Sombre HMS Prince of Wales sailors pay tribute to those killed after trying to stop Nazis building atomic bomb
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Wreaths were laid and respects paid to personnel fighting against Nazi Germany
Emotional Royal Navy sailors paid tribute to allied troops who were killed after trying to stop Nazi Germany building an atomic bomb.
The ship’s company aboard HMS Prince of Wales laid wreathes and paid their respects to personnel under Operation Freshman, Commanding Officer Captain Ben Power led the commemorations alongside the Commander of the UK Carrier Strike Group (UKCSG), Commodore Richard Hewitt.
All Second World War personnel died to a man in 1942/43. Eiganes cemetery in Stavanger, Norway, is the last resting place for most of the personnel who never had the chance to attempt the raid they trained for. They knocked out the hydroelectric power station at Vemork in Telemark, about 120 miles northeast of Stavanger.
This was where the Nazis were using the plant to produce heavy water, which is vital for developing the world’s first atomic bomb. Two gliders towed by Halifax bombers were sent to Norway carrying a team of Royal Engineers from the 1st Airborne Division – but one bomber and both gliders crashed. Those who survived the crash were captured and murdered as spies.
A group of Norwegian Commandos carried out the raid on the Vermork works - an attack subsequently immortalised on celluloid by Richard Harris and Kirk Douglas in The Heroes of Telemark. As well as honouring the Freshman dead, the sailors paid their respects at other graves. Most of those in the small Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery are dedicated to RAF personnel killed trying to prevent the German occupation in the spring of 1940.
There is a solitary sailor in the graveyard: Stoker James Walsh from Manchester. The 21-year-old was killed when submarine HMS Shark was pounced upon by German aircraft while patrolling off the Norwegian coast in July 1940. Shark’s crew succeeded in downing one German bomber, but the submarine suffered significant damage and her surviving crew were forced to surrender after scuttling their crippled boat.
Before leaving Eiganes, the sailors also inspected the Jewish War Memorial honouring Rogaland’s Jewish victims of Auschwitz, the Soviet War Memorial to prisoners of war, and Norwegian war graves of local resistance fighters and civilians killed during the German occupation. HMS Prince of Wales’ visit preceded her involvement in Exercise Dynamic Mongoose.