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Chapter 4 Trondheim

Flight Lieutenant A. F. P. Fane was turning his Spitfire for home after a frustrating reconnaissance flight over the eastern end of Trondheimsfjord in central Norway when he glimpsed a large shape in the confused pattern of grey seas, dishcloth clouds and white-capped hills below. ‘I saw something like a ship hidden in the shadow of the far end,’ he recorded in a neat, pencilled hand in his diary. It was so large that he thought he was mistaken and it ‘must be an island’. He went down for a closer look. ‘By God it’s a ship – it’s the ship,’ he wrote. He ‘rolled onto my side to have a good look and remember saying out loud, “my God I believe I’ve found it!” I couldn’t believe my eyes or my luck.’¹

Fane’s delight at his coup wore off as he struggled to reach home. The cloud pressed down to 600 feet and he was flying into ‘a hell of a wind from the south’. Twenty minutes after he should have landed he was ‘getting really worried’. There was still no sign of land and he was down to his last twenty gallons of fuel – less than half an hour’s flying time. Then a gap appeared in the cloud and he recognized Scapa Flow. He turned south and scraped down at Skitten, a satellite field near Wick. A little later he was back at base telling his flight commander Tony Hill that ‘I’d thought I’d found the old Rowboat but could not believe it’. He ‘hopped about on one foot then the other waiting for photos to be developed. When film was ready tore in to look at negatives.’ He was still worried that ‘maybe I’d missed the b––– thing. NO! there it was – no doubt now, it was the TURPITZ [sic] all right.’

Fane, a dashing thirty-year-old who was a Grand Prix racing driver before the war, had been sent with C Flight of No. 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) to Wick on the north Scottish coast on 21 January 1942 with the specific job of searching for Tirpitz. Now, only two days later, he had found her, tucked into Faettenfjord, a finger of deep water forty miles from the open sea.

Flight Lieutenant A. F. P. Fane

Churchill received the news with great excitement. He immediately ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans for Tirpitz to be bombed. ‘The destruction or even the crippling of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the present time,’ he told them. ‘No other target is comparable to it.’ A successful attack would mean that ‘the entire naval situation throughout the world would be altered’, freeing the Royal Navy to assert itself in the Pacific against Japan, which had now entered the war. He concluded: ‘The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this ship, which is holding four times the number of British capital ships paralysed, to say nothing of the two new American battleships retained in the Atlantic. I regard the matter as of the highest urgency and importance.’²

The dramatic tone of the memo made it apparent that the removal of Bismarck had done nothing to diminish Churchill’s concern about Hitler’s remaining battleship. During the second half of 1941, the PRU had kept a continuous watch on Tirpitz, flying regular reconnaissance missions over Kiel, her home port for the period. Failure to spot her, during one of her frequent excursions on sea trials, generated a flurry of alarm. Even when safely in view, she still exercised a peculiar menace. At the beginning of August, Churchill set off on board HMS Prince of Wales for his first wartime conference with President Roosevelt at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. A surveillance flight had located Tirpitz at Kiel on 6 August, much too far away to pose any threat, yet speculation persisted that she might attempt an ambush. Colonel Ian Jacob, an astute staff officer on board Prince of Wales, noted in his diary that ‘the Prime Minister did not seem to worry in the least, and he is secretly hoping the Tirpitz will come out and have a dart at him’.³

As the summer turned to autumn, worry about the battleship’s whereabouts and intentions continued to distract the navy, tying up, as the Prime Minister noted in his memo to the Chiefs, a disproportionate number of capital ships, as well as part of the American naval task force which, from September 1941, was based in Iceland to assist the Home Fleet. The Admiralty believed that three battleships were needed on standby to overwhelm Tirpitz were she to break out. Churchill thought the caution overdone, complaining to Pound that this was an ‘excessive provision’ and ‘incomparably more lavish than anything we have been able to indulge in so far in this war’.⁴

He was nonetheless impressed with the influence Tirpitz was able to assert. This attitude led to what can be counted as Tirpitz’s first indirect success of the war – a result that was achieved without her having to leave port. During the 1930s Churchill had paid little attention to the maritime threat posed by Japan, despite the fact that it was in the process of building a powerful fleet. He continued to underestimate the danger until early 1941when he first admitted, in a letter to Roosevelt that ‘the weight of the Japanese Navy, if thrown against us, would confront us with situations beyond the scope of our naval reserves’. As the year advanced and this dire prospect grew more likely, he considered moving a battleship of the most modern King George V [KVG] class to the East to deter Japan. The hope was that it would exercise the same mesmeric effect on the Japanese navy as Tirpitz did on the Home Fleet. ‘Tirpitz is doing to us exactly what a “KGV” in the Indian Ocean would do to the Japanese Navy,’ he wrote to Pound on 29 August 1941. ‘It exercises a vague, general fear and menaces all points at once. It appears and disappears, causing immediate reactions and perturbations on the other side.’⁵

