before deciding on further action.
Haugland and Skinnarland, the W/T operators, were to lie low until it was safe and await further orders from London.
Convinced that Helberg had either been captured or killed, Rønneberg and his team strapped on their skis and pushed off for the long cross-country trek towards neutral Sweden.

For eleven days following the raid, the British authorities, including the Prime Minister, waited anxiously for news of the outcome.
Haugland and Skinnarland had been unable to find a message left for them by the sabotage team at one of the huts they had been using.
It was only when Haukelid and Kjelstrup arrived that they learnt the good news.
Shortly before midnight on 10 March, the wires back in the UK came to life and the coded message began to arrive.
Deciphered, it read: ‘Operation carried out with 100 per cent success.
High Concentration plant completely destroyed.
Shots not exchanged since the Germans did not realise anything.
The Germans do not appear to know whence they came or whither the party disappeared.’
SWALLOW’s momentous message was greeted with relief and delight in Downing Street, Whitehall and the SOE
HQ in Baker Street.
Hitler’s hopes of beating the Allies to an atomic bomb had suffered a major setback – but, as events were soon to show, Operation GUNNERSIDE had not killed off his hopes once and for all.

Such was the urgency attached to capturing the Vemork saboteurs that General von Falkenhorst and the dreaded Terboven, the two most senior Germans in Norway, personally supervised the search over the weeks that followed.
The senior officer at the Vemork plant was dispatched to the Eastern Front as punishment.
At the height of the searches, over 2,000 German troops were deployed, as well as several hundred Norwegian Nazis from Quisling’s NS party.

When the sabotage party had set out to Vemork, Haugland and Skinnarland packed up their W/T apparatus and set up camp high in the mountains above Lake Møsvatn where they knew the Germans never ventured.
From the safety of their snowhole, through the binoculars they watched the German troops combing the valley.
A state of martial law was declared in the Telemark region with no one allowed to leave without official permission.
The Norwegians, however, laughed at the incompetence of the Germans’ hunt for the perpetrators.
Looking for suspicious ski tracks was an obvious place to start, but with so many soldiers involved they ended up creating an enormous confusion of tracks that killed off any leads.

Eager to avoid the more populated areas of eastern Norway, Rønneberg had decided to take the long route to Sweden, heading north at the outset before turning back to the southeast.
SOE
had made up three sets of escape maps, each of which contained twenty-six smaller, more detailed ones of the areas they would pass through.
The weather and skiing conditions had been first rate when they had set out, but it wasn’t long before they hit trouble.
Their rucksacks were heavy with equipment and poorly designed: the straps bit hard into their shoulders and put extra strain on their backs.
They also had to heave a heavily loaded sledge, which was a gruelling effort through the wet snow and over rocky scrubland.
Even Rønneberg, not a man to complain easily, recorded in his notes for the operational report that their escape was ‘an awful labour’.

Making sure they weren’t spotted added to the effort, forcing them to take detours around open spaces, main roads, towns and villages.
Before each short stretch of the journey, two of them went ahead to reconnoitre the area before the others followed.
The landscape, often shrouded in fog or snow, was a bewildering confusion of hills, valleys, forests and lakes, criss-crossed with tracks and paths.
Unable to establish their location from the maps, they often had to rely on the compass to guide them.
On several nights they were forced to sleep in their sleeping bags in the open, wet through with freezing sweat and melted snow.

On the fifth day, their spirits now at a very low ebb, the temperature plunged again but, in a rare stroke of good fortune, they came across an unoccupied farmhouse where they helped themselves to the stores of flour and bannock bread (hard, unleavened biscuit-style bread).
In the remote regions of Norway, where
many people kept huts or second homes, it is a custom to let strangers use them on the understanding that they replace, or leave some payment in kind for any provisions they use.
Needless to say, the saboteurs weren’t in a position to repay the generosity.

On the evening of the sixth day, they crawled on all fours over a lake that was starting to thaw in darkness, climbed almost 1,000 metres of steep hill before breaking into a hut.
The following day, the temperature rose sharply, which was a mixed blessing because it made the snow wet.
By the afternoon, it was raining, and progress became even slower and exhausting; by nightfall, the sodden conditions forced the exhausted party to stop.
Over the days that followed the party made good progress, but there were fresh problems: as winter continued its jostle with spring, the temperature dropped again, and their supplies were rapidly running out.

Unable to find a hut to break into, for two nights they were forced to sleep in the snow in their sleeping bags.
With their rations almost exhausted, they had to veer from the route to seek out provisions, raiding huts for flour and bannock bread.
The nearer they got to the Swedish border, the more alert they had to be, as there was a greater concentration of German and Norwegian Nazi units there.
Navigating was more straightforward when they were high up because they could see the land and consult their maps, but down in the valleys it was far harder to work out where they were.
The raiders were tantalisingly close to freedom when they got lost in the mesmerisingly uniform landscape.

They were heading for the Glåma, the longest river in the country, which runs roughly parallel with the border.
When they found it, they were dismayed to discover it was entirely free of ice.
They were forced to steal a boat to cross it.
The following two nights were spent out in the open again in wet clothes and sleeping bags.
No one slept.
They were too cold and too hungry.
The final leg was especially hard-going.
‘It was dreadful broken and stony country, through scrub and thick woods, with no visibility,’ Rønneberg noted.

Finally, just after eight in the evening on 18 March, 400 km and two weeks after they had set out, bedraggled, worn out and famished, the five men crossed into neutral Sweden.
They shook hands, slapped each other on the back and, best of all, lit their first fire in the outdoors since leaving Britain.
The following morning, after burying all their incriminating equipment, they changed into civilian clothes and walked along a main road until they were picked up by a police patrol and taken to the local sheriff and then to hospital where they washed and had their clothes disinfected and dried.
The following day, the Swedish police happily accepted their cover story that they had escaped from a German work camp.
Issued with the relevant identification papers, they continued to Stockholm and reported to the British legation, who arranged for their return to the United Kingdom.

SOE were quick to understand the trials the men had overcome during their arduous escape.
‘The difficulties of this march in winter conditions with the added strain of short rations and hard lying make it a most noteworthy achievement,’ an SOE memo
states.
Back in Britain at the end of March, Rønneberg noted movingly about his adopted country: ‘On our arrival we were handed a cup of tea.
It was a strange feeling because here I was back in Britain, but I felt like I was at home.
We often used to refer to it as home when we were in Norway and when I look back on the war I will never forget the welcome that the British showed us.’

Rønneberg, meanwhile, had compiled a comprehensive report of the raid (which can be read in the National Archives at Kew), attached to which is a handwritten message from a senior government figure (only a very few knew of the heavy water threat).
It reads: ‘A magnificent report of a great effort.
Well planned and beautifully executed.
If you return the report to me I will have a condensed edition made for the P.M.’