[BITList] Norway. WWII

Sun Oct 16 08:45:59 BST 2016


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> 62NEW ARTICLES <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/>Top <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3838954/Gripping-book-casts-new-light-audacious-mission-sabotage-Hitler-s-bid-build-nuclear-bomb.html#top>Share
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> Operation Save the World: A gripping book casts new light on the audacious mission to sabotage Hitler's bid to build a nuclear bomb - or die trying 
> Damien Lewis' book covers a mission to halt the Nazis' nuclear weapons
> It features the exploits of Joachim Ronneberg and his comrades
> They snuck into the Vemork plant tasked with destroying chemical vats 
> By TONY RENNELL FOR THE DAILY MAIL <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=&authornamef=Tony+Rennell+for+the+Daily+Mail>
> PUBLISHED: 22:01, 14 October 2016 | UPDATED: 01:23, 15 October 2016
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>     <> e-mail <mailto:?subject=Read%20this:%20Operation%20Save%20the%20World:%20A%20gripping%20book%20casts%20new%20light%20on%20the%20audacious%20mission%20to%20sabotage%20Hitler%27s%20bid%20to%20build%20a%20nuclear%20bomb%20-%20or%20die%20trying%C2%A0&body=Operation%20Save%20the%20World%3A%20A%20gripping%20book%20casts%20new%20light%20on%20the%20audacious%20mission%20to%20sabotage%20Hitler%27s%20bid%20to%20build%20a%20nuclear%20bomb%20-%20or%20die%20trying%C2%A0%0A%0AAuthor%20Damien%20Lewis%20has%20penned%20the%20book%20telling%20the%20story%20of%20Joachim%20Ronneberg%20and%20his%20Special%20Operations%20Executive%20comrades%20in%20their%20bid%20to%20destroy%20chemical%20vats%20at%20the%20Vemork%20plant%2C%20in%20Norway.%0A%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-3838954%2FGripping-book-casts-new-light-audacious-mission-sabotage-Hitler-s-bid-build-nuclear-bomb.html%3Fito%3Demail_share_article-top%0A%0A%0AMost%20Read%20Articles%3A%0A%0AParents%20pay%20tribute%20to%20their%20%27beautiful%20angel%27%20four-month-old%20baby%20who%20was%20mauled%20to%20death%20by%20policewoman%27s%20Staffordshire%20bull%20terrier%20in%20attack%20that%20left%20his%2022-month-old%20brother%20seriously%20injured%C2%A0%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-3837711%2FBaby-boy-dies-child-seriously-injured-attacked-dog.html%3Fito%3Demail_share_article-top_most-read-articles%0A%0AChed%20Evans%20cleared%20of%20rape%20after%20judges%E2%80%99%20extraordinary%20decision%20to%20let%20jury%20hear%20from%20TWO%20of%20his%20accuser%E2%80%99s%20ex-lovers%20-%20including%20one%20who%20said%20she%20could%20not%20remember%20having%20sex%20with%20him%20and%20another%20who%20called%20her%20a%20%27confident%20sexual%20partner%27%C2%A0%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-3837756%2FChed-Evans-CLEARED-raping-teenage-waitress-retrial.html%3Fito%3Demail_share_article-top_most-read-articles%0A%0AAll%20the%20fun%20BEHIND%20the%20fair%3A%20Showground%20families%20open%20the%20doors%20of%20their%20lavish%20mobile%20homes%20-%20complete%20with%20enormous%20flat-screen%20TVs%2C%20leather%20sofas%20and%20the%20odd%20muscle%20car%20runaround%C2%A0%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-3837571%2FShowground-families-open-doors-luxury-mobile-homes.html%3Fito%3Demail_share_article-top_most-read-articles%0A%0A>  <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3838954/Gripping-book-casts-new-light-audacious-mission-sabotage-Hitler-s-bid-build-nuclear-bomb.html#socialLinks>
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> He crawled along the narrow passage, panting for breath in the fetid, airless space, his body snagging on a maze of pipes and tubes beneath him, the ceiling above so low it seemed to press down on his head and shoulders. How much further, for God’s sake? Was he going to make it?
