The Allies land at Namsos

At dusk on the evening of 14 April 1940, British destroyers put ashore some 350 sailors and Royal Marines at the small Norwegian port of Namsos, about 200 kilometres north of Trondheim. It was the first step of an expedition meant to wrest Norway’s third city from the Germans. Five days earlier, on 9 April, the Germans had seized every important port in the country from Oslo to Narvik by surprise, and Trondheim had fallen into their hands without a fight. In the following days the naval detachment was followed by the British 146th Infantry Brigade and then by French Chasseurs Alpins. Command of this force, named Mauriceforce in London, went to Major General Adrian Carton de Wiart, a sixty-year-old veteran who had lost an eye and his left hand, a holder of the Victoria Cross who only a few months earlier had headed the British military mission in Poland.

War chronologies usually record under 14 April that British and French troops began landing at Namsos that day. The starting date is right, but the landing stretched over several days and happened in a different order from the one that sentence suggests. On 14 April only British sailors and marines went ashore. The first battalions of British infantry landed on the evening of 16 April, the third on the night of 17–18 April, and the French only on the night of 19–20 April. The landing as a whole therefore ran from the arrival of the naval detachment to the coming of the Chasseurs Alpins and the destruction of Namsos by the German air force on 20 April.

Trondheim as the objective

For the Allies Trondheim was the obvious objective. Norway is at its narrowest there, and from the city roads and railways run south towards Oslo, north towards Narvik and east to Sweden. The port could take large ships, and the nearby Værnes airfield offered a base for aircraft. For the Norwegians the city also mattered politically: the old capital, where the kings were crowned, could become the centre around which the government would rebuild its authority in the country. On 12 April the British minister, Cecil Dormer, passed on to London the Norwegian government’s urgent request for the city to be retaken, and the commander-in-chief of the Norwegian army, General Otto Ruge, asked for a British division. King Haakon VII and the government, who on 10 April had rejected the German demands, needed proof that their allies were coming.

In London, however, minds were fixed in the first days after the invasion above all on Narvik, the port through which Swedish ore passed to Germany and which had earlier been at the heart of the whole dispute over Allied plans for Scandinavia. On the evening of 9 April the Military Co-ordination Committee, chaired by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, decided to concentrate forces on Narvik and merely to “explore the possibility” of seizing bridgeheads at Namsos and Åndalsnes. On 11 April the staffs were instructed to study an operation against Trondheim, code-named Maurice, as a sequel to the Narvik expedition, code-named Rupert. The situation was transformed by the second Battle of Narvik on 13 April, in which the battleship HMS Warspite and nine destroyers destroyed eight German destroyers. London concluded that Narvik would fall almost of its own accord and began shifting forces south.

The plan drawn up over the following days envisaged an attack on Trondheim from three directions. From the north would come the force landed at Namsos, from the south a second one landed at Åndalsnes (Sickleforce). The main blow was to be a landing straight from the sea: warships would force their way past the forts at the mouth of the Trondheimsfjord and put troops ashore in the city itself. This operation was named Hammer. Churchill was urged to undertake so bold an attack by the retired Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, who offered to lead it himself. The northern and southern pincers were to play only a supporting role.

Operation Henry

Carton de Wiart was given command of Mauriceforce on 13 April. No one in London knew exactly what was happening around Namsos, whether the Germans were already there or how the Norwegians would receive the British. His instructions of 14 April told the general to seek co-operation with the Norwegian forces and not to land against opposition. They set three aims: to encourage the Norwegian government, to give it and its army a rallying point, and to secure a base for further operations in Scandinavia. The immediate task was to gain control of the Trondheim area.

Reconnaissance was entrusted to the navy. A cruiser squadron under Captain F. H. Pegram, with HMS Glasgow and HMS Sheffield, then patrolling Norwegian coastal waters, was to land parties drawn from the ships’ companies at Namsos. The landing, named Operation Henry, was planned for 13 April but postponed by a day because of a submarine alarm. At dusk on 14 April destroyers carried about 350 sailors and marines ashore under Captain W. F. Edds of the Royal Marines. The men from Sheffield took up positions east of the town, those from Glasgow to the south of it near the village of Bangsund, on the road to Trondheim. They met no resistance. Pegram was sure that German aircraft had spotted the detachment. In fact, as early as 12 April the Germans had intercepted a British signal naming Namsos and Mosjøen as suitable places for a landing.

With the sailors came a small military reconnaissance party, whose report on the night of 14–15 April foreshadowed all the troubles to come. German aircraft were reconnoitring daily. There was no chance of concealing larger forces at Namsos and Bangsund. Deep snow made it impossible to deploy troops off the roads, and a march south in more than battalion strength would be slow and visible from the air.

A brigade bound for Narvik diverted to Namsos

Under the original plan two battalions of the 148th Infantry Brigade were to sail for Namsos. On the afternoon of 14 April, however, after another meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, London changed its mind. The 146th Infantry Brigade, already at sea in a convoy bound for Narvik, was diverted to Namsos. Immediately afterwards, with French consent, Mauriceforce was also allotted the first demi-brigade of Chasseurs Alpins, until then earmarked for Narvik. The 148th Brigade eventually sailed for Åndalsnes. The change was made at sea and in haste. The commander of the 146th Brigade, Brigadier Charles Phillips, was travelling on a different ship from his men and arrived with it off Narvik, from where he rejoined his brigade only on 17 April.

