In reply to The Green Giant:
> Knew they were Norwegian, thought they had been officially recruited by the British army?
They were trained by the SOE. There were three different operations, with the final one, being the successful one. The first was Operation Grouse which placed four Norwegian SOE operatives on the ground in October 1942. In November 1942, Operation Freshman was a glider-borne assault which comprised of two gliders, with 2 pilots and 15 Royal Engineers. Both gliders crashed and all personnel either died in the crashes or were executed by the Gestapo (and to be fair to the Wehrmacht they tried to prevent this) under Hitler's Commando Order. Finally in February 1943 Operation Gunnerside dropped six extra Norwegian commandos who found the Grouse (Swallow) team and that team conducted the successful raid on the plant, which stopped production for several months and destroyed all the heavy water created so far. That raid and the subsequent bombing of the plant by the USAAF meant that in 1944 the plant was abandoned. Also despite the Germans scouring the area with 3000 troops all the commandos got away. 5 skiied 400 miles to Sweden, 4 stayed in the local area and 2 went to Milborg.