Following are several excerpts from internet articles relating to the destruction of the Vemork Plant, near Rjuken, west Telemark, Norway. The plant produced fertilizer. A byproduct of this was “Heavy Water,” a vital component in the development by German scientists of an Atomic Bomb. British trained Norwegian commando, saboteur, Knut Haukelid was leader of a small team that ended the German quest. These notes by Bob Coe, 01-07-14.
Earlier, in the spring and summer of 1942, nuclear scientists and their leaders in the United States became aware of a new material created by neutron bombardment of U238. This material was named plutonium by its discoverer, Glenn Seaborg. The use of plutonium for bombs would have several advantages over U235: greater explosive power, smaller size and weight, and easier manufacturing. Its atomic designation became Pu239.
In Germany, theoretical knowledge of atomic physics and the potential application of that science to weapons was abreast of that in Britain and the United States. German scientists, however, were handicapped by shortages in materials and funds. Developments with long range application inevitably received priority behind those of immediate benefit to the war effort. Albert Speer in June 1942 discussed with Hitler the possibility of developing an atomic bomb but with no clear conclusions. German research would continue but without focus on weaponry. Allies’ intelligence was not aware of this situation.
The British were concerned about German acquisition of heavy-water produced at Vemork in southern Norway. A glider-borne British attempt to sabotage the installation in November 1942 was a failure, due to a combination of poor planning and bad weather. In February 1943 a Norwegian commando team made another attempt and succeeded in demolishing most of the plant, interrupting production for many months.
In the autumn of 1943, the British received news that the plant had resumed production of heavy-water. Increased security there by the Nazis ruled out another sabotage effort, and a precision bombing attack was approved by British-American representatives in Washington. On November 16, 1943 the attack was made by 140 B-17s from the Eighth Air Force. The power plant was destroyed and the electrolysis unit damaged, effectively shutting the plant down.
The Nazis elected to rebuild in Germany and planned to transport by rail and ferry the equipment and existing heavy-water that remained. The British decided to sabotage the ferry that would be involved. The sabotage attempt was successfully made by a three-man Norwegian team on February 20, 1944, sending the ferry and its cargo to the bottom of a Norwegian lake. After the war a member of German Army Ordnance claimed that the loss of heavy-water production in Norway was the main factor in German failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor.
A Telemark tourist internet site writes the following about hiking some of the saboteur’s routes at Vemork and Rjuken Linge was the first Norwegian sabotage organizer – Coe.
Vemork: The experiences from the heavy-water raid against Vemork in 1943 were revived when the saboteurs from the Linge-company met last weekend. Most of the men of the group, literally walked in their own footsteps during the “Saboteur’s march” Saturday.
It is people of Rjukan who have taken the initiative and arranged this march. The trail goes along the same route as the Linge-men used when they descended from the mountain above Rjukan to get to Vemork, on the night leading to the 28th February 1943. Heading the march last Saturday, were the heavy-water saboteurs, followed by the 3000 taking part in it.
Most of the Linge-men had not been in the area since the raid in 1943. The slope had its starting point in Fjøsbudalen (valley of Fjøsbu), where also the heavy water saboteurs had their last base before moving to Vemork. Joachim Rønneberg remembers well how it was when the Linge men in 1943, climbing down the hillside at Vemork, got to see the heavy water plant for first time.
“The 7 meter high building appeared large in the hilly country. Little was said, everyone found it grim and felt only expectation and excitement. We were close to the target. Now it was only the operation itself that remained.”
Forty-seven years after, eight of the ten saboteurs from the heavy water-raid met again. Knut Haugland was unable to attend, and Kaspar Idland is dead. Joining the reunion, were also Knut Lier Hansen and Rolf Sørlie, who were involved in the sinking of the Tinnsjø-ferry “Hydro” that carried RESOLUTION heavy water in 1944. This action put a final stop to the German production of heavy water at Rjukan.
