Reluctant WWII war hero dies, age 99
The plan was audacious, requiring a midnight parachute jump onto a snow-covered mountain plateau, cross-country skiing in subzero temperatures, and an assault on an isolated, heavily guarded power plant in southern Norway.
And the stakes, though no one in the five-man commando team knew it at the time, were spectacular: Destroy the Nazis’ sole source of heavy water, a recently discovered substance that Hitler’s scientists were using to try to develop an atomic bomb, or risk the creation of a superweapon that could secure a German victory in World War II.
“We didn’t think about whether it was dangerous or not,” Joachim Ronneberg, the 23-year-old Norwegian resistance fighter leading the mission, later told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper. “We didn’t think about our retreat. … You concentrated on the job and not on the risks.”
Ronneberg went on to land a crippling blow against Nazi Germany’s atomic ambitions, blowing up much of the plant and destroying its heavy-water stockpile without firing a shot or losing a man. He was 99, and the last of Norway’s celebrated heavy-water saboteurs, when he died Oct. 21, according to state-owned broadcaster NRK, which confirmed the death, but did not provide details.
“Ronneberg is one of the great heroes of Norwegian war history,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg told the media company after his death. In 2015, British military historian M.R.D. Foot told the New York Times that Ronneberg’s mission “changed the course of the war” and deserved the “gratitude of humanity.”
While historians have argued over how close the Nazis came to developing an atomic bomb, and over what prevented them from succeeding, German officials at the time seemed to agree that Ronneberg’s actions were pivotal. After visiting the damaged heavywater plant, Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, the Nazi general overseeing occupied Norway, was said to have declared, “This is the most splendid coup I have seen in this war.”
Yet even as Ronneberg’s exploits were chronicled in books, television series and movies, such as “The Heroes of Telemark,” a 1965 film starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, Ronneberg resisted being glorified as a war hero. “There were so many things that were just luck and chance,” he told the Times. “… We were just hoping for the best.”
Raised by a prominent Norwegian family in the port town of Alesund, he was born Joachim Holmboe Ronneberg on Aug. 30, 1919, and was working for a fish export company when Germany invaded in April 1940. With a few friends, he fled to Britain aboard a fishing boat and linked up with the Special Operation Executive, a wartime espionage unit that Winston Churchill dubbed his “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”
Ronneberg studied the dark arts of sabotage, including how to lay a bomb, fire a weapon and kill a man with his bare hands, before serving as an instructor for recruits in Norwegian Independent Company 1, an SOE unit sometimes known as Kompani Linge.
His rise through the organization occurred as Allied forces received reports that the Nazis were increasing coldwater production at Vemork, an industrial facility and hydroelectric power plant in the Telemark region of southern Norway.
The plant was the world’s leading commercial supplier of heavy water, which proved less effective than graphite, which their American rivals working on the Manhattan Project used to create the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Ronneberg went on to lead Operation Fieldfare, an effort to break German supply lines in Norway by damaging bridges and railroads, and Allied forces continued to monitor Vemork. U.S. planes bombed the factory later in 1943.