Dan Snow's History Hit - Sabotage, Nazis and the Atomic Bomb: Operation Gunnerside

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

In late February 1943, Norwegian commandos were given the details of their mission, Operation Gunnerside. Their job would be to sabotage the Vemork heavy water facility in Norway, hindering German industry and their development of the atomic bomb. Before they left, Norwegian Royal Army Colonel and pioneering chemist, Leif Tronstad, told his soldiers, “I cannot tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway’s memory for a hundred years.” Fully aware of the danger they faced, the men were handed suicide pills in case of capture. On the 80th anniversary of this daring raid, Dan is joined by the survival expert and TV presenter Ray Mears to discuss the challenges they faced, and the consequences of their mission.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. You've heard about great commando raids of the Second World War. Well, whatever you've heard about the most daring and brilliant raids, you can set that aside. Because this, folks, is the story of the destruction of the hydroelectric power plant in Telemark, Norway, 80 years ago in February 1943. The Telemark Heroes, a group of Norwegian special forces soldiers who went through unimaginable hardships, showed extraordinary bravery, physical fitness and skill on skis, on survival and weapons, to blow up a facility that was essential in the creation of so-called heavy water, which itself is a key component in the development and testing of atomic weapons. The Allies believed that Germany might be winning the race to building

a nuclear bomb, and this was one way to stop that progress in its tracks. On the podcast day, we're very lucky, we've got a very special guest. It's the 80th anniversary of this raid. So I've got the man who on the 60th anniversary reconstructed that raid because he is a very tough, knowledgeable, brilliant survival expert. He is the world-famous TV presenter and author Ray Mears, a legend here in Britain on our screens, a man who not only met the veterans of the Telemark raid, but jumped out of a plane and survived some of the conditions those original heroes would have faced as well.

It's a great honour to have Ray Mears on the podcast on the anniversary of so-called Operation Gunnercide, the attack on Telemark. Here is the story of the raid with Ray Mears. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Ray, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Dan, very nice to be here. First of all, let's talk about your experience. You've done a lot, but reconstructing this journey and the research you did and meeting the original guys, this must have been a career highlight, wasn't it? It's something that took me a bit by surprise. I went to Norway for a holiday because I was interested in the story of the attack on the heavy water factory and came away with an understanding that there was a survival story involved. And I started to look into that and

I thought, Greg, this is amazing. Why has nobody told this story? And the whole thing kind of snowballed and one thing led to another. The TV show, it wasn't a smooth path to getting it sorted. No, it was really difficult. The BBC didn't want to do it, and I had to kind of convince them to do it. But we got the green light, which was great. The next problem was that the men themselves, the saboteurs, these incredible individuals, were so humble.

They said, well, we didn't do anything special. We were free in the mountains. The ordinary Norwegians who were under the Nazi boot, they're the people you should really be telling the story of. So I came up with the idea that what we need to do is to, in some reconstruct the story to relive it and then perhaps we can sit down and talk to the survivors the men who were there themselves and bring the story together that piqued their interest and that's what we did we engaged the services of two Royal Marine Mountain Leaders, brilliant guys, and two Norwegian Special Forces. And we tasked them with the prospect of reliving the experience of the Grouse Party. If you know, this mission is broken into their three operations, Grouse, Freshman, and Gunnerside. And Grouse were the initial group of four norwegian soldiers trained

by sui who were parachuted onto the hardangervida as quickly as possible to be a reception committee for a mission that had yet to be devised and that's what we did and because i wanted to also be able to tell the story of sui and how they trained people to parachute and how rudimentary the training often was because of the time involved. I would parachute with them and I would have to go through parachute training to bring that to life, which is what I did. That was all quite entertaining, actually. Well, it was entertaining for us watching it, I'll tell you that much. I'm sure there were moments of terror for you, but let's get to the story itself. And you've alluded to it there. What was the purpose

of this sabotage in Telemark? What was there and why was it important? Yeah, and it's the most interesting mission of the war in many ways. People have said that there was no mission that had more importance than this one. This mission in many ways had its genesis prior to the invasion of Norway. There was already interest in this chemical being produced in Norway called deuterium oxide, heavy water, which was believed to be an essential component on one of the paths that could be taken to the construction of an atomic bomb. And the top chemists of the day, the top physicists of the day, were aware of the interest in this chemical. And of course, the Germans were trying to obtain that prior to the invasion of