The following is an excerpt about former Boy Scout contributions to the Resistance in Norway and in particular relating to the Vemork heavy water plant – Coe.
Scouting in Occupied Countries: Part Two — Denmark and Norway
In 1943, another brave Norwegian Scout, Knut Haugland-he was to win both the D.S.O. and the M.C.-was involved with eleven other Scouts in the attack on the “heavy Water” installations in Norway which the Germans hoped to use in connection with t heir attempts to produce the atomic bomb
“Heavy water” (deuterium oxide) is used in nuclear physics for harnessing atomic energy. Its production-a singularly slow process-was of importance to the Germans in their search for atomic means of destruction and their only considerable source in Europe during the war was the Norsk Hydro Hydrogen Electrolysis Plant at Vemork, in the deep Norwegian valley of Rjukan. The destruction of this plant was of great importance to the Allies, and the story of how this was done must be given a place of honour in the record of what Norwegian Scouts accomplished in the war, for the planning, mounting and control of the operation were in Scout hands. The technical adviser in London, Professor Lief Tronstad, O.B.E., was a Scout in Trondheim, and, of the twelve men actually engaged in the operation, eight had been Scouts.
Einar Skinnerland was an old Rjukan Scout, and had come to Scotland in March, 1942, in the coastal steamer Galtesund with the gallant Starheim. He was given a week’s intensive training and parachuted back into Norway ten days after he had landed in Aberdeen. He was to stay there in Rjukan and find out all he could about German intentions in regard to the “heavy water” plant. In October, 1942, an advance party of four men, three being Scouts, were dropped on the high Hardangervidda plateau, west of Rjukan. T he wireless operator was Knut Haugland, another was Claus Helberg, of whom the leader of the party wrote: “Claus travelled to Barunuten and back, a distance of fifty miles, under terrible going conditions, and proved the saying ‘A man who is a man goes on till he can do no more, and then goes twice as far.'”
To join these four men and with them to do the deed, a glider force of thirty British Special Service troops left Scotland on the 19th November but disaster overtook them. One aircraft and both gliders crashed almost two hundred kilometres southwest of Vemork. The few survivors were “interrogated,” and, in the best traditions of German fair play, were shortly afterwards shot. The entry in the advance party’s log for 20th November reads: London’s radio message about the glider disaster was a hard blow. It was sad and bitter, especially as the weather in our part of the country improved. But we are happy to hear that another attempt would be made in the next moon period.”
The difficulties of attack were multiplied. Well aware of the gliders’ objective, the Reichkommissar and Colonel-General von Falkenhorst inspected Vemork; the Rjukan garrison was increased; the area was combed for saboteurs. A second attempt to land was prevented by weather. “…To make matters worse,” runs the entry in the log for 13th December, “everybody except myself went sick with fever and pains in the stomach. We were short of food and were obliged to begin eating reindeer-moss. Knut found a Krag rifle and some cartridges. I went out every day after the reindeer, but the weather was bad and I could find none. Our supply of dry wood came to an end….” On the 23rd December “the weather cleared and at last I shot a reindeer. We celebrated a happy Christmas.”
A third attempt was made in January. The operational party flew over but mist obscured all landmarks and the six Norwegians who composed it returned to Scotland. At last, at midnight on the 16th February, 1943, they landed safely on Norwegian soil. “The jump was made from a thousand feet. One package, containing four rucksacks, landed and was dragged by a wind-filled parachute for some two kilometres before coming to rest in an open ice crack from which it was salvaged.” The party were dropped thirty miles north-west of the advance party because of the increased enemy activity in Rjukan, and a
journey of thirty miles in the Norwegian winter can take as long as one of 300 in warmer, flatter country. By 24th February, however, all ten men had met and the two leaders could prepare their plans for the attack. Their operation orders ended with the sentence: “If any man is about to be taken prisoner, he undertakes to end his own life.”
