January 14, 2025 • 49 mins
During WWII a perfectly-executed sabotage operation by British Special Operations and the Norwegian Resistance put a dent in the Nazi’s quest for an atomic bomb. Today, it’s unclear how effective it really was, but it’s still a heckuva story!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. And I guess it's a
new year because I just had the spirit of John
Strickland passed through me when I welcome everybody. Did you
hear that enthusiastic he.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah, a little bit of a well not a CoA.
I guess, just sort of an updating is this is
our first recording of the New Year, and we had
our longest break ever. You know, I think everyone knows
we take a nice long Christmas break, but this year
it stretched into November, and so we've been gone for
a long time. Yeah, And I'm like, do I even
(00:47):
know how to do this anymore?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah? Same here. I keep making this your sound whenever
I move.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Oh no, don't do that.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I can't help it. It's just I'm that rusty.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
And also this topic, it's good, but it's uh. We'll
try and keep it as streamlined and easy to understand
as possible. There's a lot of moving pieces, sure, and
there's a lot of Norwegian names that we've I still
don't know how to say the letter with like the
null set.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Uh. I think it's like a bum laut.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Is it? Okay? I mean I'm gonna treat him as zoomlouds.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as anomlout.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Okay, Okay, we're still gonna screw up some of this.
But don't worry about the names too much. You know,
we should just name everyone, you know, Bill one, Bill two,
Bill three.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Right or leaf tu.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
But anyway, we're gonna give it our best. Go. Welcome back,
my friend. I'm glad to be back in the studio
after this wonderful break.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Same here, man, same here. Welcome back yourself. So, yeah,
we're talking today about one of the more unsung operations
of World War Two. Unsung, I guess depending on where
you live. If you live in Norway, it's song all
over the place. It's like a top forty hit there.
It's sung so much.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
What is now? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, it took a little while, didn't it weirdly? Yeah,
But here in the US we don't know about it
as much because we were kind of tangential to it,
if at all. It was more a joint operation between
the Brits and the Norwegians. The Norwegian Resistance, we should say,
and the whole thing is called Operation Gunner Side. And
I have to say I want to give a big
(02:23):
thanks to one of our listeners, Matthew me malt Butuchard,
who suggested this one. I think back in November. Oh wow,
and it got it went right to the top of
the list. So here we are talking about it now
in January.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, I'm sure you got that email and you're like,
unsung saboteur story defeating the Nazis, but still my heart.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah. So the whole thing kind of starts off. I
think back in like nineteen thirty nine when some German
physicists figured out that you could split the atom through
fission and release a bunch of energy. And very very
quickly after that, physicists around the world were like, this
is really great. We can come up with a whole
new source of energy for it. This could also be
(03:06):
an extremely dangerous weapon. And right after that, World War
II started and the Allies started working on the bomb,
and they assumed that the Nazis were also working on
a bomb. So that's kind of like the mentality that
was going on with this story really starts.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah, I mean it was sort of a race to
see who could get there first. And I mean I
learned a lot researching this. I didn't know a lot
about a lot of this stuff, even though we've done
episodes about nuclear fission and the like. But there's more
than one way to skin a cat, as it turns out,
if you want to try and make a reaction big
(03:43):
enough to cause a big boom. And one of the
routes that was taken by well, not the Americans, I
guess the Germans were trying to take this route was
to use something called heavy water AKA how would you
say that? Deuterium oxide Okay, D two O, which is
(04:04):
like H two Oh, it's like regular water. This heavy
water is except instead of normal hydrogen atom, there as
an H twoo that is now replaced by hydrogen isotope deuterium,
which makes it literally heavier.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, and the reason why is because deuterium has a
neutron where hydrogen doesn't. That's the only difference. I mean,
it's still you could cook with it, you could bathe
in it. You probably wouldn't really notice any difference because
it's two atomic units heavier, so it's not like you
would like be crushed down to the shower floor, if
you had it running through your house or anything.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Or water balloon, fight the kid. The kid's using heavy.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
One exactly, given kids black eyes at that thing. Yeah. So,
but the reason that it was useful or is useful
still in nuclear reactions is because of that neutron that
it has. Right, So, when you carry out a nuclear
reaction that produces an explosion, you have an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
That's the one that where it just goes kaboom and
(05:04):
a huge amount of energy is released at once.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, that's the whole point.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yes, for the bomb part. But to make the stuff
that actually blows up, usually plutonium, you have to carry
out controlled nuclear reactions, and to make it controlled to
kind of bring some order to the chaos and slow
things down just enough that it will never explode, yet
it will still produce energy that you can use to
(05:30):
create plutonium. If you bash uranium with a bunch of neutrons,
you add a moderator, and heavy water is a moderator
because all those fast neutrons bouncing around will knock into
the heavy water and it will transfer energy to the
heavy water's neutrons, but it slows the process down. In
(05:51):
the same way. You couldn't use regular water because regular
water would be like, oh, thanks for the free neutron jump,
and turn into heavy water. I guess, so regular water
wouldn't work. Heavy water would work. The problem is is
heavy water's really really rare.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Yeah, it's super rare, and it takes a long time
to get just a little bit of it. I think
it's like, if you're just looking at a regular water source,
there's one deuterium oxide molecule for about every twenty million
regular ones. So it's not needle in a haystack territory
molecularly speaking, but it's not far off. The Germans went
(06:30):
the route of heavy water as their moderator. The Americans
looked around for a moderator, and they said, what about
Josh Clark. He's a pretty levelheaded guy.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I just show up with my note cards in a blazer.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
By the way, our first side track of the year.
I remember A reminded Ruby last night that we had
a TV show for the probably fifteenth time in her life,
and she's like, you did, And we tried again and
actually watched an entire episode which one we watched, the
one with John Hodgman, and also starring my neighbor Catherine,
(07:06):
which was the final episode. How we wrote it but
not the final episode and how it aired, right, We
won't get into that, but I have to say, dude,
you were like pretty good and a lot of that
as an actor, and I was not.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I disagree, you're always so hard on yourself. You were great, man.
You were at least as good as I was. And
that's to say you were middling.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
I think I think you're It's very nice of you
to say, but like from an I think I had
a real outside point of view. Last night. I was like,
you know, Josh was pretty good in a lot of this,
and Emily said he really was, And I said, I
never felt that comfortable and like I was doing a
good job like every once in a while I was okay,
But I think you had real possibilities as an actor.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It was probably from
a year spin as an emo drama kid.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
It was pretty good. Thanks and Ruby made it through
the episode and I was like, Hey, that's our neighbor
and that's John, you know John, so that I think,
you know, helped hold our interest a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, that was like the space one.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a good one. It
was was pretty good. So long way of saying, you
were not available as moderator because you weren't born yet.
So the US ended up pursuing graphite as a moderator.
Either one can be used. We went graphite. The Germans,
I guess we'll get to there the reason they went
(08:33):
with hard water toward the end, right, yes, and tag
that in the end, yeah, I think so. All right,
So anyway, hard water is what they're after. And as
it turns out, there was a chemist in Norway named
Leif Trunstad leaf t leaf tea, yeah exactly, who was
who understood how to find these molecules in the best
(08:57):
way possible because he was doing it for a different
reason there, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
So Tronstad was one of these early people who was like, hey,
this is weird and different and new, and we can
figure out how to get at least very small amounts
of it, and there's gotta be some cool uses for this,
like scientific, non weapony uses. And one of the ones
that he thought of very early on was used as
a tracer, which I guess you'd give somebody a glass
(09:24):
of heavy water and then you know, look at their
kidneys and see if there's heavy water coming out of
them and be like, well, there's your leak, right, that's
what I.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Think, Yeah, exactly. So that's why he was pursuing it.
And he was doing that for a company called Themork
Norse not Norst or Norse norsek with a k hydro plant,
and that was in the county of of course Telemark.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Right in the country of I guess Norway, right, sure, yeah,
look out a word like Norse confront of you. You're
talking Norway.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah. So he's at work producing a few milliliters of
that uh what like every day or so.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, from like leaders and leaders and gallons of water.
They would just get the tiniest amounts because I still
don't quite understand how they were doing it, but essentially
they were separating out this one and twenty million molecule
of heavy water from regular mountain water.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
That Norse black magic, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
So like the whole plant was originally a hydroelectric power plant,
and then they converted to using electrolysis to I think
create ammonia, which is very handy, and fertilizers and explosives,
and then it was Tronstadt, who was like, we need
to set up basically a separate heavy water operation. So
by the time World War two broke out, the plant
(10:46):
at Vermork I'm pretty sure I said that, right, Vermoork Invermindy, Sody,
ver Morek Invernment. Yeah, okay, it just took a second.
I was like, well, I'm going to laugh at it.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I was making sure I didn't screw something else up. Sorry,
that's a quality joke.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Thank you. By that time that plant was the world
leader in heavy water production.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
That's right, all right, So park that to the side.
They're producing heavy water at a rate no one had
ever seen, like a cupful of day. And World War
Two begins in nineteen thirty nine, and like I said,
the Germans were like, hey, we should try and get
on this heavy water train, and they didn't. This not
why they invaded Norway. They invaded Norway because they were Nazis.
(11:34):
Norway was neutral, had declared themselves neutral. But in April
nineteen forty they invaded Anyway and were defeated pretty quickly.
It took a couple of months, even though they had
help from the Allied so they were no match for
the German army and the Germans did as they do.
They established a Nazi government there, and the people did
(11:54):
not like that because they're Norwegian. They were like, no, no, no,
We're going to resist it, went on strike here in there.
They didn't cooperate in other ways to kind of just
you know, get in the way of progress of Nazi progress.
And so the Nazi says, all right, martial law has
been declared. If you resist, you will be put to death.
