American History Tellers - The Bastard Brigade - The Juice | 2

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

The discovery of uranium fission in Nazi Germany in 1938 terrified Allied nuclear scientists—especially since the Nazi atomic bomb project, the dreaded Uranium Club, had a two-year head start on the Manhattan Project.So the Allies decided to strike back. They couldn’t prevent Germany from acquiring uranium, but they could disrupt access to another key ingredient in atomic research—heavy water. Only one company in the world produced heavy water at the time, an isolated plant in Norway, so the Allies decided to send in teams of elite commandos on a top-secret mission to destroy it.These missions certainly didn’t go perfectly—some were in fact disasters. But to prevent Hitler from getting an atomic bomb, no price was too high to pay.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's November 1942. You're flying late at night over Norway, and you're frustrated. Beyond frustrated. You radio the commando team in the glider behind you. Glider 1, what do we think about this weather? It doesn't bother us if it doesn't bother you. The thing is, it does bother you. It's sleeting out, and you can feel the ice building up on the wings, the planes getting sluggish and heavy. You see

that red L yet? Nope. Keeping our eyes peeled. I'm gonna make one more pass, then we're heading back. Then you better cut us loose right now. We got some Nazis to take out. You try to laugh, but you're not in the mood. You've spent hours circling the snowy plateau. You're looking for the rendezvous point where you can safely land the glider you're towing behind you and the team of commandos inside. You're all British, but there are supposed to be four Norwegian troops waiting for you, an advanced scouting team that'll mark where to land by flashing red beacons in an L shape. When you find them, you'll cut the glider's tether, and the commandos inside will coast to the ground to start their sabotage mission. Except that you can't find the Red L.

There are clouds everywhere, obscuring your vision. And when you do get a peek at the ground, it looks utterly alien. Just endless stone ridges and white snow. You consult the map again and swear. If only there was a goddamn road or stream or something. I can't get a fix on anything. You circle a few more times, searching for the red L. You know that if you return to base with the glider, your superiors

will be furious. This mission is too important. But after another hour, you simply can't continue. The ice is too bad. It's now building up on the rope and glider too. Glider one, we're heading back. Hey, wait a minute. We might have seen it. One more pass. No, I'm in charge here. We're aborting the operation. That's final. Wait, just let me... You turn down the radio and bank into a turn. You don't want to head back either, but it's the right decision. Halfway through your turn though, feel some strain on the rope connecting you to the glider. It's heavy with accumulated ice, so you increase the throttle a little until you feel a sudden lurch forward.

God, what the hell? Oh, Jesus. You whip your head around to look behind you, but the cockpit windows are too small. You can't see. Glider 1, can you hear me? Repeat, Glider 1. You turn to your co-pilot.

Take the controls. You unbuckle and start pushing your way toward the aft of the plane. Looking out of the glass gunner bubble there, all you can see is the broken end of the rope flapping uselessly in your wake. The glider and all the soldiers inside are gone. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking.

And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Explore themes of friendship, loss, and hope with Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Find what piques your imagination. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it. It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery

app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, and necessary. After all, Nazi Germany had a big head start in the race to develop atomic weapons. Scientists in Nazi Germany had discovered uranium fission in the first place, and the Third Reich founded its version of the Manhattan Project, the Uranium Club, two years before the United States. That news had caused fear and panic among American scientists. Many of them were refugees from Nazi Germany and knew what a disaster it would be if Adolf Hitler got his hands on atomic weapons.

But despite warnings from the scientists, Allied governments were slow to take action. Meanwhile, German scientists hurtled forward in their research. The Allies finally responded to the German threat by sending in commandos on sabotage missions. This included the glider mission, which aimed to take out a Nazi-controlled manufacturing plant among the cliffs of central Norway. The plant was producing a key ingredient in atomic research, a substance called heavy water. But things didn't go according to plan, and the clock was ticking.

