72. Destroying the Nazi Nuclear Program: Bombing Norway (Ep 1)

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2:31Joachim Rønneberg:In November of 42, I was called up to Major Hampton. He said he had just got a telegram from London asking if I could take on a job in Norway and if I could pick five of the unit to go with me. I asked, do they need to be skiers? And they didn't know because they didn't know anything. They just knew that it was an operation that had to be done as quickly as possible. Well, I picked out the five I wanted and said, I've been offered a job. I don't know what it is yet. Do you want to follow? And everybody, of course, they cheered. And I knew I had a good team. A very good team, indeed. Welcome to The Rest is Classified.

3:04Joachim Rønneberg:I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And that was Wachim Roneberg. Joachim. Joachim Ronenberg. I practiced beforehand, Gordon, and I still screwed up. You've just lost all our Norwegian listeners already. Can you say it again for me? Joachim, I'm going to go with. Joachim. That was Joachim Ronenberg recalling the moment he was asked to lead, I think, what was arguably the most daring, dangerous, and important sabotage mission of the Second World War. And he's going to lead that into his native Norway. It is codenamed Operation Gunnerside, and it is our story this week on this explosive two-parter about great skiing action and on The Rest is Classified.

3:47Joachim Rønneberg:Of course, it would not really be a Rest is Classified episode, would it, Gordon, without you needing to explain some aspect of nuclear science and engineering. So, there's going to be all kinds of wonderful adventures in store for everybody this week on the pod. And Gordon, you're a huge fan of this story. And also Joachim Rodenberg. Yes, I am. Now, it's fair to say, David, there is this saying, which you might know, which is never meet your heroes, which is one of the reasons why I think if you're ever offered the chance, don't enter a room with Edward Snowden. He'd only let you down. He'd only disappoint you if you ever met him in real life.

4:25Joachim Rønneberg:But, oh my gosh, every week someone comes up to me. They basically say, how can you be on that podcast with Gordon Carrera? He loves Edward Snowden so much. Someone came out to be in Dallas like two weeks ago and showed me a picture of a baby onesie that has the letters printed on it, WWESD. It's what would Edward Snowden do? And it is available apparently on Amazon. And he said, I think Gordon might like this for his kids. I said, Gordon's kids are older than that. Yeah, they are. That would not be a good look. Nonetheless, the sentiment stands. Yeah. But I am quite reluctant on the whole, despite what you think about me, to divide the world into heroes and villains.

5:06Normally, that is a mistake. But here, I think we are talking about someone who I actually genuinely think is a true hero in my eyes and who embodies what I think is a particular type of heroism. And I got to meet him. So I met Joachim.

5:23Joachim Rønneberg:He did not let you down once you met him. He did not let me down. So he did not let me down when I met him and when I spoke to him. I met him many years after he took part in this, what I think is the most daring sabotage mission of the Second World War and also a genuinely important one. So it's got the excitement and the action of the most dramatic story. And there was a not perfect Hollywood movie, the heroes of Telemark made about it, which is not entirely accurate. But the fact a movie was made about it tells you how exciting it was. And yet it also really mattered because it goes to this crucial question, which is very modern as well, which is how do you stop a country developing a nuclear bomb?

6:03Joachim Rønneberg:We're talking about this story in the wake of the aerial bombing raid on Iran's nuclear program. And of course, on this program, we've also looked at how do you stop a nuclear program? How do you slow one down? Everything from killing scientists to cyber attacks. You know, we just concluded that series on Stuxnet and kind of the digital weapons you could use to halt a nuclear program. But this time, I mean, going back now into the Second World War to do a bit more of a historical series on the rest is classified. I mean, we're going to look at this is a good old fashioned physical way to attempt to slow down or stop a nuclear program involving essentially a Norwegian ski team, which is very wonderful.

6:46Norwegian ski team takes on Nazi nukes is the simple way of putting it. That's good, Gordon. You just came up with that right now. That's good. I literally just made that up. But it does go back to the start of the Second World War and the fear that the Nazis are putting together a nuclear program and that they could get the bomb before the Allies. And of course, if they'd managed to do that, it would have changed the course of the war and therefore the course of history, really. So it's that consequential. And so we are going to go back to this period, start of the Second World War, early 40s, when these scraps of intelligence are going to come in, that the Nazis are up to something.

