Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters - The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship. Patrick Bishop
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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.
Chapter 5 ‘A wonderful chance’
In the first two months of 1942, nine Allied convoys crossed the Arctic Ocean, going to and from Russia. The voyage tested the seamanship and character of the crews to the limit. In the freezing heart of winter, the sea lapping the polar ice cap was the grimmest place on earth. They travelled in darkness, relieved only by a few hours of wan twilight in the middle of the day, through fog-smothered and snow-swept waters seething with submerged growlers and jagged floes that could rip through the hull of a merchantman like a tin opener. Sudden storms whipped placid seas into cliffs of angry water, seventy feet high, tearing the formation apart and scattering ships far and wide. Strange effects compounded the literal truth that they were sailing to the end of the world. Cold air settling on warmer water created wraiths of mist that made it seem that the sea was boiling. On a clear night the Northern Lights flickered mystically in the black, star-dusted canopy above, filling those who looked up at it with awe and apprehension.1
The narrowness of the waters east of Bear Island meant that ships could not turn into the waves and meet heavy seas bow-on as they did in the Atlantic. Instead, they were rocked from side to side, rolling as much as 30 degrees to port and starboard. Temperatures could plunge to sixty below,