Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/world-war-iis-untold-stories-the-missions-youve-never-heard-of/
The popular picture of World War II usually centers around beaches, battles, and bombs. Normandy. Pearl Harbor. The liberation of Paris. These moments form a kind of mental shorthand for what we think happened during those years. Yet beneath all that familiar narrative lies a secret layer, missions so quiet or so strange they barely made it into the history books.
Here’s the thing: we’re talking about real operations that shifted the trajectory of the war, but without much fanfare. Some involved climbs up frozen cliffs in darkness. Others relied on inflatable rubber and sonic trickery. A few required dropping corpses into the sea or planting bombs that bounced. Let’s dive in.
Saboteurs on Ice: The Vemork Heavy Water Raid
In February 1943, a team of Norwegian commandos of SOE’s Norwegian Independent Company 1 destroyed the production facility in Operation Gunnerside. On the evening of February 27, 1943, nine Norwegian commandos infiltrated the German-held Vemork plant, a hydroelectric plant owned by Norsk Hydro just outside of Rjukan, Norway. These men didn’t know much about atomic bombs or nuclear physics. What Colonel Tronstad, himself a prewar chemistry professor, was able to tell his men was that the Vemork chemical plant made “heavy water,” an important ingredient for the Germans’ weapons research. Beyond that, the Norwegian troops knew nothing of atomic bombs or how the heavy…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-01-26 19:38:00
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