The Making of the Atomic Bomb

From the bridge the two men slipped to a back street where they met their driver in a car Haukelid had arranged with its owner to steal in the name of the King and return on Sunday morning. The owner had modified the car to run on methane and they were a long hour starting it. They picked up Larsen, who was prepared to escape Norway to avoid arrest after the work was done. He brought a suitcase of valuables and had come directly from a dinner party where he had heard a visiting concert violinist mention plans to leave on the morning ferry and had tried unsuccessfully to convince the musician to stay in the area one more day to sample its excellent skiing. Another Rjukan man also joined them. They drove to the lake well past the middle of the night:

Armed with Sten guns, pistols and hand-grenades, we crept… down toward the ferry. The bitterly cold night set everything creaking and crackling; the ice on the road snapped sharply as we went over it. When we came out on the bridge by the ferry station, there was as much noise as if a whole company was on the march.

Rolf and the other Rjukan man were told to cover me while I went on board to reconnoitre. All was quiet there. Was it possible that the Germans had omitted to place a guard at the weakest point in the whole route to the transport?

Hearing voices in the crew's quarters, forward, I stole to the compan-ion[way] and listened. There must be a party going on down there, and a game of poker. The other two followed me on to the deck of the ferry. We went down to the third-class accommodation and found a hatchway leading to the bilges. But before we had got the hatch open we heard steps, and took cover behind the nearest table or chair. The ferry watchman was standing in the doorway.

Haukelid thought fast. “The situation was awkward, but not dangerous.” He told the watchman they were escaping the Gestapo and needed a place to hide:

The watchman immediately showed us the hatchway in the deck, and told us that they had several times had illicit things with them on their trips.

The Rjukan man now proved invaluable. He talked and talked with the watchman, while Rolf and I flung our sacks down under the deck and began to work.

It was an anxious job, and it took time.

Haukelid and Sorlie found themselves standing on the bottom plates of the boat in a foot of cold water. They had to tape the two alarm-clock timers to one of the steel stringers that braced the ferry's hull, attach four electric detonators to the timers, attach high-speed fuses to the loop of plastic explosive, lay the charge of explosive on the bottom plates and then, most dangerously, hook up batteries to detonators and detonators to fuses.

“The charge was placed in the water and concealed. It consisted of nineteen pounds of high explosive laid in the form of a sausage. We laid it forward, so that the rudder and propeller would rise above the surface when water began to come in [to prevent navigating the boat to shallower water]… When the charge exploded, it would blow about eleven square feet out of the ship's side.” The sausage was some twelve feet around.

Sorlie went up on deck. Haukelid set his alarms to go off at 10:45 a.m. “Making the last connection was a dangerous job; for an alarm clock is an uncertain instrument, and contact between the hammer and the alarm was avoided by not more than a third of an inch. Thus there was one third of an inch between us and disaster.” Everything worked and he finished at 4 a.m.

The Rjukan man had convinced the watchman by then that the escapees he had sheltered needed to return to Rjukan to collect their possessions. Haukelid considered warning their benefactor but decided that might endanger the mission and only thanked him and shook his hand.

Ten minutes from the ferry station Haukelid and Larsen left the car to ski to Kongsberg, forty miles away around the lake, where they would catch a train for the first leg of their escape to Sweden. Sortie carried a report for London to the clandestine radio. The driver returned the stolen car and he and the Rjukan man strolled home. At Haukelid's suggestion the Norsk Hydro transport engineer had arranged a foolproof alibi: over the weekend doctors at the local hospital operated on him for appendicitis, no questions asked.

With fifty-three people aboard including the concert violinist the Hydro sailed on time. Forty-five minutes into the crossing Haukelid's charge of plastic explosive blew the hull. The captain felt the explosion rather than heard it, and though Tinnsjo is landlocked he thought they might have been torpedoed. The bow swamped first as Haukelid had intended; while the passengers and crew struggled to release the lifeboats, the freight cars with their thirty-nine drums of heavy water — 162 gallons mixed with 800 gallons of dross — broke loose, rolled overboard and sank like stones. Of passengers and crew twenty-six drowned. The concert violinist slipped high and dry into a lifeboat; when his violin case floated by, someone was kind enough to fish it out for him.

Kurt Diebner of German Army Ordnance counted the full effect on German fission research of the Vemork bombing and the sinking of the Hydro in a postwar interview:

When one considers that right up to the end of the war, in 1945, there was virtually no increase in our heavy-water stocks in Germany… it will be seen that it was the elimination of German heavy-water production in Norway that was the main factor in our failure to achieve a self-sustaining atomic reactor before the war ended.

The race to the bomb, such as it was, ended for Germany on a mountain lake in Norway on a cold Sunday morning in February 1944.

Despite Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Japanese sweep across a million square miles of Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, the Pacific theater commanded less attention in the United States in the earlier years of the war than did the European. Partly that neglect was a result of the deliberate national policy that gave priority to Europe. “Europe was Washington's darling,” Pacific Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey would write in a memoir, “the South Pacific was only a stepchild.” But Americans also found it difficult at first to take seriously an Asian island people who were small in stature and radically different in culture. Reporting from the Solomon Islands east of New Guinea late in 1942, Time-Life correspondent John Her-sey found the typical U.S. marine “very uneasy about what he feels is Washington's ignorance of the Pacific. Sure, he argues, Hitler has to be beaten, but that doesn't mean we have to go on thinking of the Japs as funny little ring-tailed monkeys.” The U.S. Ambassador to Japan at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Boston-born Joseph C. Grew, confronted a similar skepticism when he returned from Japanese internment and battled it by traveling the nation lecturing:

The other day a friend, an intelligent American, said to me: “Of course there must be ups and downs in this war; we can't expect victories every day, but it's merely a question of time before Hitler will go down to defeat before the steadily growing power of the combined air and naval and military forces of the [Allies] — and then, we'll mop up the Japs.” Mark well those words, please. “And then we'll mop up the Japs.”

Grew thought such bravado ill-advised. “The Japanese have known what we thought of them,” he told his audiences — “that they were little fellows physically, that they were imitative, that they were not really very important in the world of men and nations.” To the contrary, said Grew, they were “united,” “frugal,” “fanatical” and “totalitarian”:

At this very moment, the Japanese feel themselves, man for man, superior to you and to me and to any of our peoples. They admire our technology, they may have a lurking dread of our ultimate superiority of resources, but all too many of them have contempt for us as human beings… The Japanese leaders do think that they can and will win. They are counting on our underestimates, on our apparent disunity before — and even during — war, on our unwillingness to sacrifice, to endure, and to fight.

So far Grew's lecture might have been merely exhortation. But he went on to emphasize a phenomenon that Americans fighting in the Pacific were just then beginning to encounter. “‘Victory or death’ is no mere slogan for these soldiers,” Grew noted. “It is plain, matter-of-fact description of the military policy that controls their forces, from the highest generals to the newest recruits. The man who allows himself to be captured has disgraced himself