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A clandestine photograph of the "Broompark", under the command of Captain Olaf Paulsen,sailing out of Le Verdon Roads, from Bordeaux, on June 19, 1940 with France's heavy waterstocks
PAULSEN'S
"
BROOMPARK 
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Launched on September 12, 1939 and completed the following month as Yard No 921 atLithgow's Port Glasgow yard, for Denholm's of Greenock, the 5,136-ton "Broompark", a six-foot long, glass-cased, model of her still to be seen in Denholm's Glasgow office, was to playan important part in helping The Allies win WWII, her captain, Olaf Paulsen, properly one of the war's early heroes and awarded both an OBE and a Lloyds War Medal for Bravery at Sea.With The Fall of Paris in May 1940 and France facing defeat, Dautry, the French ArmamentsMinister who, with British support, had negotiated with Norway's Norsk Hydro Rjukan, aNorwegian company largely owned by The Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas and secured 185kg of "produit Z" heavy water, ordered Frederic Joliot-Curie to ensure that France's heavywater stocks did not fall into enemy hands, Joliot-Curie in turn entrusting the task of movingeverything out of Paris to his physicist colleagues Hans van Halban and Lew Kowarski.Halban put his wife and one-year-old daughter in the front of his car, one gram of Joliot-Curie'smother-in-law's radium in the back and, to minimize any possible danger from radiation, the26 cans of heavy water in between and, drove the car's precious cargo and all the reasearchpapers to the spa town of Mont-Dore, in central France, where Halban was allowed to lodgethe cans in the safety of the town's women's prison, the cans moved to the safety of condemned cell of the prison in nearby Riom the following morning.Hoping to continue the work, Halban set up a new laboratory in a small villa but, within days,was ordered to evacuate everything to BordeauxWhen ordered to evacuate a few days later, a number of prisoners serving life sentences inRiom's prison moving what was indeed The World's total stock of heavy water from the1
 
prison's condemned cell to a waiting vehicle and Haliban and his family then setting off forBordeaux to join up again with Lew Kowarski and meet Charles Howard, The 20th Earl of Suffolk, Liaison Officer in France for The British Department for Scientific and IndustrialResearch, who was charged with rescuing rare machine tools, some $10M worth of industrialdiamonds, fifty French scientists and France's heavy water stocks, Howard's immediateproblem being to find a ship and a ship's captain willing to sail for England, the harbourbombed, The Gironde Estuary, notoriously subject to strong tidal currents, requiring greatcare in even the bestconditions and the port entrance itself now too mined.As luck had it, Halban and Howard came across Captain Olaf Paulsen, master of Denholm'snear-new cargo ship "Broompark", Paulsen arriving in Bordeaux apparently unaware that Parishad been occupied just days earlier, on June 14, 1940 and he immediately agreeing to theirrequest for help.While the cans of heavy water were being placed in wooden crates, these then lashed topallets on deck, so that they might float free if the ship hit a mine or was bombed, Howard, The Earl of Suffolk, gathered guns and other weapons, together and began teaching thefleeing scientists how to use them. Joliot-Curie, who would later go underground and became a leader of 'The Resistance', choseto remain in France and would thus begin a difficult period in charge of The Coll`ege deFrance's cyclotron, it to be the only one available in Occupied Europe to Germany's scientistsfor, although there was one in occupied Copenhagen, the Danish physicist Neils Bohr theresimply forbade its use by Axis personnel; an act which only he could conceivably have gottenaway with thanks to his then on-going relationship withWerner Heisenberg, he later to behead of the German atomic bomb project and Bohr, because of his partially-Jewish heritageand about to be to be arrested by the German police, dramatically escaping from Denmark toSweden and then to London in October 1943.Bohr was evacuated from Stockholm in 1943 in an unarmed de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber operated by BOAC, the passengers on BOAC's Mosquitos were carried in animprovised cabin in the bomb bay. The flight almost ended in tragedy as Bohr did not don hisoxygen equipment as instructed and, passing out at high altitude, he would have died hadnot the pilot, surmising from Bohr's lack of response to intercom communication that he hadlost consciousness, descended to a lower altitude for the remainder of the flight, Bohr's latercomment being that he had slept like a baby for the entire flight.2
 
And so, on Wednesday, June 19, 1940, the "Broompark", with 101 unusually accommodatedpassengers plus crew, all eyes on board scanning the water for mines, began moving downthe chaos of The Gironde Estuary, a ship ahead of her hitting a mine and sinking and Joliot-Curie, soon questioned by the Germans as to the whereabouts of France's heavywater stocks, directing their attention of the unfortunate victim of the mine.Clearing the Gironde's estuary and to avoid its seizure, the "Broompark" secretly off-loadedher cargo of heavy water into a cave on the French coast, it later retrieved by a Britishsubmarine crew, taken to London and deposited yet again in prison, this time at WormwoodScrubs, where it was held until the Coll`ege de France's team of French scientists were readyto continue their experiments at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory and the heavy watereventually sent to The University of Chicago for safe keeping, the "Broompark" herself arriving safely in Falmouth with the scientists, the industrial diamonds, the industrialmachinery and the research papers on June 21, 1940.Her cargo discharged, the "Broompark" sailed for Vancouver and loaded 5,130 tons of lumberand metals for Glasgow, she coming up the east coast of America and joining Convoy HX72for The Atlantic crossing, all going well until September 21, 1940, three months exactly tothe day of her arrival in England from Bordeaux.Unknown to the convoy commodore, they had been sighted by "U-47", commanded byGunther Prien of HMS "Royal Oak" sinking fame at Scapa Flow, "U-47" on weather reportingduties after expending all her torpedoes in the earlier part of her patrol and Prien only able tokeep reporting the convoy's ever changing positions until other U-Boats arrived.At 23:38 hours on September 21, 1940, at 55° 08' N / 18° 30' W (U-Boat Grid Square AL6554), Heinrich Bleichrodt's "U-48" (she proving to be the most successful of all WWII U-Boats,3
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