And so a lot of Norwegians left, obviously fought from
(12:19):
other places, and a lot of them said, you know what,
We're going to stay here and maybe work with the
Allies kind of undercover as moles.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Yeah, it's like a secret resistance, right, And one of
those people was Tronstad, at least at first, and then
it became clear that he basically needed to get out
of Dodge, so he ditched and went to I think
he went straight to the UK because after the Nazis
set up this program like it was, it was not
a pleasant place to be when they took over Norway
(12:48):
and the whole thing. Chuck reminded me of do you remember,
way way way early in the podcast, we stumbled upon Simohaya,
the White Death, the Finnish sniper who was just like
a farm boy who like I think, killed more Russians
than anybody else in the war. Yeah, I just remembered
sim Ohaya, so I thought i'd give him a shout out.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, but I'm surprised you called up that name. Nice work.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So but Leif Tronstad, he became like a really valuable
asset because this guy is like the world leader in
heavy water production, who has all of the inside dirt
on the place where the most heavy water is being produced.
And it's very clear now that the Nazis have taken
over this plant and stepped it up from like a
(13:35):
few millileters a day to like, I think a few
kilograms of heavy water a day, that they have designs
on making an atomic bomb. And then with the Allies,
the three words Nazi atomic bomb was among the most
frightening combination of words you could possibly come up with.
And even today you know, you're like, got a Nazi
(13:57):
atomic bomb, that'd be horrible, And then you remember, oh, yeah,
the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on population centers and
that was pretty bad too. Yet still, somehow Nazi atomic
bomb seems even worse.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, it does. So he, like you said, went to
the UK. There he met up in real life with
the intelligence people he'd been working with, you know, on
the down low from a long distance, which imagine was
a pretty fun meeting. They probably hit some tea and
caught up in person. And he started training these commando
(14:30):
units to be saboteurs to eventually do their their you know,
saboteur work in Norway, and the whole time was staying
in contact with his allies at the at the plant
there at Vmork and eventually, and we're just gonna say
these names again. I wish we could all nickname them
all to make it easier to keep up with. But
(14:52):
one of the guys there that he kept in touch with,
who will play it part in this story, is named
Ainar skinner Land. That's pretty easy. Yeah. Uh, swallow Blue
was his code name. And that feels like a pretty
good place for a break.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I think it is.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yes, all right, so we do remember how to do this,
and we'll be right back right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
I want to learn about a terris ort and call
it treadactyl, how to take a bergery, all about fractals
gone that's another hunt the Liz Plane everything. Word up, Jerry.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Chuck. Have you seen that movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
It's like a Newish guy ritchie movie. No, it's pretty good.
Actually all right, it's like an easy watch, like there's
it's not some big, huge sweeping epic or something you
have to really, you know, keep up with. It's just
a kind of an.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
In richie movie.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, right, well I would call Snatch kind of convoluted.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Oh well, sure with accents.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Sure, But there actually was something called the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare. That was the nickname for it. It was
called the Special Operations Executive officially, and they basically trained saboteurs.
So that's who Leif Tronstad threw his lot in with.
And one of the first things they did for the
Norwegians was send them to Scotland and have them train
(16:24):
in like extreme weather as much as they could. But
I'm thinking, like the Norwegians would be like, this is
this is like summer to us? What is this like
they I don't see why they would need to train
in Scotland, but trained they were. Yeah, And the reason
why they were trained for extreme weather and extreme conditions.
Because of the location of the the Mark power plant
(16:45):
or I guess heavy water plant. It was in a
really forbidding place that you would not want to go
to without like a car.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah, it was. It was tough. I would say, you'd
need one of those cool old army jeeps if you
wanted to get there. Back then, it was surrounded to
buy a plateau, a mountain plateau called here we go Hardanga,
Vita perfect. That's got to mean danger or something.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I think it actually means like wide mountain plateau.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Danger.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I looked. I looked it up because I thought so too.
I was like, that's got to be like the name
of a god that's going to kill you or something. Yeah,
it means it means high mountain plateau.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
I think Vita might be a plateau really uh maybe
hard danger. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
So wait so that Oh, what was the guy's name,
Ricky Uh, I can't remember, but he was saying, like
living the plateau loco, Oh God, Ricky Martin, Ricky Martin,
Ricky Martin from Menudo.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
That's right. Shout out to Bernudo. You knew that was coming.
I did not know they were going to make an appearance,
all right, So it was rounded by that mountain plateau.
It is a very very cold place. I think Livia
dug up this kind of old factoid. It freezes flames
in the fires, is how cold it was there, Not literally,
(18:13):
of course, but you know those Norwegians are with a
turn of a phrase. So Americans came in and they said,
why don't we just drop a bunch of bombs on
this plant? What's your problem with these saboteurs and they
said no. Tron said was like, we've got ammonia tanks there,
liquid ammonia. You're definitely going to kill a bunch of
civilians nearby. And all this stuff is underground, under concrete
(18:37):
and metal in these bunkers, and it probably wouldn't destroy
everything you wanted to destroy anyway. He also, you know,
didn't say this out loud, but was like, I don't
want you to destroy the only hard water plant we
have because this is a valuable thing, and all of
a sudden you would kind of own not the patent
but the process for that.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah, and after the war, who knows who's going to
need that stuff? So exactly, Yeah, it was a little
bit of national pride too, that was driving it, so
he actually talked him out of it. The Allies or
the Americans, I guess we're put off for a little while,
and they're like, all right, you go ahead and do
your little sabotage thing. Let's see how you do. So
that whole group of Norwegian resistance fighters was called Company
(19:18):
Ling and Company Ling I kind of made it over
as the group of trained saboteurs from the Special Operations Executive,
So Company Ling. They launched an operation Operation Grouse, great
operation name yeah, but they apparently that so he didn't
think so, because they renamed it Operation Swallow.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
And the whole thing was led by a guy named
Jens Anton Poulsen, which I think I nailed just then,
except it's Yen's man, I saidm I nailed it. No,
you had it except for that, but that's okay, okay.
So Yen's Anton Poulsen led I think three other resis
since fighters who parachuted back in Norway and essentially just
(20:04):
became backwoodsmen for months, setting up like a camp literally
in like a trapper's cabin, yeah, and lived off punting
reindeer and just basically became the first little toe hold
of this operation of Norwegian resistance fighters coming back to
sabotage the Behmark plant.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yes, exactly. So they're there, they set up their camp.
They're eating reindeer. It's very sad for reindeer.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Sad but delicious.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
You've never had reindeer, have you?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah? A couple of times.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Really No. I was about to say, where the heck
do you even get reindeer?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
I don't know. I'm shure that somebody sells reindeer meat
and like somewhere Weird, Missouri or something.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's people in Main right now.
They're like, you've never had reindeer.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
We always have someone across the pond here.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Right exactly. So about a month after that, they launched
another operation, Operation fresh Men, because they were like, these
guys are going to need some real, you know, some
muscle behind them.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
So they sent in two air gliders with thirty nine
British soldiers and they were just kind of coming in,
you know, behind them as back up. It did not
work out so well though. One of the planes crashed
into a mountain and killed everybody on board. The other
one crashed into the ground not where they were supposed
to land, but you know, a distance from that, and
(21:26):
it didn't kill everybody, but they, you know, they saw
this happen. The Gestapo found the survivors and executed them, yeah,
basically on the spot, and also found a map that
showed that they were headed for the hard water plant.
They didn't locate those original people, and they just sort
of stayed there, you know, hunkering down in that cabin
(21:46):
for a while and surviving undetected.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, so Operation Freshmen was, like you said it was.
The idea was just storm the heavy water plant, overwhelm it,
and blow it up. And they decided instead, okay, instead
of sending thirty nine soldiers with a ton of equipment
including bicycles, I read, we'll just try a more subtle touch.
So they went to man Joaquin Runeberg Nice who was
(22:15):
twenty three at the time, and they're like, you're you're
basically an old band in World War two standards, why
don't you lead a team for Operation Gunner Side? And
this is finally the operation that this whole episode is
based on. And it was a small tactical saboteur team
who went to the heavy water plant to destroy the
(22:37):
marks heavy water production capabilities.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I love this kind of thing. It's just the kind
of thing. And if you're thinking, man, why is it
there a movie about this? There was an older movie
with Kirk Douglas that I don't think, you know, set
the World on Fire. But I think this could go
for maybe a Guy Ritchie update totally. Yeah. I doubt
if he would do it after the other one, but
you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
I don't think he's opposed to making a sequel or reboot.
I mean, Snatch was basically Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels
done over again.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, he made a lot of several of those Sherlock
Holmes movies, I think.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Right, No, Lockstock and two Smoking Barrels. No, Oh, I see,
you were just trying to take a little side step
in the logical direction, right.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, that didn't fall first one back, Yep, there you go.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
So yeah, I think the first one was pretty good.
I don't know about the second one. Was that any good?
Speaker 3 (23:36):
I didn't see any of them.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
The first one was not bad if you don't let
yourself stop and think, like, who would have the audacity
to make sure Lock Holmes like a like a rough
and tumble action hero and just kind of give yourself
over to it. It's pretty good.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, and what you know, I can also recommend for kids,
especially younger girls and Nola Holmes you no, Loa Holmes
movies are pretty good.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Both of them are good.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah. I enjoyed those.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
We have to do with Sherlock Holmes episode at least
we haven't done that, No, not as far.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
As Yeah, we totally have to because I don't I
don't really know anything about much of that.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It's gonna be like our chess or our soccer episode,
though I have a.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Feeling other home homesy's that get upset.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
It's a whole hornet's nests. We're gonna stick.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
What are the what are the clown uh? What's the
clown band?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Uh? The insane clown posse?
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Yeah? But what other people called the Juggalos Juggalos? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
The guy who does my hair is a former Juggalo.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Ye. I think those are two. Where do you like
to hear together?
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Former Juggalo?
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Yeah? Yeah, it's like former homesy Yeah, after they leave
that world behind.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You know, hey, I don't think the other part. Let
you leave that world behind?
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Oh boy, it's threatening.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
So where were we Chuck.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, we are at Operation Gunner side. This guy Runberg.
He didn't know even why that plant was a target.
