Quotes from Neal Bascomb

The Germans now wanted to increase heavy water production to five thousand kilograms a year, and Paul Harteck, whom Tronstad knew from Cambridge, was on his way to advise on new methods to obtain such levels. Realizing the importance of conveying this information to the British, but with Skylark B in jeopardy, Tronstad found a courier—a man planning to escape by boat to Scotland the following week.

A week later, Tronstad's courier was seized at the wharf's edge. Fortunately he was able to swallow the cigarette paper before being hauled away.

In Farm Hall, a quiet country house outside Cambridge, ten Uranium Club scientists were waiting for a decision to be made about their fate. They had been held there since July 3, 1945, rounded up when the Nazi regime fell, along with their papers, laboratory equipment, and supplies of uranium and heavy water. Among them were Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, and Kurt Diebner.

At 6:00 p.m. on August 6, 1945, a short BBC bulletin reported that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan by the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay.

The next morning, September 26, two members of the resistance network picked him up in a truck. They drove toward neutral Sweden, a hundred miles away. An hour's hike from the border, they got out and set off on foot through the woods.

Some, like Heisenberg, were already putting together the framework of their own defense, conveniently justifying the failure of their efforts as a calculated strategy to keep Hitler from obtaining the bomb.

A month passed before Tronstad gained passage to Britain, from where he hoped to continue his fight to free Norway.

On October 21, Tronstad arrived at King's Cross station in London.

Buenos Aires was also a modern commercial city that served as the hub of Argentina's vast agricultural and natural resources, as well as its industrial center. Highways and great railway lines radiated out in every direction, bringing in goods from the countryside, and the port, one of South America's largest, sent those goods abroad.

On his first Sunday in London, Tronstad sat down across from Commander Eric Welsh, head of the Norwegian branch of SIS. Welsh ran Skylark B and had choreographed Tronstad's journey to London.

Laurence Binyon's poem "For the Fallen" was read in English and in Norwegian translation at the ceremony: "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning, / We will remember them.

Knut Haugland spent 101 days in 1947 as the radio operator on the Kon-Tiki, a simple raft that crossed the Pacific Ocean with only a six-man crew. Beyond offering great adventure, the journey exorcised his own demons.

What nature and time could not mend, their friendship supported them through. Until the end of their lives, Kompani Linge members gathered often to share experiences that few others could understand.

Running had become more of a competition to draw out the best that was in him, as if he were plumbing the depths of his will.

Tronstad knew that if he refused to dispatch Haukelid to take care of the ferry, the Allies would bomb Vemork again before the shipment left the plant or while the train or ferry were in motion. Many more innocent civilians would die in these scenarios.

But Buenos Aires also had poor outlying slums, called villa miserias, where hundreds of thousands of people lived in tin or cardboard shacks, a single tap providing water for fifty families. Their plight was made worse by an economy that funneled most of the country's riches to a few hundred families and suffered from rampant unemployment, an exploding budget deficit, and a vigorous black market.

You have to fight for your freedom and for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It's like a glass boat; it's easy to break. It's easy to lose. —JOACHIM RØNNEBERG, Gunnerside leader

The war is singing its last verse, and it requires every effort from all who would call themselves men. You will understand that, won't you?

Making history was never the aim of the Norwegian saboteurs, nor of the British sappers who were sent before them. After the war, the sacrifice of the British Royal Engineers and RAF crews of the ill-fated Operation Freshman was not forgotten. Thirty-seven bodies were recovered and buried at gravesites in Norway. Bill Bray's headstone reads, To live in the hearts of those that loved me is not to die.

He had always figured it was going to be a one-way journey, he said, and now he wanted his leader to know that he did not intend to slow down the team if they had the chance to escape. He would find his own way. "Nonsense," Rønneberg said flatly. "You've kept up with us until now, and you can keep up with us to Sweden." For this decision the young leader did not offer a vote.

Culling staff and methods from SIS's D section (D for destruction) and the Army's similar MI (Military Intelligence) unit, its masterminds, who started the organization from three rooms at St. Ermin's Hotel, referred to themselves as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

For a brief spell, he would try to avoid all war news and think only of science and history and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It would not be easy.

A man who sets out to become an artist at the mile is something like a man who sets out to discover the most graceful method of being hanged. No matter how logical his plans, he can not carry them out without physical suffering.

Finally, Rønneberg, the leader of Gunnerside and the last surviving saboteur, who was ninety-six years old in 2016, often spoke eloquently about why he braved the North Sea to be trained in Britain and why he then returned, twice, by parachute, to Norway. "You have to fight for your freedom," he said. "And for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It's like a glass boat; it's easy to break. It's easy to lose.