This is Episode 2, The Juice. Imagine it's the summer of 1939. You're a middle-aged German physicist, and you've had a rotten year. Your marriage is falling apart. Those Nazi thugs have overrun your country. Colleagues have been fired by the dozen, and you can barely work amid the chaos. That's why you're glad to be at sea, sailing for the United States. You're giving some lectures there, and while you always take some papers up on deck to work with you on this trip,

mostly you just walk and take in the sea air, trying to clear your mind. Today, as you round a corner, you collide with another passenger, a young woman who begins apologizing profusely in German, your native language. Ach, in Schuldergun, I'm so sorry. Let me get those. That's quite alright. Good day, miss. It's Ingrid. And wait, aren't you that scientist? Who? You are! You were

taken prisoner during the Great War and sent to that camp in Siberia. It was in all the newspapers. Yeah, um, I'm sure you're too young to remember that. And you ended up proving all that science from yourself with just a pen and paper. It was a pencil, actually, yeah. I chewed it to sharpen it, but yes, that was me.

You suddenly notice how vivacious this woman is. Young and blonde. She's smiling right at you. So, how have you found the trip so far? Ingrid, right? A little lonely, actually. I've never been to New York before. New York? That's where I'm going. No? Have you been there before? Once or twice? Well, then you have to be my escort. In her excitement, she grabs your hand, which is suddenly sweaty. You feel your stomach flutter, too. I want to see the world's fair so badly. Will you go with

me? Oh, I suppose you'll be too busy. I could make time. Your wife won't mind? How did you know I was married? Well, I could only assume a war hero like you. You're also wearing a ring. Of course, things with my wife are complicated. But I don't want to bore you with that. Don't you think it's awfully warm out here? Would you like to grab a drink inside? I'd love to, and you can tell me all about New York and San Francisco. This stops you in your tracks. I'm sorry, how did you know I was going to San Francisco?

You said so. I don't believe I did. She slips her arm in yours. Oh, yes you did. How else would I know? I remember because I'm going there too, after New York, to work in the German consulate. Wouldn't it be lovely to see the Golden Gate Bridge together? I try thinking back.

Did you mention San Francisco? But it's awfully hard to concentrate when she's biting her lip like that. Well, maybe I did mention it. Oh, you did. And now that you say it, I am getting warm. How about that drink? You hesitate, but she squeezes your arm. Something is nagging you, but you feel like a teenager again. Giddy and a bit reckless. You decide for once in your life to leave caution behind. Well, I can't believe we're both going to New York and San Francisco. What a lovely coincidence. Except it's not a coincidence at all.

And the meeting will have dire consequences for the war ahead. German physicist Walter Botha was a brilliant man. He would later win the Nobel Prize. But he had no idea that the lovely young woman he fell for on board the U.S.-bound ship in 1939 was a Nazi spy. The Germans had sent her to keep tabs on him. And after his return to Germany late that summer, he joined the Uranium Club. By then, the spy had Bothota wrapped around her little finger, and in admiring her, he couldn't help but also begin to admire her employers, the Nazis. His political opposition

to them softened. He also knew that the Nazis would throw money at weapons research, and scientists like him always needed more research funds. Perhaps he and the Nazis could find a way to work together on atomic weapons research. The Nazis agreed, and Botha was assigned a key role in the bomb project to run tests on substances called moderators. Moderators help produce chain reactions by slowing the speed of the neutrons that split uranium atoms. If the neutrons move too fast, the uranium atoms won't absorb them, and the chain reaction will fizzle. But certain substances can moderate or slow down the speed of neutrons, allowing the uranium atoms to absorb them and in turn letting the chain reaction proceed. Scientists in 1939

knew of just a few substances that seemed promising as moderators. These included a form of carbon known as graphite, the same substance found in pencil lead. Bota's job was to test how well carbon graphite slowed neutrons down. He did this with giant spheres of graphite three or four feet in diameter. He'd drill a chimney into them and drop a small plug of radioactive material

into the center of the sphere. The radioactive material would emit neutrons that would ping-pong their way through the graphite. Detectors outside the sphere could then measure how much the graphite had slowed them down. Bota ran dozens of tests with graphite, and normally he was a talented scientist. But this time, he was still swooning over the spy.

