Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [144]
The first attempt was a commando-type operation staged in November of 1941. Two bomber aircraft took off from Scotland towing two gliders. All four crashed in Norway without getting anywhere near their objective. The aircrew were killed in the crashes, and the soldiers who survived the landing were rounded up by the Germans and shot, in accordance with Hitler’s order to execute commandos. Cost of the operation: two bombers, two gliders, and forty-seven lives, for no result except to alert the Germans of British interest.
The second attack was by SOE, which sent in a team of nine specially trained Norwegians. At the end of February in 1943 the Norwegians penetrated the Norsk Hydro plant and blew up 2,000 pounds of heavy water, temporarily wrecking both the storage and production facilities. They got away without a shot being fired at them and believed they had set the German program back two years.
They were correct in assuming they had scored a phenomenal success, wrong in their estimate of the German recovery time. By August the Germans were producing at a rate exceeding pre-attack levels. Now the Americans entered the affair, and the head of the American atomic bomb project asked General Marshall to take an interest in Norsk Hydro. The result of this interest was an attack by 115 Flying Fortresses of the U. S. 8th Air Force. On November 16, 1943, they dropped nearly 200 tons of bombs on the plant and the adjacent town of Rjukan. They killed twenty-two Norwegians, including one several miles from the target, wrecked Rjukan, and never even hit Norsk Hydro. The Norwegian government in exile delivered a stiff note of protest to both the British and the Americans, neither of which paid any attention.
The Germans responded by planning to transport all the existing heavy-water stocks south to Germany. On Sunday, February 20, the Norwegian SOE operatives sabotaged the shipment, and as the heavy water was being ferried across a lake, they sank it in 1,300 feet of water. Several Norwegians went down with the ferry, but the heavy water was lost for good.
The heavy-water strikes were somewhat atypical, in that the plant and its products were ideal targets for unconventional operations, while very difficult ones for the regular forces. Nonetheless, they gave some idea of what might be achieved, and have continually been cited by those who maintain that covert operations and industrial sabotage are far more cost-effective, as well as far cheaper in lives, than indiscriminate and imprecise area-bombing. How much more might have been achieved in this way, as the Resistance moved toward its fourth and final stage, was a matter of argument.
The ultimate aim of all that had gone before was a full-scale uprising, a national war of liberation that would drive the enemy from the homeland. Hopefully, the entire country would participate in this. If every single Frenchman or Belgian were out pulling down telephone wire, changing road signs, blowing up culverts, and—if possible—sniping at Germans, the whole untidy affair would make occupation physically impossible. It would be organized chaos, planned anarchy, and it would topple the German empire. In the midst of this mass action the shadow government of the Resistance would come out into the open at last, and as German power faded from the scene, the liberation, and the moral regeneration that went with it, would be accomplished.
That was the ideal, visionary situation, and it never happened. In some places, the Resistance came close to achieving this aim. Yugoslavia was probably the most nearly successful. Tito controlled large areas of Yugoslavia by 1944 and he and the Axis forces engaged in pitched battles. Late in 1944 Belgrade was occupied by Soviet and Titoist forces, but Tito was strong enough to pursue an independent line and to keep the Soviets from overshadowing him. He managed to clear the rest of his country and take Trieste without Soviet help or interference. Though the country remained theoretically a monarchy, Tito’s National Liberation Front wielded the real authority,