Hal Jespersen’s World War II Tour of Norway, September 2026 [Part 2]

These are my (Hal’s) notes from a trip to Norway to study World War II: the German invasion, the occupation, and the resistance. I traveled with a British-based tour company, The Cultural Experience, for the first time. They entitled the tour “Shells Exploding at a Picnic.”

Since this is a lengthy report with lots of photos (iPhone 17 Pro Max), I have broken it into three parts:

Saturday, September 5 — Gaustatoppen, Rjukan

At nine we checked out of the hotel and boarded our twenty-four-passenger Volvo bus, which was roomy and comfortable. We drove 160 kilometers west to Rjukan, a trip of about three hours. On the drive, Palle explained the history of the resistance movement, focusing on Norwegian Independent Company 1, also known as Kompani Linge, which was trained by the SOE in the UK. Later in the drive he described Milorg, the main domestic military resistance organization, which eventually grew to 40,000 members.

Lake Tinnsjø is the third deepest lake in Norway at 460 meters. At an overlook near Rudsgrend, Palle described the sabotage sinking of the D/F Hydro ferry here on February 20, 1944, which was carrying equipment and heavy water from Vemork, headed for Germany. Four German soldiers and fourteen Norwegian civilians were killed. We passed through the town of Mæl, at the northern end of the lake, where Rjukanbanen rail cars from Vemork were loaded onto the Hydro, and stopped there to eat a sandwich lunch.

We labored up a steep switchback road and had dramatic views of deep valleys. Gaustatoppen is southern Norway’s tallest mountain at 1,883 meters. The Gaustabanen funicular, built inside the mountain during the Cold War, was constructed to access the military radio relay station on, and inside, the mountaintop. At the foot of the mountain, a tram runs about 850 meters horizontally into the mountain to a station, where we changed to a rail-mounted cable car for a 1,040-meter-long ascent up a 39-degree inclined shaft. Seating was tight on both legs of the journey.

Despite some rain through the day, we had moderately good conditions at the top and saw some beautiful views as the clouds passed. We were told that on a clear day you can see a third of southern Norway, from the west coast to Sweden. I did not ascend to the very top and the radio tower, because an uneven and wet rock staircase without railings intimidated me, so I missed a session with Palle in which he pointed out key geographic positions in the Gunnerside expedition against Vemork.

We drove into the town of Rjukan, which is quite small, with most houses and businesses on a single street. It sits in a deep valley with extremely steep mountains on either side. I have read that from September through March the town gets no direct sunlight, because the mountain to the south blocks the sun, which stays low on the horizon. Our hotel was the Rjukan Hotell, which is rather dated. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant.

Sunday, September 6 — Rjukan, Vemork

Since hiking websites I consulted showed rocky stretches that my diminished balance probably couldn’t handle, I and seven of the others sat out the morning hike on the Saboteurs’ Trail, a strenuous eight-kilometer path that follows the route of the Gunnerside crew to Vemork, rising 150 meters and descending 550 meters. Here’s a hiker’s view of the trail. I did get some modest exercise by walking around Rjukan instead.

The Rjukan–Notodden Industrial Heritage Site is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The site runs 93 kilometers and consists of power plants, two towns, and two industrial parks built during the early twentieth century. According to UNESCO, they signified “sweeping social changes” and “an important step forward for mankind in the fields of science and engineering.” There is a power plant downtown with dramatic 1930s architecture.

I was able to see, way up in the distance, the famous Rjukan sun mirror, which consists of three computerized heliostats, each with a seventeen-square-meter mirror mounted 742 meters above sea level. The mirror moves on horizontal and vertical axes, following the path of the sun and reflecting sunlight down onto the Rjukan town square. It reflects approximately 80 percent of the sunlight it catches and gives a heating effect of three to four degrees Celsius on the square. During the summer, the mirror operates from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, it operates for only one hour.

I passed a statue honoring Gunnar Fridtjof Thurmann Sønsteby, a member of the resistance known by the nickname “Kjakan” (“The Chin”) and as “Agent No. 24.” He was the most highly decorated citizen in Norway, including being the only person awarded the War Cross with three swords, Norway’s highest military decoration. In a nearby park stood a retired impulse water turbine, a massive device that had been in use since 1911.