After their liaison, Ingrid had stayed in San Francisco to work at the German consulate and, unbeknownst to Bothe, continue her spying activities. But Bothe still sent her love letters. On the first anniversary of their meeting, he wrote, I have been speaking of physics the entire day while thinking only of you. He also referred to himself as a drunken teenager and recalled playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata over and over while pining for her. He was completely distracted.

Perhaps as a result, he bungled his experiments with graphite. He ended up concluding incorrectly that graphite would not work as a moderator. The Nazis were aware of Bothe's infatuation, but they had no idea it was undermining his work, or that their spying efforts had completely backfired. Because of his mistakes, the German bomb project had to shift focus. Once the Uranium Club had ruled out graphite as a moderator, the members had only one option left. They decided to use what's called heavy water. Heavy water looks just like regular water and has mostly similar properties. Like regular water, heavy

water molecules contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, H2O. But the hydrogen atoms in heavy water are heavier and denser because they have a neutron in the nucleus, where those in regular water do not. While regular water tends to absorb neutrons and kill off chain reactions, heavy water does not. Instead, it simply slows neutrons down, helping the chain reaction along. Producing a successful chain reaction is the first step in making an atomic bomb, so the Nazi Uranium Club needed a supply of heavy water, or else their entire bomb project would come to nothing. And that's where the trouble started, because heavy water is exceedingly rare. Heavy water molecules do exist in the water found in nature,

and scientists at the time knew how to isolate them by zapping tanks of water with electricity. But that required tons of water and a lot of electricity, which made the separation process extremely expensive. And in the 1930s and 40s, there was only one plant in the world that produced heavy water. Vemork was a power plant in central Norway, located 100 miles west of Oslo on a bleak, unforgiving plateau. The plant itself sat on a rock ledge overlooking a 600-foot gorge. There was also a giant waterfall nearby, which supplied both water and cheap, abundant hydroelectric power. Because heavy water was so expensive, over $4,000 a pound in today's

money, the owners of the plant produced it in craft batches only, usually a quarter ounce or so at a time. So the owners were shocked when in early 1940, a military physicist in the Uranium Club visited the plant and announced he wanted to purchase 400 pounds of heavy water right away for roughly $1.6 million in today's money. He also wanted to place a standing order of 220 more pounds per month for the next several years. The owners knew that the heavy water was good for one thing only, nuclear research, so they refused to sell it to the Nazis and alerted a military agent they happened to know in Paris. That agent arranged to smuggle the entire stock of heavy water from the plant in Norway,

sending it to Paris for use in Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie's lab. But to get it there required some spycraft. First, the agent and some plant officials decanted the heavy water into custom-made stainless steel canisters that fit inside ordinary luggage. At the Oslo airport, the agent and his partner made an obvious fuss about how important their extra-heavy suitcases were. Guards at the airport took notice, and as the two agents were loading their special heavy luggage onto their flight to Amsterdam, the airport guards alerted the Nazi Air Force, who realized something was afoot and readied a few fighter planes. Meanwhile, a speeding taxi roared up to the airport gates, the passenger inside claiming he was desperately late for his flight.

