Raiders (20 page)

The destruction of the heavy water and the safe return to the UK of the men who carried it out was by no means the end of the story.
There was a great deal of drama to be played out yet.
In early April, SWALLOW reported to England that Helberg had been shot trying to escape the Germans.
Tributes were duly paid by SOE and his Norwegian comrades.
This was wrong.
Helberg was very much alive and enjoying a remarkable adventure.
The story of his escape, which he wrote up on his return to the UK, amazed even his SOE commanders, who witnessed plenty of high adventure in their roles.
His boss Colonel Wilson scrawled a note on Helberg’s report: ‘The attached is an epic of cool headedness, bravery and resource.’

After the raid, Helberg and Poulsson both headed east for Oslo and met, as arranged, in a café the following week.
Poulsson left for Sweden a few days later in order to return to Britain.
Helberg’s long-term plan was to make contact with the resistance movement Milorg back in Telemark after lying low for a few weeks while the Germans hunted for the raiders.
In the short term, his main priority was to move to a safer place the cache of incriminating equipment that GUNNERSIDE had left near the Jansbu hut where they had sought refuge from the snowstorm after their parachute drop.
Were the Germans to find it, there was a strong risk of reprisals against the locals, dozens of whom had already been arrested and taken in for interrogation.
After a couple of weeks in Oslo, Milorg said it was safe for him to return to the Hardanger.
He left Oslo on 22 March, unaware that the Telemark region was in fact still crawling with Germans.

Helberg spent his first night back on the Hardanger in a hut that was burnt to the ground the following day.
The Germans – furious at being unable to track down the ‘British’ saboteurs – were venting their fury on the locals.
Still oblivious to the large concentration of German troops in the area, Helberg skied off to the Jansbu hut.
Pushing open the door, he found the entire contents of the hut strewn all over the floor.
He immediately turned round and saw three German soldiers skiing towards him at speed.
Quickly strapping his skis back on, Helberg took his Colt .32 from his rucksack and put it in his pocket.
As he pushed off, the Germans opened fire on him, the bullets kicking up puffs of snow around him.
‘I increased my pace so they had to
stop shooting and then a first-class long-distance ski race began,’ recalled Helberg in his official report.
‘I had a half year’s training to my credit and was in splendid form.’

Two of the Germans turned back after an hour or so but the third, a very strong and accomplished skier, kept up the chase.
Helberg was a strong uphill skier so he headed for the mountains in the hope of shaking him off.
He also skied straight into the low, brilliant bright sun in order to dazzle the German if he attempted a potshot.
Helberg was weighed down by a heavy rucksack and his skis were in a poor state because he had not had a chance to wax them.
Slowly the German gained on him.
After about two hours Helberg reached the lip of a steep hill and, fearing his pursuer would catch him on the descent, he decided to stop and settle the matter in a shootout.
The German pointed his Luger at him and bellowed ‘
Hande hoche!
’ (‘Hands up!), but was taken aback when Helberg pulled out his Colt .32.
Helberg stood stock still and let the German empty the whole magazine of his pistol.
He knew the Luger was not effective beyond a range of about fifty yards and the German was further away than that.
When he had fired his last bullet, the hunter became the hunted.
Helberg quickly closed on him, took aim and fired.
The German slumped to the ground.

Darkness was fast enveloping the Hardanger as Helberg headed back down to the floor of the valley.
Halfway down, he felt the earth disappear from under him – he was falling over a very high precipice, as high as forty metres, Helberg estimated.
His landing was cushioned by deep snow but he knew instantly that he had
broken his left shoulder.
To his relief, his skis remained intact and he pressed on, in excruciating pain and exhausted after a day and a half on his skis.
Heading towards a town called Rauland where there was a house he knew, he was stopped by a German patrol.
Unruffled as ever, Helberg calmly produced his identity card and told the Germans that he had been helping in the search for the British saboteurs.
When he arrived at the house, he was disappointed to find it occupied by a group of German soldiers, but once again he passed himself off as a pro-German and settled down for a night of cards and drinking games.
So well did he get along with the men who had been tasked with hunting him down, that one even bandaged up his arm in a sling and arranged for him to see a German doctor.

The following day a German Red Cross car was laid on to transport the smiling British-trained Commando to the town of Dalen.
There he was to spend the night in a hotel before continuing to Oslo by boat and train for hospital treatment.
It was typical of Helberg’s run of luck that Terboven, the country’s ruthless Reichskommissar, arrived at the hotel that night to use it as a base from which he could conduct the searches.
Terboven moved into the room next door and SS guards were posted along the corridor.
Helberg was caught in the centre of the spider’s web.

Early the next morning, hours before sunrise, a Gestapo officer ordered Helberg to join the other Norwegian guests in the lobby where they were made to wait for six hours.
This was a nerve-racking time for Helberg.
Not only was he the only single person
among the guests, he also had a suspiciously sunburnt, weather-beaten face that could only have been acquired from spending a very long period out in the open.
Finally, an officer arrived to explain why they had been rounded up.
At dinner the previous evening, an attractive young girl had spurned Terboven’s public overtures and insulted him.
Enraged by this display of Norwegian defiance, the Reichskommissar had ordered that all the guests were to be sent to the notorious concentration camp at Grini.
Women over fifty and very elderly men were allowed to stay, but the seventeen others were shepherded onto a bus and told that they would be shot on the spot if they attempted to escape.
An SS guard sat at the front of the bus by the only door and three more SS men were on motorbikes with sidecars in the escort.

