73. Destroying the Nazi Nuclear Program: Saving the World From War (Ep 2)

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We could hear the humming of the machinery and we saw it faintly in the moonlight.

It was slightly overcast, so it was excellent weather for us to work in.

When we had to walk downhill, the snow was up to our waists.

When we came further down and had to make a shortcut round the houses, it even went up to our arms.

You had to sort of do a front crawl to get out of the snow and downwards.

The whole time we heard the humming from the target, hoping that in about two hours' time, it would be quiet.

Of course, we were tense, but the situation was very calm at the same time.

Everybody was talking calmly.

We were eating biscuits and raisins, and chocolate.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that was Jakim Runnenberg, pronounced the name better this time, talking about the moment that he and his team are getting ready to attack the Vimork heavy water plant to destroy or delay the Nazis' ability to get the atomic bomb.

And they are going to change the course of the war, or hope to.

We are halfway through our story of Operation Gunnerside, this extremely adventurous ski journey into the heart of the Nazi atomic bomb program.

And we left our team last time standing on the edge of a gorge.

It was a truly a proper cliffhanger.

And they are looking out across this gorge at their target, the Vimork heavy water plant.

And they are after, as in all good nuclear bomb stories on the rest is classified, they are trying to destroy a group of cylinders in the basement that are producing heavy water.

That's right, David.

I love the fact they're eating biscuits and raisins and chocolate as they prepare to launch energy, right?

You need energy if you're going to climb 600 feet down a gorge and then up the other side.

This team just sitting there going, oh, nice chocolate, you know, as you prepare to launch the most daring act of sabotage known to man.

So the plan is they're first going to go down the slope of the gorge.

Now,

they start doing this.

And one of the things is, of course, going down a slope is pretty hard, especially when you've got heavy packs that you're carrying which are containing explosives.

It's also quite challenging.

But they make it down that part and then they reach the river valley at the bottom.

The river is partially iced over so they find an ice bridge which they have to cross and hope that it will take their weight.

as they gingerly make their way across it.

Then they're going to have to go up and start their ascent on the other side.

And this side of the gorge, of the cliff face, effectively, is even steeper.

There's just a few shrubs on it.

And so they are really having to rock climb, looking for hand holds on the ledges and toe holds on the ledges, all of this while carrying the kit.

And a few times, some of them talk and remember, you know, losing grip with one hand, then having to kind of pendulum swing to kind of find another place that they could grip to keep on the cliff face and to keep going on this ascent so it's an extraordinary process which they're going to do but eventually they make it up to the railway line

which is just running into the plant and which they've been told is relatively unguarded so they make it there walk quietly across it.

They can now see that the suspension bridge, which was the other way in, which is also well guarded, is kind of below them running across the valley but they walk across the railway line and they're getting close now one of the advantages they've got is that it's quite a noisy hydroelectric plant the humming that he was talking about yeah yeah the humming that's coming out of it so it does give them a little bit of cover so as they are getting closer jochim ronenberg he reiterates his orders there's going to be a four-man sabotage party which are going to go in and the rest are going to stay out a bit further away and act as a covering party with their guns at the ready just to deal with whatever might come up their white painted tommy guns that they their white painted tommy guns the orders are clear whatever happens blow the place even if you're going to die doing it you've got to do it they look at their watches they've got to wait They've timed their attack for half an hour after midnight, because that's when one of the guards is released from the bridge and moves to the barracks.

So that's the moment when they've decided to strike.

We talked in the last episode about the grouse team that had been collecting intelligence on the plant and had recruited sources inside the plant.

But one of the espionage pieces of this that I think is important to mention is just how good their intelligence is, how detailed their intelligence is about the workings of the plant, right?

Because as we go through this, it's really hard to imagine them having any prospect of success unless they have details about the guard schedules, who's where, when.

I mean, they really have a very granular feel for the facility, it seems, by the time they've gotten up the other side of the gorge.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

So, the grouse team has got sources inside who are telling them what's going on, when things happen.