Waving him in, the officials let the taxi drive right onto the runway, where the late man popped out and began tossing his luggage onto a flight for Scotland. What no one knew was that the two agents each had two tickets, one to Amsterdam, but another to Scotland. Both flights left around the same time, and both airplanes were sitting on the tarmac right next to each other. In the confusion of the taxis' arrival, the two agents slipped onto the plane going to Scotland, leaving their extra heavy baggage on the Amsterdam flight. A few minutes later, both planes took off. As soon as the Amsterdam flight left Norwegian airspace, German fighters intercepted it and forced it to land. Nazi officials wrenched open the luggage the agents had fussed over at the airport, and to their shock, found it filled with gravel. Meanwhile, the agents were well on their way to Scotland with the heavy water, which

was inside the late man's luggage, who was himself a third agent. Upon landing, the precious heavy water was hustled through customs and rerouted to the Joliot-Curieuse in France. German scientists were furious about this heist, but they got their revenge soon enough. Nazi Germany invaded Norway in April 1940 and quickly overran Oslo. The men and women of central Norway continued to fight for weeks, but the resistance there eventually collapsed in May. And when it did, the Third Reich seized the Weimar power plant. Adolf Hitler now commanded the only heavy water production facility in the world and was one step closer to developing an atomic bomb. Now streaming.

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Winston Churchill had once called heavy water a sinister term, eerie and unnatural. And perhaps in deference to him, some Allied officials began referring to it as the juice. In particular, the Allies heard that Werner Heisenberg was building atomic reactors with the juice, a crucial step toward making bombs. Rumors about his rapid progress were leaking out through neutral countries like Switzerland, and the Allies realized they needed to strike back and quickly. Bombing, though, seemed unlikely to work. Weymark stood on a cliff and would be a difficult target to hit. The heavy water equipment was also located in the building's basement,

which offered further protection from bombs. So the Allies schemed up something more daring, a commando raid. Imagine it's September 1942. You're a master thief, a lockpicker. It's been a dizzying 24 hours. Yesterday, you were rotting away in your jail cell, but late last night, an army colonel came by and told you to grab your things. You had no idea what was going on, but soon you were handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to a military base in northern Scotland. Now, you're at some sort of warehouse. Inside, there's

what looks like an apartment building with rows of big windows, except it's made of wood and it's only a few stories tall with no roof. You're baffled. With all due respect, Colonel, what the hell am I looking at? That is none of your business. You're supposed to be the best lock picker in Britain. Is that true? Some people say. I'm not in a mood for games. Are you or aren't you? I am. Good. We need you to teach our boys how to pick the lock on a certain door in that building. What tools do you need? First, could we... You hold up your hands. You're still manacled. The colonel turns to a lieutenant and snaps his fingers. Get these handcuffs off. No need. You slip your wrists out and laugh when you see the colonel's face. You shouldn't have let me have that toothpick at breakfast. See, I am the best.

The colonel's face darkens, and before you're sure what happens, he has your arms pinned behind your back and your face against the wall. Wait, wait, that was certainly a dumb joke. I hope you like your cell because you're returning to it right now. No, no, please. You brought me here for war work, right? I've been stuck in that cell for months, wishing like hell I could do my part. No more jokes, I promise. There better not be.

Just let me see the lock. He releases your arms and you enter the wooden building and descend some stairs. The colonel points at a big metal door. The light is dim, but you bend over and peer at the lock. A bobby pin and a shim should do it. The colonel hands them to you. How long will it take? Three minutes?

You've got two. Peel the lights! Suddenly, you're plunged into darkness. Hey! Our boys have to plunged into darkness. Hey! Our boys have to break in at night. Clock's running. You grope for the doorknob and start. You don't really need light.

Picking locks is all about feel. But still, it's unnerving. You pick the first few pins right away, under 30 seconds. But the next one's a bear. God, it's jammed. One minute elapsed. You end up bending the bobby pin and curse under your breath. You snap part of it off and keep working. Minute 30. Finally, the last pin gives. You jam the shim into the lock and turn it like a key. The door sticks a little,

but finally swings open. Minute 54. That's very good. Hit the lights. Takes your eyes a moment to adjust, but just before you let away, you manage to peek inside the room beyond the door. There are a dozen metal cylinders, each four feet tall. Painted on each one in block letters is the word JUICE. That master thief was part of a mission called Operation Freshman, whose goal was to take out the Weymork heavy water plant. Overall, Operation Freshman consisted of two teams of soldiers. The first group was a small scout team of four Norwegians tasked with reconnaissance. They parachuted onto the plateau near the plant in October.