By October he had settled on sending the Prince of Wales and in the War Cabinet discussion of 17 October he again cited the ‘example of the battleship Tirpitz which … compelled us to keep on guard a force three times her weight in addition [to the] United States forces patrolling the Atlantic’.⁶

Prince of Wales was duly dispatched to Singapore on 23 October, over the strong objections of the Admiralty, which feared that Tirpitz might attempt a breakout at any minute. She sailed first to Ceylon where she met up with the ageing battle cruiser Repulse. On 2 December they arrived in Singapore. Their deterrence mission was long obsolete. Five days afterwards the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and launched an invasion fleet towards Malaya. Prince of Wales and Repulse set out to intercept it. On 10 December, both ships were sunk within an hour of each other by Japanese torpedo bombers, a disaster that plunged the nation into gloom, temporarily extinguishing the hope aroused by the arrival of the United States into the war.

Though Churchill and the admirals were not to know it, Tirpitz represented no threat at all during the second half of 1941. Having lost Bismarck, Räder was taking all care of his single greatest resource and the tests and trials to establish her sea- and battleworthiness that filled the rest of the year were rigorous even by peacetime standards. While the Home Fleet steeled itself for the battleship’s appearance she was engaged in a leisurely working-up programme cruising back and forth between Baltic ports.

The fate of her sister ship Bismarck seems to have had surprisingly little effect on the morale of the ship’s company. Onboard routine and the spirit of the ship were described in great detail by the administration officer, Korvettenkapitän Kurt Voigt in his letters home to his wife Erika, or ‘Klösel’ as he affectionately called her. He was a member of the Prussian professional middle class who had joined the navy in 1917 and carried on as a career officer in the interwar years. Voigt comes across in his correspondence as a decent man, a loving husband and father and a considerate boss. He was now in early middle age, considerably older than the rest of the crew. He nonetheless showed a boyish pride in his association with a famous vessel. Like everyone, the first thing that struck him about Tirpitz was its immensity, after which the First World War era battleship Schlesien seemed ‘a ludicrous trawler’.⁷

Karl Topp (left) and Kurt Voigt

He arrived on board at the end of September, as the ship stood off the Aaland Islands, the Baltic archipelago at the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia. Tirpitz was the core of a force that included the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and four light cruisers. Since June, Germany had been at war with the Soviet Union and the fleet was assembled to deter Russian warships from venturing out from Kronstadt. The Soviet ships stayed put and there is no sense at all of impending action in Voigt’s accounts of onboard life. Instead his letters are taken up with marvelling at the comfort and modernity of his surroundings. ‘My room is considerably bigger than what I’m used to,’ he wrote on 7 October after Tirpitz had returned to Gdynia. ‘[There’s] a chair with leather-type upholstery for visitors, a comfortable writing chair, a square table, lace curtains on the portholes and the sides, all in cream.’ He also had a telephone ‘that communicates with all officers and other stations. There’s an entire phone book for this little city.’

The latter was an exaggeration but Tirpitz certainly had the facilities of a fair-sized village or small town. There was a hairdressing salon with five barbers, a bakery, a cinema well stocked with newish films, and a printing press which churned out regular editions of the onboard newspaper Der Scheinwerfer (The Searchlight). Officers took their meals in a mess that was like ‘a large and imposing restaurant with ceiling lighting’. The food was plentiful and pretty good. His first meal on board was ‘excellent’ – lentil soup followed by roast meat. During the Baltic autumn there were luxuries to supplement the staples of meat, tinned fish and potatoes and ‘now and again we get beautiful apples, tomatoes and grapes’.

There was also plenty to drink. At his first meeting with Kapitän Karl Topp, he was offered sparkling wine then whisky. He had encountered him before and found him ‘not much changed except a bit greyer’. Topp was extremely welcoming. ‘He was friendly and spent a lot of time talking to me,’ he reported to Erika on 1 October. The following day he comments again on his friendliness and observes proudly that ‘he treats me with respect … something the others remarked on’.

Voigt’s evident admiration for his captain appears to have been shared by most of the men on board. Karl Topp was forty-five years old when he took formal command of Tirpitz on 25 January 1941. He was born in Vörde in Prussian Westphalia, the son of a clergyman, and joined the Imperial navy when he was nineteen, serving in submarines during the First World War. At its close he was first officer of a U-boat in the Mediterranean which succeeded, through sinkings and minelaying, in forcing the temporary closure of the port of Marseilles. His captain was Martin Niemöller, then a fierce nationalist who went on to become a Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi theologian.

Topp was one of the lucky ones who managed to stay on in the service during the harsh and chaotic Weimar years. He combined virtuoso seamanship with technical knowledge and specialized in military shipbuilding. He was stocky with a broad, meaty face and bright blue eyes. His manner was calm and methodical. He radiated authority, leavened with humour and consideration for his men. The weather was bitter on 25 February 1941, the day Tirpitz was officially commissioned. One of the engine room officers, Georg Schlegel, remembered that ‘we all went to the top deck and it was snowing and very cold. The Commander kept it short so that we didn’t have to stand in the snow so long. The flag was hoisted and that was that.’⁸ Touches like that generated affection as well as respect among the ship’s company, who had given him the nickname ‘Charlie’.