7:19And it's focused on this crucial site in Norway. And to stop them, they're going to do something much riskier, really, and more daring than bombing from the air, as we've just seen in Iran. But they're going to put a small team on the ground to carry out an act of sabotage.

7:36Joachim Rønneberg:And I mean, any good adventure story, of course, has a protagonist, a main character who's going to lead the team and unite everyone around them. And so our main character, Gordon, why don't you introduce us to Joachim. Joachim. Joachim. I'm so sorry, Norwegian listeners. Joachim. I'm so sorry. Joachim. I'm honestly not trying to do this. Okay. Okay. This is just my shambling Americanism, Gordon. Mr. Ronneberg, you can call him from now on. Yeah. So he was born in 1919. So by the time we meet him in the Second World War, he's going to be only in his early 20s. So he's young. By then he's tall, six foot three, long angular face, lengthy dark hair with a side parting, quite laid back as a character, and yet also fearless.

8:20So one of the aspects, I think, of his heroism is that, especially when you look at pictures of him, he kind of looks quite ordinary. He's good looking, he's young, but he's not in many ways your typical hero. He's also not your typical soldier. He's not someone who wants to fight and to kill. There's no tradition of military service in his family. His family are actually big in the business of exporting dried and salted fish in a town called Olesund, which I know is the correct pronunciation. I visited last year, went there on a family holiday to Olesund, absolutely gorgeous town up on the Norwegian coast.

8:56It's interesting, it's a town with close ties to Germany. There's a big fire which destroys the centre of Olesund in 1904, and the Germans, the Kaiser himself, helps rebuild it. And then lots of German tourists are coming there, although Joachim Ronneberg remembers in the 30s, Lots of them were coming in the 30s as tourists and taking lots of pictures of the harbour and the boats. And you're like, hmm, looking back, they might not just be tourists, I think. Taking pictures of the spires. Yeah, the cathedral spires. So he's not done any military training. What he is, and this is crucial, is a real outdoorsman and a skier.

9:32So he knows the mountains. He describes them as his playground since when he was a small boy. He would go in his Easter holiday and stay in the mountains, moving from one hut to another. He'd been a boy scout, joined the local skiing club. War comes, end of the 30s. First, of course, Germany invades Poland. But then in the spring of 1940, the Nazis sweep through Western Europe, take the low countries of France, and they invade Norway in April 1940. I'm looking at the picture now.

10:01Joachim Rønneberg:I realize you're in the middle of going through the Second World War, but he looks like Matt Smith. I think. From the crown. From the crown. From the Doctor Who and other things, yeah. I think Matt Smith is probably, what, a good couple of decades older than this guy in this picture. Yeah, yeah. But he's got kind of angular face. Angular face. Yes. Yeah, that's not a bad comparison. Anyway, back to the Second World War. I was just looking at the picture trying to come up with a celebrity comparison. If you're listening, just think of a younger version of Matt Smith in skis. And our young hero, when Norway is invaded in April 1940, is taken by surprise.

10:38Now, Norway gets invaded by the Nazis. Britain tries to land some troops to help fight them off, but the operation fails. That disaster is one of the reasons why Churchill ends up becoming prime minister. But still, by June, the Nazis have basically got control of Norway. Now, the invasion takes them by surprise. Joachim himself is taking part in an Alpine skiing competition at the time. His father wakes him up and says, there's a war on, we're being occupied. He had no idea about it. The crucial thing is he decides he wants to leave. He doesn't want to live under Nazi occupation. Age 21, he decides he's going to escape.

11:17And lots of people are doing that at this time. And they're going to try and flee the country. And he writes two letters, one to give to the Germans when they come to his parents and ask about what's happened to him. And another one, which is only going to be delivered after he's gone to his parents to tell him really why he's leaving. And we've got that here.

11:34Joachim Rønneberg:Do you want to read it? I do want to read it. Yes. This is young Joachim writing to his parents. It says, you will wonder why I did not come to dinner when my bed is empty. You can seek solace in the fact that you are now sharing the same sacrifice as many families in our beloved country. and also that I will never feel more free than on the day we cast off from Norwegian soil and plough the sea, bound for freedom's last hope. Live well then, dear mother and father. We will meet again before too long. You will always be with me wherever I go in the world. Quite powerful, isn't it? This young man who's leaving everything behind.

