The Winter Fortress Read online

  Some time later, the door clanged open. Petersen and two prison guards took three of the sappers down to a first-floor office. There, Seeling gave them another shot. The syringes all contained morphine. Fehlis wanted them dead, and Seeling had been commissioned to do it. One of the soldiers succumbed after his third injection. Seeling and a prison guard tried to carry out his body, but the other two prisoners refused to let go of their friend. One of them, sensing that something was very wrong, began shouting. His voice resonated out into the halls. Petersen instructed Seeling to give him another shot. Seeling hesitated, not sure what to do. In a short time, Seeling assured him, the prisoner would be dead anyway. This was not quickly enough for Petersen. He and a prison guard wrapped a leather belt around the man’s neck and tied the end to a radiator. Then they strangled him to death. After witnessing this horror, Seeling injected air into the veins of the other prisoner to speed his death. Whether it was this act, or the blow to the neck he received from Petersen’s boot, or the morphine that killed him in the end, Seeling did not know. The fourth prisoner, the one who had been left in his cell, was taken by car to Gestapo headquarters, where Petersen pushed him down some cellar steps, then shot him in the back of the head. That night, Petersen and several others took the four bodies out to sea. They tied a heavy stone to each corpse, then tossed them overboard.

  The five other sappers who had survived the crash relatively unscathed were dispatched to Oslo for interrogation—and torture, should it be required. Fehlis already knew most of what he wanted to know. Among the gear scattered around the glider, the patrol had found a folded silk map with a planned escape route. Circled in blue: Vemork.

  Part III

  11

  The Instructor

  * * *

  POULSSON AND HIS MEN packed up their gear in the Lake Sand cabin. Their latest instructions from Home Station were to retreat into the Vidda as soon as possible. “Sabotage troops were engaged and annihilated . . . It is vitally necessary that you should preserve your safety . . . It is almost equally important that we should have earliest possible information in regard to increase of enemy troops in neighborhood of target . . . Advise you to move yourself and your station . . . Keep up your heart. We will do this job yet.”

  Reports from London of the failure of the glider operation, and the deaths of all those men, struck the Grouse team hard. They wondered how the operation had gone so wrong. They questioned what else they could have done to bring the planes in to the landing zone. Could they have sent more precise weather reports? That there were clear skies for the next two nights made the disaster even more bitter to accept. Their only solace was that the mission to sabotage Vemork had not been canceled. According to another cipher message from Tronstad, the next attempt was to be by men in their own company. It was set for mid-December. Poulsson assured Tronstad that his team would do anything they could to help.

  For now, the four commandos needed to get away. On the night of November 22, they left Lake Sand. From Skinnarland, they had a freshly charged battery for the radio and the key to a cabin on the Vidda owned by Olav Skogen. They skirted around the German troops stationed at Lake Møs and trudged a dozen miles northwest to Grass Valley, deep and high enough into the Vidda that few dared venture there in wintertime. The cabin was surrounded by nothing but snow and a few scraggly juniper bushes that struggled to survive in the windswept hills. Inside, they found some salted reindeer in a barrel, but otherwise it was as barren and cold as an ice locker.

  The next day, their rucksacks emptied of all but the essentials, they headed west toward the Songa Valley, where they had first parachuted in over a month before. They needed to pick up the food and supplies they had left in their depot. On the way, they spent a night in a dilapidated hay barn. The next evening, they reached their landing site and dug a snow cave for sleeping. The morning of November 26 welcomed them with a misty fog, and they searched for several hours in the deep snow before finding their containers. The stores of food were limited—some sacks of coffee, sugar, and flour—but they were desperate for it. Starvation and the tempestuous Vidda were their enemies now.

  After dividing up the supplies, Haugland and Helberg skied east, back to Grass Valley, their packs filled with most of what they had found. Poulsson and Kjelstrup went in the opposite direction. Back in Scotland, Knut Haukelid had given them the names of some locals, including his cousins, who lived around his family’s mountain farm. They would help build up underground resistance cells in the area.

  That night, a blizzard hit.

