Vemork Hydroelectric Plant at Rjukan, Norway in 1935. In the front building, the Norsk Hydro hydrogen production plant, a Norwegian Special Operations Executive (SOE) team (Operation Gunnerside) blew up heavy water production cells on the night of 27/28 February 1943 in order to sabotage the efforts of the German nuclear energy project. -

When they learnt that the Nazis had embarked on an atomic weapons programme the British were prepared to take considerable risks to disrupt it. The main target was the Norwegian hydro electric plant which was producing ‘heavy water’ essential for the Nazis to progress with their programme.


King Haakon VII of Norway at the premiere of the film Kampen om tungtvannet (Operation Swallow: The Battle for Heavy Water), Oslo, Norway, Feb. 5, 1948. Soldiers in uniform, from the left: Joachim Rønneberg, Jens Anton Poulsson shaking hands with the king, Kasper Idland. Oslo Museum photo by Leif Ørnelund

In late 1942 they dispatched Operation Freshman. This attempt to mount an armed raid on the facility at Vemork had ended in disaster when one plane and two gliders carrying Airborne Division troops had crashed in Norway. Those troops, mainly Royal Engineers, who survived the crashes were subsequently executed under Hitler’s Commando Order.

Now the British Special Operations Executive tried again. The advance team for Operation Freshman, four Norwegians who had parachuted into the country before the gliders, had survived the winter by living off reindeer and moss. It was a notable feat of survival. Now they were joined by further Norwegian parachutists for a covert raid on the plant, rather than a military assault

Joachim Ronneberg was one of the men who now arrived by parachute and who now made an attack on the plant:
"The main building was 25 by 100 metres in seven stories. The production started in the top storey and continued in circles until it ended as heavy water down in the bottom. And that was our target: a battery of 18 cells, the last stage in the production.

Two of us managed to get in and we started laying the charges. The order was that if anything happened that could endanger the result, you had to act on your own. The three other chaps in the demolition party, one of them carrying a set of charges, decided to break the window to get inside because they did not know that we were busy inside. When the window broke, both goups were equally surprised.

I helped one of my friends to get in, and we finished laying the charges. They were not big charges. They weighed about 4.5 kilos, and had been chained up by the British before we left. Two-minute fuses, four of them.


There was a Norwegian workman inside the factory reading the instruments and filling out the logbook. He heard us talking Norwegian, discussing whether we should put on a 30-second fuse just to be sure that we heard the bang as soon as possible.

That was when he asked for his glasses. It was difficult to get glasses in Norway, so he wanted to have them before we lit the charges. I remember I threw away what I was doing and searched for the glasses and found the case and handed it to him.

He was very pleased and I started getting the ignition sets ready when he suddenly said that the glasses were not in the case. I said “Where the hell are they then?” And he said “Well, they were there when you came in.” In the end I found them being used as a bookmark in his logbook, and gave them to him.

Then we ordered him to give us the key for the cellar door so that we could go out through the door like other human beings. We opened the door and I remember Major Tronstad saying that in case we needed to lock up the guard, the key for the lavatory was on the left-hand side of the door. I remember just after we had lit these 30-second fuses, I saw the key, but we did not need it.


We said to the man, “You just run around the corner, up the staircase, lie down and keep your mouth open, until you hear the bang. There will be only one bang, so when it is over you can go down and watch the result”. I do not know if he did. But I know that he kept his mouth open, because he could hear when I met him two years later. Otherwise, if he had had his mouth closed he would have blown out his eardrums.

We had planned to meet the covering party down by the river. They expected to be there a while after they heard the bang, not knowing that we had used only 30-second fuses, so we met them just outside the gate.

What astonished us was that the Germans did not understand what had happened at all. The covering party told us that one man came out of the doorway of the guard house with a torch, and made a sort of search around the house and went in again. When we got back across the river, we took a parallel road to the main road leading down to Rjukan centre. At the place where the funicular starts down in the valley, we began climbing a zigzag road leading up to the top. It was a rise of about six or seven hundred metres, and it took us, I would say, three hours from the explosion until we could put on our skis up on the mountainside."
http://ww2today.com/28th-february-19...-telemark-raid
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Joachim Ronneberg: "I only realised the importance of the mission after the bomb on Hiroshima"

Secret mission
Mr Ronneberg had fled Norway for Britain when the Nazis had invaded, but was determined to return and fight.

He was summoned to an office of the Special Operations Executive just above Baker Street Tube station in London and asked to undertake a special mission.

He was asked to find six men he wanted to take on the mission as soon as possible.