12:06And he's going to make his way over to Scotland, initially, to the UK. And I think one of the things helpful if you look at a map, if you want to understand it, and if you don't know the geography, actually how close the north of scotland and particularly the shetland islands off scotland are to norway i mean they really are actually physically close and actually culturally close and you know there's fishing links between the different communities and during the war there'll be something called the shetland bus which is not an actual bus but it's a secret boat link which allows agents to be brought in and out of norway from the shetlands but there's also So fishing boats going out and young Joachim goes on one of these fishing boats to Scotland.

12:48He's never been on a boat before. He's never been on the open seas, at least on a boat. So he's seasick, but he decides he wants to join the Navy because he thinks it's exciting. So I kind of, you already get a sense of a bit of a taste for adventure. It's like Mansfield coming. He's a prospective Navy man who also gets violently ill at sea. Yeah, exactly. Like the first chief of MI6. That's right. Another friend of the show. So he goes to Scotland, then comes down to London. Interestingly enough, he goes first to a place called the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, which is quite close to where I live in South London.

13:22Not that far from Goldhanger offices either, where we're recording. It's all the important places in life. That's right. Two landmarks in South London. Two landmarks. Gordon's address, which is in the show notes. And Goldhanger Towers. And Goldhanger's Towers. And it's a big, huge, quite menacing Gothic building with dark corridors. and it's where refugees are taken. So people who arrive in the country fleeing Europe, taken here first. And it's a kind of filtering station where they're interrogated, partly to see whether they might be spies who are being sent to Britain, and one or two are discovered to be spies.

13:56And then it's quite handy because Wandsworth Prison is just over the road. It's a place where MI6, the British Secret Service, and another group, which we'll explain a bit more about the special operations executive are recruiting those refugees or at least looking for people amongst those refugees who might be good for let's call it special work and uh jockham is going to be one of those it's kind of memorable he's only there for a brief period but he remembers sitting around playing poker you know with people from all around the world and with bombs falling on london you'd obviously never heard though kind of experience so he's told while he's there about something called a Norwegian Independent Company, who are a group who are going to do special operations and fight back in Norway.

14:42And he decides he wants to join them. And he's picked up through them and through this thing called Special Operations Executive, SOE, which for people who don't know about it, who aren't big Second World War fans, SOE was set up by Churchill to, in his words, set Europe ablames. What a charter.

14:59Joachim Rønneberg:What a mission statement. Yeah, it's just like go out there and just blow things up. So if you imagine MI6 are there quietly gathering intelligence and SOE are very loudly blowing things up. Using said intelligence, ideally. Using said intelligence. Although I think it's fair to say the two organisations were not always easy bedfellows. Yeah. There's quite a lot of tension between them for obvious reasons. But Joachim is going through SOE training. So he goes first on armed and unarmed combat training, quite tough to weed people out. Then he gets more spy training, cover story codes, then sabotage and explosives training, and then parachute training.

15:38He complains the scenery isn't very realistic in the middle of England because it doesn't look like Norway. It's not enough mountains. But he's very good at this. And actually, he's going to be picked up to be a trainer himself because he's so good. But also, it's kind of interesting because he says he found the training quite difficult because he's fundamentally quite a peaceful person. and he says he was disturbed by being taught to slit people's throats with a knife and things like that because it gives him trouble sleeping so you get the sense he again he's not a natural killer

16:10Joachim Rønneberg:he's not like a ruthless person and he has not been exposed at this point in his life to any violence really yeah he just wants to do his bit so having been through training doing some training himself late november 1942 he summoned to soe headquarters at baker street and told as you read from right at the start, that he's been picked for an important job if he wants to do it. And he's been told this team's mission is to sabotage a plant back in Norway and a set of cylinders. But he's actually at this point not told anything more or why it's so important, which I think is interesting. And here we are continuing with our recent theme on The Rest is classified of large cylindrical objects in a plant.

16:56Joachim Rønneberg:How do you destroy them when the other side doesn't want you to destroy them? And it's probably worth explaining here now, this is not a centrifuge cascade at Natanz, right, Gordon? But it is time for another nuclear lesson from Gordon Carrera, because we've got to explain what this plan is and why it's important and what those big cylinders are doing. Our producer, Callum, has suggested actually that once we're done with all of these, we should stitch them together. We can go back to the Klaus Fuchs episodes. We can take the Duxnet episodes. We can take what you're about to do. And you'll basically have a manual.