I mean, the detail they've been briefed on is extraordinary, so much so that they're told that if when they're inside the plant, there's a toilet where they could put someone if they need to hide someone there, and they're told exactly where the toilet key is kept normally so they know where to get it and find it i mean that's the kind of granular intelligence you need and they've got that it's also interesting though stuff will still go wrong as we'll see so the first thing they do is they reach a perimeter gate and

luckily jochim ronnenberg has got some bolt cutters now he hadn't actually been equipped with these by soe which seems like a bit of an oversight he'd been in a cambridge hardware store and he'd seen them when he was back in britain before he'd been sent out so he just bought them so you can actually see the receipt for them in his file because he obviously claims for them on his expenses like any good soldier would.

But he's got these bolt cutters.

He's bought just from a hardware store in Cambridge.

And he uses those to get through the initial perimeter gate.

And then they need to use more wire cutters to get towards the kind of the factory perimeter.

Here comes the crucial moment, though.

Now you've got this four-man sabotage party heading in.

The cylinders are in the basement.

There's a set of doors to get in, which they're expecting to be open.

Done, done, done.

They get to the doors, and of course.

They're not open, are they?

They're not open.

They've been locked already.

You've got a problem.

Now, again, this goes back to your point about the intelligence, because Jochen Ronnenberg remembers he'd been told back in Britain when they'd been looking at the plans of the plant about a duct tunnel through which pipes carry material in and out of the site.

And there's an access to the duct tunnel that he can get into.

So he and another man are going to crawl into that and start to crawl through this tunnel to get into the facility this other way with the doors being locked.

At one point, the other guy's Colt 45 pistol clatters out of its hold or out of his pocket onto the tunnel and they wait, but nothing happens.

He's not sure at this point what's happened to the other two because he'd been expecting the other two of the four-man sabotage team to to follow them into this duct tunnel, but it turns out they can't find the entrance.

20 yards of crawling, they come out into a room no one there but they can see the entrance to the room where the heavy water cylinders are they barge in there's one local Norwegian worker a kind of night guard I guess they pull their pistols he puts his hands up they've actually got chloroform pads to knock anyone out they need to but they decide it's you know they're going to talk to him instead interesting enough if we remember they're in British battle dress they say they're British soldiers now in Norwegian yeah What kind of English does Joachim Ronenberg speak at this point?

He speaks pretty good English, yeah.

He's learnt it when he was young.

So they claim they're British soldiers.

They're actually going to leave some items of British military equipment littered at the place.

And the reason that they're doing that, and they're telling this guy they're Norwegians, is that they're worried that if the Germans realize that it was Norwegians rather than Brits doing it, there'd be retaliation against local civilians.

They do what they often do, which is just execute a load of people.

Whereas if it's kind of the Brits, there's less they're going to do about it.

So that's all part of the plan.

So Yochim at this point is starting to lay explosives around the cylinders.

These are about four foot tall.

They're kind of like a hot water tank, I guess.

Much like a centrifuge.

A uranium.

Centrifuge at the tons, which I think we also described as looking similar to a hot water heater.

Everything looks like a hot water cylinder in our nuclear program,

not to be confused with my boiler system and my hot water system.

So they're putting a chain of half pound charges around them.

And the aim is partly to destroy the cylinders, but it's also, it's interesting, it's to drain them of the heavy water that's inside.

Because if we go back to our explanation, our brilliant scientific explanation, the heavy water is really hard to produce and there's not much of it around.

So you also crucially want to destroy the stocks that they've got there.

It's not dangerous, right?

For them, the heavy water?

I mean, you could drink it, I think.

Don't try that at home, kids.

So he's halfway putting charges around the cylinders when suddenly there's the crash of breaking glass.

And you've got to think at this point, you're going to be into a firefight.

He looks round to where the sound is coming from, the breaking glass, ready for it to be Nazi guards.

And he sees the head of one of the other members of his sabotage team poking through a window.

And it turns out the other guys hadn't found the access tunnel.

And they're like, we've got to get in, we've got to finish the job.

So they've tried to smash a window and then crawl in to get through.

And one of the guys is basically halfway through the window.

And Jochen Ronnenberg goes up to him and pulls him in.

And in doing so he actually cuts himself pretty badly even though he's wearing rubber gloves on the glass left in the window but they're all in now the team they're gonna finish laying the charges this has all taken about half an hour so quite a long time but they're finally ready to go supposed to have two minute fuses they decide instead to go with 30 second fuses I think partly because they want to hear the bang as they leave to make sure it's gone off and also give less time, I guess, for anyone who might come in to do like they do in the cartoons and kind of stamp on the fuses or do something stopping it.