They basically just said, here, old Chap, we want you
to go destroy some pipes at the plant, and the
people that tried before you all died and you might
as well pip. Yeah, that's basically it. That's all the
(25:19):
information he had. But he was a game. He was
that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah. I mean they accepted cyanide pills as part of
this operation, and yeah, they had no idea what they
were doing. They just knew they had to go blow
up some pipes and that was that. Likes how dedicated
these people were that they were willing to sacrifice their
life to try to blow up some pipes because the
Brits told them it was going to help cripple the
Nazi war effort. So I think there was five of
(25:45):
them that parachuted in just like the Operation Swallow people
had before, but they were miles miles away from the
landing site. They just maybe got blown off course or
something like that, and it took them five days of
trudging through the snow, though I think they might have
had skis to find the operations swallow people who'd been
(26:05):
sitting there eating reindeer the whole time. And even when
they found them in this trapper's cabin and hooked up
with them, and now there's nine people in this operation.
They were still forty miles away from the heavy water plant.
And again it's like snowy in February in Norway.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
You can just imagine, yeah, yeah, there's a suspension bridge,
there's one way you get through, but of course they
had Nazi guards there, so that wasn't the best route.
The other options were like a literal minefield or I guess,
mine forest that they could have crossed through at great peril.
Or they could hike all the way down into the
(26:43):
gorge which had like a half frozen river running through it,
and then go to the plant that way and then
hike back up. And so they said they took a boat,
I guess, and they said minefield, no good, Nazis on
the bridge, no good. Let's just get on our skis
as we do and hike down that gorge. And that's
(27:03):
how they did it. We did need to mention one
little side thing that we've failed to mention is that
before this all happened, when Runberg was I guess, debriefed
and sort of getting his act together to go. He
went into a hardware store and apparently on a whim,
as the story goes, bought some heavy duty bolt cutters,
(27:24):
like metal bolt cutters, and to just park that right there,
because you know, if you introduce bolt cutters, I guess
in this case Act two, you know they're going to
cut something in Act three. Right, So he's got those
bolt cutters, and they decide to go down into the
gorge as their route to the hard water plant.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, and again not just going down into a gorge,
crossing a half frozen river and climbing up a cliff
get to the top of the gorge on the other
side where the heavy water plant was. And apparently that
route was such an unlikely route that the Nazis didn't
even bother guarding the gorge.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
No nobody would go down there exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
So February twenty seventh they made it for the forty
miles to their target. I think it was the night,
like right before midnight. This team of nine saboteurs from
Company Linya, the Norwegian Resistance are sitting there outside of
the the Mark power plant, figuring out exactly how they're
(28:23):
going to get in, and they decided that they would
split up. There were five of them and as they
were sitting outside, they were faced with their first obstacle,
which was a fence. And apparently the Brits had said,
there's a fence, so here's a handsaw. And the guy
who was in charge, who was it, Runberg? Yeah, yeah,
his second in command Canute hawk Lead. We're like running
(28:48):
through these Norwegian.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Names many that sounds pretty good to me.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Okay, so and I know it's Canute. I always thought
it was newt but it's Canute. As I watched this
cool little Nova special and he was interviewed and they
definitely said Canute. He said, Runberg, don't you have some
bolt cutters?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Right?
Speaker 2 (29:06):
And Rumberg gave him the bull cutters and instead of
this loud, tedious, laborious hack saw that they would have
tried to use and probably gotten caught using, they just
snipped right through the fence in a few minutes thanks
to Rumberg's foresight back in Cambridge.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
That's right, snip snip, so that pade off pretty quickly.
Much more that was still out too well. I think
I got the saying wrong if you introduce bulcutters in
neck two, they're gonna snip something in nect two. Yeah,
they're on the property now, five of the people, five
of the nine provide cover the other two. And they
had tommy guns, they had chloroform. They were set for
(29:43):
an attack if need be, and they were keeping a
watch on like the barracks because there weren't like, you know,
hundreds of German soldiers. I get the idea if they
were going in with the initial twenty nine that it
was probably a couple of dozen maybe. I mean, that's
just a guess.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
I don't even know if was that many. I mean,
as important as this heavy water plant was, so the
atomic program in Germany, Yeah, it was so remote that
they were just like, you know, I think it's going
to take a few people. We got mines, there's a gorge,
we got people on the bridge. It's fine.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they were keeping a watch on
the barracks, they were keeping a watch on that bridge
for the guardsmen there, and just sort of waiting around
for any you know, activity, so they could get those
tommy guns out or maybe silently chloroform and Nazi, which
was a dream a Norwegian saboteur.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
You know, they want to do that.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
So yeah, so the other four guys split into two pairs.
They each had and I get the idea, they split
up in case and they each had enough to like
blow it up in case, like two of them got
caught or killed, the other two could still complete the job. Right.
They got in through a second gate, and they had
(30:52):
arranged with one of the co workers there to I guess,
you know, one of the inside moles, to leave a
cellar door open. But unfortunate only that person called in
sick that day, and I guess didn't seem to think like, hey,
I had this important other task right to do. And
Tron's dad had previously told him though, like if you
can't get in that way, there's a cable shaft you
(31:12):
can probably slip through. And that's what they ended up using.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
I's want to circle back and emphasize the fact that
this man was a lynch pin to a sabotage plan.
All he had to do was show up to work
and leave a door open.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
He could have gone home right after that, yeah, and
been like I just threw up at the get out of.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Here, right, And my guess this is nineteen forty three.
There's an eighty five percent chance that his illness was
a severe hangover, which makes it even worse. Yeah, probably
so so yeah, luckily, yes, they found that that hatch
was opened in the cable shaft and they basically slid through.
The two who made it through the cable cheft was Runberg,
(31:51):
the leader, Yeah, and a guy named Frederick Frederick Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Kaiser, Yeah, Frederick Frederick Frederick.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah, eat your heart out. Frederick's it's probably Frederk. Yeah,
would be my guest. I like Frederk. That's how we
say it in America. Anyway, Kaiser and Rumberg they were
the ones who went down this cable shaft and they
start getting busy. I think Kaiser was holding it. Go
They're like, we have some extra time, it's right, go ahead.
(32:24):
So they yes, and they went down a shaft even
as well, and so almost immediately they found a watchman
I take him to be a Norwegian watchman maybe, and
they were like, you know, you're now our hostage. Sit
there and be quiet, and he's like, no problem, you
guys do whatever you want. And despite his complicity, Kaiser
(32:45):
was like, this is my one chance, and so he
chloroformed the watchman anyway, And so as he's doing this,
Rumberg went and planted the explosives on the pipes, just
as he was told to do. And right about then,
all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's a explosion
of glass as a window shatters, and Rumberg and Kaiser
(33:05):
and the chloroform guard I'll turn and look, and the
other two men from the other explosives team come in
through the window.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
That's right. They're like, it's just us, guys, We're all
here together, so we can get this thing bombed up quicker.
They set up those explosives, the four of them, I guess,
at this point, and the fuses at the time were
two minute fuses that would have given enough time to
get the heck out of there. Runberg said, no, I
really want to make sure we hear this thing go off.
(33:34):
So we're going to go down to thirty seconds. I
imagine everyone said, oh, how about a minute? He said, no,
thirty seconds is plenty. So they're getting ready to light
the fuses. The guard that they had at gunpoint said,
can I get those glasses? Yeah? You know, if they
blow up, my optometrists has quit and retired. I'm not
(33:54):
going to be able to replace those things very easily,
so they said, sure, get your glasses, and at that
point another civilian employee Norwegian obviously comes into the room
and is now another temporary prisoner. Runeberg lights those uses
counts to ten, which means they only have twenty seconds,
(34:15):
and then says run to the two civilians. They get
the heck out of there as well. I reckon in
the movie, guy Ritchie would really have to sort of
fudge things, because what is not exciting in a movie
like this is when is all you hear? And that's
kind of all they heard. It wasn't a huge explosion.
It's not like they were blowing up this entire plant
(34:37):
like he would probably do in a movie. They were
just trying to damage these pipes, and he said that
later on, he said they heard a tiny, insignificant pop.
Also because it was underground under that concrete and stuff.
Windows did break though, enough at least to rouse some
sleeping Nazis. This part is very movie like because the
four that were guarding kind of watched as half dressed
(35:00):
Nazi gets out and was like, oh, do I hear anything?
Do I hear anything? But apparently that was a pretty
noisy plant. So he just goes back to bed.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
I can't help but imagining like a Sergeant Schultz type, yeah,
stumbling out totally. So, yeah, it wasn't a big deal.
And as a matter of fact, I mean it turned
out to be a big deal, but like, yeah, it
didn't cause like that huge explosion where guards start coming
out of nowhere and you know, there's alarms going off
and searchlights coming on. It wasn't anything like that. And
(35:29):
in fact, all nine people who were the saboteurs in
this operation got away. They escaped scott free, and in retrospect,
not a single bullet was fired and not a single
person died in this highly successful, amazingly daring sabotage operation.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
That's right, but that is not the end of the story.
So maybe we should take our second break, yes, and
we'll come back and finish up right after this.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
I want to learn about a terror sort and college
fred actl how to take a berg fractal gink is gone.
That's a little hunt.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
The boarder murders and they kind of all rung on
the slane.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
Everything sport up. Jerry.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
All right, So, as you said, the saboteurs got away.
I think one of them, Poulsen, took off to Scotland
by sea. Runenberg and the and the rest of the
gang stayed on their skis as the Norwegians do. They
skid about two hundred miles, which is like nothing for them.
They skid to Sweden. In fact, with Nazis chasing them,
(36:42):
they had planes above trying to locate them. Like that
part would be a pretty good part of the movie,
I guess. But they got away, and there was a
German head of the German special forces in Norway who
called it the most splendid coup. However, it only took
a few months before where the Nazis were able to
(37:02):
restart production at the plant. I think this happened in February,
so in May of that same year they had ramped
back up to full capacity, which seems like a big disappointment.
