{"id":32316,"date":"2013-02-27T12:02:05","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T18:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=32316"},"modified":"2013-02-27T12:22:06","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T18:22:06","slug":"the-end-of-the-nazi-bomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=32316","title":{"rendered":"Ten Men And The End Of The Nazi Bomb"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first wrote about this episode three years ago; today is the seventieth anniversary of the Ryukan Raid, \u00a0in which ten Norwegian commandos with the British “Special Operations Executive” raided a hydroelectric dam that produced most of the world’s supply of “Heavy Water”, a key component of the process the Nazis were using to try to build an atomic bomb.<\/p>\n

It was a good piece, so I’m going to re-run it, with a few suitable revisions.<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

I’ll cop to it; after the 2009 “Nobel Peace Prize” award to a president who, as of the award deadline, had done nothing to warrant it, and has done even less since, my self-esteem-respect as an American of Norwegian anscestry has taken a bit of a beating.<\/p>\n

But it’s on days like today – the 70th anniversary of the\u00a0Norwegian raid on the Vemork heavy-water plant at Ryukan, Norway<\/a>\u00a0– that I get a bit of that old Norse\u00a0m\u00f8j\u00f8<\/em>\u00a0back.<\/p>\n

You may not have heard the story – largely because most American history teachers are illiterate about history, and partly because the font of all historical knowledge for most of them, Hollywood, transformed the event into an Anglo-American triumph (the atrocious\u00a0Heroes of Telemark<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Like much of what you learn about “history” from Hollywood, it’s BS.<\/p>\n

A little\u00a0scientific and historical background<\/a>:\u00a0 nuclear reactors need something to “moderate” their fission reactions – i.e. to keep them under control.\u00a0 The United States program used a mixture of Cadmium and Graphite.\u00a0 The Germans, for reasons best explained by a physicist, chose Deuterium Oxide – aka “Heavy Water” – a compound found in infinitesimally tiny quantities in all water.\u00a0 All you need to do is refine it out of all the regular water.<\/p>\n

And in all of Europe in the early 1940s, there was exactly one facility that could refine bulk lots of Deuterium Oxide in the quantities a nuclear weapons program would need; the Vemork plant near the village of Rjukan, Norway.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Vemork<\/dt>\n
Vemork<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Vemork sat by a hydroelectric dam – so both \u00a0water and the electric power needed to find the Heavy Water were available in immense abundance.<\/p>\n

The British had wanted to attack the plant\u00a0ever since they learned of its significance.\u00a0 The British “Special Operations Executive” – a wartime organization that sat at the intersection of intelligence and special operations, much like “Special Operations Command” in the US does today, and whose\u00a0American analogue, the “OSS”, became the\u00a0anscestor of the CIA\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>US Special Forces\u00a0– established an agent inside the plant (Einar Skinnarland) who smuggled out blueprints and paved the way.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Einar<\/dt>\n
Einar Skinnarland<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

In October of 1942, an SOE reconnaisance team with four more Norwegian operators (Jens Anton Poulsson, Arne Kjelstrup, Knut Haukelid and Claus Helberg), men who’d fled to the UK after the German invasion and undergone commando and intelligence training,\u00a0were infiltrated into Norway to reconnoiter the area for a followup British commando raid.\u00a0 The four men were air-dropped into a remote area far from Ryukan, and skied for days through the gathering mountain winter before they could even begin their mission.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0plan came together…<\/p>\n

…and then completely unraveled.\u00a0 The followup British commando raid\u00a0to attack the plant failed catastrophically, with gliders and tow planes crashing in the snow and all the commandos either dying in the crashes or being caught and executed by the\u00a0Gestapo,\u00a0<\/em>after revealing under torture the target of their raid.\u00a0 The Germans reinforced Vemork, in case the Brits tried again.<\/p>\n

The four-man recon team had to not only survive a mountain winter, but do it with an alerted enemy actively searching for them,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>stay on the grid and able to assist the followup mission that had to come.<\/p>\n

Later that winter, it fell to them and six more Norwegian commandos to finish the job.<\/p>\n

The six reinforcements – Joachim Holmboe R\u00f8nneberg, Knut Haukelid, Fredrik Kayser, Kasper Idland, Hans Storhaug and Birger Str\u00f8msheim – dropped into Norway, linked up with Poulsson, Kjelstrup, Haugland and Helberg, and carried out the plan.<\/p>\n

Bypassing the heavily-guarded bridge that ran 600 feet above the Maan River, the team descended from the plateau above into the river gorge, snuck across the icy stream, up a cable tunnel, and through a window.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Up<\/dt>\n
Up for a bit of a climb?<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

They encountered a caretaker – who turned out to be a Norwegian who was happy to help.<\/p>\n

The team placed the bombs – which destroyed the entire 1000-pound heavy-water supply – and escaped unscathed.\u00a0 The Germans dispatched 3,000 troops to try to catch the commandos – but all escaped, with six of them staying in Norway to carry on the battle, and the other five skiing to Sweden to return to the UK to carry on the war.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/dt>\n
Most of the team, after the war. Front: Poulsson, commander Leif Tronstad, R\u00f8nneberg. (Back) Storhaug, Kayser, Idland, Helberg, Str\u00f8msheim.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Being lucky and skillful, they all survived the war.<\/p>\n

Being Norwegian, most of them lived long, healthy lives afterwards; all but Idland lived into the 1990’s; Poullson and Knut Haugland in the past few years, Str\u00f8msheim just last December. \u00a0Haugland was probably best-known to Americans, having participated in Thor Heyerdahl’s famous\u00a0Kon Tiki<\/a>\u00a0expedition in the late forties. Joachim R\u00f8nneberg is still alive.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There are those who say, with some factual backing, that the German nuke program could never have caught up with the US program, even without the Vemork raid.<\/p>\n

Perhaps.<\/p>\n

Thanks to eleven brave underdogs and their mission, patched together against impossible odds, we never needed to even try to imagine what London and Moscow would look like as craters.<\/p>\n

PBS’\u00a0Nova\u00a0<\/em>did an\u00a0excellent documentar<\/a>y on the Vemork\u00a0raid<\/a>\u00a0and its larger context, the Nazi nuclear weapons program.\u00a0 It includes\u00a0\u00a0a useful bio page<\/a>\u00a0on the whole group of Vemork raiders.\u00a0\u00a0This site<\/a>\u00a0also explains the raid, and the science, in excellent detail.<\/p>\n

The BBC also did a documentary – some forty years ago, now – on the subject. Hopefully it’ll stay available for a while:<\/p>\n