Operation Freshman - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Allies were unaware of the fate of the operation until they intercepted a German communiqué stating that two gliders and one aircraft had been forced down, and the crews engaged and annihilated. On 11 December they received a message from an SOE agent explaining that the second gliders occupants had all been shot. Many of the details about the fate of the two glider combinations were only discovered after the war had ended.

None of the soldiers or aircrew who survived the crashes remained alive for very long. Of the soldiers from the first glider, three of the four injured men were tortured by the Gestapo and later killed by a doctor who injected air into their bloodstreams. The fourth injured man was shot in the back of the head the next day. All four bodies were dumped at sea. The five uninjured men were held at Grini concentration camp until 18 January 1943, when they were taken to nearby woods, blindfolded and executed by the Gestapo. The German Wehrmacht and the Gestapo argued over the fate of the prisoners from the second glider. The Wehrmacht believed they should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, but in the end the survivors were interrogated and executed within a few hours of their capture at the German barracks at Bekkebo. They were taken into nearby woods and shot one by one, each being forced to listen to the man before him being executed. Their bodies were stripped and thrown into an unmarked grave. All of the executions were conducted in accordance with the Commando Order issued by Adolf Hitler in October 1942, which stated that all Commando troops were to be killed immediately upon capture. The local Norwegian population were unable to prevent the prisoners being executed, but tended the graves of the dead until the end of the war.

Although the Allied soldiers believed that they had burnt all of their maps, one from the second glider was missed. When the Germans found it they were able to identify the Vemork plant as the target and increased their defence accordingly. German reprisals started instantly and 200 armed Gestapo agents swept into Rjukan where they arrested 21 Norwegians for questioning, but the members of Operation Grouse slipped away into the wilderness of Hardangervidda. They later contributed to the successful Operation Gunnerside in February 1943, when a small team of Norwegian SOE agents were parachuted into the area and demolished much of the Vemork heavy water plant. The plant did eventually resume operation, but further bombing raids ensured it produced little heavy water for the German atomic weapons programme.

Although the operation had been a failure, it demonstrated the range, flexibility and possibilities of airborne forces and glider operations, and also highlighted equipment failures that were rectified for later operations. This included developing a new version of the Rebecca-Eureka homing device system, the Mk II, which was ready by 1943 and proved to be very successful when used in later airborne operations; during Operation Market Garden and Operation Varsity, aircraft that used the system reported a 95% success rate.

When 1st Airborne Division arrived in Norway in May 1945, they were informed of the fate of the prisoners, and cooperated with the Norwegian government to have the fallen men buried with full military honours. The five from the first glider were re-interred at the Commonwealth War Graves plot at Vestre Gravlund near Oslo. The second glider's occupants were reburied at Eiganes churchyard in Stavanger and the Halifax aircrew were reburied at Helleland.

The head of the Gestapo in Oslo, who had signed the order for the prisoners' executions, committed suicide several days prior to 1st Airborne Division's arrival in May 1945, but several Wehrmacht personnel implicated in the decision to execute the prisoners were put on trial and found guilty; one was shot and another hanged, whilst a senior Non-Commissioned Officer who had shot a prisoner in the back of the head was extradited to the Soviet Union for alleged abuse conducted against Soviet prisoners. Furthermore, the commander of the German forces in Norway – Generaloberst Nikolaus von Falkenhorst – was also found guilty of two of the Freshman deaths during his war crimes trial.