Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Ronneberg made his final preparations. He would lead a four-man assault team to break into the plant and destroy the heavy water cells. Haukelid would command a five-man support party. The tenth man—radio operator Knut Haugland—would remain concealed in a nearby hut to inform London of developments.

In the early evening of 27 February, the commandos put on their British army uniforms. All were carrying “the death pill”—cyanide encapsulated in rubber and guaranteed to kill them in three seconds if captured. At 8 p.m. the nine men of the attack and support parties, weighed down by sixty-five-pound packs, skied out into the darkness. They slithered down onto the road leading from Rjukan to the plant, nearly colliding with buses carrying shift workers. Only by thrusting their ski sticks hard into the snow did they brake in time. The buses rumbled past and off into the night, leaving the intruders still undetected.

Descending to the bottom of the gorge was dangerous and difficult in the dark for men thrown off balance by the movement of their heavy, unwieldy packs. Because there had been a slight thaw and the river-ice had thinned, their next worry was whether it would bear their weight as they crossed. Treading cautiously, Helberg found a strong enough area of ice for them to cross, then guided his comrades to the route he had discovered up out of the gorge. Grasping at snow-covered rocks, shrubs, and branches of birch with frozen fingers, by 11 p.m. the men were on the railway line, following it silently and in single file toward the factory.

At 11:30 p.m. they halted five hundred yards from the gate leading into the plant. From there they had a clear view of the suspension bridge, where, they knew, the guard would change at midnight. They waited for the change to take place and for the new guard to settle down, huddled in their guardhouse. At 12:30 p.m. the Norwegians advanced, moving cautiously at first for fear of land mines. Haukelid and the support party cut the padlocked iron chain on the gate, ran inside, and, well armed with tommy guns and sniper rifles as well as pistols, knives, and hand grenades, took up a position to provide covering fire if necessary.

Ronneberg and his demolition team slipped past them toward the building housing the heavy water cells. They found the steel door locked, but after a frantic search, Ronneberg and one of his men discovered a cable duct through which they could climb. It led them thirty yards over rusty pipes and tangled cables down to a semibasement room. Carefully opening a door in the room marked “no admittance except on business,” they peered into the heavy water production chamber itself. An elderly watchman was sitting with his back to them.

The two commandos rushed inside. While Ronneberg secured the door from the inside, his comrade pointed his pistol at the watchman’s head. He told him in Norwegian that they were British commandos on a mission to destroy the plant. So long as the watchman cooperated, he would not be harmed. Pulling on rubber gloves in case of electric shocks, Ronneberg began swiftly fastening explosive charges to each of the eighteen steel-clad, four-foot-high heavy water cells. Then the sudden sound of smashing glass in a skylight made him freeze. The face of another member of the demolition team appeared in the jagged opening. Unaware of the duct, he had broken the glass in a desperate bid to get inside.

The commandos waited for alarms to sound, but, to their surprise, none did. Ronneberg hurriedly completed placing the charges. Just as he was about to ignite the fuses, the old watchman implored him to help him find his spectacles, pleading that he was almost blind without them. Touched by the man’s desperation, Ronneberg sacrificed precious moments to find them. He was again just about to light the fuses when the sound of boots descending the steps from the floor above made him pause anew. It was the Norwegian night foreman, who gazed at the intruders in astonishment.

Hesitating no longer, Ronneberg lit the fuses. There were two sets: thirty-second fuses and, as backup in case they should fail, two-minute fuses. Shouting to the two employees to take cover higher in the building, the commandos rushed upstairs and out through the steel door, which they had unlocked with a key taken from the old watchman, pulling it shut behind them. They were just twenty yards from the building when the explosion came. To Haukelid, waiting in the shadows with the support team, it seemed “astonishingly small.” Indeed the noise was so muted that several minutes passed before an unarmed German soldier came outside to take a look. After a cursory glance around the compound he returned, satisfied, to the warmth of the guardhouse.

Meanwhile, the nine commandos regrouped outside the plant and embraced. They retraced their path back along the railway track and reached the bottom of the gorge before the wailing of air-raid sirens, the signal for general mobilization in the Rjukan area, announced that the Germans had finally realized what had happened. Once again luck was with them. The Germans had installed powerful floodlights to illuminate the gorge, but in the confusion no one could find the switch. The commandos slipped away into the darkness, some to ski to safety in neutral Sweden, others to hide out in the mountains, all to survive to fight another day.

Despite the muted sound of the explosion, their attack had been entirely successful; the heavy water cells were wrecked, and nearly half a ton of the precious liquid had leaked away. The commander of the German occupying forces in Norway, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, summoned to inspect the damage, conceded that “the English bandits performed the finest coup I have seen in this war.”

LESLIE GROVES met Robert Oppenheimer for the first time in October 1942 at Berkeley during his initial inspection tour of the key laboratories. They could not have been more different—Groves the supremely practical human bulldozer and Oppenheimer the intellectual sophisticate. Nevertheless, Groves took to the thirty-eight-year-old scientist, recognizing a man who could penetrate a problem swiftly and would give of himself unstintingly. Soon after, Groves invited Oppenheimer, then leading a small team of theoretical physicists set up by Arthur Compton at Berkeley to look at bomb design, to Washington. Groves asked his views on the type of laboratory needed to design and build the bomb. Oppenheimer suggested that, rather than choosing an existing location like the University of Chicago, the laboratory should be built in a remote place where scientists could work freely but securely.

Groves agreed and began doggedly seeking a suitable site. His criteria were not easy to satisfy: The location had to be isolated but still accessible by car, train, and plane, with a good, year-round climate and enough power and water. New Mexico seemed promising, and initial surveys suggested potentially suitable locations near Albuquerque. Groves arrived on an inspection tour, accompanied by Oppenheimer. The first site they visited was hemmed in on three sides by high cliffs, which Oppenheimer argued would depress the workforce. Knowing the region well from vacations at Perro Caliente, his ranch near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—named by the Spanish conquistadores for the bloodred glow that stained them at sunset—he recommended a site facing them and about thirty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe belonging to the Los Alamos Ranch School.

The school lay on a seven-thousand-foot-high mesa—a tableland formed by the flattened cone of a long-extinct volcano—whose red- and gold-striped walls plunged to the Rio Grande Valley below. The valley was pure desert except for a fecund strip along the water’s edge, dotted with Indian villages. Across the valley Oppenheimer’s snow-tipped Sangre de Cristo Mountains swept skyward. To the west lay the slopes of the green-domed Jemez Hills. The mesa itself was covered with sweet-scented, long-needled pine trees. Groves and Oppenheimer arrived in November 1942 as light snow was falling, dusting the trees. Despite the weather, the schoolboys and their masters were out on the playing fields in shorts. Looking around, Groves noted the school’s neat buildings of wood and stone, which could be used to house people until more accommodations could be built. The mesa itself was riven with deep canyons, suitable for containing special laboratories. A narrow, rutted mountain road connected the site with the highway to Santa Fe. According to one of Groves’s party, he announced, “This is the place.” Barely a week later, the War Department ordered the purchase of nearly fifty thousand acres there. It was, Oppenheimer wrote to a colleague, “a lovely spot.”