Topp commanded a crew of 2,608, made up of 108 officers and 2,500 men. Most of them were young and inexperienced. Among them, though, was a core of sailors who had experienced the full trauma of war at sea. They were survivors of the heavy cruiser Blücher, the newest ship in the Kriegsmarine which had been sunk by shore-based gun and torpedo batteries as she sailed into Oslofjord during the invasion of Norway in April 1940 – an event as shocking and unexpected as the loss of Hood was to be for the British. Tirpitz seemed immune from such a catastrophe. Everyone on board took comfort from the ship’s armadillo hide of steel armour and the huge guns, encased in turrets named Anton, Bruno, Caesar and Dora. ‘The many, very heavy guns give a sense of absolute safety,’ wrote Voigt to Erika in Berlin. The sheer size seemed to promise security, as reflected in the metaphors of impregnability that crop up again and again in his correspondence. The ship was a ‘fortress’, a ‘slab of granite’.

Tirpitz, though, was an offensive not a defensive weapon. In the aftermath of the Bismarck disaster there was uncertainty as to how she should now be used. The loss had jolted Hitler into action. Admiral Räder noted that the Führer abandoned laissez-faire and now became ‘much more critical and more inclined to insist on his own views than before’.⁹

The battleground for which Tirpitz had originally been intended no longer seemed attractive. America’s full entry into the war in December 1941 made the Atlantic a much more dangerous place for surface ships. The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau were still in the area, lying up at Brest, where they were harassed by Bomber Command and afflicted by mechanical problems that delayed their return to operational health. Tirpitz was still not at battle readiness and, even if she were, would face a dangerous voyage to a French Atlantic port and be exposed to RAF attack once she got there. If a raiding force did venture out its operations would be circumscribed by a dire shortage of oil. All in all, Atlantic operations by large ships seemed to offer more danger than they did reward.¹⁰

Hitler’s thoughts turned instead to Norway, which Germany had held since the spring of 1940. He regarded its possession as a strategic necessity. Norway commanded the Reich’s northern approaches. It was also vital for the transportation of essential iron ore supplies from Sweden. During 1941 he grew increasingly worried that Germany might be about to lose it. Hitler harboured a persistent suspicion – which sometimes seemed to shade into obsession – that Britain planned to invade Norway. A series of increasingly daring raids by British and Norwegian commandos on the Lofoten Islands, Spitsbergen and Bear Island, and Vaagsøy on the mainland, raised the possibility that a landing in Norway might be imminent. The prospect of losing Narvik was particularly alarming. It was the only ice-free port in the area, through which Swedish ore could be shipped to German war factories all year round.

On 13 November Hitler met Räder at the Wolfschanze, a headquarters in East Prussia from where he oversaw the war on the Eastern Front. It was decided to transfer Tirpitz from the Baltic to Trondheim. Hitler was now of the opinion that ‘every ship which is not stationed in Norway is in the wrong place’.¹¹ Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would be moved north when the circumstances allowed.

Räder doubted there was any real danger of a British attack on Norway. It was another example of Hitler’s exasperating belief in instinct over logical assessment. However, the move had his approval. He, too, had come to believe that the Atlantic was too dangerous for extended raiding operations. Northern waters offered a more advantageous battleground for his big ships. From Norwegian ports they could sally forth against the Arctic convoys which, in response to Stalin’s appeals to Churchill and Roosevelt, were ferrying substantial war supplies round the North Cape to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel. The first had sailed from Iceland on 21 August, six more followed by the end of the year and many more were expected in 1942.

The goal of strangling Britain had diminished in importance. The great struggle now was with the Soviet Union and Tirpitz could make an important contribution to the war on the Eastern Front. The holds of the cargo ships plying the Atlantic and Arctic oceans were crammed with tanks, aircraft, lorries, engines, guns and ammunition, shoring up Soviet resistance to the German onslaught. It was far more efficient to destroy them on the high seas than on the battlefield, and each ship sent to the bottom by the navy saved many Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe lives.

The mere presence of Tirpitz and the other big units in northern waters would also add greatly to the Royal Navy’s already crushing burden of duty. The convoys needed heavy protection and a substantial force of capital ships, destroyers, minesweepers, anti-aircraft vessels and submarines would have to shield them as they came and went. Even if the German ships never left port they would act as a ‘fleet in being’, forcing the enemy to maintain a countervailing force in the area, tying up valuable units that could be put to much-needed use elsewhere.

Räder summarized his intentions in his sailing orders. Her new home was to be Trondheim, halfway down Norway’s western coast. From there she was to ‘protect our position in the Norwegian and Arctic areas by threatening the flank of enemy operations against the northern Norwegian areas and by attacking White Sea convoys … to tie down enemy forces in the Atlantic so they cannot operate in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean or the Pacific’.¹² Tirpitz would be supported by the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen which would soon be on their way from Germany.