They studied the best way to approach the plant and also where the Nazis had placed guards and machine guns. The second group was a team of British commandos with an agency called the Special Operations Executive. Informally, they were known as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Their job was sabotage. To help the ungentlemen train, the Allies built a wooden mock-up at the Weymourke power plant in Scotland. British commandos trained for Norway by tromping around the countryside in snowshoes. To conceal the reason for this, the British and their American allies began spreading rumors that the men were actually training for a fictitious trophy called the Washington Cup, a supposedly

heated competition between the Yanks and the Brits. And with the guidance from the master thief, soldiers drilled endlessly on breaking into the Weymour compound and navigating it in the dark. The soldiers also practiced using plastic explosives to blow up the heavy water production equipment. In particular, they were targeting the four-foot-tall metal cylinders in the plant's basement, where the Nazis stored the purest heavy water. There were 34 ungentlemanly soldiers in all, divided into two teams. The plan for infiltrating Norway called for two bomber planes to tow them there in gliders. The bombers would search out the rendezvous point on the plateau, where the advanced scout team would be flashing their beacons in a red L.

The planes would then cut the ropes towing the gliders and let them descend silently, avoiding detection. After landing, the soldiers would meet up with the scout team and march through the snow to the plant. They'd break in, place explosives around the metal cylinders, and flee on foot. All in all, it was an elegant plan, one that could cripple the Nazi atomic bomb project. But it was also dangerous, and their risks were high. The British expected to lose some troops on the raid, but they added a clever final touch to keep casualties at a minimum.

Just before blowing up the equipment, the soldiers planned to drop a silk handkerchief with a map sketched onto it. It had the Weymark plant circled in blue and a false escape route plotted to western Norway. The handkerchief was a red herring intended to throw the Nazis onto the wrong track. Meanwhile, the troops would be decamping in the opposite direction, towards Sweden. But if the British were hoping to minimize casualties this way, it didn't work. The glider drop took place on November 19th, despite the fickle weather near the Weymark plant that day. The advanced scout team kept sending weather reports to London

on a crude radio they'd brought along, but by the time the British received and decoded the reports, the winds and clouds had already altered conditions there. But despite the dicey weather, the British were desperate to take out the heavy water plant as soon as possible, so they sent the planes and gliders up anyway, one at 6.45 and another at 7 p.m. The planes lost contact with each other, and both of them circled uselessly for hours, unable to find the rendezvous point. They were buffeted by winds the whole time, and ice started building up on the ropes connecting them to the gliders. Eventually, both ropes snapped and sent the gliders hurtling toward the boulder-strewn plateau below. One of the planes did manage to limp back to England afterward, and its crew survived. But the other plane did not. It started circling in the air, trying to get a fix on its lost glider. But in doing so,

the pilot clipped the side of a mountain and tumbled down the slope. The plane exploded after a few rolls. The commandos and the gliders had it worse. In the first glider, three of them died instantly during the crash landing, and six were critically injured. Given that his men needed medical care, the officer in charge surrendered to a Nazi patrol. According to the customs of war, the commandos, as uniformed soldiers, should have been taken to a prisoner of war camp. But just a month earlier, Hitler had issued a Führerbefeu, or Führer Command, to shoot all foreign saboteurs as spies. So when the Nazi

patrol handed the men over to the Gestapo, the Gestapo interrogated them, trying to find out what their sabotage target had been. Bravely, the surviving commandos refused to say, but this made the Nazis furious, and they responded by driving the men to a remote valley. There, the soldiers were marched behind a concrete shed, one by one, and shoved before a firing squad. All 14 bodies were dumped into a ditch. The men in the other glider met an equally grim fate. Six died on impact and four were critically injured. Two of the wounded froze to the ground in their own blood.