> 
> But this tiny service duct had been the only way he could find to break into the heavily guarded, top-secret building in the icy wilderness of Nazi-occupied Norway. He pressed on, hoping his luck would hold.
> 
> Joachim Ronneberg and his team of white snow-suited saboteurs from Britain’s Special Operations Executive had already done the impossible — parachuted in during the hell of a winter so cold that frost formed inside their nostrils, trekked for miles over snow-covered mountains and dragged themselves up the sheer face of a seemingly impregnable cliff.
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> The Special Operations Executive team that worked on stopping Hitler in his bid to build a nuclear bomb, including Joachim Ronneberg (bottom right)
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> And now they were inside the massive, fortress-like industrial plant they had come to destroy. Undetected — so far. But just in case they were discovered, half his team stood under cover with their guns levelled on the door of the adjacent barracks, where dozens of German soldiers were settling down for the night, with no inkling that the strategically vital complex they were guarding was under attack.
> 
> Ronneberg, 22 years old, a rugged Viking of a man who had escaped across the North Sea to Britain when his country was invaded in 1940, led the rest to their target — a rank of innocent-looking steel vats and cylinders.
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> As he inched his way along the duct, he could actually see them below him through gaps in the pipes. There was a single guard down there, too, sitting quietly at a desk. Suddenly the silence was shattered by a loud clang. The man coming along behind Ronneberg had dropped his revolver onto a pipe. Both froze. Surely the game was up?
> 
> What was at stake in that moment was the whole future of mankind — as author Damien Lewis explains in a breathless new book, Hunting Hitler’s Nukes: The Secret Race To Stop The Nazi Bomb.
> 
> The vats Ronneberg and his men were risking their lives to destroy contained stockpiles of so-called heavy water, an extremely rare variation of H²0 that was a component in the production of nuclear energy.
> 
> German scientists working under Hitler’s orders to develop an atom bomb — a super-weapon that could utterly change the course of the war — were relying on supplies of the precious liquid to come from the Vemork hydroelectric power plant in the district of Telemark in the remote mountains of southern Norway, where it was laboriously manufactured in a process of electrolysis.
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> So it was here that in February 1943 a deeply worried Winston Churchill, conscious that the Allies were lagging as much as two years behind the Germans in nuclear research, had sent this crack team of highly trained saboteurs.
> 
> The mission was urgent and immediate. Time was running out. They were to wipe out existing stocks and smash the plant. If they failed, the consequences could well be devastating for the whole world.
> 
> There had already been failed attempts to destroy the heavy water facility, which had ended in disaster and death. With a Dambusters-style bombing raid ruled out because of the mountainous terrain, a glider operation had been launched four months earlier to land a platoon of Royal Engineer commandos nearby to storm the plant.
> 
> Untested and over-ambitious, it was also hit by bad weather and mechanical problems. The gliders crashed, killing most on board. Survivors were captured, tortured and shot by the Germans who, now alerted, increased security at the plant with mines, booby traps and electric fences and brought in more troops to guard it.
> 
> The odds were stacked even higher as the job — now seen as more desperate than ever — was handed over to Churchill’s secret task force of ‘gangsters’, the SOE, set up by him with the express purpose of causing havoc behind enemy lines by fighting hard, fast and dirty.
> 
> The 6ft 3in Ronneberg — clever, quick and strong with a grudge against the Germans for stealing his homeland — was the stand-out choice to lead what was designated as Operation Gunnerside. To accompany him, he picked five fellow Norwegians every bit as tough and determined as him. They were issued with cyanide pills. Being captured was not an option. If it came to the crunch, this was a suicide mission.