  Crossing an ice-blue lake that had been blown clear of snow, Helberg and Haugland became separated. Alone in the howling, blinding storm, each man struggled forward in the darkness. Helberg, whose skis had steel edges, managed to make it to the other side without incident. Haugland did not have the same advantage. He was driven across the lake in whatever direction the ferocious gusts of wind happened to be blowing. At one moment, unable to get a grip on the ice, he found himself being hurled toward a patch of open water at the lake’s edge. Stabbing the ice with his poles to steer away, he narrowly avoided a plunge that would certainly have killed him.

  To the west, Poulsson and Kjelstrup were also at the mercy of the treacherous storm. They skied down into a gully but each time they tried to climb out on the opposite side, the wind threw them back in. Hounded by squalls, they were forced to crawl on their knees to keep moving. At last they came across a shack in the valley. The dirt-floored shelter barely fit the two men, but it was a retreat from the wind. They found a half-rotten reindeer shoulder on the wall. Starving, they cut off strips of the flesh, combined them with a shard of pemmican, and called it dinner. In the morning, they managed to push the door open far enough to discover that the shack had been buried in the storm. Handful by handful, the shack filling up with snow, they cleared a path and eased the door open. Then Poulsson squirreled up and out into a bright, clear day.

  On November 24, back in Scotland, Joachim Rønneberg was called into Drumintoul Lodge, Kompani Linge’s headquarters at STS 26. Before his British SOE commander, Major C. S. Hampton, the young second lieutenant stood to attention, all six feet three inches of him. With a long dome of a forehead, narrow-set gray-blue eyes, and the edged jawline of a silver screen star, Rønneberg had presence in spades.

  “You’re to be the leader of an operation,” Hampton said.

  Rønneberg was unsure what his commander meant. He already had a mission: Operation Fieldfare. “What is it?” he asked, his graveled voice belying his years.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, but you’re to pick five men for the job.”

  “Yes, but Lord God,” Rønneberg said, all questions, “I have to know if we’ll be operating on the coast or in the mountains. Are we going in by boat or plane? Will we be there a long time? Do they need to be good skiers?” He knew every member of Kompani Linge well, and there were many to choose from, depending on the conditions. “Any advice you can give me in my choice of men?”

  Hampton shook his head. All he knew was that one of the five had to be Knut Haukelid, who would be Rønneberg’s second in command. Why? Hampton gave no answers. A few days later, Rønneberg was summoned to London, where he hoped to find some.

  When Martin Linge had sent Rønneberg back to Stodham Park to instruct recruits only weeks after he had finished his own training, new arrivals were shocked that someone so young, with no military experience, who seemed as “gentle as a lark” (as one said) was already an instructor. Then they got to know him. Rønneberg was intelligent, tireless, strategic, thorough in his preparations, and professional in every way. What distinguished him most was his innate ability to lead. “He had a quality that made him stand out alone,” said one in his company, “without being envied, without making enemies or rivalries.” He did not need to dominate, raise his voice, or entreat. He simply gave his best effort and inspired others to do the same. Wilson and Tronstad were confident that he was the man to lead this most important of jobs.<
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  “Where are we off to?” Rønneberg asked straight out when he arrived by overnight train at Chiltern Court. He tended to speak with his whole body, his shoulders rolling back.

  “To Vemork,” Tronstad said. “To blow up the plant there.”

  Rønneberg was to organize, train, and lead a six-man team that would parachute into the Vidda. They would be met by the advance party, Grouse, hit the heavy water facility at Vemork, then escape on skis to Sweden. The operation was codenamed Gunnerside, the name of a hunting cabin owned by a chief SOE officer.

  Neither Wilson nor Tronstad told Rønneberg why the Germans needed the heavy water, but apart from that detail they held little back, particularly about the cold-blooded killings of the Operation Freshman sappers. They wanted him and his team ready to leave by December 17 so they could arrive at Vemork on Christmas Eve. Any element of surprise was now unlikely. The Germans would be aware that the plant was a target, and the Christmas holiday might prove their best chance of finding diminished defenses.

