Obituary - Joachim Rønneberg, Second World War saboteur who thwarted Hitler’s atomic bomb

Died: October 21, 2018

JOACHIM Rønneberg, who has died aged 99, was the last of “the heroes of Telemark,” Norwegian saboteurs working for British intelligence to thwart Hitler’s attempts to create what could have been the world’s first atomic bomb.

Aged 23 at the time, Rønneberg and a small team parachuted from England into Norway, cross-country skied in sub-zero temperatures to an isolated hydroelectric power plant run by Nazi occupiers, blew it up and escaped safely, again mostly on skis across 200 miles, to neutral Sweden. Their story was told in the 1965 movie The Heroes of Telemark starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, although Mr Rønneberg was highly critical of the film’s fictionalised and romanticised scenes and said “it should never have been allowed”.

He and his team had been trained as commandos in the Scottish Highlands, at Lochaber, Glen Feshie and Loch Morar near Mallaig where Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) – Churchill’s “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” – trained allied volunteers at Swordland Lodge on the loch’s northern shore. It was there that Rønneberg learned the art of sabotage, weapons expertise (often using live rounds – many trainees died), how to build and plant bombs and even how to use his Fairbairn-Sykes dagger or bare hands to “terminate the enemy with extreme prejudice”.

The SOE assigned him as leader of a Norwegian commando group known as Kompani Linge. His time in Scotland led to a lifelong love of the country and he returned in later life and was considered something of a local hero although he was reluctant to hear that word and said he and his men were “just doing our job for peace and for freedom, the freedom of my country, of Britain and of the world.”

John C Hutchison, a retired Lochaber area manager with the Highland Council, told The Herald from Fort William: “Joaquim visited visited Fort William in 1997 after the big Rotary International Convention in Glasgow, while en route to his former training locations. He spoke to Lochaber Rotary Club and I hosted his talk in Lochaber House, the Highland Council Chambers, for the benefit of the wider community including some expat Norwegians. His detailed account of the raid was inspiring, especially on realising he was only 23 at the time.

"Contrary to the film account, of which he was dismissive, not a shot was fired. Despite his fame, he seemed a modest character. He was tall and lithe but his visual resemblance to Clint Eastwood was striking.”

It was in February 1943 that Lieutenant Rønneberg and eight Norwegian comrades, all wearing British army tunics under their snow gear (they would have been executed on sight if identified as Norwegian civilian résistants) and carrying cyanide capsules in case they were captured, parachuted into southern Norway in the black of night.

Their mission, codenamed Operation Gunnerside, was to reach and destroy the Nazi-run hydroelectric plant at Vermork, at the time the biggest hydroelectric plant of its type in the world. Rønneberg recalled years later that he only knew his target, not its importance. It turned out that the Nazis were using the plant to create “heavy water,” a new substance Hitler hoped could help produce an atomic bomb that would first hit London and soon end the war in his favour.

“We had no real plan to get out. We assumed we were on one-way tickets,” Mr Rønneberg recalled. It also turned out that heavy water was less effective in producing weapons-grade plutonium than graphite, which the U.S. Manhattan Project went on to use to create the atomic bombs they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end the war.

The nine-man Norwegian group skied through the freezing Telemark pine forest until they reached a deep, snow-covered gorge separating them from the hydroelectric plant. It looked impossible to get down and cross the gorge but they did so. Observing the Nazi guards’ movements, Rønneberg decided to strike while the guards were changing their shifts. While his team covered him with their Tommy guns, he cut through wire, crawled through a narrow ventilation shaft, stuck his gun into the chest of a guard and planted his explosives. Setting the timer for 30 seconds, he crawled out and was jumping back down into the gorge when he heard a boom muted by the snow. Mission accomplished.

Interviewed by The Daily Telegraph more recently, Rønneberg recalled the moment he and his comrades stopped once out of reach of their Nazi pursuers. “It was a mackerel sky. It was a marvellous sunrise. We sat there very tired, very happy. Nobody said anything. That was a very special moment.”

A British military historian, M.R.D. Foot told the New York Times in 2015 that Rønneberg’s mission changed the course of the war and deserved the gratitude of humanity. Even the Nazi commander in occupied Norway, Gen. Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, was forced to admire the operation. “This is the most splendid coup I have seen in this war.” As for Rønneberg, he once said with a wry smile: “it was the very best skiing weekend I ever had."

US and allied bombers later attacked the hydro-electric plan – initially it had been ruled out because of the danger of civilian casualties – and inflicted further damage. Hitler’s atomic bombs were over, as his life was soon to be.

Rønneberg said years later that he realised the importance of his mission only in August 1945 when the U.S. dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “And then we knew what we had done was of great importance. Not until then," he said.

Joachim Holmboe Rønneberg was born on August 30, 1919, in Alesund, Norway, a son of Alf, a prominent local merchant with an old family firm, and Anna Rønneberg. He was 20, had just completed his education there and was working for a fish-exporting firm when the Nazis invaded and occupied his homeland in April 1940.

While some of his young fellow patriots, including some of his family, stayed on as part of the Norwegian resistance, Rønneberg, a fine skier and mountaineer since childhood, fled to England via what Scots and Norwegians termed “the Shetland bus,” a fishing boat to Shetland.

Determined to fight the Nazis, he immediately headed south to London to make contact with like-minded Norwegian expats. The first he met was Martin Linge, a Norwegian actor whose name would later be given to Rønneberg’s commando unit, Kompani Linge. At an interview in an SOE office above London’s Baker Street tube station, Rønneberg was asked to lead Operation Gunnerside and the rest is now history.

Rønneberg went on to carry out other wartime missions in Norway, attacking German supply lines and blowing up vital bridges. After the war, he returned to his hometown of Ålesund where he became a radio journalist, and eventually editorial director at a local radio and television station, before retiring in 1987. He went on to lecture on Norway’s history and his own wartime experiences. On his 95th birthday, Alesund erected a statue of him near his favourite café.

He received Norway’s highest decoration for military gallantry, the War Cross With Sword, the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) from Britain, the French Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre, and the American Medal of Freedom With Silver Palm, honouring civilians who aided the war effort.

His wife Liv Foldal, a crafts teacher, died in 2015. They had three children, Jostein, Asa and Birte.

PHIL DAVISON