But no, because here come the Americans with their initial
plan to just bomb the plant, and just like they
were warned, it did not do a ton of damage
to anyone but the twenty two Norwegian civilians who were killed.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah, Like this heavy water plant was in this basement
of a power plant, so it was not easy to
get to as far as like aerial bombs are.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Concerned, especially the bombs back then, you know, yeah for real.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
But the thing is it did show the Nazis that like, hey,
this remote, isolated, actually surprisingly vulnerable plant. Yeah, that's like
the one source of our heavy water. We should probably
stop creating heavy water there and move the operations to Germany. Yeah,
so they did. Remember the Nazi heavy water program is
(38:03):
set back a few months, and this is at a
time where the Allies are racing in the Manhattan Project
to create the atomic bomb. Assuming the Nazis are in
the same race as them. The Allies understand that we
can do this in like two three years. So to
set back a Nazi atomic program three months is an
(38:23):
enormous setback in a two or three year race to
become the first to come up with an atomic bomb.
So from that standpoint, even at the time, they were like,
that was a very successful operation, even though, like you said,
the Nazis got back up to full full capacity in
just a couple of months. But as we said, they
were moving everything to Germany, and I guess the company
(38:44):
linga crew, the Norwegian freedom fighters, they were keeping an
eye on all the movements of the heavy water from
I guess they're moles inside the heavy water plant, and
they knew that the Nazis were going to move the
heavy water, when they were going to do it, and
how they were going to do it.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
That's right. So they come up with another plan to
further thwart their efforts, and they determined the best way
to do this was to sabotage the ferry that's going
to be ferrying everything over to Germany. So they knew
it would cost some civilian lives, but they figured that
was their best chance to get it before it even
had a chance to get set up again. An old
Canute is back on the scene. He was the second
(39:26):
in command there at Gunnerside, if you remember, and he
was leading the team this time. He had been promoted,
I guess. And in February nineteen forty four, they set
off explosions on the bow of that ship. It was
a ferry called the Hydro, and fourteen Norwegian sadly were killed,
along with four Germans, and this again was a big success.
(39:49):
For a long time, they weren't even positive that there
was heavy or they couldn't prove at least that there
was heavy water on board and there was a German
heavy water expert after the war that said, no, those
were just those dummies. Dummy and I guess to try
and undermine the idea that it was a success. But
PBS Nova to the rescue. In two thousand and three,
(40:09):
they organized a salvage of one of those barrels from
that sunken ferry and they proved that it contained heavy water.
So it was a great success after all.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
That was the Nova mini documentary. I watched. It was
really good. Yeah, but one of the things that they
covered that the reason why the Allies were like, maybe
those were dummies, is that there were reports of survivors
of that fairy sinking, that barrels have been floating, like
some people were trying to like climb onto the barrels
to survive. They're like, heavy water's not supposed to float
(40:39):
in regular water, and so they were like, it's possible
that this was a decoy because also intelligence showed that
some heavy water did arrive in Germany. Well, it turns out,
thanks to this Nova special I'm about to spoil it,
that those barrels that floated were the most pure form
of heavy water that they had mark the barrels weren't full,
(41:02):
and so the air inside the barrels was making them float.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yes, so it was heavy water that they sabotage. They
did put a dent in the amount of heavy water.
I think there was a fifteen ton shipment and the
Germans were only able to collect I think the four
that were floating. So it was a big deal too.
But again, eighteen people lost their lives, for fourteen of
them innocent Norwegians.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, And I think that's that's actually something they wrestle
with in the Nova documentary because they interview some of
these people we've talked about, and they know they're trying
to reconcile their guilt with the how impactful the mission was,
especially living for decades with that gnawing rumor in the
back of their head that those had been dummy barrels.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
Yeah, and it resulted in the loss of so many,
you know, civilian lives.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah. So I think they were quite relieved to find
that it really was heavy water. And still there's debate
today over even with the success of Gunner Side, was
the success of that Swallow group thinking of the hydro ferry,
how much of an impact it really had on Germany's
atomic program, and in fact, how much of a program
(42:12):
Germany had during World War two to build an atomic bomb.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Yeah, for sure. The official historian of the s oe
H M. R. D. Foot Great Name said that it
changed the course of the war. The fact that they
were denied that that regular, steady supply of heavy water
really put a dent in their operation. Olivia Various Stutey
points out another factor was that key scientists were a
(42:41):
lot of them were Jewish scientists that the Nazis were using,
and they either escaped or were murdered, which also slowed
down the You know, the Germans pursued of the bomb,
but also I think you found out too that was it.
The Germans U regretted pursuing heavy water.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Was that what it was instead of so they were
basically they took a wrong turn right out of the
gate with what they chose as a moderator. I think, like,
did you say earlier that the United States chose graphite.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Right, Yeah, we used graphight. They went with heavy water,
which was a mistake.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Yeah. Well they're both really great moderators. But graphite is
available in abundance. You can find it anywhere, right, sure,
heavy water is really hard to come by, so right
out of the gate, the Germans chose a moderator that
was really difficult to get and that there was only
one place basically in the world that was producing it,
whereas the Americans just went out and bought a bunch
(43:37):
of graphite at the grocery store basically to use their moderator.
So right away that first hurdle the Americans overcame the
Germans ran into. And the most interesting thing is it
was based on a miscalculation.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, that's right. If they had have calculated correctly, then
they would have known from the beginning, right.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah. So I think whoever conducted I can't remember their
but they conducted experiments on the viability of graphite as
a moderator, and they basically forgot to carry a one
or something. I think what it really was is they
didn't factor in the influence of impurities in their graphite sample,
and they concluded that graphite wasn't a very good moderator,
(44:17):
so let's use heavy water instead. So essentially, even before
the program started, the Nazi atomic program was just dead,
like dead in the water. Basically, yeah, got to carry
that ice, yes, but the Allies didn't know this, And
it turns out that just the idea that the Nazis
were involved in heavy water production suggested that they were
(44:40):
after an atomic bomb and that the Allies then were
in a foot race against them, and that led to
the creation of an actual atomic bomb. So the Nazis
directly influenced the production of an atomic bomb, even though
it wasn't theirs.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
The Nazis being involved in heavy water production sounds like
some sort of weird October fet slogan.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
It'd be like, what does this mean. They'd be like,
just drink this huge gallony here show.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
I mentioned that film nineteen sixty five's The Heroes of
Telemark with Kirk Douglas as sort of a mashed up
fictional character based on both Ronenberg and tron Stadt, that,
like I said, wasn't like the biggest film ever, but
it wasn't an American film. So we did know about this
operation more than they did in Norway until like twenty fifteen.
(45:33):
State broadcaster NRK ran a mini series called The Heavy
Water War in twenty fifteen, and that's when a lot
of Norwegian's kind of first learned of this operation. And
if we're talking tron Statt, we want to button up
his story. You feel bad for this guy because he
didn't get to parachute in and actually have feet on
the ground for this kind of thing. He finally got
(45:53):
to do that kind of thing in October of nineteen
forty four. He got under that parachute for Operation Sunshine,
which was, you know, protecting Norway's some of their industrial
assets and infrastructure from German saboteurs as the Nazis were
on their way out. So he got his hands dirty,
(46:14):
which he'd always wanted to do. But very sadly the
following May I believe in nineteen forty five, he was
shot dead by the brother of a Norwegian collaborator who
he was questioning, so he tragically died as well.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Yeah, which is sad. At least he didn't get to
get to oversee and fly in on Operation Sunshine.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
I wonder if he got to use any chloroform.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Maybe so, Chuck, I think that's it for the Norwegian
sabotage Operation Gunner Side. We haven't figured out what we're
going to name this episode.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
I like Olivia's title.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Oh man, it's one of the better ones.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
You want to go ahead and tell everyone. Yes, she
titled this article like water for nazis pretty great sense
of humor. Yeah, really good.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Well, thanks Olivia for that, and thanks to you for listening.
And how about we set up a listener mail so
I can thank that person too.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
That's right. This is from Justin Meeks about Tavern on
the Green. Hey, guys, and this shows you how long
we've been off, because I've been hold on to this one.
My grandma had a wonderful related story to Tavern on
the Green. She was from rural Montana and travels to
New York in the late nineties with a group of
old ladies over Thanksgiving. One of her traveling group actually
(47:31):
had sold David Letterman his Montana ranch, so they went
to a taping of a show and he invited them backstage.
He found out they were going to be in town
for Thanksgiving and invited them to have Thanksgiving dinner with
him at Tavern on the Green. What wow, Yeah, Grandma
said that was one of the first Thanksgivings she could
remember that she didn't eat turkey dinner because at Tavern
on the Green they had to order their steak and lobster,
(47:53):
especially because Letterman was paying for it. Grandma never missed
an episode of Letterman even before this certainly never did
it afterwards. Letterman is seriously a great dude, and love
that Grandma got to meet one of our heroes like this.
Thanks for the many years of the podcast, Keep up
the great work, Come back and see us in Denver.
That is from Justin Meeks and Justin We're gonna head
(48:13):
back to Denver at some point, but we should probably
tell people since we're getting emails that we are not
doing live shows in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, including sketch Fest. We've gotten a lot of emails
from people who's like the sketch Fest schedules wrong because
it doesn't have stuff you should know on there, right,
And yes, we're sorry to inform me we're not going
to be at sketch Fest for what the first time.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
In like many years, ten years maybe or something. Yeah,
we're just taking it down yere from doing live shows.
We're gonna we're gonna be back out there again, so
fear not. We're just taking it down here. And that's
like four less trips that we're gonna take and we're
gonna be with our family. And that's a decision we
made that we feel good about.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, and ironically I just reached diamond status for twenty
twenty five.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Oh, I've never been diamond.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
I couldn't believe it. I got the email and I
forwarded it to you me. I was like, well, now
I know it's going to be written on my headstone.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
Yeah, and I'll be buried next to you and it'll
just say sadly peaked at platinum.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
What else? Man?
Speaker 3 (49:14):
That's it?
Speaker 2 (49:14):
Okay, Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
To Justin Meeks.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Justin Meeks, whose grandma has a great story and who
I assume did not go on to become Letterman stalker.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
Right, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
If you want to be like Justin and email is
a pretty cool story about David Letterman, or otherwise, you
can send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. And I guess it's a
new year because I just had the spirit of John
Strickland passed through me when I welcome everybody. Did you
hear that enthusiastic he.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah, a little bit of a well not a CoA.