Norway. When Norway fell, the factory fell into German hands and the alarm bells rang. Of course, in time in Britain, the Prime Minister was informed that the Germans were attempting to construct a bomb that had the capability to destroy a whole city. And that message was not ignored. And the operations that followed were given the highest priority. And so where was this? I mean, is it pretty difficult to get to? So basically, what you have is a mountain plateau north of Oslo called the Hardanger Vida. It's a huge mountain plateau, 3,000 feet. On top, it's flat, and it looks very much like Dartmoor. And it has very steep valleys that come off of it. In one of the

tightest valleys at a place called Vermoort near Rukkern, there is a hydro plant because they can bring off water from the top of the Hadangerville through pipes, they can generate a huge amount of energy and it's a lot of energy that's required to produce deuterium oxide. So you have this very tight valley, in fact it's so tight that during the winter months, the sun doesn't reach the bottom of the valley. Today is an ice climbing Mecca. But that's where this factory was. And it made it a very difficult target for bombing because it's hidden in this tight gorge. And of course, there's also a civilian population surrounding it. Ray, Norway had been occupied by the Germans in 1939. Was there an active Norwegian resistance? Were the Norwegians part of British forces in the same way that the

French would be and other nationalities would come to Britain for training and then to be reinserted into their countries? Well, you have to remember that the Germans invaded Norway before they invaded France. It took everybody by surprise. It was a chaotic time. And Norway decided that they didn't want to be occupied by the Germans. They gave all the power of their parliament to the king, who was in exile here in Britain, and they didn't capitulate. So unlike France, where you had Vichy France, in Norway, the country was illegally occupied, and it was legal to resist, of course, not easy to do so. Within Norway, there would be a very effective underground army would form called Milorg. And they would do amazing work. You then had individuals who just determined that they would throw a spanner in the Nazi works and started to, without any assistance or training or anything, just got on with the job. One of the most effective was an incredible man called Gunnar Sundstede, who became the greatest thorn in the side of the Gestapo and just totally outwitted them. the side of the Gestapo and just totally outwitted them. And then you had Norwegians who fled to Britain by any means they could, by boat, even long overland journeys. And when they arrived in Britain, they brought with them, you know, skis and windproof clothing, sleeping bags, rucksacks,

the things they knew that were essential for Norway. And later on, the Germans would outlaw the possession of those items to try and prevent Norwegians moving freely in the mountains, which of course is their great strength. And here in Britain, we sifted through them to make sure that there was no fifth columnist amongst them and worked out who were the men of the most interest, the most capable. And they were sent to Scotland for training under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive. They were sent up to Glenmore for training. They were incredible. And then this organization, Company Linger, started, which became the de facto Norwegian

special forces of the day. Once this factory fell into the Nazi shadow, people within the factory started to try and sabotage the production, those in the know. shadow, people within the factory started to try and sabotage the production, those in the know. And also people from the factory, there's one important man called Arne Schinnerland, who had three weeks leave coming up, took that leave, jumped on a boat and came to Britain. And here in Britain, he was very quickly identified by our authorities. They did a superb job of recognizing his importance. identified by our authorities, they did a superb job of recognising his importance.

And he would, just a couple of days later, with rudimentary training, was parachuted back into Norway to be a man on the inside within the factory. And what was the plan? You've referred to the bit that you re-enacted or reconstructed, because it wasn't the simplest plan on earth, was it? There wasn't a plan. There wasn't a plan. This was the problem. It was a real nightmare. The weather was bad. If you're going to bring people into Norway by air, you have to have good weather and you have to have the right moon state. And that greatly limited the opportunity to get people in from the air. And so quite early on, a party of four men, the grouse party, were parachuted onto the Hardangerveda. These are all local men led by Jens Anton Poulsen, who was a remarkable individual. And their job was to be there as a

reception committee for whatever commando operation would be put forward. That at that point hadn't been decided as far as I can determine. There were all sorts of desperate measures being considered. And in the end, the mission that came forward was Operation Freshman, which would involve engineer commandos, two identical units. In case one failed, there'd be a second party to complete the job. And they would land on the Hardangervidde by glider, attack the factory, destroy the factory, and then get home by whatever means possible. There was no firm plan for how to get these men back. And given Hitler's commando order, I think there's a good chance that this was in many ways a suicide mission.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, telling the story of the most extraordinary commando raid of the Second World War. The telemark heroes. More coming up. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the Middle Ages. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presto John, what did they think they were hearing? We explore cutting edge research. Genetic signatures found in present day Jewish populations were shared by the genetic ancestries we found. From everyday life to dynasty shattering

events. It's a time when all the major Viking raids have started which as Christians they think of as vengeance from heaven. And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles. I stand up straight in a bed, I'm hairy at my base and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis. Every Tuesday and Saturday, we'll explore some of the biggest stories, the greatest mysteries, and latest research. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And so the grouse lads are on the ground through the winter, right? Yeah, what happened then is they were parachuted onto the Hudanga Vida miles from where they needed to be with all these stores and equipment that they needed to move. Their food, their rations were already deteriorating.

