Telemark

[sfc_darrel]

Fullbore Friday



Sadly, much of our WWII history is from clunky Technicolor movies decades old, or worse - even the very good movies are very American centric. If you make an effort though, there are a lot of good examples out there of those who took the initiative, who had the patience, and who had a focus on mission that should give all pause and ponder on how focused they are in their profession.

Norwegian warrior Birger Stronsheim just passed after living an example of how it is done right.

... four Norwegians became stranded in the area after British soldiers for whom they were doing advance work were captured, tortured and eventually killed. That first group hunkered down for the winter in an abandoned cabin, built a makeshift radio from a car battery and stolen fishing rods and began planning their own rescue and another assault on Norsk Hydro. They ate lichen that they scraped from rocks, killed an occasional reindeer for meat and vigilantly avoided detection by the occupying Germans.

The second effort would not fail. After parachuting to a plateau, the second group, some of whom grew up in the area, skied in subzero temperatures for several days before uniting with the four stranded soldiers. The combined group then made its way to the opposite side of a steep gorge from the Norsk Hydro facility. With the only bridge across guarded by Nazis, they descended to the bottom and climbed to the top on the other side.

Mr. Stromsheim was 31 at the time of the assault, the oldest member of the mission. He was particularly respected for his expertise in explosives and for his calm.

“We didn’t think about whether it was dangerous or not,” Joachim Ronneberg, the leader of the mission, recalled in an interview in The Telegraph of London in 2010. “We didn’t think about our retreat.”

A Norwegian caretaker, a civilian, was the only person in the room where the heavy water was produced and he quickly agreed to cooperate with the soldiers. Mr. Ronneberg said that setting the dynamite proved to be “easy,” but the men still worried that they would be detected at any moment. They lighted a 30-second fuse and ran.

“They didn’t reckon that they would get out alive,” Mr. Stromsheim’s son, also named Birger, recalled in an interview for this obituary. “They weren’t sure of that. They were scared in some ways, but there was no panic.”

Stormy conditions helped muffle the explosion inside the building, and the men made it safely back across the gorge before the Nazis realized what had happened. Nazis searched the area for days afterward, but no shots were fired and no one was hurt in the second mission. Many years later, experts determined that the Nazis were far from being able to build a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Stromsheim, who grew up skiing, hiking and bicycling, was among several soldiers who made it to safety by skiing more than 200 miles to Sweden.

Speaking of bad Techicolor history; yep, you've see it.

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I like how Birger put it,

“He saw that,” Mr. Stromsheim’s son said. “He didn’t like it. It was too glamorous.”

Here is a better telling.


Hat tip BR.

http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/20...friday_28.html

[sfc_darrel]

Birger Stromsheim

Birger Stromsheim , , who has died aged 101, was considered the greatest of the “Heroes of Telemark” who in 1943 launched a daring raid to destroy a crucial part of the Nazi atomic weapons programme.


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A scene from 'Heroes of Telemark' Photo: ITV/ REX FEATURES




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Birger Stromsheim
















6:28PM GMT 15 Nov 2012



Stromsheim, then 31, was the oldest of a team of six Norwegians trained by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted into the Telemark region, in southern Norway, to blow up the Norsk Hydro plant. Set atop an icy ravine at nearby Vemork, the plant produced heavy water, or deuterium oxide, that was central to German hopes of mastering the atomic chain reaction which would lead to a Nazi bomb.


An attempt had already been made to blow up the plant the previous October, when a separate four-man team of Norwegian commandos had been dropped in to Telemark as an advance party for 30 Royal Engineers.

But foul weather had led to a series of crashes as the British soldiers were towed into the area in gliders, with the result that some died instantly, and those who escaped were captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and eventually executed.


The failure had alerted the Nazis to potential sabotage plots, and as a result security was increased at Vemork: mines were laid and floodlights illuminated the only approach – a bridge across a 660ft ravine.


Such was Allied concern about the plant, however, that despite these measures, a second bid to destroy the plant was quickly prepared.

Operation Gunnerside, as it became known, was led by Joachim Ronneberg. Then aged just 23, he looked up for reassurance to Stromsheim, one of four explosives experts in the team and an expert skier who spoke good English and German. “Birger was the oldest man in the group and was almost like a father to us,” said Ronneberg. “He was a very calm and balanced person, who was extremely valuable.”


Just after midnight on February 17 1943 the Gunnerside team were dropped by parachute into Telemark, where they were to meet the surviving four-man Norwegian team from the previous autumn’s failed mission.


Once again, however, appalling weather intervened, and they landed 18 miles away from the drop zone. Stromsheim and his colleagues were forced to spend five days struggling through snowstorms and freezing temperatures on langlauf skis before finally meeting up with their compatriots.

Together they set off for Vemork at 8pm on February 27. The plant, perched at the top of a thickly-forested ravine, appeared impregnable, with Germans guarding the bridge that led to its entrance. The commandos, however, decided to climb down one side of the ravine, cross the icy River Maan at its base, and climb up the other side, following a railway track that led into the plant.

