This slide show was created from my home-made videotape of a television feature broadcast during CBS coverage of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.
The original videotaped feature was about 15 minutes long. I feared that a quick-time or other streaming-video form of this material would be too hard for many people to download from the Web, so I did video-captures of frames from the original video (source for the images seen in each "slide" of this slide show), and then transcribed the dialogue that accompanied each segment (which is shown to the right of each image). Although graphic images are still sometimes time-consuming for people to download from the Web, I hoped that by creating this slide show, I would make this information more widely available, particularly to schools.
This slide show tells the story of an incident near the end of World War II -- when the Nazis were secretly working on developing the atomic bomb. If they had been able to do that, they would most probably have won the war! (Imagine London flattened instead of Hiroshima.)
The Nazis were prevented from accomplishing their plan because of some brave Norwegian commandoes. The weak point in the Nazi plan was that, to develop the their atomic bomb, they had to have "heavy water," which is used in turning uranium into the kind of plutonium that can be used in building an atomic bomb.
There was only one place in the world, during World War II, that made heavy water -- a factory in Norway. The Nazis had occupied Norway in 1939, partly to get hold of this heavy water plant. Some Norwegian men who escaped from the Nazis were trained in secret and, in a daring commando raid, managed to blow up the heavy water plant. But the story didn't end there! Six months later, the Nazis had managed to eke out ONE tanker car full of heavy water. It would probably have been enough to allow them to finish work on their atomic bomb. One Norwegian commando of the early group had remained hidden in the mountains of Norway -- and he found a way, despite a veritable army of Nazis guarding it, to destroy the tanker car full of heavy water. This ended the Nazi's chance to build an atomic bomb first.
This slide show tells a succinct version of that tale. (In my opinion, one of the best short versions of this complex tale that I've ever heard!) Many people don't know this story, and -- as Charles Kuralt said in the program -- they really should. These guys were amazing -- real heroes. Basically, they saved the world from take-over by the Nazis!
See also:
Operation Freshman -- a British schoolteacher's site telling about the Allies' attempts to destroy the heavy water plant in Norway, including a raid that included British engineers who were captured, tortured, and killed by the Nazis
Special Operations Missions -- a site that describes many of the commando missions, with Norwegian and British personnel, that were launched against the Nazis in Norway