And they had a nightmare because the snow hadn't properly formed. It was really difficult to move their stores and supplies to the remote hut that they would be using to hide themselves. And they lost an awful lot of weight doing it. And that's one of the things we had our commandos reconstruct, and their weight loss was staggering. It was a very difficult thing that these men did. And then when Freshman was put forward, they set up obviously a landing strip on the Hardanger Plateau. They put out landing lights and they had an experimental communication device called an S-phone,

which would enable them to have very clear ground-to-air communication on a narrow beam with the aircraft that were coming in. And they signaled to the UK that the weather conditions were good for the drop. And the gliders took off, towed by Halifaxes and headed towards Norway. But during that time, the weather changed and they didn't get there. Basically, one of the aircraft made contact with the grouse party. I know that because I was told that by their wireless operator, who was himself an incredible man. He made contact, but they were lost in the storm. Both gliders were lost and one Halifax was lost. And the survivors were either shot immediately when they were found by German troops,

or they were tortured, bound with barbed wire and then shot. So it's pretty sad. That's shocking. And that's going on in November, this Operation Freshman. Did this not alert the Nazis as to the fact that this was a high value target, making it even more difficult in the future? The Germans were obviously now aware of our interest in the target. Moreover, they knew that there was a reception committee on the hills and went to search for them. And the grouse party were told from London to go into the hills and hide. As one of the men said to me, how, where, with what? We had no food left. And that's exactly

what those four men did. They went up to a really well-hidden, very difficult hut to find even now, a hut called Svensberg, a tiny little hut. And there they lived through the winter. And Klaus Helberg, who was the best skier in the party, each day went out trying to reach different huts to see if there was any food stored in the mountains. It was a very risky business. He'd been equipped with skis with metal edges, which were unheard of in that region at that time. And the locals could tell that those were different skis, unusual skis. So it was quite risky for him to do so. I think he managed to find a barrel of fermenting fish, which went down very well, a raka fisk. Jens Anton Poulsen, who was the best hunter in the party, went out on a daily basis

looking for reindeer to shoot. On the 23rd of December, he found a reindeer herd, took a shot, and his first shot missed. Can you imagine? But then the second shot, he managed to bring down one of the reindeer. As is customary, he drank the blood, and then he dragged the reindeer back to the party in Svensberg. And they had the best Christmas of their lives listening to, I think they tuned into the World Service and listened to hymns while they ate reindeer and felt wealthy. I bet they did. So they're surviving up on the hill and the British decide to send yet another operation. This is February 1943.

This is 80 years ago now. It's amazing. And back in Britain, I mean, basically, there was a big change. Operation Freshman was organized by Combined Operations. And now the responsibility for the operation passed to SOE entirely, with the thought that the best way now to affect any sort of sabotage would be solely by the use of Norwegians. Obviously, it's their country, they know the grounds, they're the local experts. And they were, of course, brilliant. And if you go to Scotland today, and to Glenmore Lodge, which is near Aviemore, you're there in the heart of the Norwegian SOE training camp where

company Linger, which is the Norwegian Special forces, were trained. If you go to the campsite at Glenmore Lodge, you'll find the footings of their hut still visible. And if you walk along the shore of Loch Morlick, you'll find little bits of glass where it looks like someone's had a party. These are the remains of the Molotov cocktails that they trained with, but that was demolitions training area. And there's still quite a lot of traces of the Norwegian army in that part of Scotland. And now Company Linger looked for a specialist team to send in. So they selected from their already selected men. And the two commanders of what would become the Gunnerside Party, the CO was Joachim Ronneberg, the most remarkable

human being I think I've ever met. Just a young man at the time, but he had the capacity to galvanize men and to lead them. And his two IC, Knut Haukeli, who I didn't have the opportunity to meet sadly, was a really tough soldier. And these two men would see the mission through. tough soldier. And these two men would see the mission through. And they then trained and prepared to be sent to Norway to carry out a sabotage operation. And we are given the impression, I think, that SOE was kind of an amateur organization. They were anything but. They were very, very professional. They built a mock-up of the factory. They had a local expert who could tell them about the internal layout of the building, even describing where a key to a door they would need to open was hung on a hook within the building.