At 12:45 we bused to the Vemork plant and met the hikers, who had taken four to five hours to reach us. Hearing their reports of many rocks and slippery surfaces on the steep descent, I felt completely justified in having skipped the experience. The terrain here is a remarkably severe river gorge, and it is astonishing to think of the courage and stamina the saboteurs must have had. In fact, our compatriots had followed what was called the Approach Trail and never got into the really rugged (and snow-covered) ground across the ravine that the saboteurs had to cover at night. From the parking lot a road climbs steeply for 700 meters, but we were able to take a shuttle bus up to the plant and walked back down at the end. The current building, though impressive, looks quite different from its prewar predecessor.

Our guide, Richard, explained electrolysis while standing in front of a massive tank, one of 288 in the hall, which together once produced 20 percent of the world’s fertilizer. Electrolysis works by passing an electric current through water, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen gas at opposite electrodes; ordinary hydrogen reacts and is drawn off slightly faster than its heavier isotope, deuterium, so with each successive stage the water left behind becomes a bit more concentrated in deuterium. At Vemork, the spill water, the liquid that didn’t convert to hydrogen or oxygen, was drawn off and processed through further electrolysis stages until it was refined into pure heavy water, or D2O. Richard also spoke about the German atomic program, though he made a few claims I thought were of dubious accuracy.

We then went down to the heavy water processing cellar. The original building was demolished after the war, but in 2017 excavators dug through to the ruins and built a new museum structure over the cellar itself. Richard gave us a detailed blow-by-blow account of the raid. A film he showed included clips from the 1948 movie Operation Swallow: The Battle for Heavy Water, in which six of the actual saboteurs played themselves. We finished with a self-guided tour through the generator plant, where the turbines, very impressive and in beautiful condition, shared the space with small exhibits on the atomic programs and the history of the plant and town.

On the way back to the bus we came upon a small radio shack that originally stood in Skinndalen in the Hamrefjell mountains by lake Møsvann. From the autumn of 1944 the shack served as the headquarters of Operation Sunshine, to maintain radio communications with England. Leif Tronstad commanded Operation Sunshine. He was the scientist and military reserve officer who coordinated all the Kompani Linge activities from London and who died on the Sunshine mission in March 1945. In the area that Sunshine was responsible for, where sixty percent of all electricity in Eastern Norway was produced, the main task was to prevent the Germans from destroying industrial and power plants during their withdrawal and/or capitulation. The group was extensively involved in training and organizing resistance groups in Upper Telemark and Numedal. Weapons and ammunition were brought in by air from England. Several of the members of the group had also taken part in the sabotage raid against Vemork and the ferry Hydro.

We had a nice dinner a few blocks away at Hotel Admini, an elegant mansion that supposedly was the residence of the director at the Vemork plant.

Monday, September 7 — to Kristiansand

A drizzly morning. We drove past Vemork again, and a friend showed me a video of his journey on yesterday’s trail. I am doubly grateful I didn’t attempt it.

We drove all morning on narrow, winding roads, often in fog. We passed a number of picturesque lakes and mountains that would have been very memorable in better weather. About noon, we stopped at a waterfall that had no military significance but was an excuse to stretch our legs. Lunch was smørbrød in a small hotel in Rysstad.

We drove through the pretty Setesdal Valley—the fog had mostly lifted by the afternoon—with a stop at Bygland to examine the story of the Lancaster bomber crew buried there. There is a memorial propeller from a British B-17C shot down at Bygland on September 8, 1941, after an air battle with German fighters. It was in a group of four bombers sent to sink the German heavy cruiser, Admiral Scheer, near Oslo. It was intercepted by two Bf 109s, which it fought against, killing one and damaging the other, but the bomber was also damaged and crashed into a mountainside. Although this is a civilian church cemetery, there are seven graves maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

After the cemetery, there was about a two-hour drive to Kristiansand, on Norway’s southern coast, where we checked into the Thon Hotel Parken, which is very nice and modern. The day was essentially a full day of travel only. I had some time to walk around the shopping district of Kristiansand, and it was quite lively and pleasant despite a very light rain. Very nice dinner at Bønder i Byen just around the corner. My starter was a salad with delicious grilled Norwegian cheese similar to halloumi.