17:35Joachim Rønneberg:On how to make a nuclear bomb. How to make a nuclear bomb. Maybe that could be our coffee table book, Gordon. You know how the rest is history, guys, have one. We could have a rest is classified coffee table book, which is nuclear bombs 101 from gordon carrera and david mccloskey it's that accurate and that detailed it's that good it's gonna be heavily heavily censored and redacted heavy water heavy water that's what it's about it's water that's heavy let's go back 1930s go back to our class fuchs days scientists working out you can split the atom for energy and perhaps to make a bomb so this idea is just as the war has started is is in the air but mainly in secret But Churchill, at the start of the war, early on, has said the priority is to make sure Britain builds this and no one else does.

18:22And eventually that's going to lead to what's called the Tube Alloys Program as cover for the UK, which will then kind of join with the US Manhattan Project. Because you didn't have the money or the resources to really sink your teeth into it. We had Klaus Fuchs. What more do you need? We had a communist spy. You had a communist spy to contribute to the effort. He was good, though. So that's the kind of allied program, but the Germans. MI6 is getting intelligence about intensive German activity that suggests they're also trying for a bomb. It's pretty fragmentary, but there are these fears that are actually in the lead.

18:57And crucially, 1941, they're going to have got a report from Norway about Germany stepping up activity in this plant at Vermork, which is in a region called Telemark, about 100 kilometres from Oslo in the south-east of the country. And this is where we get to heavy water. So Vermark is home to the Norsk hydro plant, which when it was built was the largest hydroelectric plant in Europe. We'll come back a bit to the geography. The region's on a plateau. There's a gorge with a river in the valley, but also a lake up on the plateau. And water is being redirected from the lake on the plateau down this gorge with the industrial plant about halfway down on a kind of cliff edge.

19:44And the water comes down through tunnels from the top and turns turbine generators, which provides massive amounts of power. But the additional bit of this is some of the water then goes into what's called electrolysis cells, David. Taking notes, yeah? What is that? I'm writing I'm doing feverishly now. Which I think you'll find uses electricity to drive a chemical reaction. In this case, it splits the hydrogen and oxygen apart. Hydrogen pumped to a local factory to make fertilizer. But from the 1930s, there's a professor at the plant called Leif Tronstadt. Good name. He's worked out you can do something more with all this kind of energy and water.

20:25And in the basement of the plant, there's another set of these specialist electrolysis cells, which are cylinders, and they could take some of the water and turn it into something called heavy water, deuterium. It's heavy because, David, it has an extra neutron in its nucleus compared to normal water, just as I figured. Just as you figured. The clue's in the name. If you put an ice cube of heavy water inside water, it will drop because it's heavier. But doing this takes enormous amounts of power. Doesn't a neutron have an atomic weight of zero, though? Is that right? I should have checked this beforehand.

21:01I guess there's an extra thing, but it shouldn't be

21:03Joachim Rønneberg:heavier, right? What's the atomic mass of a neutron? You're taking us down a little bit of a diversion here, which I'm not sure is going to get us back to skiing and adventure. So I'm going to go back to the story and tell you, you worked that one out. But the key point is it takes huge amounts of power and water and a lot of time to produce just a small amount of this heavy water. No one's quite sure what it's for in the 30s. The atomic mass of a neutron is approximately 1.0087 atomic mass units. Great. That's slightly more than the mass of a proton. So I was incorrect, which was entirely foreseeable.

21:38So back to heavy water. So one of the routes to making a nuclear bomb is through building a nuclear reactor. For the reactor to work, you have to moderate the fission of the uranium, which is splitting apart. And one of the way of doing that, it's thought at the time, is to use heavy water as a moderator. So this is leading edge science. And Vermeork in Norway is really the only place in the world capable of producing heavy water at scale at the time. And there's hardly any in existence as the war starts. There's about 185 kilograms of heavy water in the world. Most of it in Vermeork. Yeah, at the start of the war.

22:15Just as the war's starting, so back a little bit earlier, there's been this race to actually get hold of that stockpile. The Germans are trying to buy it, and the company are a bit unsure about that, and the French get wind of it. And the French do this kind of crazy operation, all credit to the Deuxième Bureau of the French. They do a great operation where they substitute bags at an airport so that the Germans think that the heavy water is going on a cargo flight to Amsterdam, and they intercept that. When in fact, they've switched the bags, and the French have put it on another flight to Scotland.