The Allies decide to leave Norway

On the evening of 24 May 1940 a telegram was handed in for dispatch at the Admiralty in London for which tens of thousands of soldiers in northern Norway had been waiting, although none of them yet knew it. That day the Defence Committee of Winston Churchill’s new government had decided that the Allied forces were to leave Norway. Narvik, for which British, French, Polish and Norwegian troops had been fighting for six weeks, was to be taken, destroyed and abandoned. The decision was made at a time when German panzer divisions in Flanders had already reached the English Channel and the French and British armies in the north had been cut off from the rest of France. Faced with the threat of defeat on the Continent and of an invasion of the British Isles themselves, the fight in the far north had lost its purpose. The Norwegians, whom the Allies had come to defend, were informed of the decision only a week later.

Dates

The British took the final decision to end operations in Norway on 24 May. According to the British official history of the campaign (T. K. Derry, The Campaign in Norway, 1952), the evacuation was settled at a meeting of the Defence Committee on 24 May; the order was sent the same evening and the War Cabinet approved it the following day, 25 May. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cork, in command of the expedition, received the telegram during the night of 24–25 May.

Two earlier dates are connected with this decision. It is often recorded under 1 May that the Allies began evacuating their troops from Norwegian ports and that the evacuations would last until June. That is true in a broad sense: the last units sailed from Åndalsnes on the night of 1–2 May and from Namsos on the night of 2–3 May, and the last soldiers left the Narvik area on 8 June. Under 5 May, on the other hand, some chronologies state that a Norwegian government-in-exile was set up in London. That was not so. On 5 May the King and the government of Norway had for several days been working in Tromsø, on a still-free strip of their own country, and they stayed there until 7 June. They sailed to Britain only after the decision of 24 May, and according to Norwegian records the first meeting of the government in exile was held in London on 11 June 1940.

After the retreat from Trondheim

For the Allies the spring of 1940 in Norway began with a setback. After the German invasion of 9 April they tried to retake Trondheim, but without airfields or fighter cover their units in central Norway stood no chance against the Luftwaffe. On 26–27 April London decided to evacuate them, and at the turn of April and May the British and French sailed from Åndalsnes and Namsos. Within the next few days the Norwegian forces south and north of Trondheim capitulated, and on 5 May the Hegra fortress surrendered. Organised resistance in southern and central Norway came to an end.

The war went on only in the north. There the Allies had more room and more time: from mid-April the British had been landing at Harstad on the island of Hinnøya, while General Eduard Dietl’s garrison in Narvik, deprived of naval support since the Second Battle of Narvik, was cut off from Germany and supplied only by air. After the evacuation of central Norway, Narvik became London’s sole objective in the campaign. The British official history lists the reasons: the capture of the port was to cut the Germans off from Swedish iron ore, offset the defeat in the south and, as the instructions put it, “preserve a part of Norway as a seat of government for the Norwegian King and people”.

A government in Tromsø, not in London

King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav and the government of Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold reached Tromsø on 1 May, having been taken off from bombed Molde two days earlier by a British cruiser. For five weeks the largest town in northern Norway became the de facto capital of the free state. The King and the Crown Prince lived in a log cabin in the Målselv valley, the government issued decrees and conducted foreign policy, and the Commander-in-Chief, General Otto Ruge, who had reached the north after the evacuation from Molde, directed the rest of the army from there. The connection with London that lies behind this common mistake is only partial. A Norwegian legation operated in London, and from April so did Nortraship, the body managing the Norwegian merchant fleet – one of the largest in the world – requisitioned by a government decree of 22 April. Yet as late as 18 May the government issued from Tromsø a law on the administration of shipping, and its members travelled to Paris and London only for talks: two ministers returning from Paris happened to pass through London on their way home on 10 May.

For the Norwegians the presence of the King and the government on Norwegian soil was a matter of principle. As long as the lawful authorities were functioning inside the country, no one could claim that Norway had capitulated, and the puppet government of Vidkun Quisling, which the Germans themselves soon discarded, had no legal basis whatsoever. That is precisely why the decision of 24 May concerned not only soldiers but the Norwegian state itself.

