The Allies plan an intervention in Scandinavia

On 5 February 1940 the Anglo-French Supreme War Council met in Paris. It was the joint body in which the prime ministers and commanders of the two powers agreed on the conduct of the war, and this was its fifth meeting since the outbreak of war and its first of the new year. The British side was represented by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, together with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, the Secretary of State for War, Oliver Stanley, the Secretary of State for Air, Kingsley Wood, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who was attending the Council for the first time. They were accompanied by the chiefs of staff, among them General Edmund Ironside and Admiral Dudley Pound. France was represented by the Prime Minister and Minister of National Defence, Édouard Daladier, with three ministers and the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin. The Council adopted a British plan for an expedition to Scandinavia. Allied troops were to land at Narvik in Norway, cross northern Sweden by rail and reach Finland, which had been holding out against the Red Army for three months. On the way they were to occupy the Swedish iron-ore mines at Kiruna and Gällivare, which supplied the German armaments industry.

Popular war chronologies record that on this day Britain and France decided to intervene in Norway in order to cut off the ore trade in anticipation of a German occupation and “ostensibly” to open a route for aid to Finland, with the operation due to begin around 20 March. The assessment of motives is accurate: for the staffs in London and Paris the ore was what mattered most, and aid to the Finns gave it a political and legal justification. Two qualifications must be added, however. The plan concerned not only Norway but Sweden to an equal degree, since the railway from Narvik to Finland ran across Swedish territory. Nor was it a decision to enter neutral countries at any price: the expedition was to set out at Finland’s formal request and with at least the tacit consent of the governments in Oslo and Stockholm. It was on this condition that the whole plan foundered. As for the date, the British official history speaks of readiness to act by mid-March, while other studies give 20 March as the day on which the first troops were to go ashore.

Ore from Lapland

Since the autumn of 1939 Allied strategists had been looking for a way to seize the initiative in the war in the west. On the Franco-German border the Phoney War dragged on, and neither side intended to attack the other’s fortified lines. It was believed, however, that the Reich’s economy had two weak points: oil and high-grade iron ore. The Allies had no influence over oil, but they might have some over ore. Before the war Germany had imported some 9–10 million tons of ore a year from Sweden. In summer it went through the port of Luleå on the Gulf of Bothnia; in winter, when the gulf froze, it went by rail to ice-free Narvik and from there by ship along the Norwegian coast, within the belt of territorial waters where British warships could not stop it. The German navy had spotted this weakness as early as October 1939, when Grand Admiral Erich Raeder argued to Hitler that the British might forestall the Germans in Norway. In London the same thing was seen from the other side.

At the end of November the British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimated that Germany, deprived of Swedish ore, would be unable to wage an active war for more than a year. The French cited a memorandum by Fritz Thyssen, an industrialist who had broken with Hitler and fled to Switzerland, and who argued that Swedish ore was everything to the Reich. The British official history of the Norwegian campaign later remarked coolly that no one had checked Thyssen’s competence in the matter, and that the ministry’s calculations assumed that Germany would do nothing to replace the lost ore with scrap, stockpiles or its own poorer output. Nevertheless, belief in an “ore knockout” was widespread in both capitals.

Churchill was the loudest in demanding action. From September 1939 he had been proposing to mine Norwegian coastal waters so as to force German ore ships out into the open sea, where the Royal Navy could intercept them. Chamberlain’s cabinet hesitated, since violating the waters of a neutral state risked a clash with the Norwegians and a bad impression in the United States. On 6 January 1940 London warned Oslo and Stockholm that it might enter Norwegian waters, since the Germans were abusing them, but after firm protests from both governments it went no further. It was then that a broader and more promising idea emerged.

Finland as pretext and as cause

The Soviet attack on Finland on 30 November 1939 shocked public opinion in the West. The Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations, and the Assembly’s resolution called on League members to give Finland every assistance. The Finnish victories of December and January in the forests of Karelia and at Suomussalmi aroused admiration, and the French and British press demanded action. For the staffs it was an opportunity. An expedition to help Finland, presented as the fulfilment of the League’s recommendations, could pass through Narvik and Swedish Lapland – precisely where the mines and the ore railway lay. British documents said so openly: seizing the orefield was the main objective, and aid to the Finns was to provide the passage and the justification.