They've already gone full send on the operation.

What's one more layer of risk?

Why not do the 30-second fuse?

You want to do it.

If you're going to do it, do it right.

So Joachim Ronenberg lights the fuse and they run.

They run out.

They're outside.

They hear an explosion, but it's actually not that big.

It's quite small.

And it's inside a concrete building.

And the charges aren't that big.

And it's a kind of muffled sound.

So in a weird way, the final moment of this, all that effort is actually slightly anticlimactic as they remember it it's not like the movies where you know the whole plant is gonna kind of go up in flames in the hollywood film the whole plant goes down the whole side of the gorge this ain't hollywood yeah that's that's too bad just kind of like a wump sound that they hear That's exactly it.

And it's quite funny because one guard, one Nazi guard seems to come out thinking he heard something, but then goes back into his hut.

So he's like, oh,

was that a bang?

Goes back for a sip of heavy water into his into his little hut but what's extraordinary is the explosion has destroyed all of those cylinders and drained them without firing a shot and the fact the explosion isn't that big and isn't that dramatic just gives him a bit more time to escape now we get to the escape because if you think that's it the escape is also a kind of remarkable bit of the operation it's only as they're now heading out that the sirens are going to go because an engineer who'd been in the building had heard the explosion and goes down to check it out obviously sees what's happened and alerts the guards but the guards don't know who's done this or where they are the guards slight bit of nazi incompetence can't work the searchlights properly it turns out what kind of nazi guards are these you had one job there's no dogs and the nazi guards don't know how to work the searchlights this is an incompetent operation yeah i think they literally get sent to the eastern front the guards some of that oh do they really for being yeah they really do not have any sympathy for them so the team are now out so they've got a tumble they literally kind of tumbling down the gorge now to get out the way they they came more falling than than climbing then they've got to cross the river then go back up at one point they look down at the the road which leads towards the plant and they see the first reinforcements are already arriving by car to try and find them they get to the top they recover their skis their wooden skis which they've left up there oh we haven't had ski action in a while i'm glad that we're back to the ski here comes the ski action because they've now got to first of all ski to a cabin where they have a whiskey.

Of course they do, which is what I do, and then collapse and sleep.

Now, this is the wild bit.

The story is an entire German division is sent to chase them.

Some have said 10,000 Nazi troops are summoned to try and find them.

Let's go with that number.

I mean, it's thousands.

I think 10,000 is entirely plausible.

The Germans initially think that they're only looking for three men.

They think maybe they'd come as civilians.

There's quite a lot of confusion.

So they don't really know how they did it.

The team has to escape and they're going to split into two.

Joachim Ronnenberg says, you know, our enemy now was the Norwegian winter, as much as the Germans.

The Germans are going to get confused.

I mean, some of the German teams are going to be firing on each other, but they're going to split into two, the teams, because some of them are actually going to stay in Norway.

Some of the kind of intelligence gatherers and move to different locations.

But Joachim is going to try and take a route which is going to take him 300 miles into Sweden, Not even the direct route into Sweden, because he's got to go north of Lillehammer, where there's a headquarters for the Germans.

You know, the Germans and all the towns.

So you've got to go remote to get out of there.

So it's pretty wild.

So two groups, but there are some close calls for both groups.

Tony Insel, great book on this, secret alliances, talks about how one of the men had nearly been caught twice.

On the first occasion, he was surprised by a small German patrol and pursued for hours across the mountains.

He eventually managed to shoot and injure the only German who'd kept up with him and make his escape.

Are the Germans on skis too?

Yeah.

This is ski on ski action here.

It's ski-on-ski action.

He makes his escape.

However, soon afterwards, this man in the darkness skis over a cliff and breaks his arm.

I mean, you've got Germans pursuing you.

You manage to shoot the only one who catches up with you.

And then in the dark, you ski over a cliff.

I mean, anyway, it's wild.

For Joachim and his group, there's about, I mean, it's two weeks of skiing, basically.

Mountains, woods, only go over crossings at night if anywhere is more inhabited.

Some days they're doing 40 kilometers of skiing, break into huts, our famous Norwegian

for food, for sleep.

Sometimes you sleep in the open for some of those nights.

That sounds terrible.

At least you have the rabbit for underpants.

So you're warm in the places that matter.

