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By Root 2762 0

Commander-in-Chief, General Ruge, appealed desperately for help from the British and French governments. On 14 April Foley added his own commentary. Norway, he said, ‘has lost her arsenals and supplies in towns captured by Germans. They are fighting almost with bare fists . . . Unless help comes at once there will be a first class disaster from which allies will, I submit, find it difficult to recover.’ General Ruge ‘fears he will not be able hold out much longer. Please take his word most earnestly. You cannot conceive pitiable condition material this army but men fine types.’ Foley’s secretary, Margaret Reid, afterwards compiled a vivid account of the retreat under attack from German bombers, eventually reaching Molde on the west coast where they embarked for Scotland on 30 April. During one air raid the SIS wireless operator, H. C. Edwards, collapsed. ‘He was unconscious for over an hour,’ recalled Reid, ‘and part of the time delirious and calling out for his wife and Commander Newill.’ ‘In all probability’, she thought, it was ‘due to overstrain and too little sleep’. He died a few days later.2

On his return to London Foley was put in overall charge of operations in Scandinavia (with Newill as section head), the Low Countries and those involving de Gaulle’s Free French movement. Inevitably there was a period of confusion while the arrangements needed to underpin a successful co-ordinated clandestine effort evolved. Not only was there friction between SIS and SOE, but there were internal differences between the Norwegian armed services themselves, and establishing satisfactory liaison with the Norwegian government-in-exile took some time. Meanwhile on 10 June wireless contact was established with agents in Haugesund (on the coast south of Bergen), but the group was broken up by arrests in August 1940. With SIS clearly under pressure to re-establish a presence in Norway, two large groups of agents were infiltrated in September by a motorised fishing boat from the Shetland Islands: ‘Skylark A’ (destined for Oslo) had twelve agents, and ‘Skylark B’ (Trondheim) twenty-one. By April 1941, with the Norwegians and SOE separately sending in their own people, Newill complained that without any central control there were ‘many examples of line crossing’ which ‘increases the hazard to our agents to such an extent as to make their work almost impossible’.

Although Claude Dansey’s appointment in May 1941 as an adjudicator between SIS and SOE eased the inter-agency problems, progress was slow. In July 1941, other than some intermittent communications from Skylark B, all the Norwegian section could report was the early stages of four additional operations, three of which aimed to provide ship-watching reports from along the coast. During 1941 a series of operations identified by Greek code-names were initiated. Most of these emanated from suggestions by Norwegian escapees that they should return to Norway equipped with a wireless set, or that they had contacts (particularly in shipping circles) who could already operate a set and who would willingly act as observers. One operation was ‘Epsilon’, run by Newill’s successor, Eric Welsh. In particular this investigated German interest in heavy water, an important component in the development of an atomic bomb, and produced by the Norsk Hydro hydroelectric plant at Rjukan in south-central Norway. In October 1941, Leif Tronstad, a professor of chemistry in Trondheim and a member of the Skylark B network, escaped to England where he was interviewed by R. V. Jones, an Air Ministry official seconded to SIS’s scientific section (which he headed), and Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s scientific adviser.3 Based on Tronstad’s information Welsh (a scientist himself ) proposed the destruction of the plant by bombing or sabotage. ‘The removal of this source of supply’, he wrote, ‘would completely cripple any designs the Germans may have with regard to this type of weapon and on the other hand, the Allies are not in a position to use this potential weapon themselves for at least eighteen