The brigade numbered 2,166 men in three Territorial Army battalions: the 1/4th Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, the Hallamshire Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, and the 1/4th Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. They were accompanied by a section of engineers. They were volunteers from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire with at most seven months of continuous training and no experience of fighting in mountains or snow. They had heavy Arctic coats, but no skis or snowshoes and no idea how to use them. The brigade had no artillery of any kind, neither field nor anti-aircraft, and no motor transport. One battalion had lost its mortars in the confusion of the voyage, and according to Carton de Wiart few of the soldiers “really knew” the Bren light machine gun. Under Plan R4 these battalions had originally been meant to garrison Trondheim and Bergen as friendly ports. On 8 April they had been disembarked within an hour from the cruisers that were to carry them there, and some of their equipment had been left on board. According to the British official history of the campaign (T. K. Derry, The Campaign in Norway, 1952), their supplies, originally calculated for two weeks, were after repeated transhipments enough for barely two days.

The brigade was carried by two large ships, the Polish liner MS Chrobry under Captain Zygmunt Deyczakowski and the British liner Empress of Australia, escorted by Admiral Geoffrey Layton’s cruisers. They were to enter Namsos at dusk on 15 April. Captain R. S. G. Nicholson, whose destroyers were to help with the unloading, warned, however, that the port was unsuitable for large ships without command of the air. The Admiralty decided to tranship the troops to destroyers in the remote waters of Lillesjona, some 160 kilometres to the north, where the German air force would find it harder to locate the big transports.

The general flies in

Carton de Wiart flew across the North Sea on 15 April in a Short Sunderland flying boat. As the aircraft alighted in the Namsenfjord it was attacked by a German plane. The only staff officer accompanying the general was wounded and had to return to Britain. Carton de Wiart accepted the change of plan, and the next day he went by destroyer to Lillesjona to settle the details with Layton.

Before noon on 16 April the Lincolnshire and Hallamshire battalions transferred to five destroyers, among them HMS Afridi. They set off during a German air raid but at around 9 p.m. reached Namsos and Bangsund without loss. In the few hours of darkness that an April night affords at that latitude, the general dispersed his men over the wooded hills around the town. The naval parties returned to their ships. The third battalion was to follow on a second run by the same destroyers, but at Lillesjona German aircraft were attacking almost without pause and the men crammed aboard the liner were growing ever more exhausted. It was therefore decided that the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry battalion would be carried by Chrobry alone. The Polish ship left Lillesjona at dawn on 17 April, cruised well away from the coast until evening and on the night of 17–18 April landed the battalion at Namsos without loss.

The march on Steinkjer

Despite its shortcomings the force moved quickly. Carton de Wiart understood that he had to reach Steinkjer, where the two roads running south from Namsos converged, before the Germans got there. One detachment went by rail east to Grong, from where the line curved round to the south. A second set off from Bangsund along the road towards the Beitstadfjord, the innermost arm of the Trondheimsfjord. By the afternoon of 17 April the British were in Steinkjer and at Follafoss on the western shore of the fjord. On the evening of 19 April the brigade’s forward headquarters stood on the northern outskirts of Steinkjer, with sub-units at Røra and Stiklestad, roughly a hundred kilometres from Trondheim. The vehicles were supplied by the Norwegians: twenty lorries with drivers carried troops and supplies.

The British were working alongside Colonel Ole Getz, from 17 April commander of all Norwegian forces in the area. In practice he had two battalions of poorly trained reservists and ammunition for a single day’s fighting, a hundred rounds per rifle. The Norwegians promised above all ski patrols. Getz advised occupying the Fetten defile, about 50 kilometres from Trondheim, as quickly as possible, but the British decided there was no hurry. Nor did anyone give serious thought to when the ice would go out of the fjord. Once it did, German ships could sail from Trondheim straight into the rear of the British, who did not have a single gun.

The Germans, meanwhile, were rapidly building up their strength. When Carton de Wiart flew in to Namsos they had about 1,800 men in the Trondheim area. Thanks to Værnes airfield they were flying in fresh units every day: by 18 April they had some 3,500 men, by 19 April about 5,000.

The French and the end of Hammer

The last days before 20 April were the moment when prospects looked brightest. On the night of 19–20 April the 5th Demi-Brigade of Chasseurs Alpins, made up of the 13th, 53rd and 67th Battalions, arrived at Namsos under Brigadier General Antoine Béthouart, who was subordinate to the divisional commander, General Sylvestre Audet. The convoy of four transports, escorted by the French cruiser Émile Bertin and destroyers, was attacked from the air on its way through the fjords. The damaged cruiser turned back for home. The French dispersed over the wooded hills, but the stores could not be cleared from the quay before dawn. The anti-aircraft guns, transport, skis, snowshoes and mules had been left for the second echelon. There were not even straps for the skis. From the Ville d’Alger, too large to come alongside the quay, some 800 of her 1,100 troops were landed on 22 April, and the brigade’s anti-aircraft battery and transport only after almost a week. Even so, Carton de Wiart now had more than four thousand French soldiers at his disposal, and General Audet planned to send out ski patrols to cut the railway from Trondheim to Sweden.