On the night of 27th February, Claus Heiberg led the way down to Vemork. “Skis and rucksacks were hidden close to the power-line cutting, from which we began a steep and slippery descent to the river at 10 p.m. On the river the ice was about to break up. There was only one practicable snow-bridge with three inches of water over it. From the river we clambered up sheer rock-face for about 150 metres to the Vemork railway line. We advanced to within 500 metres of the factory’s railway gate…. Here we waited till 12-3o a.m. and watched the relief guard coming up from the bridge….”
A bite of food, a final assurance that each man knew what he had to do, and the advance to some store-sheds about 100 metres from the gates began. One man went forward and, with a pair of armourer’s shears, easily opened the factory gates. Once inside, the covering party took up temporary positions while the demolition party opened a second gate ten metres below the first. At a given sign, the covering party advanced towards the German guard-hut while the demolition party moved to the door of the factory cellar
through which it was hoped to enter. It was locked. “We were unable to force it, nor did we have any success with the door of the floor above. Through a window of the high concentration plant, where our target lay, a man could be seen.” Meanwhile, the covering party, in position round the guard-hut, passed a breathless moment when the door of the hut was flung open and a German non-commissioned officer stood silhouetted against the light. He looked round, listening. Barely four yards away four men had him covered, one with a tommy-gun. After a few seconds, which passed like hours, he turned and went in, closing the door behind him.
In their search for the cable-tunnel-their only remaining method of entry-the demolition party became separated. One of them found it, and, followed by another, “crept in over a tangled mass of pipes and leads…. We decided to carry on the demolition alone. We entered a room adjacent to the target, found the door of the high concentration plant open, went on and took the guard completely by surprise. I began to place the charges. This went quickly and easily. The models on which we had practised in England were exact duplicates of the real plant.” At this point two others joined them, and the charge was checked before ignition. Then both fuses were lit and the captive guard was told to run to safety. He blurted out that he had lost his spectacles and could not possibly secure another pair in Norway. There was a frenzied search and the spectacles were found. “We left the room,” writes Captain Ronneberg, “and twenty yards outside the cellar door we heard the explosion. Our sentry at the main entrance was recalled from his post. We passed through the gate and climbed up to the railway track. For a moment I looked back down the line and listened. Except for the faint hum of machinery that we had heard when we arrived, everything in the factory was quiet.”
The two parties withdrew independently. Ronneberg led four men across the Swedish border, a journey of 250 miles on skis in conditions of great hardship. Knut Haukelid, D.S.O., M.C., remained behind to organize resistance farther west among the mountains. The advance party, after waiting to report results, dispersed, leaving only Einar Skinnerland and Claus Helberg.
He had a narrow escape when, rounding the corner of a hill, he came suddenly face to face with three Germans who began to shoot. He turned and fled on his skis, but found that one of the enemy would inevitably outdistance him. He fired a shot from his pistol, calculating that, at that distance, the man who emptied his magazine first would lose. He stood there as a target until the German had emptied his Luger pistol, and was turning to retreat. Claus sent a bullet after him, and the German staggered and stopped, hanging over his ski-sticks. Claus made off. A little later, in the darkness, he went over a cliff and fell forty metres, damaging his right shoulder and breaking his right arm. After various adventures, from the unpleasant consequences of which he saved himself by his courage and resource, he returned to Great Britain. In the autumn of 1944, he went back to Rjukan with a party to protect the Norsk Hydro plant from German demolitions. Colonel-General von Falkenhorst visited Vermork immediately after the explosion and described the operation as “the best coup I have ever seen.” Mr. Winston Churchill characterised it as “completely successful” and wrote in the margin of the report upon it: “What is being done for these brave men in the way of decorations? ” The German guards were punished and the patrols reinforced.
Keeping up the pressure, the Eighth United States Air Force attacked Vemork on the 16th November, 1943, but, owing to the mountainous terrain, little damage was done. For the Germans, however, it was the final straw. They decided to abandon Vemork and remove all stocks of “heavy water” to Germany. Messages were sent to Knut Haukelid and Einar Skinnerland to join forces and destroy the stocks in transit. On 10th February, 1944, Haukelid asked permission to sink the ferry-boat Hydro on Lake Tinnsj which would carry the containers down to the railway at Tinnoset for shipment from Skien to Germany.