Here, too, the commanding officer surrendered to a Nazi patrol to get medical care. But while the Nazis did take the injured men to a doctor, they instructed him to kill them with morphine injections instead. When some of the injured men resisted, a Nazi officer strangled one of the commandos with his belt and crushed the Adam's apple of another with his boot. Their bodies were tossed into the sea. That left just five healthy survivors who ended up in Oslo for interrogation. They also refused to reveal their target. So the enraged Nazis bound their hands in barbed wire, drove them into a forest, and shot them. They were later discovered in a pit, still wearing their uniforms. Operation Freshman was a disaster, top to bottom. 34 elite commandos and one full plane crew had

died, and they never even got close to the heavy water plant, which continued to churn out juice. Even worse, the mission tipped the Allies' hand about their interest in heavy water. None of the would-be saboteurs ever talked, but in going through the wreckage of one plane, the Nazis found a silk handkerchief with a map drawn on it. The commandos had intended it as a diversion

to fool the Nazis into thinking they'd fled west instead of east, but they'd never got a chance to drop it. And in finding it now, the Germans ignored the supposed escape route and zeroed in on the site circled in blue, the Weymark heavy water plant. The Nazis now knew the saboteur's target. As a result, they added machine guns and reinforced security around the plant, making it even more impenetrable. But the Allies wouldn't give up. The very next day, in fact, despite the loss of lives, despite the bulked-up defense, Allied officers sat down and started drawing up new plans to attack the plant. Weymark was so crucial to the Nazi atomic bomb

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Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Criminal Attorney early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine you're a Norwegian commando. It's January 1943, and you've been stuck for weeks in a flimsy shack on the plateau near the Vamork heavy water plant. Whose turn is it to take out the garbage? Peter's, but he's hunting. Jesus, he goes hunting every day. We need food, but he never bags anything. Then he comes back so famished that he eats more than his fair share. At least he's trying. Wait, who patched up that wall and who scrounged up wood for that extra fire on Christmas? Jesus, fire again? That was two weeks ago. What are you doing to help? I am doing

plenty. Your plenty sure looks like nothing to me. Arguments like this are becoming alarmingly common. You're stir-crazy in this unheated shack. The British are supposedly sending more commandos in for another attempt on the heavy water plant, but you're worried you'll all kill each other before the Nazis even get a chance. Sometimes these arguments turn violent, but but you're worried you'll all kill each other before the Nazis even get a chance. Sometimes these arguments turn violent, but today you're too weak to fight. Instead, you stomp over to the other side of the cabin, all of ten feet away. There, you flip on the radio. Hey, that's for emergencies, you idiot. Go to hell. The music soothes you, but how many more nights can you take? Suddenly, there's a pounding on the door. You all look at each other wary.

You grab a gun and creep over to peer through a crack in the door. Peter? You wrench the door open. He's covered in blood and looks ready to collapse. But behind him, you see another shape, also covered in blood. And fur. It's a reindeer. I knew you'd come through.

Peter! Peter got a reindeer! Inside, you bundle Peter up in socks and sweaters, and soon a kettle is simmering with stew. Soup's on, everyone! But as the cook swings the heavy cast iron kettle off the hearth, his weakened arms can't hold it. He staggers and spills the

stew all over the dirt floor. You all stare in horror. Then without a word, all of you drop to your knees and start slurping. There's sand crunching your teeth, grit on your tongue, but you don't care. It's the best meal you've ever had. You want to shape the broth-soaked dirt into mud pies and eat those too. Suddenly, a fellow commando sits up and throws a finger into the air. Excuse me, waiter. There's a hair in my soup. All four of you collapse laughing. You keep trying to eat, though, and spend the next ten minutes choking and coughing and giggling and swallowing. You fleetingly wonder if this is what it feels like to lose your mind.