Tirpitz left Gdynia on the Polish Baltic coast on the afternoon of 12 January 1942. At seven o’clock the following morning she arrived at Holtenau at the eastern end of the Kiel Canal which linked the Baltic to the North Sea. There she unloaded stores and equipment in order to lighten the load and ease the passage through the waterway. On board, excitement was mounting. After nearly a year of working-up exercises the preparations seemed to be over and operations about to begin. ‘Nobody knew anything,’ remembered Adalbert Brünner, a young midshipman who had joined the ship the previous autumn. ‘Everybody hoped we were off on a Gneisenau or Bismarck type of operation.’ The crew wondered whether ‘we were on our way to the Atlantic … the ship was humming with rumours.’¹³ It seemed barely possible that her broad beam would be able to squeeze through the canal. Water from the wash overflowed the banks and it appeared to Brünner as they passed under the high bridge at Rendsburg, halfway along the route, ‘one could almost shake hands with the pedestrians’.

That evening Tirpitz arrived at Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Elbe at the western end of the canal where she took on fuel and reloaded the cargo previously taken off. The following day she steamed out into the North Sea. It was there that the crew finally heard of their destination. They were going to Norway not the Atlantic. The news did nothing to deflate spirits. Either way they would soon be in action. To some, the move seemed predestined. By a curious chance, the ship’s symbol was the curved prow of a Viking longship.

It was deep midwinter, and the weather was on their side. Before setting off, Navy Group North reassured Topp that the forecast was bad for central England and Scotland, ‘with poor take-off conditions’.¹⁴ His ship stood a good chance of getting to Trondheim without being spotted by reconnaissance aircraft. On 15 January Tirpitz was on her way. The seas were so rough that the escorting destroyers were unable to keep pace and had to follow in the battleship’s wake as it sliced through the waves close to its top speed of just over thirty knots.¹⁵ Then, on the morning of 16 January, those on deck caught their first sight of the Norwegian coast. ‘It was hung with cloud, sombre, covered with snow,’ remembered Brünner. ‘It was a strange sight for all of us, scattered houses which didn’t look as if they were connected up by roads – it seemed like the quintessence of loneliness.’¹⁶

In the afternoon they turned to starboard and passed between the low headlands at the entrance to Trondheimsfjord which plunged for eighty miles east and north into the Norwegian mainland. Their final destination was a narrow finger of water at the south-eastern end – Faettenfjord. It was only about three-quarters of a mile across at its widest, with a small island, Saltøya, planted at the entrance, and it took great skill to bring Tirpitz in. Topp managed the feat easily. ‘The commander simply made fast there without any pilot ships or tugs,’ said Georg Schlegel. ‘He was the best. He could really drive that ship.’¹⁷

In Faettenfjord a berth had already been prepared with two massive concrete capstans sunk into the rocks on the northern side of the fjord as mooring points. The crew were immediately set to work stretching grey camouflage nets over the length and breadth of the ship, which they covered with fir branches cut from the forest that covered the hill above. Soon Tirpitz was cloaked in a dusting of snow and its outlines melted into the monochrome landscape of hill and water.

The anchorage had been well chosen. Tirpitz was tucked into the tail of the inlet. The hills standing 400 to 600 feet above plunged straight into the water, making a natural mooring deep enough to take the ship’s nearly thirty-four-feet draught. There was another ridge on the southern shore, about 700 feet high. Any attacking aircraft would have to approach from the western, seaward side, making the task of the defenders much easier. The ship was protected by clusters of anti-aircraft batteries mounting sixteen 105mm, forty-four 20mm and eight 37mm guns sited to give an all-round field of fire. Within a few days more flak batteries had been placed on the slopes above it as well as chemical smoke generators that could pump out a thick, protective pall within minutes. Soon afterwards it was fully protected by attack from the water by steel antisubmarine and anti-torpedo nets, hung at right angles, a hundred yards from the stern, which faced backwards towards the mouth of Faettenfjord.

Topp and his superiors were certain that the British would soon learn about the new whereabouts of the Tirpitz and immediately attack her. Thanks to Fane’s reconnaissance flight of 23 January, the battleship had indeed been found. The Admiralty and Air Ministry now set to finding a plan that would satisfy the Prime Minister’s impatient demand that it should be sunk without further ado. In his instructions, Churchill had raised the possibility of an attack by carrier-borne torpedo planes. That would mean sailing a carrier close enough to put their aircraft within range of the target. To do so would expose the carrier and its escorts to great risk from the Lufwaffe’s Ju88 and Ju87 bombers and dive-bombers and Heinkel 111 torpedo planes that had begun to arrive in the region in response to Hitler’s new focus on Norway. Even if the Fleet Air Arm’s Swordfish and Albacore biplanes made it to Faettenfjord, the narrowness of the anchorage made it extremely unlikely they would be able to hit the target.