May in the north

At the beginning of May the situation around Narvik looked good for the Allies. The Norwegian 6th Division of General Carl Gustav Fleischer was attacking from the north; Brigadier General Antoine Béthouart’s French Chasseurs Alpins had been landing since 28 April; two battalions of the Foreign Legion arrived in the first days of May; and on 8–9 May the Polish Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade under Brigadier General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko, almost 4,800 strong, came ashore in the Harstad area. Formed in France during the winter with a view to helping Finland, it came to the north as one of the first large Polish formations to take the field against the Germans after September 1939. On the night of 12–13 May the legionnaires landed at Bjerkvik and seized the northern shore of the Ofotfjord, and on 13 May Lieutenant General Claude Auchinleck took command of the land forces. This fighting formed part of the Battles of Narvik.

South of Narvik things were going worse. The German 2nd Mountain Division was marching north from Trondheim through Nordland to relieve Dietl. London concluded that this long strip of coast could not be held by regular forces without air cover, and sent there the Independent Companies of Lieutenant Colonel Colin Gubbins, light units of volunteers meant to delay the Germans by blowing bridges and laying ambushes. On 10 May, the day on which Germany attacked in the west, the German drive northwards also began in Norway. In the morning British and Norwegian troops ambushed and broke up a German advance guard before Mosjøen, but that same day several hundred German soldiers, carried by a requisitioned coastal steamer and by seaplanes, landed at Hemnesberget, in the defenders’ rear. Mosjøen fell on 11 May.

The British troops sent from Narvik to help met one misfortune after another. On the night of 14–15 May German aircraft set on fire in the Vestfjord the Polish liner Chrobry, carrying a battalion of the Irish Guards and a brigade headquarters. The bombs killed the Guards officers in their sleep, among them the battalion commander and three majors; 12 members of the Polish crew were also killed, and most of the equipment was lost. On 17 May the cruiser HMS Effingham, carrying a battalion of the South Wales Borderers, ran onto rocks. On 17–18 May the Scots Guards lost an action at Stien, and on 18 May the British gave up Mo i Rana. Gubbins, appointed to command all the forces in the area, conducted the retreat across a snow-covered plateau towards Bodø. The Germans did not even need to attack frontally: their air force, which ruled the sky, spotted every movement of the defenders and paralysed their supply routes.

The decision

In London Norway slipped into the background after 10 May. The German offensive in France and the Low Countries absorbed the whole attention of the Cabinet, which from that day was led by Churchill – although it was precisely the failures in Norway, called to account in the Norway Debate, that had carried him to the premiership. For the first few days Churchill defended the campaign. As late as 19 May he was arguing to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, that the chief value of the troops in Norway lay in tying down much larger German forces there, far from the main decision: “Norway is now paying a good dividend and must be kept at it.”

Events in France quickly changed this calculation. On 20 May the Germans reached the English Channel and split the Allied armies. The War Cabinet was awaiting a report on the consequences of the fall of Paris or of a withdrawal of the British forces from France. An invasion of Britain itself now had to be reckoned with seriously, and then every destroyer, every fighter and every anti-aircraft gun would be priceless. On the evening of 20 May Churchill put three arguments to the new Defence Committee for abandoning Narvik once it had been taken: the Germans were already strong enough to force a passage for their troops through Sweden, so a march from Narvik to the Swedish ore mines was out of the question; holding Narvik would be a burden; and the fleet did not need it as a base.

On 23 May the War Cabinet considered the Chiefs of Staff’s appreciation of the military consequences of a complete withdrawal from Norway. The Chiefs of Staff wrote that they could send no more aircraft there, that one and a half British divisions faced what they believed to be eleven German ones (in reality the Germans had moved seven divisions, about 107,000 men, to Norway by mid-June), and that the campaign was tying down half the destroyers needed for defence against invasion. They proposed that Narvik should be abandoned once captured. Churchill still preferred to leave the matter at the planning stage, but by the meeting of the Defence Committee on 24 May the situation looked even more threatening. It was calculated that the evacuation would take 28 days from the first order to the landing of the last soldiers at home, and that if an invasion began in the meantime the fleet would have to be recalled at once, leaving the troops in Norway to their fate. That evening the telegram with the evacuation order was handed for dispatch to the secretary of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound. It was the same day on which the German tanks outside Dunkirk stopped on the halt order.

