...in a "race" with the US to develop a nuclear weapon. Everyone thought there was a race, but the big surprise of the Alsos mission to discover the "secrets" of the Nazi nuclear weapons program during the conquest of Germany was that a German nuclear weapons program, to the extent it existed at all, was primitive. There were intimations of this when Bohr escaped Denmark and brought an account of his conversations with Heisenburg to Los Alamos.
The German program was only slightly more advanced then the Japanese program, poorly funded and not a subject of much attention at high government levels.
The United States developed nuclear weapons without the use of heavy water using highly purified graphite as a moderator. The first use of heavy water moderation was for commercial nuclear energy, notably in the wonderful CANDU reactors.
The outcome of the war was not affected by this attack on the heavy water plant. Heisenburg was working on a reactor, not a bomb. The effort was primitive and under funded. In any case, Hitler regarded the technical basis for nuclear weapons a "Jewish Physics" since many, but not all, of the greatest advances in nuclear physics were in fact a product of scientists of Jewish origin, beginning of course with Einstein's discovery of the equivalence of mass and energy. The Farm Hall transcripts of the captured German scientists confirm that the Germans had very little understanding of nuclear weapons development. They were as astounded as much of the rest of the world by the American achievement.
This reality does not detract from the courage of the people who destroyed the plant. Neither they nor the people who planned the attack could know what the Germans were doing.
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