Was Norway just an inactive recipient of assistance from the Allied powers during WWII?
Apparently someone here are ignorant about the Norwegian participation and contribution to the war effort and to it’s own liberation from German occupation in 1944-45.
Here is the story about what may have been the most important and successful sabotage operation during WWII:
A statue of the leader of that operation is found centrally in hid hometown, Ålesund:
He died peacefully in 2018 at the age of 99-years.
Here is a message from the Royal House of Norway after his funeral:
He is buried in the Rønneberg family’s grave near Borgund Church in Ålesund:
They were very brave men and achieved the objective, namely settling back the Nazi progress.
The real story is that it was a masterpiece of deception. The work by the British Alloy Tubes who took their findings to the USA under the Quebec Agreement had determined that using Heavy Water was a dead end and the attention placed on destroying the facility convinced the German Scientists to continue down that path.
Also, heavy water reactors can use a form of natural uranium instead of the very difficult and expensive enriched form. It looks like the Germans were on the way to discovering what was a shorter and less troublesome path.
I still think those guys made a very decisive contribution to the outcome of WWII.
Even if it only happened to fool the Germans it still stopped them from delevoping the bomb in time to flatten London.
They were also well under way with developing ICBMs that MAY have delivered a bomb to NYC.
PS> Joachim Rønneberg was not interested in glory and refused to be involved in the making of the movie “Heros of Telemark”. He said that “the war is over, let us move on”
In his later years he changed his mind and went around schools in Norway to talk to the young generation about the futility of wars and the importance of NOT forgetting the lessons learnt from WWII, less someone repeated the same misstake again
I acknowledged their contribution to the war effort and the allies were well aware of the research in Germany. Of the Jewish scientists and others all had attended various scientific conventions and had written papers with those who had remained in Germany. Niels Bohr worked with Werner Heisenberg before the war who became the leader of the Nazi team working on an atomic weapon. Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Sweden, joining Alloy Tubes in the UK and moved with them to the Manhattan Project.
These people along with Fermi, an Italian Jew, gave an insight into German progress.
Papers obtained at the end of the war showed that the Nazi scientists were some distance away from producing a weapon.
Their progress towards a successor to the V2 rocket, a ICBM was well advanced.
The Japanese were also doing research into atomic weapons.
The Gunnerside operation was one of many by “Kompani Linge” in Norway during WWII:
Kapt. Linge and many of the members of “Kompani Linge” was from Ålesund and the district around, therefore a meeting of the “Lingeklubben” (1947-2007) was held here in May 1965 (VE +20):
Colonel John Skinner Wilson was Head of SOE Scandinavian Section and the immediate commander for both “Kompani Linge” and “Shetlandsgjengen” He sent this letter to “Lingeklubben” on it’s 10th Anniversary in 1957:
