Quotes from Neal Bascomb

There are few instincts more natural than the body in full motion as it races across a field or through the trees.

By the end, there was only one conclusion to draw: "Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable time.

By year's end Diebner had dozens of scientists under his watch across Germany refining the uranium-machine theory and building the first small experimental designs.

Beside the Columbia River in Washington State, construction had commenced on reactors that used two hundred tons of uranium moderated by twelve hundred tons of graphite. Working with their Canadian ally, the Americans were building a massive heavy water plant at a hydropower station in Trail, British Columbia. At the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, a small city of physicists was working to build a functioning fission bomb.

By Heisenberg's calculations, he was sure to have a self-sustaining reactor if he could only obtain 50 percent more uranium and heavy water. He would get neither.

The Uranium Club would require a steady, robust supply of the precious liquid. Unfortunately, the world's sole producer, Norsk Hydro's Vemork plant, was far away in an inaccessible valley in Norway, a country whose neutral status in the war made it an unreliable partner.

Since the Allied thrust into France just over a week before, it had become clear that there would be no invasion to free Norway. His countrymen would have to do it themselves.

Norsk Hydro wanted to know the purpose of such a large order, but with experiments using heavy water now labeled SH-200, a high-level military secret, the IG Farben representative offered only silence. Not long after, the Norwegians did find out, from Jacques Allier, what that purpose was: the potential development of an atomic bomb.

There was a danger that the Germans would implement a scorched-earth policy when they withdrew their 350,000 troops, as they had done when leaving Italy.

Syverstad was at Vemork, and Nielsen in an Oslo hospital, awaiting an appendectomy that his sister, a nurse there, had arranged for him to have on Sunday—the perfect alibi.

The Norsk Hydro director general offered to give France the heavy water on loan, with no price attached, and told Allier that Norsk Hydro would provide France with first claim on what was produced in the future.

At long last, on October 5, Tronstad returned to Norway, dropping by parachute into the Vidda. His "long exile" was over.

By spring 1945, the time for action looked imminent. Nazi Germany was collapsing, and the march into Berlin would soon cut off the head of the snake. Throughout Norway, the sabotage of railway transports, ports, ships, and communication lines was hobbling the Wehrmacht and obstructing the removal of its troops to reinforce their defenses inside Germany itself.

Since the day Hitler invaded Poland seven months earlier, it was plain to Tronstad that Norway would not be allowed to maintain the neutral stand it had held during the Great War.

There were good reasons for their interest, chiefly because Norway's long coastline offered potential naval bases to dominate the North Sea.

The order to mobilize was given on May 8, 1945, the day Churchill declared victory over Germany from a balcony overlooking Whitehall to a throng of revelers. The forces throughout Norway, including deep in the heart of Telemark, went into action. After years of fighting as an underground army, they put on uniforms and simple armbands and took back Rjukan and the surrounding towns.

The invaders numbered almost four hundred thousand, Milorg roughly forty thousand. There could have been an ugly fight, but there was none. At last Norway was free, and parties broke out in the streets of Oslo and throughout the country.

The Allies had broken their word. Without consulting the Norwegian government, they had sent a fleet of bombers to strike Vemork. Many civilians had died. Much needless destruction had been wrought, especially on the nitrate plant in Rjukan. That site had never appeared on any target list and only produced fertilizer for Norwegian agriculture. Hardest to accept was the fact that the primary target, the heavy water plant, had not even been damaged, just as Tronstad had warned it would not be.

Three hundred and eighty-eight B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators from three divisions of the Eighth Air Force were headed to Norway that morning.

If production continued, the Allies would likely attack Vemork again. He wanted to move the plant's high-concentration equipment—including all existing stocks of heavy water at every level of concentration—to Germany, where a new plant would be constructed.

Tronstad returned to Trondheim, where he had resumed his teaching and studies at NTH. He channeled most of his prodigious energy, however, into his activities with the underground resistance, working particularly closely with several bands of university students who were pushing back against the German hold on the country.

With his industrial connections, he gathered information on Norwegian firms and how they were helping the Germans. Norsk Hydro was but one focus of many.

German scientists had perfected the shaped charges that could bring about these collisions at very high temperatures. Diebner and his team began putting together a series of experiments that would squeeze deuterium atoms together through the use of explosive shock waves inside a hollow silver ball, their goal being to trigger a fusion reaction—and create a bomb.

A week after the celebration, on June 28, 187 members of Kompani Linge, with Poulsson and Rønneberg in the lead, paraded in uniform before King Haakon. Of their select unit, fifty-one had died during the war. The king paid tribute to the men and their clandestine work.