I guess, just sort of an updating is this is
our first recording of the New Year, and we had
our longest break ever. You know, I think everyone knows
we take a nice long Christmas break, but this year
it stretched into November, and so we've been gone for
a long time. Yeah, And I'm like, do I even
(00:47):
know how to do this anymore?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah? Same here. I keep making this your sound whenever
I move.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Oh no, don't do that.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I can't help it. It's just I'm that rusty.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
And also this topic, it's good, but it's uh. We'll
try and keep it as streamlined and easy to understand
as possible. There's a lot of moving pieces, sure, and
there's a lot of Norwegian names that we've I still
don't know how to say the letter with like the
null set.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Uh. I think it's like a bum laut.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Is it? Okay? I mean I'm gonna treat him as zoomlouds.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as anomlout.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Okay, Okay, we're still gonna screw up some of this.
But don't worry about the names too much. You know,
we should just name everyone, you know, Bill one, Bill two,
Bill three.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Right or leaf tu.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
But anyway, we're gonna give it our best. Go. Welcome back,
my friend. I'm glad to be back in the studio
after this wonderful break.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Same here, man, same here. Welcome back yourself. So, yeah,
we're talking today about one of the more unsung operations
of World War Two. Unsung, I guess depending on where
you live. If you live in Norway, it's song all
over the place. It's like a top forty hit there.
It's sung so much.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
What is now? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, it took a little while, didn't it weirdly? Yeah,
But here in the US we don't know about it
as much because we were kind of tangential to it,
if at all. It was more a joint operation between
the Brits and the Norwegians. The Norwegian Resistance, we should say,
and the whole thing is called Operation Gunner Side. And
I have to say I want to give a big
(02:23):
thanks to one of our listeners, Matthew me malt Butuchard,
who suggested this one. I think back in November. Oh wow,
and it got it went right to the top of
the list. So here we are talking about it now
in January.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, I'm sure you got that email and you're like,
unsung saboteur story defeating the Nazis, but still my heart.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah. So the whole thing kind of starts off. I
think back in like nineteen thirty nine when some German
physicists figured out that you could split the atom through
fission and release a bunch of energy. And very very
quickly after that, physicists around the world were like, this
is really great. We can come up with a whole
new source of energy for it. This could also be
(03:06):
an extremely dangerous weapon. And right after that, World War
II started and the Allies started working on the bomb,
and they assumed that the Nazis were also working on
a bomb. So that's kind of like the mentality that
was going on with this story really starts.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah, I mean it was sort of a race to
see who could get there first. And I mean I
learned a lot researching this. I didn't know a lot
about a lot of this stuff, even though we've done
episodes about nuclear fission and the like. But there's more
than one way to skin a cat, as it turns out,
if you want to try and make a reaction big
(03:43):
enough to cause a big boom. And one of the
routes that was taken by well, not the Americans, I
guess the Germans were trying to take this route was
to use something called heavy water AKA how would you
say that? Deuterium oxide Okay, D two O, which is
(04:04):
like H two Oh, it's like regular water. This heavy
water is except instead of normal hydrogen atom, there as
an H twoo that is now replaced by hydrogen isotope deuterium,
which makes it literally heavier.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, and the reason why is because deuterium has a
neutron where hydrogen doesn't. That's the only difference. I mean,
it's still you could cook with it, you could bathe
in it. You probably wouldn't really notice any difference because
it's two atomic units heavier, so it's not like you
would like be crushed down to the shower floor, if
you had it running through your house or anything.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Or water balloon, fight the kid. The kid's using heavy.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
One exactly, given kids black eyes at that thing. Yeah. So,
but the reason that it was useful or is useful
still in nuclear reactions is because of that neutron that
it has. Right, So, when you carry out a nuclear
reaction that produces an explosion, you have an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.
That's the one that where it just goes kaboom and
(05:04):
a huge amount of energy is released at once.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, that's the whole point.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yes, for the bomb part. But to make the stuff
that actually blows up, usually plutonium, you have to carry
out controlled nuclear reactions, and to make it controlled to
kind of bring some order to the chaos and slow
things down just enough that it will never explode, yet
it will still produce energy that you can use to
(05:30):
create plutonium. If you bash uranium with a bunch of neutrons,
you add a moderator, and heavy water is a moderator
because all those fast neutrons bouncing around will knock into
the heavy water and it will transfer energy to the
heavy water's neutrons, but it slows the process down. In
(05:51):
the same way. You couldn't use regular water because regular
water would be like, oh, thanks for the free neutron jump,
and turn into heavy water. I guess, so regular water
wouldn't work. Heavy water would work. The problem is is
heavy water's really really rare.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Yeah, it's super rare, and it takes a long time
to get just a little bit of it. I think
it's like, if you're just looking at a regular water source,
there's one deuterium oxide molecule for about every twenty million
regular ones. So it's not needle in a haystack territory
molecularly speaking, but it's not far off. The Germans went
(06:30):
the route of heavy water as their moderator. The Americans
looked around for a moderator, and they said, what about
Josh Clark. He's a pretty levelheaded guy.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I just show up with my note cards in a blazer.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
By the way, our first side track of the year.
I remember A reminded Ruby last night that we had
a TV show for the probably fifteenth time in her life,
and she's like, you did, And we tried again and
actually watched an entire episode which one we watched, the
one with John Hodgman, and also starring my neighbor Catherine,
(07:06):
which was the final episode. How we wrote it but
not the final episode and how it aired, right, We
won't get into that, but I have to say, dude,
you were like pretty good and a lot of that
as an actor, and I was not.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
I disagree, you're always so hard on yourself. You were great, man.
You were at least as good as I was. And
that's to say you were middling.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
I think I think you're It's very nice of you
to say, but like from an I think I had
a real outside point of view. Last night. I was like,
you know, Josh was pretty good in a lot of this,
and Emily said he really was, And I said, I
never felt that comfortable and like I was doing a
good job like every once in a while I was okay,
But I think you had real possibilities as an actor.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It was probably from
a year spin as an emo drama kid.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
It was pretty good. Thanks and Ruby made it through
the episode and I was like, Hey, that's our neighbor
and that's John, you know John, so that I think,
you know, helped hold our interest a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, that was like the space one.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a good one. It
was was pretty good. So long way of saying, you
were not available as moderator because you weren't born yet.
So the US ended up pursuing graphite as a moderator.
Either one can be used. We went graphite. The Germans,
I guess we'll get to there the reason they went
(08:33):
with hard water toward the end, right, yes, and tag
that in the end, yeah, I think so. All right,
So anyway, hard water is what they're after. And as
it turns out, there was a chemist in Norway named
Leif Trunstad leaf t leaf tea, yeah exactly, who was
who understood how to find these molecules in the best
(08:57):
way possible because he was doing it for a different
reason there, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
So Tronstad was one of these early people who was like, hey,
this is weird and different and new, and we can
figure out how to get at least very small amounts
of it, and there's gotta be some cool uses for this,
like scientific, non weapony uses. And one of the ones
that he thought of very early on was used as
a tracer, which I guess you'd give somebody a glass
(09:24):
of heavy water and then you know, look at their
kidneys and see if there's heavy water coming out of
them and be like, well, there's your leak, right, that's
what I.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Think, Yeah, exactly. So that's why he was pursuing it.
And he was doing that for a company called Themork
Norse not Norst or Norse norsek with a k hydro plant,
and that was in the county of of course Telemark.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Right in the country of I guess Norway, right, sure, yeah,
look out a word like Norse confront of you. You're
talking Norway.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
Yeah. So he's at work producing a few milliliters of
that uh what like every day or so.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, from like leaders and leaders and gallons of water.
They would just get the tiniest amounts because I still
don't quite understand how they were doing it, but essentially
they were separating out this one and twenty million molecule
of heavy water from regular mountain water.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
That Norse black magic, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
So like the whole plant was originally a hydroelectric power plant,
and then they converted to using electrolysis to I think
create ammonia, which is very handy, and fertilizers and explosives,
and then it was Tronstadt, who was like, we need
to set up basically a separate heavy water operation. So
by the time World War two broke out, the plant
(10:46):
at Vermork I'm pretty sure I said that, right, Vermoork Invermindy, Sody,
ver Morek Invernment. Yeah, okay, it just took a second.
I was like, well, I'm going to laugh at it.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I was making sure I didn't screw something else up. Sorry,
that's a quality joke.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Thank you. By that time that plant was the world
leader in heavy water production.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
That's right, all right, So park that to the side.
They're producing heavy water at a rate no one had
ever seen, like a cupful of day. And World War
Two begins in nineteen thirty nine, and like I said,
the Germans were like, hey, we should try and get
on this heavy water train, and they didn't. This not
why they invaded Norway. They invaded Norway because they were Nazis.
(11:34):
Norway was neutral, had declared themselves neutral. But in April
nineteen forty they invaded Anyway and were defeated pretty quickly.
It took a couple of months, even though they had
help from the Allied so they were no match for
the German army and the Germans did as they do.
They established a Nazi government there, and the people did
(11:54):
not like that because they're Norwegian. They were like, no, no, no,
We're going to resist it, went on strike here in there.
They didn't cooperate in other ways to kind of just
you know, get in the way of progress of Nazi progress.
And so the Nazi says, all right, martial law has
been declared. If you resist, you will be put to death.
And so a lot of Norwegians left, obviously fought from
(12:19):
other places, and a lot of them said, you know what,
We're going to stay here and maybe work with the
Allies kind of undercover as moles.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Yeah, it's like a secret resistance, right, And one of
those people was Tronstad, at least at first, and then
it became clear that he basically needed to get out
of Dodge, so he ditched and went to I think
he went straight to the UK because after the Nazis
set up this program like it was, it was not
a pleasant place to be when they took over Norway
(12:48):
and the whole thing. Chuck reminded me of do you remember,
way way way early in the podcast, we stumbled upon Simohaya,
the White Death, the Finnish sniper who was just like
a farm boy who like I think, killed more Russians
than anybody else in the war. Yeah, I just remembered
sim Ohaya, so I thought i'd give him a shout out.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Yeah, but I'm surprised you called up that name. Nice work.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
So but Leif Tronstad, he became like a really valuable
asset because this guy is like the world leader in
heavy water production, who has all of the inside dirt
on the place where the most heavy water is being produced.