> 
> In the short time available, they prepared as best they could, training exhaustively on models of the plant and getting detailed briefings from another Norwegian fugitive, who until recently had been a senior engineer there and knew it intimately.
> 
> It was he who let Ronneberg in on the secret of the tiny, man-sized cable duct as a possible way in.
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> But this was such a rush job that, even as they took off in a Halifax bomber, they had no clear plan of how they were going to break into the plant. Were they simply shooting in the dark?
> 
> Over Norway, they jumped out on to the inhospitable, snow-bound Hardanger mountain plateau — six brave, resourceful men and 11 containers with tommy guns, skis, sniper rifles, a sledge and sleeping bags inside. On these meagre resources, the outcome of the war might well depend.
> 
> T he start was not promising. For the first five days they struggled to survive, marooned in a hut just a mile from their drop zone by weather so vicious that visibility was zero and the temperature ten below. Not until the blizzard relented did they get on the move to their objective, already behind schedule.
> 
> But skiing 30 miles non-stop in just a few hours took them to a rendezvous point. There they met up with an advance party, who had been out in the wild for months now — ever since the abortive glider raid, in fact — surviving against all the odds in the most terrible of conditions, waiting to guide the raiders to the plant.
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> They were emaciated and exhausted, but at least the sabotage team was complete. What still had to be decided, however, was how exactly they were going to get inside their formidable, fortress-like objective.
> 
> What they knew for sure was that the obvious approaches from the top, via a suspension bridge spanning a ravine, were heavily defended. Even a battalion would be unable to storm that.
> 
> So what, a lone voice suggested as they discussed the options, if they came from below? Climb the apparently unscaleable sheer 600ft cliff on which the building was perched to a narrow railway track used to bring in supplies and creep in from there. Via the back door, as it were, where no one would expect them.
> 
> It was an impossible scenario — but the only one. Putting to one side the question of how they would then escape with their lives, even supposing they made it inside and got the job done, they went for it. Gunnerside was under way. No turning back.
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> 
> +3
> Norwegian World War II hero Ronneberg, now aged 97, attends a wreath-laying ceremony in his honour at the SOE agents monument in central London in 2013
> 
> On a moonlit night, the nine of them skied and trekked to the gorge beneath the plant, crossed the frozen river at the bottom, then stared up at the slippery rock face. Meltwater was cascading into their faces; cracks, handholds and vegetation to grab were few and far between.
> 
> But gradually they eased their way up, never looking down into the abyss below, ahead only, until, bruised and battered, and with a last scramble and a helping hand, they all made it on to the unguarded railway track. The first part of the impossible was done.
> 
> Now they crept half a mile along the ledge to the back gate of the Vermork plant, drawn on by the increasingly loud hum of the machinery inside.
> 
> In the distance they could see lights and German sentries patrolling the suspension bridge and even hear their chatter. But here at the back of the plant there was no one in their way, just a padlocked chain, quickly opened with bolt cutters. They were in.
> 
> Having placed men to cover the German barracks, Ronneberg got to the door of the electrolysis building, where the heavy water was made, grasped the handle and turned. It was locked. He reached for a grenade to blast it open, but realised that an explosion would blow their cover, too.
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> He remembered the cable duct. Looking up the side of the building, he spotted a metal ladder leading to a hatch in the wall. That had to be it! He climbed up and wormed his way in and along.
> 
> Below him, the guard must have heard the clang of the dropped revolver, but took no notice. No doubt the machinery made all sorts of odd noises. You’d go mad if you investigated every single one of them.
> 
> Ronneberg eased forward until he reached the end of the duct, then dropped through a hatch down into the control room below, gun in hand. The guard, a Norwegian civilian worker, gawped and put his hands in the air.
> 
> Ronneberg went to work, grabbing packs of sausage-shaped plastic explosive from his rucksack and frantically moulding them round the cells of the electrolysis unit. But which fuse should he use to trigger the explosion?