And they then rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed what they would be doing. Their firearms training was taken to fever pitch. Everything they needed to be able to do was honed to a razor edge. And so they land successfully in Norway? They're parachuted onto the Hardanger Vida and they're not landed where they expect to be. And I've often wondered if that was deliberately done by the Royal Air Force, just in case there'd been any local underground compromise to give the men an edge. But they were dropped quite

away from where they were intended to be. And they landed in a whiteout and had no idea where they were. I think this was a real moment where leadership is tested. Ronneberg saw it through, and he was amazing. And they eventually literally walked into the wall of a hut, a hut called Skrikan, which is located very very very much in the middle of the hardangerville in this shallow sort of cauldron area it's very difficult place to get to and they had no idea where they were this was just a hut in the mountains in the snow and searching the hut they found a map and when they looked at the map they noticed there was a smudgy mark on one of the huts like where somebody put their finger and they reasoned that maybe this is where we are. That's people are saying, this is where we are. We're going to

go fishing there tomorrow. And that's what it turned out. It turned out that that is exactly where they were. And now they could prosecute their design, meet up with the grouse party and get on with the job. And we should remember, this is late February 1943. I mean, the weather is, well, it's just freezing. You're a survival expert. How difficult is it to keep the human body fit and fed and warm and not just alive, but able to then perform feats of endurance? These men have landed on a landscape that is equivocal to Baffin Island. Nansen did his training for his Arctic expeditions on the

Hardangavida, in one case nearly losing his life. It's a very difficult place. The weather is fickle, it's very cold, it's very exposed to the wind. It's a difficult place. And that winter was notoriously bad. It was a really bad winter. But Ronneberg said to me, he said, in Britain, you didn't know what it was to be occupied. He said, we would have given our lives and given them freely to get our country back. And that's the sort of determination that you saw during this mission. And they then meet up, do they, with the reception committee with Grouse? They meet up with this very exhausted Grouse party

and Ronneberg brings a fresh energy to the whole operation. When you talk to them, you can feel this invigoration of energy arriving. And they set to now to think about how they might attack the factory. They have to do reconnaissance to work out the way this will be done. And that falls to one of the grass party, again, Klaus Helberg, who's very good on skis. He makes three visits to the factory by ski, which is descending from the Hardanger Vida and then climbing it again before they're happy that their plan can be set in motion. The RAF, for them, it's a hard target, even for mosquitoes. Cables have been stretched across the gorge to prevent aircraft flying up it. It's very difficult to see from the air. And again, as I mentioned earlier, there's the risk of collateral damage.

They want to avoid that at all costs. To get to the factory, which is on the far side of the gorge, there is a narrow cable bridge, which is guarded by German guards. So the option that they decided on was to climb down the gorge, cross the gorge, climb up the far side, and then approach the factory from the railway line that connects it.

And that will be their mission. So apart from anything else, a gigantic feat of physical stamina, like apart from the fact they may have to fight and lay explosives when they get there and do all sorts of things, escape and evade. This is a massive day out for anyone. It's a very big deal, Dan. I think it's easy to underestimate how difficult it was.

Hollywood makes it look easy. It wasn't. And the men are going to make the attack in British uniforms as commandos so that if they're captured or killed, there's a greater likelihood the Germans won't take reprisals on the local population. They ski down from their forward operating hut to the road that runs through the valley. There, they secrete their rucksacks for their escape mission and take with them only what they need for the mission, their weapons, their charges. And a set of bolt cutters, they descend the gorge, cross the gorge, climb up the far side, make their way down the railway line to a gate, which they open using the bolt cutters. And then the assault party enter the factory, just as they had rehearsed in the model that they created in Britain.

Inside, they find a night watchman and they start to set their fuses. They've been told to put two-minute detonation fuses on the explosives. And in the end, they decide to set 30-second fuses. It's worth pointing out they didn't know the significance of their mission. They did know it was very important and they had been told it could change the course of the war, but they didn't know exactly what they were doing. It would be several years before they did. The night watchman, they want to get him out and he panicking because he can't find his glasses, which like a lot of people have reading glasses, were on his head. Anyway, they managed to get him out.

They leave, and the explosion goes off. Knut Harkley, who was outside watching a German sentry while they were in the factory, in fact, only three feet from him, he was commended for not killing the German guard. He said that when the explosion went off, it sounded like two cars crashing in Piccadilly Circus, and the Germans didn't respond. The men couldn't believe it.

