Nazi beaters
Inside Churchill’s ungentlemanly secret army
It was a few minutes before midnight and the moon was glancing off the deep snow. In the shadows of a ravine, 10 saboteurs clambered up the sides of a near-vertical cliff, clutching at rocky outcrops and dangling spruce branches.
In the distance loomed the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant. This stateof-the-art factory was of vital importance to the Nazi war machine – the only place capable of producing the heavy water (deuterium oxide) necessary to build an atomic bomb. Its destruction was so crucial to the Allied war effort that Winston Churchill had ordered it to be given “the highest possible priority”. If Hitler’s scientists managed to build an atomic bomb, they would win the war. But if the factory could be destroyed, then his atomic ambitions would be at an end.
The story of the attack on Norsk Hydro has been told in books and films, notably the 1965 movie The
Heroes of Telemark. But what has never been revealed is that the operation was orchestrated by an elite secret circle working directly for Churchill. They were the members of the Special Operations Executive: six maverick gentlemen with a passion for destruction who planned – and carried out – the most audacious guerrilla attacks of the Second World War; assassinating Nazi top brass and bringing down key enemy infrastructure.
They operated under total secrecy. When the then foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, later learnt of their activities, he privately admittedly to colleagues that it bordered upon “warcrimes business”.
As a result, their extraordinary story remained hidden for more than seven decades, so too the most outlandish operation of them all – the destruction of Norsk Hydro. It is one of the many undercover missions that forms the subject of my new book, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The Special Operations Executive was led by Colin Gubbins, a dapper Scottish Highlander with a curt manner of speech and clipped moustache. A self-taught master of sabotage, Gubbins had overseen countless clandestine operations, including the assassination of Hitler’s favourite subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich, who was killed by hurling a compressed anti-tank mine at his armoured Mercedes. Gubbins had brought together five like-minded experts who believed, like him, that the Nazis would only be defeated by tearing up the rule book. “This was total war,” he said, “and total war is a very cruel business indeed.” Churchill agreed and provided unlimited funds to Gubbins and his team, referring to them as his “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. In the autumn of 1942, Churchill put Gubbins in charge of planning his most important mission to date, an attack on Norsk Hydro. The heavy water plant was perched atop a 700-foot shaft of vertical rock. Three of its sides were sheer, while the fourth – which joined it to the adjacent mountain – was covered in mines. There was one point of access: a narrow suspension bridge under 24-hour guard. Even if the saboteurs forced an entry, they’d still have to plant their explosives unseen by the guards before making their escape. Gubbins thought it a suicide mission.
But Churchill was insistent and so Gubbins set to work. He felt that the only hope of success was to parachute a team of Norwegian saboteurs onto the lonely Hardanger plateau. They would then have to cross the snowbound plateau, scale the gorge and break into the plant. Gubbins selected his saboteurs from men who had fled to England following the Nazi invasion. Their leader was a bold 23-year-old, Joachim Ronneberg. He and his comrades were trained by two key members of Gubbins’s inner circle, Eric ‘‘Bill’’ Sykes and William ‘‘Shanghai Buster’’ Fairbairn, who ran a secret killing school at Arisaig House in the Scottish Highlands.
Both men looked like amiable clergymen with thick glasses and benevolent smiles. But they had run Shanghai’s anti-gangster squad and were experts in murder. “What I want you to do,” Fairbairn told the saboteurs, “is to get the dirtiest, bloodiest ideas in your head that you can think of for destroying a human being.”
Ronneberg was initially appalled, for he had been “a very quiet, innocent boy back in Norway”. Now, he learnt that “it was kill or be killed”.
Once the Norwegians had completed their training, they were sent to Brickendonbury Manor in Hertfordshire, run by another of Gubbins’s specialists, George Rheam. A dour northerner with a passion for destruction, Rheam was the leading expert in industrial sabotage. He built an exact replica of Norsk Hydro in the grounds and put Ronneberg and his men through an intensive training programme, including how to use pipe-busting explosives.
On the evening of February 16, 1943, Ronneberg’s team were parachuted onto the Hardanger plateau, landing in the teeth of an Arctic blizzard within striking distance of Norsk Hydro.
Their sabotage mission got underway 10 days later, under the cover of darkness. They clambered down into the gorge below Norsk Hydro and then began their treacherous ascent. Unseen by the guards, they reached the perimeter fence. After using bolt-cutters to gain access, they split into two groups. One, led by Ronneberg, was to blow up the plant. The other was to provide cover.
Ronneberg crept through a ventilation duct and attached the explosives. “The charges that had been made at Brickendonbury Manor fitted like a glove,” he said later.
The saboteurs were still inside the plant – their Sten guns trained on German sentry posts – when the explosives detonated. The sausage-shaped charges were fabulously destructive, imploding into the machinery and causing catastrophic damage. By the time the alarm was raised, the entire stock of heavy water had drained away.
The mission was textbook guerrilla warfare . Even the Germans were impressed. The commander in Norway, General von Falkenhorst, called it “the most splendid coup of this war”.
Hitler’s atomic programme would never recover.
Churchill was delighted that his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare had scored yet another sensational coup, although he warned that their work was so controversial it could never be publicly acknowledged, even when the war was over.
It is only now – long after the deaths of Gubbins and his men – that the whole extraordinary story can be told.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton is published by John Murray (£20). To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk