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06:15At first it was small local groups which grew steadily into a nationwide organization
06:22mill all its leaders decided to prepare to support the other Unisirred invasion but
06:28that any premature sabotage would put the population at too much risk.
06:36Other Norwegians were determined to get away and take a more active part in the war.
06:47Many, like Lars Ronneberg, escaped by small boat across the North Sea to Britain.
06:53When I left Norway in March 41, I went by a fishing boat.
06:58It was a boat of about 50 feet, ordinary fishing vessel.
07:03And I went together with six, seven other Norwegians.
07:10And our area was pretty easy to leave because it was not what the Germans called prohibited area.
07:20After landing and being screened to ensure that they weren't spies,
07:24many joined the conventional free Norwegian forces.
07:36But others were recruited as agents by less conventional British organisations like SOE,
07:42the Special Operations Executive, or the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS.
07:47Their instructors, such as Colonel Charles Hampton,
07:51found them enthusiastic but not always very careful.
07:56It's security, which is one of the main things we had to teach Norwegians,
07:59because they were a little naive when they came first.
08:03And, you know, they rather took the line when you chased them on an exercise,
08:08but, oh, and you surprised them.
08:10Of course, we wouldn't do that in Norway.
08:12Because this is the very thing we said, well, you've got to do it here.
08:15I mean, so you don't do it in Norway.
08:18Nevertheless, on the 5th of September, 1940,
08:21a fishing boat set off back to Norway from Scotland.
08:24On board were four Norwegian radio operators who had been trained by the SIS.
08:30Their aim was to set up radio stations in Trondheim and Oslo,
08:35to send intelligence back to Britain.
08:39The radio spies' first attempts to establish contact with Britain failed.
08:44But soon, station Skylark B in Trondheim
08:46began to send back a steady stream of information.
08:50Within a few months, this enabled the Royal Navy to win a vital victory.
08:58The relative ease with which fishing boats could slip to and from
09:02the long coastline of Nazi-occupied Norway
09:04meant that the route soon became known as the Shetland Bus.
09:08It operated in all weathers for the next five years,
09:11with trips virtually every week.
09:18None of the agents sent in, like Olaf Reed Olsen,
09:21had any illusions about the risks they were running.
09:24The other guys, wouldn't they have the same wish?
09:28That if anyone was hurt, we should shoot him.
09:33Just think what would happen to anyone of us being caught.
09:42Steadily, the number of ports under constant observation increased.
09:56The timing of convoys was passed back to the Royal Air Force.
10:01Visits were then arranged.
10:28The radio spy's first major coup came on the 22nd of May, 1941,
10:34when they reported the arrival of three German destroyers at Trondheim.
10:40This was a crucial message for the British Admiralty.
10:45It knew that the German battleship Bismarck, accompanied by the cruiser Prince Eugen,
10:50and a destroyer escort, had entered the North Sea from the Baltic.
11:03And air reconnaissance had shown that they had put into the Norwegian port of Bergen.
11:11But poor weather meant that the British could not tell whether the ships had left again.
11:17The radio spy's message confirmed that Bismarck had left her escorts and was at sea once more,
11:23trying to slip out to ravage the convoy routes in the North Atlantic.
11:29The home fleet was deployed, and five days later, Germany's most powerful warship was brought to bay and sunk.
11:44In March 1941, British commandos mounted a highly successful raid on the Lofoten Islands.
11:51The German response was to destroy houses and arrest a number of prominent local people.
12:00Seventy were sent to a concentration camp in Norway,
12:02and Milog made clear that it considered this too high a price to pay for the success of the raid.
12:10The Norwegian government in exile was also angry at not having been informed of the raid beforehand.
12:16But it was wary of giving Milog total support for fear that it intended to set up an alternative government
12:22in Norway after the war.
12:27Aware of growing resistance, German restrictions increased.
12:32And in July, the state of emergency was declared by the Reichskommissar.
12:40The following month, the Germans confiscated all radios in the country.
12:47Milog responded by producing underground newspapers based on BBC World Service broadcasts to Norway.
12:56During the autumn, an agreement was reached bringing Milog under government control as part of the armed forces.
13:10The military importance of Norway was radically increased in June 1941,
13:15when Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union.
13:19Within weeks, the first convoys had sailed from Britain to take military assistance to its new ally.
13:29German air and naval attacks on this vital lifeline built up steadily.
13:42The general feeling of crisis was kept on the boil at the end of 1941,
13:47by further major British commando raids on the Lofoten Islands and the port of Varks.
14:02Winston Churchill was keen to follow up with an invasion of Norway.
14:06Although the British chiefs of staff managed to dissuade the Prime Minister,
14:10Adolf Hitler had also decided that Norway would be a vital theatre of war.
14:18The garrison was steadily built up until more than 350,000 German troops were stationed in the country.
14:29Milog increased its sabotage operations to keep them occupied.
14:40But for most of the Germans, Norway was a comfortable posting,
14:43well away from the horrors of the war against the Soviet Union.
14:56For the Norwegian resistance, one of the most important developments came in early 1942,
15:02when Hitler ordered the major surviving units of his surface suite to northern Norway.
15:10The battleship Tirpitz, Bismarck's sister, led the deployment,
15:15and the threat she posed to the Russian convoys became a major concern for British planners.
15:23Monitoring the whereabouts of the German fleet in the distant and isolated fjords
15:27became the main task of the Norwegian radio spies.
15:32Their surveillance activities were expanded,
15:35with radio stations along the length of Norway's 2,000-mile coastline.
15:43The activity of the Shetland bus increased,
15:46and men such as Bjorn Rohrholt often had to take appalling risks to get into restricted areas.
15:52Getting a radio transmitter installed at the German-held Agnes Fortress, of course,
15:57was a bit of a headache. But it was solved in this way, that I was fitted out as an
16:04insurance salesman,
16:05with the false papers, which the only correct thing about it was it said agent on it.
16:11And I simply took the coastal steamer out to the Agnes Fortress,
16:17and walked off the steamer and straight up to the commandant's office.
16:22And I explained to him that I had arrived that morning from Oslo on a night train,
16:27and I simply did not have time to get the special papers which were necessary to be permitted to enter
16:33the fortress.
16:34And here are my credentials, and would he please give his personal permission for me to go around
16:42and see my Norwegian clients?
16:46And he jokingly asked me if I wanted to make an insurance policy for him,
16:51and I told him that no, as a matter of principle, we never take risks on German naval officers.
16:57And he thought this was a huge choke, and he gave me his permission.
17:01We then parted, and I went to see the very brave man, Magna Hussle, who had promised to operate the
17:09transmitter.
17:10For almost three years, the German ships were tracked, as they moved from hiding place to hiding place.
17:22Meanwhile, there was a major crackdown on Milorg by the Gestapo and Abwehr.
17:27Informers were successfully infiltrated, and by mid-1942, Milorg had virtually ceased to exist in southern Norway.
17:36German countermeasures and searches threatened the radio spies as well.
17:45Ola Freed Olsen and his team had a lucky escape.
17:55Only hours after this photograph was taken, they found themselves fleeing for their lives.
18:00All around the district, they've circled the whole thing with close to 600 men.
18:10And we ran them from one machine gun post into another one, constantly.
18:20And of course, they started firing like mad, and then we had these running patrols after us.
18:26And if we hadn't had a physical condition that we did have, of course, we'd never make it.
18:32And as I always said to the boys that we are the boss, no Germans can outwit us when it
18:40comes to the woods.
18:42While the Germans and the police cars were running all the time up and down the valley,
18:48we took the ordinary bus in to town.
18:53Went through two controls, had our papers, nobody said a word.
18:59So by doing what they didn't think we would do, certainly saved us that time.
19:10In a desperate attempt to destroy the Gestapo's records, RAF Mosquitoes made a daring low-level attack
19:17on its headquarters in Oslo on the 25th of September 1942.
19:22One bomb struck home, but failed to explode.
19:31While the resistance war was hotting up, Allied intelligence had become aware of another threat.
19:42One which had the potential to win the war for Hitler.
19:52Deep in the bleak Telemark region, 70 miles west of Oslo, was the town of Ryukkan.
20:04Disturbing reports were being received that the hydroelectric plant at nearby Wehrmork
20:09was playing a crucial role in Germany's race to develop an atomic bomb.
20:16As a by-product, the plant produced heavy water, deuterium oxide,
20:21a vital element to control nuclear reactions within a laboratory.
20:29Without this, German research would grind to a halt, and spies reported that the
20:34Norse hydrofactory had been ordered to step up production urgently.
20:44The information landed on the desk of Lieutenant Commander Erik Walsh,
20:48who was in charge of the Norwegian section of British intelligence.
20:53It was decided that the situation must be assessed,
20:56and that the first step was to get someone into the factory who had a knowledge of the plant
21:01and the technical background to monitor exactly what was happening.
21:10The ideal man was soon found. Einar Skinnerland had recently escaped to Britain.
21:17He came from the Ryukkan area and was a hydroelectric technician.
21:22He was also an expert skier and amateur radio operator.
21:28After hurried briefings, Skinnerland was dropped back into Norway on the night of the 29th
21:34of March 1942.
21:38He managed to get a job with a construction team at the Norsk hydroplant,
21:42and his report soon made it clear that the production of heavy water must be disrupted.
21:50British intelligence was instructed to do so.
21:54A four-man team was chosen from Norwegian volunteers,
21:58among them Jens Anton Poulsen, who later became a general in the Norwegian army.
22:03We were called into Colonel Wilson's office, I remember,
22:09and he gave us the outline of the operation and so on.
22:13But the thing I remember is that he told us that if the Trumans get hold of the heavy water,
22:19or he didn't know what they were using it for, but if they get hold of it,
22:23they would be able to blow up the whole of London.
22:27The team, codenamed the Swallows, was infiltrated by parachute into the Telemark area in October 1942.
22:36They would guide the main group of paratroop engineers who would arrive by glider.
22:43Once a team reached Ryuka, they contacted Skinnerland, who warned them that the Germans had recently reinforced the guard at
22:51the plant.
22:52The Swallows informed London of this, but the glider operation went ahead.
23:06Two gliders, each with 17 engineers, took off from Wick Airfield in the extreme north of Scotland on the 19th
23:13of November 1942.
23:20Operation Freshman was a disaster.
23:27Both gliders crashed, and the survivors were shot by the Germans after a brief interrogation.
23:36It was not until after the war that their bodies were exhumed, and the full details of the mass murder
23:42were revealed.
23:46The four Swallows, isolated and short of food, went to ground.
23:51They must survive through the bitter winter until another attempt could be made on the plant.
24:02On the bleak Hardanger Plateau in Telemark, the four-man team managed to avoid detection throughout the winter.
24:16Klaus Hellberg remembers the extremes they were reduced to.
24:20We had much food left, so we were anxious.
24:27I remember we started digging into the snow to get moss.
24:43SOE now took over planning for another attempt to sabotage the Norsk hydroplug.
24:48It would be codenamed Operation Gunnerside.
24:53Lieutenant Joachim Ronneberg, one of the Norwegian section's most experienced officers, was chosen to lead it.
24:59And then I was told that we were going to Weymark to blow up this heavy water factory.
25:05And we were also told about the trial which had been done already by British commanders with the two gliders.
25:14And we were told about the little group of Norwegians who had been back in Norway as a reception committee.
25:22Ronneberg selected five expert skiers and they trained in Scotland using a mock-up of the plant.
25:34On the 23rd of January 1943, the new team took off by bomber to be dropped on the Hardanger Plateau,
25:41where the swallows were waiting for them.
25:45The first attempt failed because the bomber crew could not spot the lights of the reception party.
25:50Ronneberg and his men had to wait for the next full moon to try again.
25:56This time, on the 16th of February, the drop went well.
26:02But high winds took them away from the landing zone and it took several anxious hours to locate the swallows.
26:09You never forget that meeting.
26:16Oh yeah, yeah, marvelous.
26:18I heard someone shouting.
26:22Hello.
26:24And that was one of the men.
26:26And we were of course very, very happy.
26:31And then we saw the others that had been hiding.
26:43the Norse hydro plant stood on the side of a precipitous gorge the only approach across this
26:49was a bridge but this was closely guarded as with the slopes above the factory however the
26:57Germans seem to think that the gorge was impossible Klaus Holberg went to investigate I found a way
27:06down to the gorge rather steep but not too difficult across the river and upon the other side it wasn't
27:14so
27:14difficult we could get down in daylight it would of course be a little more difficult in nighttime he
27:24then returned to the hut and explained the two possibilities we voted about it and I think
27:34five or six were for the gorge and the others for the bridge the two officers they were for the
27:43bridge but we decided to use the gorge they started about eight o'clock in the evening it was dark
27:55we crossed the gorge with weapons and demolitions
28:09shortly after midnight they approached the perimeter fence of the plant
28:16to their amazement they spotted no centuries and were able to cut the single chain and padlock without
28:32difficulty although they could hear voices from a guard house they reached the heavy water production
28:37plant unseen and broke in the charges were laid
29:04and the saboteur slipped out into the darkness still undetected the heavy waters
29:13water cells and storage tanks were totally destroyed
29:21and even General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst the German military commander in Norway had to admit that it
29:28was the most spectacular coup he had ever heard of thousands of his men scoured the area but most of
29:38the
29:38sabotage team got away to Sweden none were caught even though sometimes it was a close-run thing
29:51the remainder including klaus hellberg stayed behind to plan further raids
30:00a few weeks later as he approached one of the supposedly safe houses he momentarily let down his guard
30:07I was relaxed I was glad to be by myself so I loaded the sun good skiing conditions
30:23When I got there I saw a lot of ski tracks outside the hut and it was rather suspicious
30:30Why are there so many ski tracks?
30:33Then from the hut I saw Germans
30:40The Germans had discovered this particular hut
30:44The Germans had discovered this particular hut
30:47I ran as fast as I possibly could into my skis and ran off
30:53And then the Germans started shooting, shouting and shooting
30:59I saw this is the end
31:09Two men managed to keep up and chased me
31:16After a while there was only one
31:20The only thing I thought was you had to be faster, even faster to get away
31:29When I was skiing uphill, I was faster
31:32When I was skiing uphill, I was faster
31:33When skiing downhill, he was faster
31:39In the long downhill, he was quite close to me
31:57I took my pistol gun
32:00Shot, two shots, didn't hit
32:03And he started shooting at me
32:04He didn't hit me
32:06And when he had no more shots
32:10He turned as quickly as he could
32:13I sent him two shots
32:16Here and away
32:18And I had escaped
32:21Operation Gunnarside was an enormous boost to Norwegian morale
32:24But within three months, the Germans had repaired the plant
32:28And production of heavy water began again
32:33In November, the US 8th Air Force bombed the plant
32:40It was not hit, although the town of Ryukan was damaged
32:44But the attack persuaded the Germans that heavy water production at Norsk Hydro should be abandoned
32:49And the remaining stocks shipped back to Germany
32:56London was told of this by Einar Skinnerland
32:59And it was decided that the stocks must not be allowed to reach the Reich
33:06Knut Halkalid, one of the Norsk Hydro team who had stayed behind, was chosen to carry out the operation
33:14Because of the danger of civilian casualties, his instructions came from the highest level
33:20And it ended up with a definite order to do it
33:25I know for certain that it was taken up in a Norwegian cabinet meeting
33:32And the order was to sink it at any cost
33:38The only way the Germans could get the heavy water from the plant was by railway
33:42But the train was too heavily guarded to make an attack on it feasible during its journey
33:53The railway wagons were then parked, to be loaded on a ferry the next morning
33:57To take them across Lake Tinshire
34:02That evening the wagons were closely watched by German troops
34:12But they had forgotten to guard the ferry, and Halkalid seized his opportunity
34:18We just walked aboard the ferry in the middle of the night
34:22Got around the Norwegian watchman who was there
34:25And went down into the villages and lay the delayed charge which would sink the ferry
34:35Next day, the 20th of February, 1944
34:37The heavy water wagons were shunted on board
34:55The ferry set sail
35:02And as it approached the deepest part of the lake
35:11The ferry sank within five minutes, taking all the heavy water wagons with it
35:18It was the end of Hitler's dream of building an atomic bomb
35:25Throughout the operations against Hitler's atomic plans
35:28The radio spies continued to monitor the movements of German warships in Norwegian waters
35:36The battleship Tirpitz remained their major target
35:43And during 1942, the RAF made a number of bombing attacks on the ship
35:47None was successful in damaging her
35:56That autumn Tirpitz was based in a fjord near Trondheim
36:05The Royal Navy now came up with an ingenious plan to attack her using their new chariots
36:10Torpedoes with a two-man crew
36:12And a removable warhead
36:17To get the chariots close enough to their target
36:20They would be transported by one of the fishing boats of the Shetland bus
36:23The Arthur
36:25In command was one of the Norwegian Navy's most experienced skippers
36:30Leif Larsen
36:34The Arthur set out from the Shetlands in October
36:37With two chariots lashed to the deck
36:39And their Royal Navy crews hidden below
36:47Before reaching the entrance to Trondheim Fjord
36:50The chariots were lowered into the sea
36:52And towed below the Arthur
36:57As they proceeded up the 75-mile fjord
37:00A German patrol boat stopped and searched Larsen's vessel
37:05His forged papers passed scrutiny
37:08And the Arthur continued towards Trondheim
37:15But when they were less than 10 miles from their target
37:18The Arthur was hit by a sudden squall
37:20The chariots broke their toe and were lost
37:25All Larsen could do was scuttle his boat
37:27And set off by foot for Sweden
37:32All but one of the party eventually made it back to Britain
37:47And the other German warships in Norwegian waters
37:56And using their information, another attempt to cripple the Tirpitz was made in autumn 1943
38:02This time using midget submarines called X-Craft
38:12These succeeded in damaging her
38:14And the radio spies told London that she would be out of commission for six months
38:21A few weeks later their efforts were again rewarded
38:24On Christmas day in 1943
38:27The battlecruiser Scharnhorst sailed from Altenfjord
38:30And a signal from the radio spies alerted the British home fleet
38:41Scharnhorst was cornered while trying to attack a convoy off the North Cape
38:44And sunk
38:51Despite the disastrous sinking of the Scharnhorst
38:541944 opened well for the large German garrison in Norway
39:00Conditions were relaxed
39:01A far cry from the appalling defeats the Reich had suffered in Russia and the Mediterranean
39:07But their Führer remained convinced that Norway would be an Allied invasion target
39:12And as the date for their landing in France drew nearer
39:15The Allies were determined to keep him thinking that way
39:20As part of Operation Fortitude
39:22The elaborate deception plan to keep the Germans guessing about D-Day
39:26Radio trucks toured the Scottish Highlands broadcasting the radio traffic
39:30Of a fictitious army preparing to land in Norway
39:34The German garrison remained at full strength
39:37Even as the Allied troops boarded their landing craft for Normandy
39:46As they did so, the Norwegian radio spies were given a new and urgent job
39:51For the Allied landing was being threatened by storms sweeping in from the Atlantic
39:57Information about the weather patterns in Norway
39:59The German railway was urgently needed to predict whether D-Day could go ahead
40:04By now Olaf Reid Olsen was a much-wanted man
40:08With many aliases and a substantial price on his head
40:18But he was still in the field
40:20And had even managed to plug his secret transmitter into part of the National Electric Grid
40:36We had a message saying that the police would send weather reports every hour
40:42Well, it started every second hour, and then every hour
40:51This was done. The radio spies found it a tedious task
40:59But the reason why the information was so desperately needed soon became clear
41:05The weather reports was a pain in the neck
41:09Anyway, we were sitting and listening to the news
41:13And then suddenly we heard the invasion was on
41:16The radio spies had played a vital part in building up the picture of a brief lull between the unseasonal
41:22storms
41:23Which enabled General Eisenhower to give the go-ahead for the D-Day landings
41:26After a nail-biting 24-hour delay
41:31So, we were very proud to have sent weather reports
41:39As the Allied troops built up their bridgehead in Normandy
41:42And began to drive the Germans back
41:44The pressure was kept up in Norway to prevent any of the garrison from being moved south
42:00The air attacks on coastal convoys increased
42:12And the Norwegian motor torpedo boat flotilla based at Lerwick in the Shetlands
42:17Began to use more aggressive tactics
42:25The crews made frequent crossings of the North Sea
42:32On reaching Norway, they would hide up in a fjord
42:38The crews became expert at camouflaging their boats
42:43Local resistance men told them of shipping movements and provided other information about enemy activity
42:53Attacks from these hidden bases added to the pressure on the Germans
43:08But Tirpitz remained in being
43:11And the radio spies monitored the series of carrier-borne air attacks made on her during the spring and summer
43:16of 1944
43:30They were able to tell London that even though the fleet air-armed plane scored hits
43:35They were not sufficient to knock out the German battleship
43:56They were not sufficient to knock out the Germans
43:57Finally, in November 1944, Tirpitz was struck by RAF Lancaster bombers
44:01Using 12,000-pound Torboy bombs
44:08She rolled over and sank
44:24A threat that had obsessed the Royal Navy for almost three years was ended
44:29The destruction of the beast, as Churchill called Tirpitz
44:32Could not have been achieved without the intelligence provided by the Norwegian radio spies
44:44But all the while the Norwegians were only too aware that the Allied strategy was a direct advance into Germany
44:50across Northwest Europe
44:51The Nazi forces in Norway would be left to wither on the vine
44:55There would be no direct help for the resistance until German forces elsewhere surrendered
45:04Willorg increased its sabotage campaign
45:06One of their more imaginative projects was to contaminate fish bound for Germany
45:21Nevertheless, the war did come closer to Norway in the autumn of 1944
45:25When German forces in Finland began to withdraw through the far north of Norway
45:30Hotly pursued by the Russians
45:33As the Germans withdrew, they laid waste to the area
45:43A force of 350 Norwegians were sent from Britain to join the Russians
45:47And ensure that the inhabitants of the liberated area were not maltreated
45:59With the end of the fighting in Europe in May 1945
46:02Willorg's moment finally came
46:04Its 60,000 members took the surrender of the German garrison
46:08Now swollen to 365,000 men
46:11A single Norwegian in civilian clothes and wearing an armband
46:15took the surrender of the German garrison of Oslo
46:18And British airborne forces were quickly deployed to Norway
46:22To help disarm the Germans
46:34They were greeted by ecstatic crowds
46:39It had been a hard and frustrating five years
46:45Much of the work of the resistance in Norway
46:48Had been a secret and unglamorous war of the shadows
46:52But the intelligence provided by the radio spies
46:55And the efforts of the Norwegian special forces
46:58And the gallant men and women of Milorg
47:00Ensured that Norway played a substantial part
47:03In the ultimate Allied victory
47:05And the
47:20The
47:20The
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