It was left to Bomber Command to come up with something. Tirpitz lay at the extreme limit of the range of even the four-engine bombers that had now come into service. To reach the target and return safely home they would have to take off from bases in Scotland. The operation that ensued was given the name ‘Oiled’. It was undertaken in a spirit of hope rather than expectation. The RAF had long been aware that it lacked the means to pose a deadly threat to large German warships. Since the second day of the war it had been trying to sink them, with very little success. Tirpitz herself had been the object of five operations while lying at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. The results were negligible, even when large numbers of aircraft were involved. On the night of 20/21 June 1941, a force of 115 Wellingtons, Hampdens, Whitleys, Stirlings and Halifaxes set off for Kiel to ‘identify and bomb the Tirpitz’. Not one aircraft succeeded in doing so.¹⁸

At this stage navigational aids were still primitive and it was a considerable achievement to find the target. Even then, the chances of hitting it were small. Bomb sights were simple and hopelessly inaccurate. To limit the risk from flak, aircraft had to drop their bombs from heights of 10,000 feet or more. To hit a target as tiny as the deck of a warship from this range was a considerable feat. When bombs did strike they were unlikely to cause fatal damage. Once again, post-war economies had held back research and development and RAF aircraft went into the new conflict with much the same ordnance as they had carried in 1918. The biggest bomb the twin-engined Whitleys, Hampdens and Blenheims in service at the start of the war could carry weighed 500lb of which only a third was explosive charge. Bomber crews sometimes endured the heartbreak and frustration of struggling through flak and fighters to strike their target, only to be let down by their weapons. Such was the experience of the fifteen Halifaxes of 35 and 76 Squadrons which broke through fierce fighter opposition to hit Scharnhorst where she lay at La Pallice on the French Atlantic coast on 24 July 1941. Three armour-piercing bombs passed through the ship without exploding. Another two bombs did detonate but the damage was repairable and Scharnhorst was ready for action again in four months. If the quality of the crews’ weapons had matched their skill and courage, she should have been sent to the bottom.

The nine Halifaxes and seven Stirlings from 15 and 149 Squadrons which took off in the early hours of 30 January from Lossiemouth, on the north-east coast of Scotland, to attack Tirpitz were almost certainly destined to fail. So it turned out. The weather was terrible. Only two aircraft managed to find Trondheim where they dropped their bombs without effect over some unidentified shipping. One Stirling was shot down. Churchill’s incessant prodding meant it unlikely that the failure would deter further attempts. On 22 February Bomber Command got a forceful and ruthless new commander, Sir Arthur Harris, who was anxious to impress. There would be two more attempts by the RAF to sink Tirpitz in Faettenfjord before the start of the summer.

The ship was now under regular surveillance. A picture taken by a PRU overflight on 15 February shows it lying at its usual berth, the long, finely tapered bow flaring out into a broad 118-foot beam. It looks safe and secure inside its protective netting, with a cluster of small maintenance and supply craft huddled around it feeding its needs, and a sheet of snow on its upper surfaces. The photographic intelligence was soon supplemented by reports from Norwegian agents in the area.

They were operating in an extremely risky environment. By now the German occupation had set hard over Trondheim and the surrounding area. The army had garrisoned the town. Navy control boats plied the length of Trondheimsfjord checking fishing boats and cargo vessels while bigger ships stood sentry at the entrance. In their wake came the Gestapo, led by Obersturmbannführer Gerhard Flesch, who arrived in October 1941. He took over the local prison as his headquarters and set up a concentration camp at Falstad, near Levanger, north-east of Trondheim.

Trondheim was historically and economically important. Norwegian kings were still crowned there in the Gothic cathedral of Nidaros whose triple spires poke elegantly above the merchant houses and leafy squares of the old town. The banks of the Nidelva river, which snakes around the centre, were lined with slipways, small canning factories and warehouses, painted yellow and red and topped with steep-pitched, corrugated-iron roofs. The smells of the sea – drying nets, fish, salt, tar and diesel oil – hung pleasantly over the town.

A small minority of Norwegians had welcomed the arrival of the Germans. The Norwegian Nazi Party, led by Vikdun Quisling, had a presence in the area. Over time they planted their supporters in influential jobs in schools, hospitals and local administration. They forced the Protestant bishop from the cathedral and a collaborator was installed in his place.

With his arrival, congregations dwindled. It was the young who seemed to feel the German presence most, especially the students at the Institute of Technology, an imposing granite pile, which had been training architects and engineers since 1910. The Gestapo were quick to suppress displays of patriotism. Gestures of defiance, though, hardly posed a threat. Their main concern was enemy agents who could pass on intelligence about German dispositions and movements, particularly the activities of Tirpitz which now lay only fifteen miles to the east of the town.