And it's very clear now that the Nazis have taken
over this plant and stepped it up from like a
(13:35):
few millileters a day to like, I think a few
kilograms of heavy water a day, that they have designs
on making an atomic bomb. And then with the Allies,
the three words Nazi atomic bomb was among the most
frightening combination of words you could possibly come up with.
And even today you know, you're like, got a Nazi
(13:57):
atomic bomb, that'd be horrible, And then you remember, oh, yeah,
the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on population centers and
that was pretty bad too. Yet still, somehow Nazi atomic
bomb seems even worse.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, it does. So he, like you said, went to
the UK. There he met up in real life with
the intelligence people he'd been working with, you know, on
the down low from a long distance, which imagine was
a pretty fun meeting. They probably hit some tea and
caught up in person. And he started training these commando
(14:30):
units to be saboteurs to eventually do their their you know,
saboteur work in Norway, and the whole time was staying
in contact with his allies at the at the plant
there at Vmork and eventually, and we're just gonna say
these names again. I wish we could all nickname them
all to make it easier to keep up with. But
(14:52):
one of the guys there that he kept in touch with,
who will play it part in this story, is named
Ainar skinner Land. That's pretty easy. Yeah. Uh, swallow Blue
was his code name. And that feels like a pretty
good place for a break.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I think it is.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yes, all right, so we do remember how to do this,
and we'll be right back right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
I want to learn about a terris ort and call
it treadactyl, how to take a bergery, all about fractals
gone that's another hunt the Liz Plane everything. Word up, Jerry.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Chuck. Have you seen that movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
It's like a Newish guy ritchie movie. No, it's pretty good.
Actually all right, it's like an easy watch, like there's
it's not some big, huge sweeping epic or something you
have to really, you know, keep up with. It's just
a kind of an.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
In richie movie.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yeah, right, well I would call Snatch kind of convoluted.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Oh well, sure with accents.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Sure, But there actually was something called the Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare. That was the nickname for it. It was
called the Special Operations Executive officially, and they basically trained saboteurs.
So that's who Leif Tronstad threw his lot in with.
And one of the first things they did for the
Norwegians was send them to Scotland and have them train
(16:24):
in like extreme weather as much as they could. But
I'm thinking, like the Norwegians would be like, this is
this is like summer to us? What is this like
they I don't see why they would need to train
in Scotland, but trained they were. Yeah, And the reason
why they were trained for extreme weather and extreme conditions.
Because of the location of the the Mark power plant
(16:45):
or I guess heavy water plant. It was in a
really forbidding place that you would not want to go
to without like a car.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah, it was. It was tough. I would say, you'd
need one of those cool old army jeeps if you
wanted to get there. Back then, it was surrounded to
buy a plateau, a mountain plateau called here we go Hardanga,
Vita perfect. That's got to mean danger or something.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I think it actually means like wide mountain plateau.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Danger.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I looked. I looked it up because I thought so too.
I was like, that's got to be like the name
of a god that's going to kill you or something. Yeah,
it means it means high mountain plateau.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
I think Vita might be a plateau really uh maybe
hard danger. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
So wait so that Oh, what was the guy's name,
Ricky Uh, I can't remember, but he was saying, like
living the plateau loco, Oh God, Ricky Martin, Ricky Martin,
Ricky Martin from Menudo.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
That's right. Shout out to Bernudo. You knew that was coming.
I did not know they were going to make an appearance,
all right, So it was rounded by that mountain plateau.
It is a very very cold place. I think Livia
dug up this kind of old factoid. It freezes flames
in the fires, is how cold it was there, Not literally,
(18:13):
of course, but you know those Norwegians are with a
turn of a phrase. So Americans came in and they said,
why don't we just drop a bunch of bombs on
this plant? What's your problem with these saboteurs and they
said no. Tron said was like, we've got ammonia tanks there,
liquid ammonia. You're definitely going to kill a bunch of
civilians nearby. And all this stuff is underground, under concrete
(18:37):
and metal in these bunkers, and it probably wouldn't destroy
everything you wanted to destroy anyway. He also, you know,
didn't say this out loud, but was like, I don't
want you to destroy the only hard water plant we
have because this is a valuable thing, and all of
a sudden you would kind of own not the patent
but the process for that.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah, and after the war, who knows who's going to
need that stuff? So exactly, Yeah, it was a little
bit of national pride too, that was driving it, so
he actually talked him out of it. The Allies or
the Americans, I guess we're put off for a little while,
and they're like, all right, you go ahead and do
your little sabotage thing. Let's see how you do. So
that whole group of Norwegian resistance fighters was called Company
(19:18):
Ling and Company Ling I kind of made it over
as the group of trained saboteurs from the Special Operations Executive,
So Company Ling. They launched an operation Operation Grouse, great
operation name yeah, but they apparently that so he didn't
think so, because they renamed it Operation Swallow.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
And the whole thing was led by a guy named
Jens Anton Poulsen, which I think I nailed just then,
except it's Yen's man, I saidm I nailed it. No,
you had it except for that, but that's okay, okay.
So Yen's Anton Poulsen led I think three other resis
since fighters who parachuted back in Norway and essentially just
(20:04):
became backwoodsmen for months, setting up like a camp literally
in like a trapper's cabin, yeah, and lived off punting
reindeer and just basically became the first little toe hold
of this operation of Norwegian resistance fighters coming back to
sabotage the Behmark plant.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yes, exactly. So they're there, they set up their camp.
They're eating reindeer. It's very sad for reindeer.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Sad but delicious.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
You've never had reindeer, have you?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah? A couple of times.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Really No. I was about to say, where the heck
do you even get reindeer?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
I don't know. I'm shure that somebody sells reindeer meat
and like somewhere Weird, Missouri or something.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's people in Main right now.
They're like, you've never had reindeer.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
We always have someone across the pond here.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Right exactly. So about a month after that, they launched
another operation, Operation fresh Men, because they were like, these
guys are going to need some real, you know, some
muscle behind them.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
So they sent in two air gliders with thirty nine
British soldiers and they were just kind of coming in,
you know, behind them as back up. It did not
work out so well though. One of the planes crashed
into a mountain and killed everybody on board. The other
one crashed into the ground not where they were supposed
to land, but you know, a distance from that, and
(21:26):
it didn't kill everybody, but they, you know, they saw
this happen. The Gestapo found the survivors and executed them, yeah,
basically on the spot, and also found a map that
showed that they were headed for the hard water plant.
They didn't locate those original people, and they just sort
of stayed there, you know, hunkering down in that cabin
(21:46):
for a while and surviving undetected.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, so Operation Freshmen was, like you said it was.
The idea was just storm the heavy water plant, overwhelm it,
and blow it up. And they decided instead, okay, instead
of sending thirty nine soldiers with a ton of equipment
including bicycles, I read, we'll just try a more subtle touch.
So they went to man Joaquin Runeberg Nice who was
(22:15):
twenty three at the time, and they're like, you're you're
basically an old band in World War two standards, why
don't you lead a team for Operation Gunner Side? And
this is finally the operation that this whole episode is
based on. And it was a small tactical saboteur team
who went to the heavy water plant to destroy the
(22:37):
marks heavy water production capabilities.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I love this kind of thing. It's just the kind
of thing. And if you're thinking, man, why is it
there a movie about this? There was an older movie
with Kirk Douglas that I don't think, you know, set
the World on Fire. But I think this could go
for maybe a Guy Ritchie update totally. Yeah. I doubt
if he would do it after the other one, but
you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
I don't think he's opposed to making a sequel or reboot.
I mean, Snatch was basically Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels
done over again.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Yeah, he made a lot of several of those Sherlock
Holmes movies, I think.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Right, No, Lockstock and two Smoking Barrels. No, Oh, I see,
you were just trying to take a little side step
in the logical direction, right.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, that didn't fall first one back, Yep, there you go.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
So yeah, I think the first one was pretty good.
I don't know about the second one. Was that any good?
Speaker 3 (23:36):
I didn't see any of them.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
The first one was not bad if you don't let
yourself stop and think, like, who would have the audacity
to make sure Lock Holmes like a like a rough
and tumble action hero and just kind of give yourself
over to it. It's pretty good.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, and what you know, I can also recommend for kids,
especially younger girls and Nola Holmes you no, Loa Holmes
movies are pretty good.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Both of them are good.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah. I enjoyed those.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
We have to do with Sherlock Holmes episode at least
we haven't done that, No, not as far.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
As Yeah, we totally have to because I don't I
don't really know anything about much of that.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It's gonna be like our chess or our soccer episode,
though I have a.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Feeling other home homesy's that get upset.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
It's a whole hornet's nests. We're gonna stick.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
What are the what are the clown uh? What's the
clown band?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Uh? The insane clown posse?
Speaker 3 (24:33):
Yeah? But what other people called the Juggalos Juggalos? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
The guy who does my hair is a former Juggalo.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Ye. I think those are two. Where do you like
to hear together?
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Former Juggalo?
Speaker 3 (24:44):
Yeah? Yeah, it's like former homesy Yeah, after they leave
that world behind.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You know, hey, I don't think the other part. Let
you leave that world behind?
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Oh boy, it's threatening.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
So where were we Chuck.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Yeah, we are at Operation Gunner side. This guy Runberg.
He didn't know even why that plant was a target.