  It was a tight schedule: three weeks until launch.

  Rønneberg already knew which four men he would select for the mission. He had instructed them all at STS 26, and he cabled them now from London, telling them to get down to some hard training in the Highlands.

  Birger Strømsheim was his first choice, and the easiest one to make. Like Rønneberg, he was from Ålesund. With his wife, Strømsheim had escaped to Britain on a fishing boat. A building contractor with a broad, honest face and curled sweep of blond hair, he was levelheaded, quiet, and, as reported in his SOE file, “reliable as a rock.” Able to fix or make just about anything, he was also a fine skier and tireless worker. The two had spent many hours together in Scotland planning their now-delayed operation to sabotage German supply lines. At thirty-one years old, he would be the grandfather of the group.

  Next was Fredrik Kayser, a thin stalk of a man with clean-cut looks. He had trained with Strømsheim at Stodham Park, Meoble, and parachute school. Kayser grew up in a family that prized well-roundedness. And so he fished, played the mandolin, danced, rowed, played soccer, and joined the scouts—often finding that he was second-best at everything. His scouting carried him into the military, where he served in the King’s Guard. Afterward he returned to his hometown, Bergen, to take a job as a clerk at an ironworks factory. When Russia invaded Finland in November 1939 he volunteered to join a Norwegian squad to help push back the aggressors. He was shot at, suffered frostbite, put an ax through his leg while chopping wood, and still kept fighting. The day he returned from that war, Germany invaded his own country. He kept up the fight there too. When Norway surrendered, he took a fishing boat across the North Sea to Britain. Rønneberg knew few men who had proven themselves more adaptable and cheerful under pressure.

  Third was Kasper Idland, a former postman from a small town outside Stavanger. In Britain, he had trained with Kayser and Strømsheim. Even as a boy, Idland had been taller and bigger than most. His mother warned him not to get into fights at school out of fear he would hurt somebody. Encouraged by his passivity, the other kids teased and tormented him relentlessly. Loyal to his mother, Idland did not strike back. After one particularly bad afternoon of being bullied, he asked his mother’s permission to defend himself. She consented. The next day, Idland challenged the two worst offenders, knocking them about. He was never bothered again. As a soldier, Idland was intelligent, an excellent shot, tough, and what Rønneberg prized most of all, loyal.

  His fourth choice was Hans “Chicken” Storhaug, a short, pencil-necked twenty-seven-year-old. Although he was not the deepest of thinkers, there were few better in the woods, hunting or skiing. What was more, he came from Hedemark, a district bordering Sweden that the team would need to cross when making their escape. A man who knew the terrain would give them an advantage.

  The fifth member of his team, Haukelid, was cause for concern. His help would be key: he knew the area and was close to the advance team. But he was considered a loner by some within Kompani Linge, and Rønneberg worried about whether he would fit in as second in command on the mission.

  The two shared a deep, unbending patriotism that had driven them both to travel to Britain to join the fight against the Germans, a risky move taken only by a small number of Norwegians. Both had been tapped by Linge to join the elite Independent Company. But in many other ways—age, temperament, and experience—a vast gulf separated the two. Unlike Haukelid, who was eight years his senior, Rønneberg was not a rebel. He did not bristle under authority, nor did he seek to break the rules at every turn. Further, Haukelid was a veteran of the resistance fight and the battle for Norway. Given Rønneberg’s military inexperience, beyond field exercises in Scotland, he wondered how Haukelid would take to not leading the mission.

  Regardless, Rønneberg suffered no hesitation on his return to STS 26. He gathered the five men together and said, “Now, I do not know you all equally well personally, but if there’s any disagreement between you, then put it aside until we’re done with the job. Or get out.” The men stayed where they were.

  He then outlined the operation and its purpose. Whatever this heavy water was, it must be important if SOE wanted to make another attempt on a target that had already cost so many lives. They were to understand that, if they were caught, the Germans would show them no mercy. Afterward Rønneberg drew them aside, one by one, to give them the opportunity to back out. No takers.