The starving commandos in Norway were the same troops who had been flashing red lights to form an L on the night of the ill-fated Operation Freshman mission three months earlier. Afterward, they were stranded at their remote post for months, all through Christmas and all through the bleak, dark month of January. But no matter how desperate things got, the Allies insisted they stay put. Operation Gunnerside was coming. Operation Gunnerside was essentially a replay of Operation Freshman. A team of commandos would trek through the snow, break into the heavy water plant, and blow the equipment to smithereens. The big difference was that instead of 34 troops, there would be only 10, a leaner and meaner force. After several months of training and delays, the gunner-side crew

finally parachuted into Norway in February and rendezvoused with the stir-crazy ground crew. The Norwegians were delighted to get fresh food. They spent several days gorging on the raisins and chocolate the parachuters brought. Then, after a few days' rest, they slipped on white snowsuits and set out to cripple the heavy water plant and avenge the deaths of their slain colleagues. They were discovered immediately, but by four teenagers. Two boys and two girls had snuck out to some cabins nearby for a romantic rendezvous, and they stumbled right into the heavily armed gunner-side crew. Thankfully for the teens, one of the commandos was a local and recognized them. He growled at them to lock themselves into

one of the cabins and not come out for 24 hours or else. The terrified teens obeyed. It was a 25-mile ski to the plant. Before long, the commandos could hear the roar of the waterfall that powered Vamork, and soon, as they came into a forest clearing, they saw the building itself, the plant that had been dominating their minds for months. It was eight stories tall, and during peacetime, its windows would have blazed like a glitzy hotel, bright lights powered by an endless supply of cheap electricity.

But during wartime, they'd all been painted over black. Still, the commandos could hear, even above the waterfall, the hum of machinery. Weymour produced ten pounds of heavy water that very day. To elude Nazi patrols, the commandos descended into the steep gorge in front of the plant, then forged an icy stream at the bottom. Then they faced an arduous 600-foot climb to the cliff ledge on which Vamork stood. Their hands, stiff and numb, gripped the icy ledge. After some tense moments scaling the cliff, they reached the ledge at 10 p.m.

The guards were changing shifts then, so the commandos rested half an hour to let the guards grow bored and complacent. Then they crept around to a back gate, walking in footprints already imprinted in the snow by Nazi patrols. At this point, most of the commandos peeled off to train their guns on the guard stations and provide cover. The remaining four clipped a fence and crept forward to the plant. These four split into two teams of two. All of them had already written goodbye letters to their loved ones back home. They fully expected to reach the basement and blow up the equipment. They did not expect to walk out alive.

Unlike the freshman crew, the gunner side team never received training picking locks. Spies inside the plant had assured them that the Nazis left the outside doors open. But they were wrong. Every door and window the two teams tried was locked tight. At one point, one of the commandos tiptoed past a window with a bit of paint chipped off. He peeked inside and could see the heavy water cylinders in the basement. He was sorely tempted to smash the glass and crawl through, but he held off and kept searching. Finally, that commando spotted a utility duct. After removing the snow packed inside, he and his partner wriggled into it and began snaking their way forward. Because they'd

practiced with the wooden mock-up of the plant in England, they knew exactly where they were, even in the dark utility shaft. After a few minutes of wriggling, they reached a spot near the target room and dropped through a hatch onto the floor. A sign on the door warned, no admittance except on business. They planned to shoot the lock, but to their shock and delight, this door was open. So they pulled their guns, nodded,

and burst in on the guard. The Nazis had posted dozens of cracked troop outsides to guard the approach to the plant, but in a major blunder, there was only a single, feeble elderly night watchman here in the inner sanctum. The two commandos easily overwhelmed him and pushed him into a corner.