The enemy took every precaution save one. SS troops were drafted into the Rjukan valley; two aircraft patrolled the mountains each day; guards were stationed on the factory line from Vemork to the ferry quay.
The containers, loaded on to railway vans at Vemork under strong guard, were flood-lit at night with many guards round them. But, by some freak of chance, not a German was posted on the ferry-boat.
Haukelid and two friends-one of them Gunnar Syverstad, boarded the Hydro at 2 a.m. on Sunday, 20th February, 1944, leaving a third in charge of their car. They persuaded a Norwegian guard that they were fleeing from the Gestapo and he allowed them into the bilges of the boat, where they crept up to the bows and laid explosive charges there, hoping that the explosion would lift the stern of the ferry and render it unnavigable.
The charges were coupled to two time-delay mechanisms made by Haukelid from alarm clocks, and the time was set for 10-45, because Haukelid had found out that the ferry should be at the deepest part of the lake at this time. “At 4 a.m. the job was finished, so we left. The car took us to Jondal and we were in Oslo the same Sunday evening.” It was as easy as that, but it could have been far otherwise.
Einar Skinnerland’s part had been to collect information about the operation. On that Sunday afternoon, he sent a happy signal to London which said that shortly before 11 a.m. the Hydro had gone down after an explosion and that the vans with the “heavy water” were sunk in the deepest part of Tinnsji Lake. So it was that the manufacture of “heavy water” ceased in Norway and that all stocks available to German scientists were lost. Written by Kjetil Lillesæter
Skiing and the Creation of a Norwegian Identity by Odd Mølster
The Origins of Skiing
The word ski (pronounced ‘shee’ in Norwegian) is one of the very few Norwegian words to enter languages worldwide. It is derived from the Old Norse skith, which meant a split piece of firewood. Rock carvings show that skis have been used on the Scandinavian peninsula since the Stone Age, 4000 years ago. Skis and skiing are also mentioned several times in the Norse Sagas. However, until 1850 skiing was a means of transportation in wintertime, not a sport.
The use of skis started to change when the Norwegian army mobilized companies of ski troops in the 17th century. Ski soldiers played a major role in several wars, and probably saved Norway from a Swedish invasion in 1808. Skiing was then on the verge of becoming a military sport.
The real ski revolution, however, took place in Telemark, a district in southern Norway with a hilly terrain, well suited for skiing. In the 1850s, outstanding craftsmen and skiers in Telemark began to change the design of the ski drastically. The sides of the split wood were curved inwards, and skis were made shorter, broader and with new bindings around the heel. This ski became the forerunner for all later developments in skiing, and the Telemark region earned its place as the cradle of modern skiing.
In Oslo, skiing competitions took place as early as 1862. It might seem strange that skiing was born as an urban sport, but profound changes in society during the 19th century explain this. Industrialization led to the development of a middle class which had leisure time. This was a new concept to Norwegians who quickly realized they could spend this free time on sports. A parallel development of organized sports was seen all over Europe and resulted in the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. The first winter Olympics were held in Chamonix 28 years later. Around the turn of the century, Norwegians introduced skis all over the planet (they like to think) – at least in Europe and the United States.
Skiing through Norwegian History
Skis played a crucial role many times in Norwegian history all the way up to World War II. In 1206, for example, two heroic Birkebeinere (Birchlegs) brought the two-year-old Prince Håkon to safety, skiing 60 kilometers across the mountains from Lillehammer to Østerdalen.
In 1814, Norway was freed from Danish rule and thrown into a political union with Sweden. The whole period from 1814 to the dissolution of the union in 1905 is characterized by the quest for something purely Norwegian – something with which the people of Norway could identify in order to legitimize an independent Norway. Skiing, combined with sportsmanship and polar research, became springboards for the liberation of Norway.