They basically just said, here, old Chap, we want you
to go destroy some pipes at the plant, and the
people that tried before you all died and you might
as well pip. Yeah, that's basically it. That's all the
(25:19):
information he had. But he was a game. He was
that kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Yeah. I mean they accepted cyanide pills as part of
this operation, and yeah, they had no idea what they
were doing. They just knew they had to go blow
up some pipes and that was that. Likes how dedicated
these people were that they were willing to sacrifice their
life to try to blow up some pipes because the
Brits told them it was going to help cripple the
Nazi war effort. So I think there was five of
(25:45):
them that parachuted in just like the Operation Swallow people
had before, but they were miles miles away from the
landing site. They just maybe got blown off course or
something like that, and it took them five days of
trudging through the snow, though I think they might have
had skis to find the operations swallow people who'd been
(26:05):
sitting there eating reindeer the whole time. And even when
they found them in this trapper's cabin and hooked up
with them, and now there's nine people in this operation.
They were still forty miles away from the heavy water plant.
And again it's like snowy in February in Norway.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
You can just imagine, yeah, yeah, there's a suspension bridge,
there's one way you get through, but of course they
had Nazi guards there, so that wasn't the best route.
The other options were like a literal minefield or I guess,
mine forest that they could have crossed through at great peril.
Or they could hike all the way down into the
(26:43):
gorge which had like a half frozen river running through it,
and then go to the plant that way and then
hike back up. And so they said they took a boat,
I guess, and they said minefield, no good, Nazis on
the bridge, no good. Let's just get on our skis
as we do and hike down that gorge. And that's
(27:03):
how they did it. We did need to mention one
little side thing that we've failed to mention is that
before this all happened, when Runberg was I guess, debriefed
and sort of getting his act together to go. He
went into a hardware store and apparently on a whim,
as the story goes, bought some heavy duty bolt cutters,
(27:24):
like metal bolt cutters, and to just park that right there,
because you know, if you introduce bolt cutters, I guess
in this case Act two, you know they're going to
cut something in Act three. Right, So he's got those
bolt cutters, and they decide to go down into the
gorge as their route to the hard water plant.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, and again not just going down into a gorge,
crossing a half frozen river and climbing up a cliff
get to the top of the gorge on the other
side where the heavy water plant was. And apparently that
route was such an unlikely route that the Nazis didn't
even bother guarding the gorge.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
No nobody would go down there exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
So February twenty seventh they made it for the forty
miles to their target. I think it was the night,
like right before midnight. This team of nine saboteurs from
Company Linya, the Norwegian Resistance are sitting there outside of
the the Mark power plant, figuring out exactly how they're
(28:23):
going to get in, and they decided that they would
split up. There were five of them and as they
were sitting outside, they were faced with their first obstacle,
which was a fence. And apparently the Brits had said,
there's a fence, so here's a handsaw. And the guy
who was in charge, who was it, Runberg? Yeah, yeah,
his second in command Canute hawk Lead. We're like running
(28:48):
through these Norwegian.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Names many that sounds pretty good to me.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Okay, so and I know it's Canute. I always thought
it was newt but it's Canute. As I watched this
cool little Nova special and he was interviewed and they
definitely said Canute. He said, Runberg, don't you have some
bolt cutters?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Right?
Speaker 2 (29:06):
And Rumberg gave him the bull cutters and instead of
this loud, tedious, laborious hack saw that they would have
tried to use and probably gotten caught using, they just
snipped right through the fence in a few minutes thanks
to Rumberg's foresight back in Cambridge.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
That's right, snip snip, so that pade off pretty quickly.
Much more that was still out too well. I think
I got the saying wrong if you introduce bulcutters in
neck two, they're gonna snip something in nect two. Yeah,
they're on the property now, five of the people, five
of the nine provide cover the other two. And they
had tommy guns, they had chloroform. They were set for
(29:43):
an attack if need be, and they were keeping a
watch on like the barracks because there weren't like, you know,
hundreds of German soldiers. I get the idea if they
were going in with the initial twenty nine that it
was probably a couple of dozen maybe. I mean, that's
just a guess.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
I don't even know if was that many. I mean,
as important as this heavy water plant was, so the
atomic program in Germany, Yeah, it was so remote that
they were just like, you know, I think it's going
to take a few people. We got mines, there's a gorge,
we got people on the bridge. It's fine.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they were keeping a watch on
the barracks, they were keeping a watch on that bridge
for the guardsmen there, and just sort of waiting around
for any you know, activity, so they could get those
tommy guns out or maybe silently chloroform and Nazi, which
was a dream a Norwegian saboteur.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
You know, they want to do that.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
So yeah, so the other four guys split into two pairs.
They each had and I get the idea, they split
up in case and they each had enough to like
blow it up in case, like two of them got
caught or killed, the other two could still complete the job. Right.
They got in through a second gate, and they had
(30:52):
arranged with one of the co workers there to I guess,
you know, one of the inside moles, to leave a
cellar door open. But unfortunate only that person called in
sick that day, and I guess didn't seem to think like, hey,
I had this important other task right to do. And
Tron's dad had previously told him though, like if you
can't get in that way, there's a cable shaft you
(31:12):
can probably slip through. And that's what they ended up using.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
I's want to circle back and emphasize the fact that
this man was a lynch pin to a sabotage plan.
All he had to do was show up to work
and leave a door open.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
He could have gone home right after that, yeah, and
been like I just threw up at the get out of.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Here, right, And my guess this is nineteen forty three.
There's an eighty five percent chance that his illness was
a severe hangover, which makes it even worse. Yeah, probably
so so yeah, luckily, yes, they found that that hatch
was opened in the cable shaft and they basically slid through.
The two who made it through the cable cheft was Runberg,
(31:51):
the leader, Yeah, and a guy named Frederick Frederick Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Kaiser, Yeah, Frederick Frederick Frederick.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah, eat your heart out. Frederick's it's probably Frederk. Yeah,
would be my guest. I like Frederk. That's how we
say it in America. Anyway, Kaiser and Rumberg they were
the ones who went down this cable shaft and they
start getting busy. I think Kaiser was holding it. Go
They're like, we have some extra time, it's right, go ahead.
(32:24):
So they yes, and they went down a shaft even
as well, and so almost immediately they found a watchman
I take him to be a Norwegian watchman maybe, and
they were like, you know, you're now our hostage. Sit
there and be quiet, and he's like, no problem, you
guys do whatever you want. And despite his complicity, Kaiser
(32:45):
was like, this is my one chance, and so he
chloroformed the watchman anyway, And so as he's doing this,
Rumberg went and planted the explosives on the pipes, just
as he was told to do. And right about then,
all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's a explosion
of glass as a window shatters, and Rumberg and Kaiser
(33:05):
and the chloroform guard I'll turn and look, and the
other two men from the other explosives team come in
through the window.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
That's right. They're like, it's just us, guys, We're all
here together, so we can get this thing bombed up quicker.
They set up those explosives, the four of them, I guess,
at this point, and the fuses at the time were
two minute fuses that would have given enough time to
get the heck out of there. Runberg said, no, I
really want to make sure we hear this thing go off.
(33:34):
So we're going to go down to thirty seconds. I
imagine everyone said, oh, how about a minute? He said, no,
thirty seconds is plenty. So they're getting ready to light
the fuses. The guard that they had at gunpoint said,
can I get those glasses? Yeah? You know, if they
blow up, my optometrists has quit and retired. I'm not
(33:54):
going to be able to replace those things very easily,
so they said, sure, get your glasses, and at that
point another civilian employee Norwegian obviously comes into the room
and is now another temporary prisoner. Runeberg lights those uses
counts to ten, which means they only have twenty seconds,
(34:15):
and then says run to the two civilians. They get
the heck out of there as well. I reckon in
the movie, guy Ritchie would really have to sort of
fudge things, because what is not exciting in a movie
like this is when is all you hear? And that's
kind of all they heard. It wasn't a huge explosion.
It's not like they were blowing up this entire plant
(34:37):
like he would probably do in a movie. They were
just trying to damage these pipes, and he said that
later on, he said they heard a tiny, insignificant pop.
Also because it was underground under that concrete and stuff.
Windows did break though, enough at least to rouse some
sleeping Nazis. This part is very movie like because the
four that were guarding kind of watched as half dressed
(35:00):
Nazi gets out and was like, oh, do I hear anything?
Do I hear anything? But apparently that was a pretty
noisy plant. So he just goes back to bed.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
I can't help but imagining like a Sergeant Schultz type, yeah,
stumbling out totally. So, yeah, it wasn't a big deal.
And as a matter of fact, I mean it turned
out to be a big deal, but like, yeah, it
didn't cause like that huge explosion where guards start coming
out of nowhere and you know, there's alarms going off
and searchlights coming on. It wasn't anything like that. And
(35:29):
in fact, all nine people who were the saboteurs in
this operation got away. They escaped scott free, and in retrospect,
not a single bullet was fired and not a single
person died in this highly successful, amazingly daring sabotage operation.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
That's right, but that is not the end of the story.
So maybe we should take our second break, yes, and
we'll come back and finish up right after this.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
I want to learn about a terror sort and college
fred actl how to take a berg fractal gink is gone.
That's a little hunt.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
The boarder murders and they kind of all rung on
the slane.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
Everything sport up. Jerry.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
All right, So, as you said, the saboteurs got away.
I think one of them, Poulsen, took off to Scotland
by sea. Runenberg and the and the rest of the
gang stayed on their skis as the Norwegians do. They
skid about two hundred miles, which is like nothing for them.
They skid to Sweden. In fact, with Nazis chasing them,
(36:42):
they had planes above trying to locate them. Like that
part would be a pretty good part of the movie,
I guess. But they got away, and there was a
German head of the German special forces in Norway who
called it the most splendid coup. However, it only took
a few months before where the Nazis were able to
(37:02):
restart production at the plant. I think this happened in February,
so in May of that same year they had ramped
back up to full capacity, which seems like a big disappointment.