So as I mentioned, I was lucky enough to meet Joachim Roddenberg, I guess, 70 years after he did this.

And this is my favorite bit of the story, because I interviewed him about the operation and he was talking about this escape on skis.

And I said to him, you know, what was it like?

Expecting him to say, oh, it was dangerous.

It was dramatic, you know.

And he just looks at me with a smile and he goes, it was the best skiing weekend I ever had.

And I just thought,

he just was clearly like, it was just good skiing.

First off, that's a great line.

It's a great line.

But this must have been terrible, right?

Like this,

in reality, this has to have been one of the worst schemes we can see probably ever.

Well, being pursued by 10,000 Nazis

by 10,000 Nazis.

I like how we've anchored on that larger figure.

I think that's right.

Yeah, but I think that's right.

10,000 Nazis on skis in white suits with their guns, even if their searchlights don't work.

I mean, that's still pretty bad.

He eventually gets to Sweden.

They cross the border and they claim they're refugees.

And they've got to claim they're just fleeing rather than having been involved in a military operation.

So they take off their uniforms and weapons and binoculars and they arrive in just their

rabbit fur underpants

and snowsuits.

Yeah, they've got a snowsuit on, but underneath all they've got is their rabbit fur underpants.

I was picturing the rabbit fur underpants with like the snowsuit tied on, like a cape, and they're just flying down the hill.

I mean, that's the way to arrive.

And then it's even better because they make contact with the British legation in Sweden.

They've been waiting, worried something's gone wrong.

And then, this is a bit, I think a couple of them remember this.

They then get deloused and and washed with a brush by some Swedish nurses, which these young men seem to, it's interesting in their histories as they describe it in later life.

This seems to be something which for some reason they remember very vividly, this process of having just done two weeks skiing and then being washed by these Swedish nurses.

Why do you think that was, Gordon?

I have no idea.

Odd detail to remember being brushed by a Swedish nurse who's delousing your rabbit for underpants.

Anyway.

They go to the opera.

they go to the opera they see la travialta in stockholm that evening and they actually remember this team physically pinching each other as they're sitting together in the opera to go is this a dream or not so quite literally not as an expression yeah no they were pinched they were they were actually physically pinching each other to make sure they were awake and then from there there's a postal plane to scotland and then london for tea and medals quite literally

but i guess gordon our cliffhanger here has got to be what in the world happened to the Nazi bomb program?

Is it really over?

Because the team have, they're having their tea and medals.

They have their framed D-Laused rabbit for underpants to commemorate the journey.

But did they really stop the German bombs?

Let's take a break when we come back.

We'll see whether this operation did what they intended it to do.

See you after the break.

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Well, welcome back.

We are now gonna switch perspective just for a second because we have to figure out, of course, Gordon, what the damage assessment is for this sabotage operation.

And we are in this room that's just full of heavy water, which is, in my mind, is sort of smoking and smoldering, even though it's absolutely not.

And there's a wonderfully named General von Falkenhorst, who is sort of got his, you know, big Nazi boots deep in this oozing mass of heavy water.

Also, in my mind, Gordon, he's smoking while he's doing this, even though he's probably not.

This General von Falkenhorst commanded the German occupation forces in Norway and he arrives at the plant to inspect the damage in this basement.

And he was reported to have smiled and said, this is the most splendid coup I have seen in Zavor.

That's right.

It's a Colonel Klink.

Which I'm particularly pleased with that accent.

He was actually kind of impressed on one level.

So they've definitely lost the stocks they were building up of heavy water.

And they've got to start to repair the cylinders.

But here's the problem general von falkenhurst is going to call this plumber and it's going to take them months to get it back on stream that's disappointing isn't it just months it is disappointing i think getting rid of the stocks is one thing but yeah it is only going to take months i mean i guess they're cylinders they're electrolysis cylinders you can rebuild them so they've got a problem because they still have got to stop this program so the next attempt is going to be interesting because

The Brits are going to decide to call in the Americans and call in the big bombers.

So November 1943, a few months later, the US Air Force is going to do a massive bombing raid, dropping 700 bombs on the plant.

Now, we'd said before that this was always going to be quite dangerous, and it is, because even though they do a bit of damage to the plant, they don't do that much.