Skis have often been crucial in Norwegian history. In 1206, two skiers brought the two-year-old prince Håkon to safety when they skied 38 miles across the mountains from Lillehammer to Østerdalen.
In 1814, when Norway was freed from Danish rule and thrown into a union with Sweden, Norwegians sought something purely their own and found it in skiing, which provided a vehicle for liberation. In this context four achievements emerge: Fridtjof Nansen’s crossing of the Greenland ice shelf in 1888 and his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1895, Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition and the Vemork sabotage.
Heroes of Telemark
In 1940, Norway was occupied by Germany, despite its proclaimed neutrality. But as history had demonstrated, the national sport could become a fine weapon in time of war. In 1943, Norway’s resistance movement won an epochal victory – on skis, of course – in one of the most celebrated resistance acts of World War II, the sabotage of the German heavy water plant at Vemor, near Rjukan, deep in the mountains of west Telemark.
Heavy water was crucial for the invention of atomic weapons and a supply of heavy water could have put an atomic bomb in the hands of Nazi Germany. Thus the heavy water plant at Rjukan was considered a critical target. When the Allies’ attempts to destroy it in air attacks failed, Norway’s skiing spirit came to the rescue.
In January 1943, six men, all of them excellent skiers, parachuted into the mountain plains of Hardangervidda. After waiting for two months in the mountains, the demolition team managed to blow up vital parts of the plant. Five members of the team escaped on skis to Sweden, while the sixth, Claus Heiberg, was chased by a German and managed to ski away. The author is cultural attaché at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Preventing NAZI A-Bombs
McNair Paper Number 41, Radical Responses to Radical Regimes: Evaluating Preemptive Counter-Proliferation, May 1995
At the inception of World War II, leading physicists on all sides were cognizant of the possible revolution in explosive power that might be extracted from a uranium bomb. However, each side was faced with a huge investment and scientific challenge before theoretical knowledge could be converted into an operational atomic weapon.
American and British nuclear physicists felt they started their A-bomb projects considerably behind their German counterparts and feared Hitler’s forces would be the first to have use of atomic arms. This evaluation was based on a number of considerations: (Note 23)
German control of the world’s only commercial source of heavy water after its occupation of Norway.
Attacks on German nuclear installations from 1941 until the end of 1943 were not effective in doing more than harassing the German nuclear research effort. A key target was the German-controlled heavy water production plant, Norsk-Hydro, at Vemork, Norway. Heavy water was required to conduct nuclear fission experiments and denial of the Norwegian plant’s output would cripple the German atomic bomb research effort.
British intelligence recommended destruction of Nosrk-Hydro at the earliest possible date. British paratroopers failed in their first raid in late 1942 when their gliders crashed during infiltration. In February 1943, six Norwegian saboteurs supplied and trained by the British, dynamited the heavy water facilities and disrupted production at Norsk-Hydro for two months. Upon seeing a resumption of German production at the site, the RAF and American Eighth Air Force dropped over 400 bombs on the plant on November 16, 1943, inflicting only light damage.
This raid, however, had positive results in that it persuaded the German authorities that Norsk-Hydro was an unsafe location for their heavy water production. Berlin decided to move every-thing back to Germany. This was a fatal mistake.
British intelligence learned of the timing and route of the German shipment of heavy water to Germany, and positioned a Norwegian saboteur, Knut Haukelid, aboard a ferry Hydro carrying all 600 kilograms of Germany’s heavy water across Lake Tinnsjoe in Norway while enroute to Germany. (Note 27) The ferry Hydro sank and, with it, Germany’s hopes of getting an atomic bomb before the end of World War II. (Note 28) This was the first nuclear counter-proliferation operation in history and it worked.
This list of original articles has been edited highlighting excerpts relating to the Rjuken heavy water program destruction, especially Knut Haukelid and his cohort – Coe.