They made their escape. They retraced their footsteps down the gorge, up the other side, regained their bergens and skis, and skied then down to the cable car, which rises up. It was set up so that people working in the factory could go up and get sunlight. And they climb up the mountainside, zigzagging underneath the cable car. And at dawn, they reached the top of the mountain there and looked back, goused the top of the mountain on the opposing side. There was a mackerel sky, and all the men described that to me.

I took them there the day after the anniversary, the 60th anniversary of the mission. And they all looked at that mountain, and I realized that was the dawn none of them had anticipated seeing. They'd all been prepared to die for this mission. Before we get to their escape, how much damage was done by the explosion? Did it meet with the expectations of the team? The explosion did the job. It crippled the production capacity, destroyed the cells that were used to produce the heavy water and made the Nazis realize that this was a hot target. It was going to be difficult for them to continue making the heavy water then. That set in motions alternative plans at their end. But they did

manage to get things up and going again. Production did restart, which wasn't the news that of course we wanted to receive in Britain. But it put a dent in their plans, I'm guessing. It did put a dent in their plans. It was a delaying action. It was very successful in that regard. The party then split up. Some of them had a mammoth journey into Sweden to escape. The wireless operator was sent to Oslo, where he worked with the resistance in Oslo and did amazing work. And Knut Haukli, the 2IC of Gunnerside, was left to organise an overwatch to keep an eye on what was going on in the factory. And he was hunted like a hare for a long while.

He eventually constructed a hidden cabin that wasn't on any map called Bamsebu. It's an amazing little cabin, very difficult to find, well camouflaged even now, with a chimney made of a drop canister. And he stayed there, and he would eventually be responsible for ending the German supply of heavy water from Norway, because he was the man who placed the charges on the ferry. When the Germans tried to remove the heavy water supplies that they had,

he sank the ferry that was carrying them. Yes, that's a subsequent success in 1944 when that ferry going down the fjord there was sunk with all the heavy water on board. Ray, the fact they managed to escape, I mean, does that just show they were masters of that environment? They were totally masters of that environment. I mean, they were incredible. At the end of the mission, Klaus Helberg realised

that they'd left some equipment at Skriken that could incriminate them as Norwegians and lead to reprisals. And so he set off on his own, which is amazing. He set off on his own to get rid of all of that. And he got to the hut and went inside. And he'd only been inside for a moment when he looks out of the window and realizes that there is a whole squad of German alpine troops approaching the hut trying to get him and he takes to his skis and heads off and there is this desperate race then through the mountains where his skiing ability outmatched the German alpine troops all but one of them and it turns out that one of them had been a competition downhill skier. And while Klaus was better at going uphill, the German would make up the distance on the downhill. Eventually, there were no more hills to climb and they ended up

in a shootout, a Mexican standoff, basically. The German opened fire first, as we're told, as I was told, and his bullets all fell wide of the mark because he was out of breath and poorly trained. And Klaus Herberg was able to finish the job because he'd had superb training from SOE. Got a moment of Hollywood-like drama there. It was Hollywood-like drama. His journey was even more amazing. I mean, he did 120 kilometers in 24 hours

and broke his arm along the way. He was in a hotel. And while he was in the hotel, the head of the Germans in Norway and the head of the Gestapo were at the hotel trying to chat up two Norwegian girls who weren't interested. And so they had everyone in the hotel, every Norwegian in the hotel, rounded up and put on a bus to Grinney concentration camp. And he managed to jump off of the bus with a broken arm and get away. He was a really a remarkable man. There's no question this is the most extraordinary commando mission of the Second World War. It was just one of many missions carried out by Company Linger, many of which have not been told.

The Norwegians were superb. The men themselves, Dan, were amazing. I mean, they're just incredible. I saw Ronneberg just a few years ago before he passed away when he visited London, and his eyes still burned. You know how it is when you make television. Just occasionally, there's something very special happens. And we were there on the evening of the attack on the factory. The men had been invited to a dinner within the factory, and they'd been bussed there, but Ronneberg wasn't with them. No one knew where he was. And then I thought, he's going to climb the gorge. And I walked towards where the railway line was. And there he was walking down the railway line. He'd climbed the gorge. And his eyes were aflame

with the memory of that experience. And I interviewed him. I think it was a really good interview, but it wasn't used, which is a shame because he was actually reliving the experience all those years later. Oh, to think that ended up on the cutting room floor, Ray. Where is it now? It's a historical document of its own, Ryan. It's nowhere. Oh, yikes. Thank you so much, Ray, for coming on the podcast and talking all about it on this 80th anniversary. Thank you so much, Ray, for coming on the podcast and talking all about it on this 80th anniversary. Thank you, Dan.