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The Heroes of Telemark is a 1965 British war film directed by Anthony Mann based on the true story of the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during the Second World War from Skis Against the Atom, the memoirs of Norwegian resistance soldier Knut Haukelid. The film stars Kirk Douglas as Dr. Rolf Pedersen and Richard Harris as Knut Straud, along with ...
The Heroes of Telemark: Directed by Anthony Mann. With Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris, Ulla Jacobsson, Michael Redgrave. Norwegian resistance tries to stop German efforts to produce an atomic bomb component during World War II.
- (8.2K)
- Action, Drama, History
- Anthony Mann
- 1965-12-03
A documentary about the mission called The Real Heroes of Telemark was later made two years shy of forty years after this movie was made. This documentary was apparently made to clear are some of the fictionalization of this movie which portrayed some inaccuracies, variations and differences compared to the events and circumstances of the true World War II Telemark raid.
The Heroes of Telemark is directed by Anthony Mann and written by Ben Barzman and Ivan Moffat. It stars Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris, Ulla Jacobsson, Michael Redgrave and David Weston. Music is by Malcolm Arnold and cinematography by Robert Krasker. 1942, Nazi occupied Norway, and the Germans are making great strides with their plans for atomic ...
- Overview
- You write that Allied leaders in World War II regarded the heavy water plant at Vemork as “on the thin line separating victory and defeat.” Put it on the map for us—and explain why it was so important.
- Winston Churchill called heavy water “a sinister term, eerie, unnatural.” Deconstruct it for us.
- At the outset of WWII, a race began to create a nuclear weapon. Give us an overview of the participants.
- The British team working on the bomb had a wonderfully Orwellian name, the Directorate of Tube Alloys. Give us a peek behind closed doors.
- The hero of your book is a Norwegian whose code name was The Mailman. Tell us about Leif Tronstad.
- The obvious question is why didn’t they just bomb the plant back into the Stone Age?
- The Norwegian saboteurs were trained by a top secret British unit called Special Operations Executive (SOE). Tell us about this famous organization—and the "merciless regimen" of their training in Scotland.
- Vemork is incredibly remote. How did the geography and conditions affect the sabotage attempt?
- After months of preparation, the team finally reached their objective. Put us on the ground on the night they blow up the plant. First, they’ve got to climb this bloody mountain, haven’t they?
When the Nazis captured a heavy water facility in Norway, the chemist who helped design the plant took action.
On February 27, 1942, nine saboteurs scaled a cliff in the middle of the night to blow up a Nazi-controlled heavy water plant in Norway. Hollywood turned the story of the attack into The Heroes of Telemark, a sappy action-movie-on-skis starring Kirk Douglas. The true story is both more complicated—and more compelling. Using rarely viewed Norwegian records, eyewitness accounts, and his own travels in Norway, Neal Bascomb's The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission To Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb sets this daring sabotage mission in the context of the high-stakes race between the Germans and the Allies to create a nuclear weapon.
Vemork is about 100 miles west of Oslo, on the edge of this ice-bound precipice. It was the only plant in the world that produced heavy water, which was the key ingredient in the German atomic bomb research program. They needed heavy water to create a nuclear reactor, which was the stepping-stone to producing plutonium, and then an atomic bomb. The...
Hydrogen has a single proton and a single electron. Deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen, has a neutron in its nucleus. This makes it heavier. It is very rare—there is one part heavy water for every 41 million molecules of regular water— and has this ability as a so-called “moderator.” In an atomic reaction, it slows down bombarding neutrons and doesn’t absorb them, which fosters a chain reaction.
To produce heavy water you need a lot of water and a lot of power. And Vemork had both of those. It also had this ingenious production facility, invented by a man named Leif Tronstad, a Norwegian professor, who thought, Here we have a lot of water and a lot of power, so we can create heavy water, which we hope the world will need.
Leif Tronstad is ... a brilliant scientist with a brilliant mind, but all he wants to do is be parachuted back into Norway to fight on the ground against Germans.