British intelligence agencies set about establishing a network of agents under the Germans’ noses, in Trondheim and other key points along the Norwegian coastline. Their activities were to provide a continuous stream of human intelligence, gathered by direct observation. It was extremely valuable. Despite the aerial reconnaissance and the watch kept by British submarines at the sea entrance to Trondheimsfjord, bad weather meant that there were frequent holes in the surveillance. Agents could fill the gaps. Tirpitz had only one route to the sea – westwards along the fjord. This took it right past the 50,000 inhabitants of Trondheim, which lay on the southern shore. There were further settlements strung along either side of the fjord. Reliable agents equipped with radios would be able to alert the Admiralty to any significant comings or goings.

Shortly after the battleship’s arrival, Bjørn Rørholt, a twenty-two-year-old Royal Norwegian Navy lieutenant, exiled in London after escaping the Gestapo, was called to Admiralty Headquarters in London. Rørholt came from a patriotic military background. His father Arnold was an early member of the resistance and had been taken hostage after Bjørn had fled Norway. Bjørn had studied radio communications at the Institute of Technology in Trondheim and joined the Norwegian Military Academy at the outbreak of the war. He was taken prisoner during the invasion fighting but was released in the autumn of 1940 and returned to his studies at the Institute.

By then a clandestine radio service was already in operation. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had helped set up two stations for broadcasting information back to London. One, codenamed Skylark-A, was in Oslo. The other, Skylark-B, was in Trondheim, under the direction of Erik Welle-Strand who was also based at the Institute. The students formed a pool of potential spies and saboteurs. Their natural patriotism was sharpened by resentment at the German presence which, despite the theoretical kinship the invaders felt for their fellow Aryans, was clumsy and arrogant. When black-bordered notices appeared around the town announcing the first executions of resistants, indignation curdled into hatred.

Skylark-B sent back important information on troop and naval movements. It took a year for the Gestapo to track the transmitter down. Rørholt had just finished a transmission when the secret police arrived. He said later he escaped ‘after an unintentional shooting match with the Germans … most of the others were captured. Since I had escaped the Germans blamed me for most of what had been done.’¹⁹ He made his way to neutral Sweden and then on to Britain where he joined the Norwegian navy. There he teamed up with Polish officers and technicians in a workshop near London working on miniature radio transmitters. Now the Admiralty was asking him to go back to Norway. His task was to set up another, more comprehensive radio network, to spy on Tirpitz. Even though he was well known to the Gestapo and his father was a hostage in their hands, he agreed.

He had one night to spend in London before flying to Shetland where the exiled Norwegian resistance had a base. He drew some money from a bank in the City and had a lavish dinner at the Savoy. Two days later, on 20 January, with a Lieutenant John Turner, on attachment to Naval Intelligence, he flew to Lerwick. They put up at the Queens Hotel and spent days discussing the details of the operation. Rørholt was to travel by sea to Trondheim, carrying a number of transmitters powerful enough to send a signal to Naval Intelligence headquarters. He was to identify potential agents in useful locations who would then make regular reports of enemy activity in their areas, particularly anything related to Tirpitz.

Rørholt was taken to Norway by a seaman called Leif Larsen. Larsen was thirty-six years old, quiet and modest, a brilliant sailor and a natural and inspirational leader. He had learned his craft as master of a small passenger ship that plied the southern Norwegian coast and had an intimate knowledge of its confused contours of islands and inlets. He escaped from Norway in February 1941 aboard a fishing boat, the Motig 1, and joined an outfit set up by the Special Operations Executive, the Norwegian Naval Independent Unit. It operated a ferry service using disguised fishing vessels carrying agents and saboteurs to and from the Norwegian coast and became famous as the ‘Shetland Bus’.

There was a six-day wait before the weather allowed them to sail. Rørholt used the time to dye his blond hair black. It was not much of a disguise, as the suspiciously raven locks clashed with his blue Scandinavian eyes. They set off on Saturday, 26 January 1942 on the cutter Feie with the aim of landing Rørholt south of Trondheim. The improvement in the weather had been minimal. It was freezing cold and the boat was battered by heavy seas. By the halfway mark, water had leaked into the fuel tanks, causing the engine to cut out repeatedly. At one point Larsen had to hoist canvas to make any progress while he carried out repairs. With the engine back in service they butted on. The motor cut out again. When he went to raise the sails they refused to budge. The rigging was solid with frozen spray. After more work on the engine it eventually spluttered into action and they finally reached the shore, numb, exhausted and seasick after thirty-six hours on the water.

They anchored in the lee of an island to wait for daylight. There they were discovered by some friendly fishermen who warned them that the Germans had set up a new control point on the route they had been planning to take. They changed their plans and diverted to an island farther south which was home to one of the Feie’s crewmen. His father had a boat there, which was well known in local waters. They could put Rørholt aboard and with luck he would be able to slip through the German control.

The new route would take them past another island where Larsen had previously landed an agent, who had been equipped with a transmitter. He was anxious to hear how he was getting on. They soon found the agent but he had bad news. He had failed to make any contact with Britain. He had come to the conclusion that the radio was faulty and had been trying to arrange a voyage back to Shetland.