Sitting next to the pretty girl whose boldness had so enraged Terboven, Helberg deliberately struck up a loud, boisterous conversation with her in order to draw the attentions of the SS guard.
Sure enough, the German, like a bee to a honeypot, made his way to the back of the bus and indicated that he and Helberg were to swap seats.
As the bus slowly negotiated the winding, climbing road, Helberg saw his chance, pulled open the door and leapt out.
He hit the frozen ground hard, aggravating his shoulder and smacking his head.
He ran into the woods, chased by the shouting Germans.
Reaching a high fence that he could not scale, a stick grenade exploded a few yards away, hurling him to the ground.
He hauled himself up, sprinted back past the bus and into the dense woods on the other side.
A grenade exploded behind him and another hit him in the back, but it
didn’t go off until he had scampered clear of its blast range.
The Germans fired intermittently into the dark, but after a few minutes they returned to their vehicles and continued their journey.
It was these shots that led to the report given to SWALLOW by the Resistance that Helberg had been killed as he tried to escape.
To avoid punishment for allowing him to get away, the German guards probably reported that they had killed him.

That night Helberg sought sanctuary in a lunatic asylum in a town called Lier where he had heard that the staff were Jøssings.
It was past midnight when he arrived, exhausted, soaked to the skin from the cold rain, and his shoulder and head throbbing with pain.
He was immediately taken in, fed, washed, clothed and treated by a doctor.
In the morning he was taken five miles down the valley to a hospital in the larger town of Drammen, where he was treated for eighteen days before being released.
At the end of May, after three months as a fugitive in his country, Helberg escaped into Sweden and boarded a plane for Britain.

Estimates that it would take a year before the Vemork heavy water plant would return to its preraid operational levels proved wide of the mark.
The Germans went to great lengths to repair the damage quickly, replace the destroyed apparatus and resume full-scale production.
In July, Skinnarland cabled London with the depressing news that production would be back to full capacity within a month.
Once again, the top brass in Whitehall convened to consider their options.
Nothing was ruled out.

A ‘
coup de main
’ attack, similar to the GUNNERSIDE raid, was out of the question.
Germans had made major improvements to their defences at Vemork, surrounding the plant with rows of thick barbed-wire barriers and minefields.
All doors bar the main entrance to the building were bricked up and the windows had wire meshes fitted to stop bombs being thrown or fired through them.
More troops had been drafted in to beef up the garrisons.

The only plausible option was a saturation bombing raid.
The major drawback of such a plan of action was that innocent Norwegians were likely to die and the entire plant, upon which the local economy depended, would probably be razed to the ground.
(Fertilisers for agriculture made up roughly 95 per cent of Vemork’s production.) ‘Precision’ bombing was little more than an expression in World War Two.
The reality was that bombers dropped their payloads over the area of the target from a great height and hoped enough of them scored a direct hit.
With the heavy water stored in the basement of a solidly built concrete and stone structure, hundreds of heavy, high-explosive bombs would have to be used.

The Norwegian authorities in London were sure to protest vehemently and an SOE memorandum of 20 August 1943 suggested that their High Command and government-in-exile should be kept in the dark about the plans.
For the Allied authorities the deaths of innocent civilians and damage to a small local economy was a price worth paying to halt a programme that might wreak far greater destruction in times to come.

One man who didn’t indulge in too much soul-searching over
the air raid was Major Leslie Groves, the head of the US atomic bomb project known as ‘Manhattan’.
He insisted that the destruction of the Vemork plant was an urgent priority for the Allies and it was partly down to his powers of persuasion that the US government overcame its misgivings and rubber-stamped the plan.
The job of carrying out the raid was handed to the US 8th Air Force.
The first the Norwegian authorities in London were to hear of the attack was after it had taken place.

On 16 November, a massive fleet of 300 Flying Fortresses and Liberators roared off from the US bases in East Anglia and turned for Norway.
Almost half of them split away from the main force to draw off the Luftwaffe fighters.
The remaining 162 made a straight line for Vemork.
The first wave of aircraft were 20 minutes early and, knowing that the Norwegian workers would not yet have left the plant for their lunch break, they made a circuit to kill time.
This humane gesture was to prove costly.
When the bombers returned the German gunners were waiting for them.
Almost immediately the air was thick with smoke from the bombs, the steam in the cold air, the aircraft exhaust fumes and puffs of flak.
From the outset, the plant was almost completely obscured and from 12,000 feet, it was more in hope than expectation that the Flying Fortresses and Liberators dropped 711 thousand-pound bombs and 201 five-hundred-pound bombs in just 45 minutes.

Almost all of the bombs missed the target and caused widespread devastation in the usually quiet and peaceful valley.
The RAF photographs and the intelligence sources on the ground
confirmed the planners’ worst fears.
Far from destroying the plant and its heavy water stocks, Vemork had barely been scratched.
Out of the 1,000 or so bombs dropped, only 18 landed on the site.
Some of the power had been knocked out – but that was easily fixed – and several inconsequential outbuildings destroyed, but the operational capacity remained entirely unaffected.
To add to the despair, an air-raid shelter full of women and children was hit.
Twenty-two locals were killed in all.
The Norwegian authorities back in London were enraged and a furious argument ensued that jeopardised future cooperation on vital missions – not least on how they might now proceed with a new plan to destroy Germany’s atomic capability.