ByNeal Bascombauthor of The Winter Fortress
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1939. Very quickly after the start of WWII, the Allies were thinking, We can harness nuclear fission to do one of two things: create power or make a bomb. Einstein and a group of physicists who’d escaped Germany began research as early as 1940, assembling supplies and trying to figure out whether an atomic bomb was...
The British were investigating nuclear energy at the same time as the Americans, on a separate but very much dual track. They did a lot of the early research to prove that an atomic bomb was feasible, and in 1942 they joined forces with the Americans, thanks to Roosevelt and Churchill. The Directorate of Tube Alloys was one of those curious code na...
Tronstad was a 38-year-old Norwegian professor of chemistry at the University of Trondheim, who came up with the idea of the heavy water plant at Vemork. In 1940, the Germans invade and take over Vemork. Tronstad fights in the battle for Norway, which the Norwegians lose, and goes back to teaching in Trondheim. Simultaneously, he begins working for the underground, providing the Allies with intelligence on the German interest in heavy water.
Within months, he realizes he has to escape Norway, so he leaves his family behind and goes to England. What’s so interesting about Leif Tronstad is that he’s a brilliant scientist with a brilliant mind, but all he wants to do is be parachuted back into Norway to fight on the ground against Germans.
[Laughs.] That’s what the Americans wanted to do in early 1942! The British were also willing to do that. It was Tronstad who said, No, you’re going to kill a lot of civilians if you do that and you’re not gonna hit it. The key part of the heavy water plant was in the basement of this enormous fortress of steel and stone. You can bomb it night and ...
The SOE was known as “the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare.” They were saboteurs, dropping behind enemy lines to hit the Nazis in guerrilla attacks on industrial plants and railway lines. The Norwegian branch of SOE, Company Linge, recruited young Norwegians who had either taken a boat or flown to England to be trained.
They recruited the best of the best. Then they put them through this intensive training regimen. A lot of the training was done in Scotland. They would go on night training exercises in the mountains, fording rivers, crossing passes, and sleeping outside for weeks on end. On the mental level, they learned how to handle strain and stress. I don’t think it’s too dissimilar to Special Forces training today.
Vemork is a natural fortress. It could only be reached by a single-lane suspension bridge and was surrounded by an area called the Hardangervidda, a high mountain plateau where, according to legend, it grows so cold, so fast, that it freezes flames in the fire.
There were also minefields, searchlights, high barbed wire fences, and constant patrols. The saboteurs parachuted into the area in October, to prepare for the mission and collect intelligence. They had to survive on their own in wintertime, with temperatures in negative Fahrenheit, on this barren mountain plateau, which is basically rock, snow, and wind. They have very little food, so they have to hunt reindeer, and there’s no way to travel except on skis. Thankfully, they were Norwegians, so they were born with skis on their feet. [Laughs.]
You have to fight for your freedom and for peace. You have to fight for it every day, to keep it. It’s like a glass boat; it’s easy to break; it’s easy to lose.
ByJoachim Ronneberglast surviving member of Operation Gunnerside
On the night of February 27-28, 1942, everything is ready for Operation Gunnerside. Nine of the saboteurs are led by a 23-year-old named Joachim Ronneberg, who had no military experience except for what he had learned in England. The first thing they have to figure out is how to attack the place. They have three options: they can come down from the mountains above the plant, which is littered with minefields; they can cross the single-lane suspension bridge, which is closely guarded; or they can descend to the bottom of the valley across a half-frozen river and climb a 500-foot-high cliff. They decide to climb the cliff, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter!
Thanks to Tronstad’s planning and intelligence gathering, they knew every block, stairwell, and entry point. As a result, they were able to infiltrate the plant without an alarm, set the explosives, and blow it up. General Falkenhorst, head of German forces in Norway, called it a “brilliant coup.” [Laughs.]
The Heroes of Telemark is a British 1965 Eastman Color war film directed by Anthony Mann based on the true story of the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during World War II from "Skis Against the Atom", the memoirs of Norwegian resistance soldier Knut Haukelid.
The Heroes of Telemark ★★½ 196In 1942, Norway is under Nazi occupation and Nazi scientists are dangerously close to producing an essential element for making an atomic bomb in a secret factory. Source for information on The Heroes of Telemark: VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever dictionary.
