Operation Gunnerside - Norwegian SOE Commandos Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb Project at Norsk Hydro скачать в хорошем качестве

Operation Gunnerside - Norwegian SOE Commandos Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb Project at Norsk Hydro

Top Secret - covert operations, double agents, commando raids, botched missions, narrow escapes, black ops, intelligence failures & military blunders of World War 2. Why did U.S. Aircraft have Crazy Stripes and Polka Dots in WW2?    • Видео   5 Brilliant Reasons Why U.S. Navy SEALs Wore Jeans on Top Secret Missions in Vietnam    • Видео   New videos every week | Please Like & Subscribe Hunting Nazis    • Hunting Nazis   Black Ops    • Black Ops   Long Docs    • Long Docs   Espionage    • Espionage   Conspiracies & Cover-ups    • Плейлист   In a staggered line, the nine saboteurs of Operation Gunnerside cut across the mountain slope. Instinct, more than the dim light of the moon, guided the young men. On skis, they threaded through the pine stands traversing down the uneven terrain, much of it pocked with empty hollows or buried under snowdrifts. Dressed in white camouflage snowsuits over British Army uniforms, the Norwegians looked like phantoms haunting the woods. They moved as quietly as ghosts, the silence broken only by the swooshing of their skis and the occasional slap of a pole against an unseen branch. A steady wind blowing through Vestfjord Valley, 100 miles west of Oslo, dampened even those sounds. The woods soon became too dense and steep for them to continue by any means except on foot. It was tough going. They clambered through the heavy, wet snow carrying rucksacks filled with 35 pounds of equipment and armed with submachine guns, pistols, grenades, explosives, and knives. In the moonlight, the Vemork plant cast the imposing silhouette of a fortress. The concrete and steel monolith occupied a defensively advantageous location on an icy ledge, 600 feet above the river. The Germans who oversaw it, however, were taking no chances. They had installed floodlights, barbed wire fences, sirens, and planted mines in the surrounding hillsides; machine-gun nests and troop barracks stood nearby; patrols frequently swept the grounds; and a single-lane suspension bridge provided workers and vehicles the only point of entry. Now, the commandos—a heavily armed five-man covering party and four-man demolition team—planned to infiltrate the fortress. They were not the first to try. Each man was painfully aware that the last mission had met with absolute disaster: the death of an entire 41-member British force. By early 1942, the Allies knew the Nazis were racing to harness nuclear energy. Given German interest in Vemork’s heavy water, British intelligence believed the Nazis intended to build a self-sustaining reactor to produce plutonium, a highly fissile element ideal for manufacturing an atomic bomb. “Since [plutonium] is best prepared in systems involving the use of heavy water,” an April 1942 statement from Churchill’s War Cabinet read, “the Committee recommends that an attempt should, if possible, be made to stop the Norsk Hydro production [at Vemork].” The Americans and British pushed to strike Vemork by air or with a major ground attack as a joint effort of the Combined Operations Headquarters—the British War Office department tasked with coordinating forces to conduct harassing raids against German forces on the continent. Tronstad feared either scenario would cost too many Norwegian lives. He advocated a small, well-planned commando attack against the facility. Instead, in November 1942, Combined Operations Headquarters launched an airborne operation, Operation Freshman, in which a British force in two gliders would land near Vemork, destroy the plant, and escape to Sweden. But both gliders crashed before reaching their landing zones. Those the crashes did not kill, German soldiers did: altogether 41 Royal Engineers, glider pilots, and crew died on the mission. And the Nazis now knew of the Allies’ interest in their heavy water production. The SOE turned to Tronstad. He assembled a force whose Norwegian members had escaped Nazi occupation and traveled to England, where they were recruited into Kompani Linge, an elite group of commandos under the control of the Norwegian Army High Command and the SOE. As he had with Operation Freshman, Tronstad provided the commandos with scores of reconnaissance photographs, blueprints, equipment diagrams, and reams of intelligence reports. They even practiced using a scale mock-up of the target. On the mission they would wear standard-issue British Army uniforms to prevent Nazi reprisals against the Norwegian population. Still, Tronstad knew an unexpected event could plunge the operation into disaster. He hoped their preparation—and a little luck—would see it through to success.