What the general did not know was that the attack with which his force was meant to co-operate had just collapsed. On 17 April Operation Hammer had been set for 22 April, but that very evening Major General F. E. Hotblack, appointed to command it, suffered a stroke. The Admiralty, and with it the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Cyril Newall, concluded that taking the fleet into the fjord under Luftwaffe bombs was too risky. Since the landings at Namsos and Åndalsnes had gone off without loss, it was judged enough to close the pincers on the city from north and south. On 19 April the Chiefs of Staff abandoned the attack from the sea, and the decision was confirmed the next day. Churchill was disappointed, Keyes furious. Throughout his time at Namsos Carton de Wiart learned little of what was happening elsewhere, and he was not told at once that Hammer had been called off.

Namsos in flames

From the first day Carton de Wiart warned London about the German air force. That was why the troops were landed at night and brigade orders forbade movement by day. There the means of defence ended. The force did not have a single anti-aircraft gun. The port was protected only by warships, and even those were lacking: the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Curlew had to leave to refuel, and Cairo was escorting the empty transports back to Britain. There was no airfield in the area from which British fighters could operate, and no aircraft carrier was at hand.

On 20 April at around 10 a.m., after a morning reconnaissance flight, German bombers appeared over Namsos. The raids continued intermittently until 4.30 p.m. The British counted some 63 aircraft that day. The wooden town burned almost entirely: houses, the church, the railway station with its rolling stock, the wooden quays and the buildings on the stone quay. The water mains and electricity supply were cut. Bombs hit the French headquarters, and the French lost part of their stores and ammunition. Most of the inhabitants had left the town beforehand, so according to the British official history only 22 people were killed. In the bay German aircraft badly damaged the anti-submarine trawler HMT Rutlandshire, which was beached. When the destroyer HMS Nubian returned that evening, her captain reported that the whole town was “a mass of flames from end to end”.

On the morning of 21 April Carton de Wiart telegraphed to the War Office: “Enemy aircraft have almost completely destroyed Namsos (…). I see little chance of carrying out decisive, or indeed any, operations, unless enemy air activity is considerably restricted.” He demanded that no more ships be sent into the ruined port, since there was nowhere to store supplies and the fleeing Norwegians had taken all the motor vehicles with them. The raids were repeated on 21 and 28 April. Swedish correspondents wrote of Namsos as “the most thoroughly bombed town in the world”. That was not true even then, but the impression was new and shocking: in a single day air power had deprived ground forces of their base before they had fought their first engagement.

The next day, 21 April, brought a second blow. Once the ice had gone out of the Trondheimsfjord, German ships landed troops in the rear of the British positions near Verdal. In the fighting at Vist on 21 and 22 April the British, without artillery and without air cover, were pushed back northwards, and Steinkjer was bombed and burned. The advance on Trondheim from the north was over.

Significance

The landing at Namsos was one of the first operations in this war in which British and French troops faced the Wehrmacht on land, and it exposed every weakness of the Allied conduct of the war in the spring of 1940. The plan was changed from day to day, and brigades were redirected at sea from one port to another. Troops equipped to garrison friendly ports were thrown into battle in deep snow without artillery, transport or skis. The commander at Namsos did not know what London was planning, and each of the three services answered to its own ministry. Above all, however, there was no air power. Within a single day the British learned that without air cover it was impossible to hold even a supply base.

From 22 April Carton de Wiart’s force stood still. The general advised withdrawal, but for political reasons he was ordered to hold on. As the British and Norwegians lost one battle after another in the Gudbrandsdal valley south of Trondheim, London decided on 26 and 27 April to evacuate central Norway. On the night of 2–3 May warships, under cover of fog, took off some 5,400 troops from Namsos without losing a man in the port. On the morning of 3 May German bombers sank two of the destroyers screening the convoy at sea: the French Bison and HMS Afridi, which a fortnight or so earlier had brought the first British soldiers to Namsos. On 5 May, his sixtieth birthday, Carton de Wiart arrived back at Scapa Flow.

The defeat at Trondheim had consequences far beyond Norway. The central and southern parts of the country passed into German hands, and the Allies concentrated on Narvik, which they retook on 28 May with French Chasseurs Alpins, the Foreign Legion, the Norwegians and the Polish Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade, only to abandon it in June in the face of defeat in France. In London the debate on the conduct of the Norwegian campaign on 7–8 May shook Neville Chamberlain’s government. On 10 May, the day of the German offensive in the West, Churchill became prime minister, even though he had been one of the chief architects of the Scandinavian expedition. The lesson of Namsos and Åndalsnes, where British ground troops fought under a sky that belonged entirely to the enemy, was repeated a few weeks later on a far larger scale in France.