And some of the bombers mistakenly hit the fertilizer factory rather than the industrial plant, which is in the town, and killed 21 Norwegian civilians, many of whom whom had been in a shelter.

And this causes fury, particularly amongst the Norwegians in exile, who thought that they had an agreement with the Brits about what would be targeted and how.

So there's actually real deep anger over this.

And it doesn't quite work.

And I don't know what you think.

It's kind of interesting, isn't it, in the wake of the Iran stuff we've been talking about and looking at, because bombing from the air certainly has its limits.

I guess, compared to putting people on the ground.

The other parallel, I guess, which is striking is just how even in the wake of a massive bombing raid or a really daring sabotage mission, it seems really hard to set back someone's good program.

I mean, after all that Yakim and his team did, you know, you're talking about a delay of six months.

That's not nothing.

It's presumably worth the risk, but you're kind of hoping at the end of a mission like that that

it's over, right?

And you can't rebuild it.

But the reality is you're just dealing with delay, you know, ultimately.

Yeah.

And so the Germans, actually, after the bombing run, realize that they've got a problem here.

So they're going to decide they're going to build their own plant in Germany where it's better protected and crucially move whatever stocks they've got of heavy water to Germany to a more secure location.

And it's going to go over a lake by a ferry.

So then the order is given to the SOE team who are on the ground to sink the ferry.

Moving elements of your program to a much more hardened location.

You can think of the Iranians with Fordow, right?

I mean, you have Natans, but then after sort of amid the Stuxnet attacks and a lot of concern in the Iranian program in the mid-2000s, you move massive parts of your program into this heavily bunkered sort of facility underneath the mountain, right?

So the dynamics are very similar.

And it's also the idea with the Iranian program recently, what happened to some of the highly enriched uranium the Iranians have built up.

You know, it got moved before the Fordow attack.

And you're seeing something slightly different here.

I mean, we're not talking about highly enriched uranium.

We're talking about heavy water.

But again, the Germans are trying to move it.

So they're taking it to a lake and then it's going to be put on the ferry, but the ferry isn't very well guarded.

So the Norwegian team creep in at night past the Norwegian watchman and lay charges in the bottom of the boat enough to sink it.

It's interesting because they can't warn people they know who are on the ferry because these are other Norwegians going to be catching the ferry.

And Tony Insel in his book, Secret Alliances, talks about one of the team's mother had been due to travel on the ferry the next day, and he couldn't commit her breach of security by telling her to avoid making the journey at that time.

So, instead, he chooses instead to dose her dinner the evening before with a very large amount of laxatives, which caused bad stomach pains and left her too weak to travel, which is one way of doing it.

But the next morning, the ferry is in the middle of the lake over the deepest point.

The bomb blows.

Four minutes later, the ferry's at the bottom with almost all of the heavy water.

Four Germans and 14 Norwegians drowned.

So again, they've managed to get rid of that stock of heavy water.

It is probably worth stepping back here now, as we're starting to bring it to a close, about the question you ask, which is, you know, how much difference did this make?

You know, how close were the Germans to the bomb?

And the truth is, they weren't as close as the Allies feared.

And I think one of the crucial things is that they'd gone down perhaps the wrong route with heavy water to do it.

So they were trying to build a reactor and use heavy water as the moderator for the fission reaction there.

And uranium enrichment might have been faster, or as the Americans will also do, use graphite as the moderator for the reactor.

So those would have been better and more fruitful means for getting the bomb.

And that is true.

So they were not as close as people feared.

But of course, you don't know that.

during the war.

And one of the things that the Germans tell the Brits after the war is that the sabotage prevented them from doing vital experiments, which might have convinced them that the atomic bomb was possible.

And also,

the fact that the Allies are trying so hard to sabotage the heavy water plant.

I mean, they can see all these attempts, you know, freshman gunnerside, the sinking of the ferry, maybe encouraged the Germans to think that was the best route to get to the bomb, you know, because you can see all the effort being done to disrupt it.

So the chances are they think, well, actually, this is the route we should be going down because the Allies are clearly worried about it.

If they'd been able to do more experiments on it, if they hadn't been delayed and stopped, they might have been able to go down a different route, which could have got them there faster.

So in that sense, you know, beyond the delay, there I think is a significant impact to the operation.

Delaying someone's journey down the wrong path.

means by definition, even if they're going to end up on the right one, that you've made the whole thing slower.