They quickly started laying explosives at the foot of each cylinder. Then they'd wire them all together, light a fuse, and run. But halfway through this process, they heard a crash behind them and wheeled to see a shattered window pane. Someone had punched through from the outside. The two commandos froze, bracing for guards, grenades, or the tip of a gun. But then a familiar gloved hand reached through. It was the other two commandos. They were tired

of plodding around in the snow, trying locked doors, so they'd found the same window and punched through it. It was a bold move, but bold and stupid. One of the commandos inside ended up slicing his hand open, helping them in. This rendered him useless for laying explosives, which was a problem considering he was the explosives expert. Smashing the blacked-out window also flooded the yard outside with light, a veritable beacon to any Nazi patrols. So another commando had to stand there and block the hole with his body, which rendered him useless as well.

And on top of all that, just before the team finished wiring the explosives, they heard more footsteps. Everyone froze again. They listened harder, and sure enough, someone was descending a nearby staircase. The commandos took cover, pistols drawn. A moment later, another guard appeared, one far younger than the first. The commandos pounced, and a few sharp questions revealed him to be a Norwegian,

someone with no desire to risk his life alerting the Nazis. So the commandos shoved him next to the other guard and kept working. Finally, at 1.13 a.m., everything was ready. The commandos lit a 30-second fuse. They then turned to the guards and told them to run, making sure to keep their mouths open. Otherwise, the pressure from the explosion would blow out their eardrums. When the guards were gone, the commandos ducked out a side door and began sprinting through the

snowy yard. From outside, the noise of the explosion was a meek, low, muffled pop. This left some of the gunner side crew fretting, convinced the explosives had failed. Should they turn around? Surely Nazi troops were already racing to the scene. What if they'd failed? But they felt they couldn't risk returning and began their escape. They needn't have worried. The thick walls of the plant had simply stifled the sound. Inside, the explosives had detonated, and the blast had shattered the cylinders and sprayed 770 pounds of pure heavy water everywhere. The commandos had made it in and out of the plant without firing a single shot, but they still had to escape back to their cabin.

And it wasn't easy. They had to scale the gorge again and try to slip away on skis, and the bleeding hand of the injured commando left a telltale red trail in the snow. Meanwhile, the Nazis had sounded the alarms and snapped on floodlights. Several search parties formed and plunged into the night after the commandos. But for once, the harsh weather of central Norway worked in the Allies' favor. A blizzard kicked up right after the commandos strapped on their skis. It covered their tracks and allowed them to disappear into the night.

A few hours later, they arrived at their cabin. They stayed awake just long enough to drink a toast of whiskey and then collapsed for 18 hours of sleep. Every single one of the gunner-side commandos ended up escaping Norway alive. It was one of the most courageous missions of the entire war. And a few months later, the Allies rewarded them with a feast at the Ritz in London. Each man there earned a medal, and they raised toast after toast to their success. They all agreed it was one of the grandest nights of their lives, but it was not a victory. Upon hearing about the sabotage, members of the Nazi Uranium Club had raced up to Norway to fix

the plant. In incredibly short order, the Nazis were brutally efficient. They got the plant running again. In fact, they took advantage of the downtime to improve the equipment and expand production. They could now produce more heavy water than ever. Allied intelligence officials knew this even before the meal at the Ritz, but not wanting to take anything away from the commandos, they remained silent. When the dust settled, the Allies were still faced with a frightening prospect. Despite dozens of lives lost and two clandestine raids on the Nazis, German scientists were still making progress toward the atomic bomb. To stop the Nazis, they realized they'd have to strike even harder. Next week on American History Tellers,

the American military embarks on a crazy, desperate mission to wipe out an atomic bunker in northern France with the help of one of the heroes of that mission, Joe Kennedy Jr., the volatile older brother of future President John F. Kennedy. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Graham for Airship. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode is written by Sam Kean and based on his book, The Bastard Brigade. Edited by Dorian Marina. Edited and produced by Jenny Lauer Beckman. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis. Created by Hernán López for Wondery. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free

on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.