User talk:Aldebaran

SOE operations

The details of the various attacks to destroy the heavy water and/or hydro plant are not completely correct. Here are the most important facts (found below), copied verbatim from another Wikipedia page, under the heading 'Norwegian heavy water sabotage'. My interest in adding this correction, was because this page said that Operation Grouse was a failure. It wasn't. Operation Grouse was a resounding, tactical success. It was operation Operation Freshman that was a disaster resulting in many deaths and the executions of captured men.

(I am unaware of who the original author of the excerpt that I have added below)

Between 1940 and 1944, a sequence of sabotage actions, by the Norwegian resistance movement—as well as Allied bombing—ensured the destruction of the plant and the loss of the heavy water produced. These operations—codenamed Grouse, Freshman, and Gunnerside—finally managed to knock the plant out of production in early 1943.

In Operation Grouse, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) successfully placed four Norwegian nationals as an advance team in the region of the Hardanger Plateau above the plant in October 1942. The unsuccessful Operation Freshman was mounted the following month by British paratroopers; they were to rendezvous with the Norwegians of Operation Grouse and proceed to Vemork. This attempt failed when the military gliders crashed short of their destination, as did one of the tugs, a Handley Page Halifax bomber. The other Halifax returned to base, but all the other participants were killed in the crashes or captured, interrogated, and executed by the Gestapo.

In February 1943, a team of SOE-trained Norwegian commandos succeeded in destroying the production facility with a second attempt, Operation Gunnerside, later evaluated by SOE as the most successful act of sabotage in all of World War II Knesm (talk) 17:33, 5 April 2019 (UTC)