Right.

And in the context of the Second World War, War, buying six months of time is massive.

It's a sprint, and you've slowed them down pretty considerably on that sprint.

So it's a massive achievement.

And I think it shows the value of sabotage.

And that also sometimes sabotage requires boots on the ground.

There was some debate, I think, with the Iranian nuclear program whether the Israelis would try and put Mossad or other teams on the ground to try and sabotage it, whether that might be more effective.

But also, if you think about the sabotage operations, things that the Ukrainians are doing to Russia to damage their capacity to fight, you can see this role that sabotage as an operation can still really play in degrading your enemy's ability to do something and diverting their resources and doing all those kind of things.

The other angle that I think is fascinating from just a kind of Intel perspective is

we do focus, I mean, I think rightly so, on a bit of the flash and bang in the sabotage operation.

So the actual operation itself, right?

Whether that's gunner side or whether that's Ukrainians, you know, using these sort of remote operated drones in Russia, driving them in, and then, you know, the top of the truck opens and the drones fly out and destroy strategic bombers, right?

I mean, we focus on that.

What I find fascinating about this, in particular, gunner side, is there were months of intelligence gathering work in advance.

I mean, really years, because they had access to Professor Tronstad, who had actually designed the facilities.

They had a really intimate understanding, not only of the layout and the mechanics of the place, but the rhythms, the people rhythms, the guard changeovers and things like that.

There was a massive amount of groundwork that was laid really very quietly in the shadows to make these kind of sabotage operations work.

And I think it speaks to the effectiveness of being able to destroy equipment and machinery and slow a program down is that you kind of have to build that muscle.

You have to destroy a very particular thing.

You can't just sort of make bombs go off around the facility and have the impact that you want.

You're trying to destroy a very particular piece of equipment.

And to do that, you need really granular intelligence.

Yeah, exquisite intelligence.

And I think, you know, you can see that from the story at the moments where, you know, the door is locked and they've got to find another way in.

If you don't know about another way in, you've got a problem.

If you don't know the guard routines, you've got a problem.

And I think that is testament to all the intelligence gathering that went on and the Grouse team, which was kind of vital for this as well.

And it just shows, yeah, sabotage is not easy.

easy.

It's hard to do a well-protected target like that.

So what became of our hero, Joachim Ronenberg, after this operation?

He gets dropped back in again for another Operation Field Fair to carry out sabotage of German supply lines in 1944.

And then when the war ends in 1945, he's actually in London.

He can remember this day as being, he describes it as tremendous, and he's carried down by crowds down Oxford Street on Victory in Europe Day through through to Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square finds himself in St.

James's Park the warm spring day is turning into night and then he sees this British flag up in the sky with a searchlight on it which is hanging over the houses of parliament and he just kind of glimpses this flag and it sticks with him this memory and we'll come back to it but he actually only a few weeks later understands the importance of the work of Gunnerside because he says it's in August 1945 when the US drops the bomb, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that we knew what we'd done was of great importance.

Not until then.

That's what he told me many years later.

So it's only then that he kind of makes the link and realizes, well, that's what all the heavy water was about.

And until then, he'd just basically been doing his job.

And I guess that makes sense.

I mean, he wasn't briefed on the Manhattan Project and how there's a race.

I mean, and that such thing is possible of an atomic bomb.

Yeah.

Right.

So he's just doing his job, told it's important.

You've got to do it.

What's interesting, I think, is he doesn't think of joining the army, which of course he could have done.

He's decorated as a soldier.

What does he do?

Goes to work in journalism.

What a hero.

Okay, we finally realize.

He goes to work for the Norwegian broadcasting company in 1948, and he spends the next 44 years working in radio and TV in his hometown of Ollesund.

Again, my respect for the man every day just goes up and up the more I hear about him.

I also like this.

He says he never had a bad dream, never had any regrets, describes himself as extremely lucky.

He finds he's changed, though, as a person, particularly his friendships.

So some of the old friendships have gone away, but he has these new ones with his people with whom he's faced death.

And he describes them as a gang of friends.

We're a gang of friends doing a job together.

Is that Norwegian understatement right there?

That is Joachim Ronnenberg.

You know, we're a gang of friends doing a job together.

Brackett's stopping the Nazi nuke programme by blowing up its heavy water plant, you know.