Tuesday, September 8 — Stavanger

Only one night in this nice hotel. Heavy rain at breakfast, but decent touring weather all day. At nine, we bused away to explore the batteries and defenses on Odderøya Island, which twice repulsed German assault. Coastal artillery remained here through the Cold War, and the old howitzer repair shops are now art galleries. The main battery holds two antique 24 cm French St. Chamond guns, and another 15 cm battery, the latter damaged by air attacks.

On April 9, 1940, three German attempts to land troops were repelled by fortress fire between 5 and 7 a.m., though a stray shell struck Kristiansand Cathedral’s tower, and bombing caused an ammunition depot explosion and fires in the city. At ten o’clock, the German commander pushed to break through; meanwhile, confused orders not to fire on Allied ships—and a signal flag mistaken for French—led the defenders to withhold fire during the next assault. The landing then met no resistance, and the fortress surrendered. A German ship, MS Seattle, was also sunk nearby in the crossfire. There was no ground combat in the invasion, but eight Norwegian soldiers died defending Odderøya Fortress against the cruiser Karlsruhe and its accompanying warships. Kjevik Airfield was essentially undefended.

From there we went on to the Møvik Cannon Museum, a former German fort, where our guide was named Peter. The fortress, aka Battery Vara, had four gun positions, of which one gun is still intact, along with empty gun emplacements and an empty casemate. The Krupp 38 cm gun there is one of the largest in the world; the barrel alone weighs 120 tons and is almost 20 m long. The standard round for these guns weighed 800 kg with a range of 42 km, and a special round weighing only 495 kg, requiring a barrel insert, had a range of 55 km. This type of gun was designed for battleships such as the Bismarck.

The Germans built this part of the Atlantic Wall in 1942 to block the Skagerrak Strait and the seaways to eastern Norway, the Kattegat Bay, and the Baltic Sea. Only an area ten nautical miles wide in the Skagerrak could not be covered by the guns here and in Denmark, so it was mined.

We entered the emplacement of gun #2, which had a crew of twenty-one in the turret and sixty for the full crew, along with ammunition-loading machinery and a calculating machine (“accounting table”) that factored in numerous data, including the wind and the moisture of the gunpowder. I had a photo taken of me with an armor-piercing shell like the one that sank HMS Hood and a larger 1,030 kg shell. Each firing ground away 400 g of steel in the barrel, eventually affecting accuracy, and some cleaning was done with a man crawling through the barrel itself. After the war, the gun was used by the Norwegian army and was last fired in 1957.

Eating sandwiches along the way we drove to Jøssingfjorden—quite a challenge for a large bus—to discuss the Altmark incident. It occurred on February 16–17, 1940, in neutral Norwegian waters, when British destroyers confronted the German tanker Altmark as it carried 300 British merchant marine prisoners home from ships sunk earlier by the pocket battleship Graf Spee. Though Norwegian patrol vessels had boarded and searched the Altmark three times the previous day, they failed to check the hold where the prisoners were held and let the ship proceed. After British aircraft spotted the tanker, HMS Cossack, under Captain Philip Vian, pursued it into Jøssingfjorden; when Norwegian escorts refused to arrange a joint escort or search, Vian, acting on instructions relayed from Winston Churchill, boarded the Altmark by force. In the ensuing hand-to-hand fighting, seven German sailors were killed and eleven wounded, against one British sailor wounded, and the prisoners were freed and brought back to Britain.

Germany protested the action as a violation of Norwegian neutrality and international law, while Norway’s failure to resist a stronger force fed Allied doubts about its ability to stay neutral. The episode gave Adolf Hitler further impetus to accelerate invasion planning against Norway and Denmark, which culminated in Operation Weserübung that April, while in Britain the rescuers’ cry of “the Navy’s here” became a celebrated wartime phrase and morale booster during the otherwise quiet Phoney War.

We had hoped to stop at Eiganes Cemetery to honor the captured commandos tortured and executed after the failure of Operation Freshman at Vemork, but our flight this evening was shifted earlier, so we had to barrel through. From Jøssingfjorden to Stavanger Airport was about two hours. The airport was uncrowded and stress-free, and we had dinner at a pizza restaurant; I had minimal expectations for airport pizza, but it turned out to be quite good. A forty-five-minute SAS flight took us to Trondheim, where, in what seems like a Norwegian standard, the airport is way outside of town; we were picked up by an electric bus, and it took forty minutes to get to the Radisson Blu Hotel downtown, which was very nice, modern, and comfortable.

Go to Part 3.