The decision did not come easily. The British official history records that over the following days the Cabinet returned to it three times: on 27 May the Admiralty argued that the Narvik operation was exhausting the Germans more than the British; on 30 May the Ministry of Economic Warfare put forward its own objections; and on 2 June, after the successful evacuation from Dunkirk, Churchill himself wondered whether a self-sufficient garrison might be left at Narvik for a few weeks. Each time the decision stood, and on 31 May it was also approved by the Allied Supreme War Council. The Chiefs of Staff further required that, in view of France’s position, the last soldiers to leave Norway should as far as possible be British.

Narvik nonetheless

Lord Cork – Admiral of the Fleet William Boyle – received the order almost three days before the long-planned assault on Narvik. The telegram told him to put the speed of the evacuation first and accepted the abandonment of most of the equipment, but considered the capture of the town highly desirable: it would make it possible to destroy the port and the Ofoten railway, which carried the ore from Swedish Kiruna, and a defeat of the Germans would make it easier to break contact with them. Lord Cork and Auchinleck summoned Béthouart to a conference. For the Frenchman, whose country was fighting for its survival, the dilemma was especially painful. According to the British official history, after half an hour’s reflection he agreed that the attack had to go ahead, even if it kept French soldiers away from their homeland. Later he added a third argument: the Allies needed a victory for their morale.

The secret was closely kept, above all from the Norwegians. The British feared leaks, and in their dealings with the Norwegians they used a convenient cover: since mid-May Lord Cork and Auchinleck had been negotiating with them over the creation of a new base further north, near Tromsø, so the movement of ships and men was explained as a transfer. The evacuation, moreover, began at once wherever there was no need to wait for Narvik. Gubbins, warned of the government’s decision by telephone and briefed in detail on 25 May by an officer sent from Harstad, withdrew his units on 26 May from Pothus in the Saltdal valley – where the day before the Irish Guards and the Independent Companies had fought their last serious action against the Germans – to the isthmus at Fauske, and then to Bodø. The Norwegians fighting alongside the British could not understand why defensible positions were being given up, and saw something sinister in it. On 27 May more than a hundred German bombers reduced Bodø to ashes. In the last days of May destroyers took the troops off from the town on three successive nights, while the Norwegians withdrew by fishing boat to the Lofoten Islands. According to the official history, the retreat through Nordland cost the British 506 men.

Narvik itself was taken on 28 May. On the night of 27–28 May the legionnaires and a Norwegian battalion crossed the Rombaksfjord, while the Polish Podhale riflemen attacked the Ankenes peninsula on the other side of the Beisfjord. In the afternoon Norwegian and French troops entered the town. It was the first victory of Allied land forces over the Wehrmacht in this war, won by soldiers who were taking the port only in order to abandon it soon afterwards. The Poles on Ankenes and the Norwegians in the mountains did not know that the fate of the campaign had already been sealed.

Place in the war

The Norwegian government learned of the Allied decision late on the evening of 1 June, and General Ruge the following day. It was received with disbelief and bitterness. The Norwegians asked for a day’s delay in order to try one more plan, put forward by the minister and former Prime Minister Johan Ludwig Mowinckel, for the neutralisation of northern Norway under Swedish protection, but the Germans were no longer interested in it. Between 4 and 8 June, in Operation Alphabet, some 24,500 Allied soldiers sailed from the Harstad area, among them the Polish brigade, which covered the embarkation. On 7 June the King, the Crown Prince and the government left Tromsø aboard the cruiser HMS Devonshire, and on 8 June German battleships sank the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and two destroyers in the Norwegian Sea, killing more than 1,500 men. On 10 June the Norwegian Army capitulated. Ruge went into captivity, and the King and the government began five years of exile in London – this time in earnest.

The decision of 24 May closed the first campaign in which the British and French had faced the Wehrmacht on land. Its outcome was settled not by Norway but by France: troops, ships and aircraft were needed where the fate of the war hung in the balance and where invasion threatened. Most of the soldiers evacuated from Narvik were swept into the whirlpool of the French defeat. The Polish Podhale Brigade landed in Brittany in June and within a few days was scattered in the chaos of France’s collapse; its remnants reached Britain. Germany gained for years a whole country with its ports, its bases for submarines and its airfields on the North Sea, as well as a secure route for Swedish ore. Norway lost its independence but not its statehood: the King, the government and the merchant fleet managed by Nortraship served the Allies throughout the war. For the Poles, Narvik remained their first victory after September 1939, won in a campaign that their allies had already written off as lost on the day the town was taken.