The target of the raid was in Vermork, in a remote part of Norway, home to the largest hydroelectric plant of its type in the world.


Mr Ronneberg says he was never told exactly why they were being asked to destroy it.

British intelligence had realised that the Nazis were protecting the plant because it produced a supply of heavy water, which could be used in the production of an atomic bomb.

Direct bombing was ruled out because of the scale of civilian casualties that would result if the liquid ammonia storage tanks at the plant were hit.


A small team known as the Swallows had landed in October 1942.

Their task had been to guide in two gliders full of airborne troops who would destroy the plant.

But this mission ended in disaster.

One of the gliders crashed into a mountain and another onto high ground.

The survivors were executed, but the Swallows survived and lived in the wild, hunting for food.

After three months, they received a message that six more Norwegians would be sent in an operation codenamed Gunnerside.

Mr Ronneberg was to be the leader of the team.

"We very often thought that this was a one way trip," he told me during an interview at Britain's exclusive Special Forces Club, whose walls are littered with pictures of veterans of secret operations.

Impossible climb'
It was 16 February, deep winter and pitch black, when Mr Ronneberg jumped from the plane.

Underneath snow suits, they wore British battle-dress in the hope it would offer them some protection if captured.
Joachim Ronneberg Joachim Ronneberg (centre) at a service to commemorate his team

If they were known to be members of the Norwegian resistance, they would have been shot immediately.

They carried cyanide pills as well - just in case.

"We jumped out at midnight and the landscape was covered with snow," Mr Ronneberg says.

The team landed in one of the wildest areas of northern Europe and in the wrong location - miles away from the planned site, and it took five days to connect with their reception party.

Eventually they made their way to the plant by night.

There was a bridge across the gorge that the Germans thought was the only way to cross and so it was carefully guarded.

The gorge was steep and dangerous with a river flowing through it.

The men decided to vote on which route to take and the majority voted for the gorge.

"When you look at the gorge where we climbed down, you feel it is impossible," Mr Ronneberg says.

They crept into the factory along a railway line that a local contact had told them was relatively unguarded.

They used wire-cutters to get into the factory.

The doors to the heavy-water plant were closed and so Mr Ronneberg crawled in through an access tunnel.

"Getting inside I was quite certain that the rest of the party would follow me, but only one chap came," Mr Ronneberg says.

"The other ones hadn't found the entrance for the tunnel.

"Therefore we decided we would have to do it ourselves and started laying out the charges."
'Hope of freedom'

Two more men, who had broken a window, eventually joined them.

The explosion when it came was almost disappointing - not quite the huge bang they had expected.

But the escape was the most remarkable aspect of the mission.

It involved travelling more than 200 miles on skis through southern Norway.

An entire German division was sent to chase them across Telemark, with aircraft searching overhead.

With a wry smile, Mr Ronneberg describes it as "the very best skiing weekend I ever had".

The plant was put of action for months.

Later, when it was possible to attack it from the air, American bombers inflicted further damage.

A ferry carrying supplies of heavy-water away from the plant was also sunk.

When did Mr Ronneberg realize the importance of the mission? "That was in August 1945 when they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then we knew what we had done was of great importance. Not until then," he says.

For Mr Ronneberg - the last member of the team to survive - the 70th anniversary is a chance to remember those he served with.

"We were a gang of friends doing a job together," he says.

It is also an opportunity to emphasise the importance of the ties between Norway and Britain forged during the war.

Present at the ceremonies to mark the anniversary were the head of Norway's armed forces and its defence minister.

Mr Ronneberg received a flag which had flown over the Houses of Parliament.

It was a reminder, he says, of the time during the war when he looked up at it flying over Westminster.

The colours had reminded him of his own flag and the fact Britain offered the best hope of freedom for his homeland.

"We felt very much that we had a big debt to Britain," he tells me.

"They received us, they trained us and they helped us. This operation wasn't Norwegian or British at all. It was an Allied operation."

Heavy water

• Heavy water, or deuterium oxide, contains a hydrogen isotope that has a neutron, making its molecules heavier than those in normal water
  

• In nuclear reactors it acts as a "neutron moderator", meaning it slows down neutrons, making nuclear-fission reactions more likely
  

• It is a more effective moderator than normal water as it absorbs less neutrons, meaning natural uranium, rather than enriched, can be used in reactors
  

• This makes it cheaper and easier to extract plutonium for use in nuclear weapons
  

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22298739
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apa yang terjadi kl sampe misi ini gagal dan nazi buat bom atom?