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“There were so many things that were just luck and chance,” he said of his 1943 sabotage mission that blew up a Norwegian plant vital to Nazi Germany’s nuclear program. “There was no plan. We were just hoping for the best,” Mr. Ronneberg, Norway’s most decorated war hero, added.

The leader and only living member of a World War II commando team that destroyed the Nazis’ only source of heavy water, a rare fluid needed to produce nuclear weapons, Mr. Ronneberg has had his exploits celebrated in a 1965 blockbuster movie, “The Heroes of Telemark,” starring Kirk Douglas, been showered with military medals and been honored, belatedly, with a statue and museum display in his hometown here on Norway’s west coast.

M.R.D. Foot, the official historian of Britain’s wartime sabotage and intelligence service, the Special Operations Executive, which organized Mr. Ronneberg’s mission, described the raid on a Norsk Hydro plant producing heavy water in Nazi-occupied Norway as a “coup” that “changed the course of the war” and deserved the “gratitude of humanity.”……..

it took years before Mr. Ronneberg came to understand the exact purpose and importance of the job. All the British told him before dropping him onto a snow-covered Norwegian mountain, he said, was that a row of pipes at the Vemork plant needed to be destroyed.

“They just said it was important and had to be blown up,” he said,…….

He added that he knew nothing at the time about nuclear physics, heavy water or the race to build a nuclear bomb. He knew that Britain had lost more than 35 men in a disastrous 1942 attempt to sabotage the Norsk Hydro plant, but he had no idea why it was so intent on disabling a remote mountain facility whose only product as far as he knew was fertilizer…….

Mr. Ronneberg’s raid slowed the Nazi’s pursuit of a bomb rather than delivering a knockout blow. The Nazis worked quickly to rebuild the plant at Vemork, prompting a series of bombing raids by the United States Air Force that infuriated even anti-Nazi Norwegians because of the civilian casualties they caused. The Germans then tried to move all their surviving heavy water in Norway to Germany, but this effort collapsed when Norwegian saboteurs, led by one of Mr. Ronneberg’s team, Knut Haukelid, blew up a ferry carrying the prized cargo.

While long celebrated by foreign, particularly British, filmmakers, the exploits of Mr. Ronneberg and nine other Norwegians involved in thwarting the Nazi nuclear project became widely known in Norway only this year, when NRK, the state broadcaster, ran “The Heavy Water War,” a six-episode mini-series that became a national sensation. The statue of Mr. Ronneberg in front of City Hall here in Alesund was put up only last year to observe his 95th birthday………http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/world/europe/wwii-hero-credits-luck-and-chance-in-foiling-hitlers-nuclear-ambitions.html?_r=0