But no, because here come the Americans with their initial
plan to just bomb the plant, and just like they
were warned, it did not do a ton of damage
to anyone but the twenty two Norwegian civilians who were killed.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah, Like this heavy water plant was in this basement
of a power plant, so it was not easy to
get to as far as like aerial bombs are.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Concerned, especially the bombs back then, you know, yeah for real.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
But the thing is it did show the Nazis that like, hey,
this remote, isolated, actually surprisingly vulnerable plant. Yeah, that's like
the one source of our heavy water. We should probably
stop creating heavy water there and move the operations to Germany. Yeah,
so they did. Remember the Nazi heavy water program is
(38:03):
set back a few months, and this is at a
time where the Allies are racing in the Manhattan Project
to create the atomic bomb. Assuming the Nazis are in
the same race as them. The Allies understand that we
can do this in like two three years. So to
set back a Nazi atomic program three months is an
(38:23):
enormous setback in a two or three year race to
become the first to come up with an atomic bomb.
So from that standpoint, even at the time, they were like,
that was a very successful operation, even though, like you said,
the Nazis got back up to full full capacity in
just a couple of months. But as we said, they
were moving everything to Germany, and I guess the company
(38:44):
linga crew, the Norwegian freedom fighters, they were keeping an
eye on all the movements of the heavy water from
I guess they're moles inside the heavy water plant, and
they knew that the Nazis were going to move the
heavy water, when they were going to do it, and
how they were going to do it.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
That's right. So they come up with another plan to
further thwart their efforts, and they determined the best way
to do this was to sabotage the ferry that's going
to be ferrying everything over to Germany. So they knew
it would cost some civilian lives, but they figured that
was their best chance to get it before it even
had a chance to get set up again. An old
Canute is back on the scene. He was the second
(39:26):
in command there at Gunnerside, if you remember, and he
was leading the team this time. He had been promoted,
I guess. And in February nineteen forty four, they set
off explosions on the bow of that ship. It was
a ferry called the Hydro, and fourteen Norwegian sadly were killed,
along with four Germans, and this again was a big success.
(39:49):
For a long time, they weren't even positive that there
was heavy or they couldn't prove at least that there
was heavy water on board and there was a German
heavy water expert after the war that said, no, those
were just those dummies. Dummy and I guess to try
and undermine the idea that it was a success. But
PBS Nova to the rescue. In two thousand and three,
(40:09):
they organized a salvage of one of those barrels from
that sunken ferry and they proved that it contained heavy water.
So it was a great success after all.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
That was the Nova mini documentary. I watched. It was
really good. Yeah, but one of the things that they
covered that the reason why the Allies were like, maybe
those were dummies, is that there were reports of survivors
of that fairy sinking, that barrels have been floating, like
some people were trying to like climb onto the barrels
to survive. They're like, heavy water's not supposed to float
(40:39):
in regular water, and so they were like, it's possible
that this was a decoy because also intelligence showed that
some heavy water did arrive in Germany. Well, it turns out,
thanks to this Nova special I'm about to spoil it,
that those barrels that floated were the most pure form
of heavy water that they had mark the barrels weren't full,
(41:02):
and so the air inside the barrels was making them float.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yes, so it was heavy water that they sabotage. They
did put a dent in the amount of heavy water.
I think there was a fifteen ton shipment and the
Germans were only able to collect I think the four
that were floating. So it was a big deal too.
But again, eighteen people lost their lives, for fourteen of
them innocent Norwegians.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, And I think that's that's actually something they wrestle
with in the Nova documentary because they interview some of
these people we've talked about, and they know they're trying
to reconcile their guilt with the how impactful the mission was,
especially living for decades with that gnawing rumor in the
back of their head that those had been dummy barrels.
Speaker 3 (41:46):
Yeah, and it resulted in the loss of so many,
you know, civilian lives.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah. So I think they were quite relieved to find
that it really was heavy water. And still there's debate
today over even with the success of Gunner Side, was
the success of that Swallow group thinking of the hydro ferry,
how much of an impact it really had on Germany's
atomic program, and in fact, how much of a program
(42:12):
Germany had during World War two to build an atomic bomb.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Yeah, for sure. The official historian of the s oe
H M. R. D. Foot Great Name said that it
changed the course of the war. The fact that they
were denied that that regular, steady supply of heavy water
really put a dent in their operation. Olivia Various Stutey
points out another factor was that key scientists were a
(42:41):
lot of them were Jewish scientists that the Nazis were using,
and they either escaped or were murdered, which also slowed
down the You know, the Germans pursued of the bomb,
but also I think you found out too that was it.
The Germans U regretted pursuing heavy water.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Was that what it was instead of so they were
basically they took a wrong turn right out of the
gate with what they chose as a moderator. I think, like,
did you say earlier that the United States chose graphite.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Right, Yeah, we used graphight. They went with heavy water,
which was a mistake.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Yeah. Well they're both really great moderators. But graphite is
available in abundance. You can find it anywhere, right, sure,
heavy water is really hard to come by, so right
out of the gate, the Germans chose a moderator that
was really difficult to get and that there was only
one place basically in the world that was producing it,
whereas the Americans just went out and bought a bunch
(43:37):
of graphite at the grocery store basically to use their moderator.
So right away that first hurdle the Americans overcame the
Germans ran into. And the most interesting thing is it
was based on a miscalculation.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, that's right. If they had have calculated correctly, then
they would have known from the beginning, right.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah. So I think whoever conducted I can't remember their
but they conducted experiments on the viability of graphite as
a moderator, and they basically forgot to carry a one
or something. I think what it really was is they
didn't factor in the influence of impurities in their graphite sample,
and they concluded that graphite wasn't a very good moderator,
(44:17):
so let's use heavy water instead. So essentially, even before
the program started, the Nazi atomic program was just dead,
like dead in the water. Basically, yeah, got to carry
that ice, yes, but the Allies didn't know this, And
it turns out that just the idea that the Nazis
were involved in heavy water production suggested that they were
(44:40):
after an atomic bomb and that the Allies then were
in a foot race against them, and that led to
the creation of an actual atomic bomb. So the Nazis
directly influenced the production of an atomic bomb, even though
it wasn't theirs.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
The Nazis being involved in heavy water production sounds like
some sort of weird October fet slogan.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
It'd be like, what does this mean. They'd be like,
just drink this huge gallony here show.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
I mentioned that film nineteen sixty five's The Heroes of
Telemark with Kirk Douglas as sort of a mashed up
fictional character based on both Ronenberg and tron Stadt, that,
like I said, wasn't like the biggest film ever, but
it wasn't an American film. So we did know about this
operation more than they did in Norway until like twenty fifteen.
(45:33):
State broadcaster NRK ran a mini series called The Heavy
Water War in twenty fifteen, and that's when a lot
of Norwegian's kind of first learned of this operation. And
if we're talking tron Statt, we want to button up
his story. You feel bad for this guy because he
didn't get to parachute in and actually have feet on
the ground for this kind of thing. He finally got
(45:53):
to do that kind of thing in October of nineteen
forty four. He got under that parachute for Operation Sunshine,
which was, you know, protecting Norway's some of their industrial
assets and infrastructure from German saboteurs as the Nazis were
on their way out. So he got his hands dirty,
(46:14):
which he'd always wanted to do. But very sadly the
following May I believe in nineteen forty five, he was
shot dead by the brother of a Norwegian collaborator who
he was questioning, so he tragically died as well.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
Yeah, which is sad. At least he didn't get to
get to oversee and fly in on Operation Sunshine.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
I wonder if he got to use any chloroform.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Maybe so, Chuck, I think that's it for the Norwegian
sabotage Operation Gunner Side. We haven't figured out what we're
going to name this episode.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
I like Olivia's title.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
Oh man, it's one of the better ones.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
You want to go ahead and tell everyone. Yes, she
titled this article like water for nazis pretty great sense
of humor. Yeah, really good.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Well, thanks Olivia for that, and thanks to you for listening.
And how about we set up a listener mail so
I can thank that person too.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
That's right. This is from Justin Meeks about Tavern on
the Green. Hey, guys, and this shows you how long
we've been off, because I've been hold on to this one.
My grandma had a wonderful related story to Tavern on
the Green. She was from rural Montana and travels to
New York in the late nineties with a group of
old ladies over Thanksgiving. One of her traveling group actually
(47:31):
had sold David Letterman his Montana ranch, so they went
to a taping of a show and he invited them backstage.
He found out they were going to be in town
for Thanksgiving and invited them to have Thanksgiving dinner with
him at Tavern on the Green. What wow, Yeah, Grandma
said that was one of the first Thanksgivings she could
remember that she didn't eat turkey dinner because at Tavern
on the Green they had to order their steak and lobster,
(47:53):
especially because Letterman was paying for it. Grandma never missed
an episode of Letterman even before this certainly never did
it afterwards. Letterman is seriously a great dude, and love
that Grandma got to meet one of our heroes like this.
Thanks for the many years of the podcast, Keep up
the great work, Come back and see us in Denver.
That is from Justin Meeks and Justin We're gonna head
(48:13):
back to Denver at some point, but we should probably
tell people since we're getting emails that we are not
doing live shows in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, including sketch Fest. We've gotten a lot of emails
from people who's like the sketch Fest schedules wrong because
it doesn't have stuff you should know on there, right,
And yes, we're sorry to inform me we're not going
to be at sketch Fest for what the first time.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
In like many years, ten years maybe or something. Yeah,
we're just taking it down yere from doing live shows.
We're gonna we're gonna be back out there again, so
fear not. We're just taking it down here. And that's
like four less trips that we're gonna take and we're
gonna be with our family. And that's a decision we
made that we feel good about.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, and ironically I just reached diamond status for twenty
twenty five.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Oh, I've never been diamond.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
I couldn't believe it. I got the email and I
forwarded it to you me. I was like, well, now
I know it's going to be written on my headstone.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
Yeah, and I'll be buried next to you and it'll
just say sadly peaked at platinum.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
What else? Man?
Speaker 3 (49:14):
That's it?
Speaker 2 (49:14):
Okay, Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
To Justin Meeks.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Justin Meeks, whose grandma has a great story and who
I assume did not go on to become Letterman stalker.
Speaker 3 (49:25):
Right, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
If you want to be like Justin and email is
a pretty cool story about David Letterman, or otherwise, you
can send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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