  In a clearing in the woods six miles northwest of Oslo stood the Grini concentration camp. The long, five-story rectangular brick building at its center, formerly a women’s prison, was crammed with thousands of Norwegians, most arrested by the Germans for political crimes. Two sets of high, barbed-wire fences surrounded the grounds, and guards with machine guns watched over the prisoners from several towers.

  Gestapo officer Wilhelm Esser entered the cell of the five British sappers who had survived the glider crash almost two weeks before. Stripped of their uniforms, they were dressed in blue trousers and wool jerseys. One had his arm in a sling. Another had a bad burn across his forehead. Otherwise, Wallis Jackson, James Blackburn, John Walsh, Frank Bonner, and William White were in good shape. Using an interpreter, Esser began his interrogation with one simple question: What was the object of your mission? The men refused to say. Esser then spread out several of the maps found at the crash site, their target clearly marked. He asked his question again.

  Over five days and five nights he interrogated the British soldiers, sometimes together, sometimes separately. He promised them they would be treated as prisoners of war and sent to a camp in Germany if they told him everything they knew. When promises failed, Esser had methods that the Gestapo had perfected to get men to talk. And typically they talked.

  When it was done, Esser sent Fehlis his report, and the details of the evidence and information collected on the operation were delivered to Berlin. The men were Royal Engineer paratroopers. The month before, they had been separated out from their company at Bulford and trained to blow up Vemork. Their plan was to land several miles from the target, and after crossing the suspension bridge, a lead team was to silently take out the guards on the bridge, using knives or manual assault. One group was to disable the plant’s generators, another to sabotage the electrolysis plant, and a third to destroy any “special liquids.” All of this was to take eight minutes. Then, in teams of two to three men, they were to escape to Sweden in civilian clothes. No cooperation with Norwegians had been envisaged.

  Fehlis was unconvinced that Norwegians had not been recruited to assist in the operation. He ordered the Gestapo to move into Rjukan and the surrounding area, supported by hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers.

  Every day at the Kummersdorf testing facility, a small army of scientists, engineers, skilled tradesmen, and laborers, all exempt from service at the front, showed their IDs to the sentries at the gate. Then they headed in to do their day’s work. There were five groups of buildings staggered about the estate. Each had its own works
hops, laboratories, warehouses, and offices, dedicated to designing the future weapons of the German army. These brick structures, their slanted roofs planted with grass to hide them from Allied air raids, were connected by shatterproof corridors. To transport the workforce and material, a narrow-gauge trolley ran around the perimeter of the grounds, past test sites where scientists tried out the latest weaponry. The facility had its own fire brigade, water supply, power plant, and infirmary.

  In late fall 1942, in two rows of buildings at Kummersdorf, Kurt Diebner and his handpicked team of young experimental physicists and engineers labored over their first uranium machine, the Gottow I (G-I) experiment, assembled with whatever castoff materials they could procure. Inside a cylindrical aluminum boiler, eight feet in diameter and eight feet high, they stacked honeycombs made of paraffin wax around an empty center. The team then spooned uranium oxide into each cell of the honeycomb, wearing heavy, breath-stealing gear to shield themselves from the uranium’s toxicity. The work, which took weeks, was “dreadful drudgery,” one participant said.

  When complete, the honeycomb was made up of nineteen stacks, with 6,902 uranium oxide cells, weighing almost 30 tons (25 tons of uranium, 4.4 of paraffin). The team, tired of wartime rations, joked, “If only all of it were lard!” Ready to test the design at last, they lowered the boiler into a mantle of water, and Diebner told his men to insert the radium–beryllium neutron source into the center of the honeycomb.

  Since the meeting in June with Speer and the generals, Diebner had been largely working in secret to see if his design had more merit than those of the others in the Uranium Club. In early summer, Heisenberg and his research partner, Robert Döpel, had demonstrated an increase in neutrons of 13 percent in their fourth experiment, a machine with two spherical layers of powdered uranium metal submerged in heavy water. Heisenberg claimed their machine generated more neutrons through fission than it absorbed.