Arriving at the top of the ravine, a radio operator (Knut Haugland, who later took part in Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition) was left behind to report if anything went wrong, while the other nine abandoned their skis and began the perilous descent, frequently sinking up to their waists in the snow. It was close to midnight before they managed to get to the other side, tired and soaked to the skin.

Leaving another Gunnerside member, Hans Storhaug, with his Tommy-gun trained on the Germans guarding the bridge, the other eight began their assault on the plant. At exactly 30 minutes past midnight, one member of the party ran forward with bolt-cutters to force open the gate while Stromsheim and the six remaining saboteurs held back and provided cover.
Once the gate was opened, a covering party took up firing positions inside the plant while Stromsheim and the three other explosives experts headed through another gate to the basement door, behind which lay the electrolysis chambers that produced the crucial heavy water. This door was supposed to have been left open by a Norwegian mole who worked in the plant – but he had been too ill to go to work that day. Confronted by this unexpected barrier, the explosives team split into two pairs to look for other ways in.

Ronneberg and Fredrik Kayser found an entrance through a cable duct, crawling in to surprise a Norwegian caretaker, whom they held at gunpoint while they began to lay their charges. Meanwhile, Stromsheim and Kasper Idland had found a window at the back of the basement. Unaware that Ronneberg and Kayser were already in, Stromsheim decided they had no choice but to risk alerting the Germans by smashing their way through.

Ronneberg had laid half the necessary charges when he heard the sound of breaking glass. Kayser swung round with his Tommy-gun ready to fire before realising the noise came from their fellow saboteurs. Stromsheim helped place the remaining charges while Ronneberg laid the fuses.

Though they had initially planned to give themselves two minutes to get away, the risk of the German guards arriving was such that they instead placed 30-second Bickford fuses, despite knowing that this would not give them enough time to get clear of the plant before the explosion.

The tension was heightened further when, just as the fuses were being set, the caretaker announced that he had misplaced his glasses and refused to leave without them. Though desperate to make their escape, the commandos proceeded to spend precious moments in the search for the spectacles – which were soon located. The foolhardiness of this benevolence was demonstrated when they heard footsteps approaching – but fortunately it was another Norwegian civilian, who was ordered to put his hands above his head while the fuses were lit.

Kayser counted to 10 and then told the two civilians to run for their lives, while the raiders rushed out into the night. In the event they need not have worried. There was only a dull thud as the charges went off, too muffled to alert the guards, but it sent around 1000lbs of heavy water across the floor and down the drains, . “The explosion itself was not very loud,” recalled one of Stromsheim’s colleagues. “It sounded like two or three cars crashing in Piccadilly Circus.”

By the time the guards discovered what had happened, the Gunnerside team were already back across the gorge. Stromsheim, Ronneberg, Idland, Storhaug and Kayser then headed back into the snowstorms on a 250-mile cross-country ski to the safety of neutral Sweden.

Back in Britain, SOE chiefs would later deem Operation Gunnerside the most successful act of sabotage of the Second World War. For his part, Stromsheim was described in his military file by Ronneberg as “beyond doubt the best member of the party”.

Birger Edvin Martin Stromsheim was born in the central Norwegian port of Aalesund on October 11 1911 and worked as a building contractor before the war. He spent the early months of the German occupation building quarters for German soldiers but was determined to get to Britain to join the Special Operation Executive’s team of Norwegian commandos.

He and his wife Aase travelled by boat to the Shetlands in September 1941 and Birger Stromsheim was soon being trained at a succession of SOE bases in weapons’ handling and street-fighting.

The most important preparation he received was at Station XVII, the explosives-training base at Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire, where a full-scale model of the basement of the Norsk Hydro plant was built.
For his part in the raid, Stromsheim was awarded the British Military Medal; the Norwegian St Olav Medal; the US Medal of Freedom; and the French Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre. The success of Operation Gunnerside convinced the Nazis to relocate their heavy water project and move their remaining stores of potassium hydroxide, from which heavy water was distilled, away from Vemork. The chemical was loaded on a ferry, Hydro, but this was sunk by another Norwegian resistance operation, finally sealing the fate of Germany’s atomic weapons programme.

The events of the two operations were so daring that they was made into the film, The Heroes of Telemark (1965), starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris – though the participants were far from complimentary about Hollywood’s attention to detail.

Stromsheim subsequently took part in Operation Fieldfare, which in late 1943 and early 1944 sent him and other Norwegian commandos, including Ronneberg, back into Norway to disrupt German supply lines in the event of an Allied invasion.

After the war, Stromsheim returned to building and was involved in preparations for Norwegian “stay-behind” units in the event of a Soviet invasion of his country.

Birger Stromsheim’s wife predeceased him. He is survived by a son and a daughter.


Birger Stromsheim, born October 11 1911, died November 10 2012


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...tromsheim.html