Rørholt cast his expert eye over the set it but could not find the fault. He decided to try one of his own radios. Again, he failed to get a response on any of the agreed frequencies. The three of them came to the same dismaying conclusion. The radios were useless. They would have to go back.

There was no improvement in conditions on the voyage home. They struggled through heavy seas, nauseous from the motion of the ship and frozen stiff by the wind and flying spray. The engine played up constantly. They were blown off course and instead of making for Lerwick, Larsen decided it was easier to head for the haven of Lunna Voe. On 30 January the Feie made harbour in a snowstorm.

The failure had at least taught some lessons. The transmitters were too unwieldy and unreliable to justify the risks entailed in operating them. Rørholt remembered the miniaturized set he had seen his Polish colleagues experimenting with in London. ‘It had slightly less power than the others but it had an ingenious antenna arrangement which made up for it and it fitted in a briefcase of normal dimensions,’ he said. ‘However I had not been able to take that set as it was a prototype. Now I decided that I was definitely going to get that set and some others if possible. That was why my only concern when we reached Lunna was to get to London as quickly as possible.’

There were some bureaucratic difficulties in his way. Arriving in London, he was once again refused the use of the Polish transmitters. According to the subsequent legend, Rørholt decided simply to steal some of them. He returned to Shetland and on 11 February set off for Norway. Larsen was at the helm once more. This time he had a more reliable craft, the Arthur, which he had liberated to escape back to Shetland after a previous escapade. Rørholt was now ‘Rolf Christiansen’. There were two other agents making the trip, including Odd Sørli who would play a major role in the Tirpitz story. The crossing was rough but uneventful. On 13 February he arrived in the Trondheim area to begin his vital mission.

The dangers he faced were considerable. Ranged against him and the men he hoped to recruit was a strong force of professionals unconstrained by moral scruples, led by Gerhard Flesch. Flesch did not look or sound like the conventional image of a secret policeman. He had warm eyes and a mouth that in photographs seems always to be smiling. He was born in the city of Posen, the Polish Poznaá, in 1909, when it was still part of the German empire. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 while a law student. By 1936 he had joined the Gestapo and had the job of monitoring Germany’s religious sects. He was part of the organization that operated in the Sudetenland and later Bohemia and Moravia following their occupation. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939 he returned to his hometown where he was leader of an Einsatzkommando which started the work of exterminating the 3,000 or so Jews who still lived in the city.

Flesch had help from local collaborators. The most enthusiastic was Henry Rinnan. Rinnan belonged to the category of misfits and sociopaths to be found throughout the occupied territories for whom the arrival of the Nazis was a liberation. He was born into a poor family in Levanger, north of Trondheim, on 14 May 1915, the oldest of seven children. He was short, five feet three inches, and dark-haired, in a land of large, healthy blonds, which marked him out for ridicule and teasing. His early life was a story of disappointment and disgrace. He got a job working at his uncle’s petrol station but was sacked for stealing. He was twenty-one at the time, and married. To make restitution he was forced to sell all the household goods he had acquired on hire purchase. When the war began he tried to join the Finnish forces resisting the Soviet invasion but was turned down on the grounds of his puny physique. He served as a lorry driver in the Norwegian army, in April 1940 ferrying weapons around Trondheim. Two months later he was working as a car salesman.

The Germans had arrived in town and his employer gave a party to which some of them were invited. The invaders seemed friendly enough and Rinnan responded warmly. Three days later he was summoned to the Hotel Phoenix in Trondheim where he met a Gestapo official called Gerhard Stubs. By the time he left he had become an agent and received his first reward – a hundred krone note. As the Gestapo’s first local employee he was agent 001 and had the alias ‘Lola’. The attention revived his withered self-esteem. With the money he bought a new suit. There was little work for him, though, until the arrival of Flesch who gave him the task of infiltrating communities in the districts surrounding the town. He had another Norwegian to assist him, a former Trondheim policeman called Ivan Grande, and together they built up a network of informers and agents provocateurs.

The open atmosphere of a town where everybody knew and largely trusted everyone else had been corrupted and the Trondheim that Rørholt and his companions were heading for was tainted with fear and suspicion. They arrived by passenger steamer after being dropped off on an outlying island. He later recounted how, when disembarking, a German soldier offered to carry his suitcase. The weight of it surprised him. Inside were three miniaturized transmitters which he now set about distributing. There was one man whom Rørholt was sure he could trust. Birger Grønn was the manager of the dockyard. He had learned where Tirpitz was anchored from one of his engineers who lived near Faettenfjord. While cycling to work along the road that ran along the southern shore he had been amazed to see the battleship looming out of the morning gloom.

Grønn set out to investigate. Posing as an innocent passerby he took note of the piers being built on either side of the water and the flak batteries installed on the hill beneath which the ship was anchored. To increase the hazards, the Germans had also strung steel hawsers from the ridge to the high ground on the southern side. He sketched the detail in a notebook and returned to Trondheim.