But also, you know, the other thing is he retains this very strong bond with the UK till the end of his life.

And I met him in London in 2013, so 70th anniversary of Gunnicide.

And in the afternoon, he received a flag flown over the houses of parliament.

And it was a reminder of that time at the end of the war when he looked up at the same flag flying over Westminster of what Britain had offered him in terms of hope for his homeland when he'd fled on that boat that we talked about over to Shetland.

And he said, you know, we felt very much that we had a big debt to Britain, he told me.

They received us, they trained us and they helped us.

This operation wasn't Norwegian or British at all.

It was an allied operation.

That bond, I think, which is very strong still actually between Norway and the UK and actually the Norwegian and British military and some of the special forces particularly is still there.

And I actually met him and interviewed him in a place called the Special Forces Club, which is a wonderful place in an undisclosed location in London.

It's quite known to those who go there.

I'm not a member because I haven't been in the Special Forces or in the intelligence services.

I have a mug behind me from the Special Forces Club.

To speak to him there, and the place is kind of lined with all these photographs of heroes.

And it was set up for those kind of heroes, particularly after the Second World War, who'd done some of those SOE and other operations.

And, you know, his picture was up there.

And I just remember him, we were looking at one of the pictures, which was a map of a morgue and he was just showing me the route that they took and I just thought this guy has done something extraordinary and it is not often in your life that you feel fortunate to have met someone who you truly consider just a hero I think just in that kind of low-key

way you know he wasn't puffed up in the slightest he just had this wry sense of humor he'd just been a kind of person who'd been called on to do something in his patriotic duty with a gang of friends and had just gone on and just done it.

And I just think there is something about him and about his personality and about the decisions he makes on the operation, which to me really kind of speaks to true heroism.

That's why I think I put him up there when people ask me who's the most impressive person I've ever interviewed.

Not you, David McCloskey.

Much as I admire you, of course.

That is devastating.

Or Edward Snowden, when I get to meet him, he will not be up there.

He will not even come close, I think, to Joachim Roddenberg, who I think is up there.

I had a snarky comment at the Ready, Gordon, about how you had sneakily chosen a story here that has no Americans, no CIA, a sort of

British delegated Norwegian ski hero who ends up becoming a journalist at the equivalent, the Norwegian equivalent of the BBC, it seems like.

Yeah, exactly.

We're ticking some obvious Gordon Carrera boxes here, which I'm only now realizing.

But

I echo the sentiment about the heroism.

And I think it's really remarkable, I think, in an era where so much is loud to tell a story about someone who's actually quite understated and calm and yet absolutely fearless and daring in service of an incredible cause.

So I think there is probably the right spot to wrap our crazy ski adventure in Operation Gunnerside.

And of course, we would love if all of our listeners signed up for the Declassified Club, which you can do at therestisclassified.com, where you'll get access to bonus episodes, early content, a whole bunch of other stuff.

Gordon Carrera's home address is going to be up there shortly.

We've heard the complaints about it not being advertised yet.

It's coming in due time.

But thank you for listening.

And we'll see you next time.

See you next time.

Hi, it's William DeRimple here again from Empire, another goal hanger podcast.

Here's the clip from our recent series on the five partitions that created modern Asia.

And it was deeply emotional.

Sparsh picked up some pebbles from the village, which he made into jewelry, family heirlooms for his family going down the generations.

Because he was always saying that, you know, my family doesn't have archives, etc.

We lost everything in partition, and there's nothing that we have from Baylor to show where we came from.

But so he wanted to pick up something from Baylor and make it into heirlooms for the next generations, you know, three, four generations from now, they'll still have a piece of Bela with them, even if, you know, the relationship between India and Pakistan worsens again.

And, you know, even if his kids can never visit Bela, they'll always have a piece of Bela with them.

This connection with earth, dhurti, you know, they call it dhurti in India.

And zameeen is the Udu word for exactly the same thing.

But it is much more than just the earth.

It is who you are, where you have grown from, where your forebears have grown from.

And the number of people I know who have been lucky enough to travel across the border, and I count myself as one, who find it impossible to leave without a scoop of earth.

And I have one too, you know, in Lahore, picked up a handful of earth and brought it back with me because I thought, you know, this is this, this is the stuff my grandfather used to walk on.

To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.

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