> 
> A two-minute fuse would give ample time to get away but also risked a German soldier realising what was happening, coming in and extinguishing it just in time. Ronneberg opted for 30 seconds instead. He might die, but at least the job would be done.
> 
> With everything set, he pushed the Norwegian guard out of the door, bent a match to the fuse… only for the guard to howl at him to stop. He’d left his glasses on his desk! Ronneberg ran for the glasses, astonished with himself that, for the sake of a pair of specs, he was jeopardising this mission of such absolutely vital national and international importance.
> 
> But he also knew that the Germans had seized all of Norway’s optical manufacturing facilities, so there was no way this man would get replacement glasses any time soon.
> 
> His good deed done, he lit the fuse, and ran like hell, legs pumping, pulse racing. Behind him there was the flash of an explosion and heat seared his back as the heavy water room went up in flames.
> 
> Astonishingly, there was no reaction. The massive walls and steel doors had muffled the bang. The Germans in their barracks did not stir. One soldier did eventually look out, glanced languidly around, but could see nothing wrong and went back inside.
> 
> R onneberg’s raiders re-grouped, unable to believe their luck as they raced back to the railway track and away. They appeared to have got in and out and to have blown the heavy-water plant to pieces without the defenders even realising it. Impossible!
> 
> Only when they had scrambled down the cliff face in a helter-skelter dash to escape did they hear a siren begin to wail behind them.
> 
> Up in the plant, shocked Germans stared at wrecked steel cylinders, gutted electrolysis cells, shattered pipes and water — the heavy variety included — gushing everywhere. The raiders kept running, picking their way across the river, now beginning to melt beneath them, then ploughing back up the other side of the gorge. Every second they expected to be lit up by searchlights and mown down by rifle fire.
> 
> Luck favoured them. The German sergeant in charge of the lights couldn’t find the switch — a mistake for which he was quickly transferred from his safe berth in Norway to die on the Russian front.
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> +3
> The raid was recreated by Kirk Douglas in the 1965 film Heroes Of Telemark
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> As they dared to stop and look back, Ronneberg and his men could see German reinforcements piling into the Vemork works and torchlights flashing through the trees nearby. The hunt was on, but the SOE heroes had an hour’s start.
> 
> They quickly found their hidden cache of skis and, dodging enemy patrols, headed upwards in the dark towards the wide open spaces of the vast Hardanger plateau. Up there, a savage wind howled, but the blizzard covered their tracks. They were safe.
> 
> And the job was done. From Norway, a message was on its way to London. ‘Operation carried out with 100 per cent success. High-concentration plant completely destroyed. The Germans do not appear to know where the party came from or whither they disappeared.’
> 
> Expert analysis assured Churchill it would be many months before heavy water production could resume. He breathed a sigh of relief. Hitler’s nuclear plans had been thwarted. Certainly for the time being. Perhaps for ever.
> 
> Though Germany’s nuclear programme continued and Vemork eventually went back on stream (so much so that its output had to be dealt with again in 1944), the initiative had passed to the U.S. and its Manhattan Project, which brought a sudden end to World War II with the atom bombs dropped on Japan.
> 
> By carrying out Mission Impossible, Ronneberg and his band of SOE cut-throats had blown Hitler’s nuclear dream to smithereens. Remarkably, too, all of them had survived, which, in the circumstances, stretched impossibility beyond its limits. Their exploits would later be celebrated in the 1965 British film Heroes Of Telemark.
> 
> But even the Germans were impressed by their audacity and daring and the unqualified success of the operation. ‘British gangsters,’ General von Falkenhorst, the local commander-in-chief, called them, but conceded that they had carried off ‘the finest coup I have seen in this war’.
> 
> Hunting Hitler’s Nukes: The Secret Race To Stop The Nazi Bomb by Damien Lewis is published by Quercus Publishing at £20. To order a copy for £15, visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk <http://www.mailbookshop.co.uk/> or call 0844 571 0640. Offer valid until October 22, 2016. P&P is free.
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