Rørholt already knew Grønn from his student days at the Institute. As soon as he arrived in Trondheim he went to see him, taking a taxi to his house in a suburb in the hills above the town. They discussed the best vantage points for the three transmitters. Ideally, one should be on hand near Faettenfjord, one in Trondheim and one at the mouth of Trondheimsfjord, through which Tirpitz would have to pass on its way to the open sea. Grønn told him of a man who might be willing to cover the latter location.

Magne Hassel lived at Agdenes, near the old fortress that commanded the seaward approaches to the city. Grønn knew his brother Arne who was one of his welders at the port. Before Rørholt’s arrival he had telephoned Hassel to gauge his willingness to cooperate, and he had agreed to the assignment. The problem for Rørholt was how to get a transmitter to him. The headland at Agdenes was in a closed military area.

Rørholt soon established a useful cover. He arranged a job as an insurance salesman with the firm of Tobias Lund. He equipped himself with brochures which he packed in a cardboard suitcase, hiding the transmitter underneath, and set off for Agdenes. After talking his way through the checkpoint he was taken to see the commander, a naval officer. He was friendly and swallowed Rørholt’s story that he was in the area to visit clients but had only just arrived from Oslo and had not had time to get clearance from the German authorities at Trondheim. He even expressed interest in a policy himself. Rørholt was unsure whether or not he was joking. He replied with a straight face that his firm did not insure the lives of German officers as ‘the risk is too great’. The commander laughed and sent him on his way with a sailor escort.

He found Hassel’s green-painted mill house looking out over the mouth of the fjord and left the sailor at the gate. Hassel had been warned of the visit by his brother and was waiting. He was ready to help but explained that he did not know Morse code. Rørholt gave him a card with a simple code. One signal meant that Tirpitz had put to sea. Another, that it had returned. A third gave warning that other major ships had left the fjord. They hid the transmitter under the floorboards. Over the next thirteen months Hassel would diligently record Tirpitz’s comings and goings, providing invaluable real-time intelligence that the Admiralty could match against information gleaned from signals intercepts and Enigma decrypts.

Rørholt, meanwhile, was given a lift back to Trondheim on a naval motorboat thanks to the courteous fort commander. He stayed on in Trondheim recruiting several more volunteers. They would be required to transmit more detailed data than the simple reports that Hassel would provide. To do that they needed training. Rørholt made arrangements for them to meet up with the Shetland Bus network and they were taken by fishing boat to England to undergo short courses in wireless telegraphy.

British intelligence was going to need all the help it could get in Norway. On the night of 11 February, the move to shift the main elements of the German surface fleet northwards took a dramatic step forward, when Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, together with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, nosed out of Brest and headed for home ports. The force was commanded by Vizeadmiral Otto Ciliax who had replaced Lütjens as Commander of Battleships after his death. With the fate of Bismarck in mind, Hitler had forbidden it to return to Germany via the Atlantic. Instead it was to take the direct route through the Channel. It was an intelligently calculated risk. The nearest British battleships were at Scapa Flow and the Luftwaffe had air bases the length of the northern European coastline which could provide cover. British intelligence had anticipated the move but had not expected the ships to dare negotiate the narrows of the Strait of Dover in daylight. It was twelve hours before the German fleet was spotted, crossing the Bay of Seine. The combined efforts of navy torpedo boats, Fleet Air Arm and RAF torpedo planes, fighters and bombers and the army’s shore batteries failed to stop the escapers. Night had fallen and they were off the Dutch coast before they suffered a setback. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were both damaged by mines but were still able to make their way to Wilhelmshaven from where they arrived at the mouth of the Elbe at 7 a.m. on 13 February.

The Channel Dash was regarded at home and abroad as a humiliation for the British navy. From the Kriegsmarine’s perspective, though, it represented, as the German Naval Staff admitted in their summary of the outcome, ‘a tactical victory but a strategic retreat’.²⁰ There were no German capital ships left in French Atlantic ports to menace the convoys. That was now left to the U-boats, which continued through the spring and summer to savage the Atlantic convoys.

Henceforth, the big units of the German fleet would be concentrating on a different target. A week after reaching Germany, Ciliax took Prinz Eugen, accompanied by the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the destroyers Hermann Schoemann, Friedrich Ihn and Z-25, and headed for Trondheim. Enigma intercepts told the Admiralty of their departure, and four submarines were waiting for them outside Trondheimsfjord. HMS Trident managed to hit Prinz Eugen’s rudder with a torpedo but she was still able to make it to Aasfjord, just west of Faettenfjord, by midnight on 23 February. Rørholt watched them arrive. ‘We have got the two babies. They are safe and sound with their other playmates,’ he signalled.

Their presence in Norway made the Atlantic a safer place, but it greatly increased the dangers to the Arctic convoys. A powerful squadron, led by Tirpitz, was now concentrated at the eastern end of Trondheimsfjord. It could not be long before it ventured out.