This does not mean that sympathy for Finland was feigned. In Paris the Finnish question became a matter of domestic politics. Daladier, criticised since the autumn for his passivity and for France’s failure to help Poland, needed a success, and the right and part of the left saw a war against the USSR, Hitler’s ally, as a just war. The French staff above all wanted to move the war as far as possible from France’s own borders. The French therefore pushed a far bolder plan: a landing at the Finnish port of Petsamo on the Barents Sea, which the Red Army had taken in December. That would have meant outright war with the Soviet Union, with no gain in the matter of ore. The British regarded the idea as the worst possible. The Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, called it a “silly plan” in his diary.

From the outset Norway and Sweden made it clear that they would not let foreign troops through. Both held to strict neutrality in the war in the west, and Sweden, which had declared itself a non-belligerent in the Winter War, sent the Finns arms and volunteers, but not troops. In December Berlin warned Stockholm that the appearance of Allied troops on Swedish soil would mean immediate German intervention. Around the turn of December and January the governments in Oslo and Stockholm rejected Allied soundings about transit.

The plan adopted in Paris

The plan presented in Paris had been drawn up by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee in the second half of January. The chiefs of staff called it “the first and best chance of wresting the initiative and shortening the war”. Chamberlain presented it to the Council, and Daladier, although he preferred Petsamo, agreed to the British version. According to Ironside’s diary the meeting passed in an atmosphere of remarkable harmony, with everyone “purring with pleasure”, and the general himself wondered whether they would have been so united had a little adversity touched them.

The main striking force was to land at Narvik and advance east along the railway through Kiruna and Gällivare to Luleå on the Baltic. There, in Swedish Lapland, the Allies intended to hold a force of at least two brigades until the second half of April, when the ice on the Gulf of Bothnia melted and the Germans might bring troops by sea or strike overland through southern Sweden. Two or more brigades were to go on into Finland, a modest number given the Finns’ needs. A second force, five British Territorial battalions, was to occupy three ports in southern Norway: Trondheim, together with nearby Namsos, as the main base, Bergen as an auxiliary base, and Stavanger, where the main aim was to destroy the airfield, the closest on the Continent to the fleet base at Scapa Flow. Later, much larger British and French forces were to pass through Trondheim, ready to defend southern Sweden against the Germans. According to the British official history, Britain was eventually to field some 100,000 men and France perhaps 50,000, together with forty destroyers to escort the convoys and several air squadrons. In London the various parts of the undertaking were given code names: the expedition via Narvik to the mines and Finland was “Avonmouth”, the occupation of the ports in southern Norway “Stratford”, and future operations in southern Sweden “Plymouth”.

For the expedition Britain held back two divisions from being sent to France. At Chamonix in the Alps a volunteer ski battalion, the 5th Battalion, Scots Guards, was trained, made up of officers and men who could ski; some of the officers gave up their rank for the occasion in order to serve as privates. France prepared a mountain brigade of Chasseurs Alpins and the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, newly formed from volunteers. On 28 February these units were formed into the French Scandinavian Expeditionary Corps under General Sylvestre Audet.

A Polish brigade for Finland

The plan also included a Polish unit. Under the Polish–French military agreement of 4 January 1940, a Polish army was being re-formed in France, and its Commander-in-Chief, General Władysław Sikorski, wanted the Poles to go into action as soon as possible rather than wait idly behind the Maginot Line. The decision to form a mountain brigade, which was to be part of the French corps for Finland, was taken at a briefing with Sikorski on 15 January. The order to form the Independent Podhale Rifles Brigade was issued on 9 February, four days after the Paris meeting, and its composition was settled on 14 February. Organised on the model of a French Chasseurs Alpins brigade, it eventually numbered almost 4,800 men in four battalions, most of them pre-war economic emigrants to France, among them veterans of the Spanish Civil War. It was commanded by Colonel Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko, a brigadier general from April 1940. For soldiers who a few months earlier had watched the Red Army march into Poland, an expedition against that same army had a particular meaning.

Why the plan never went ahead

The decision of 5 February hung on three conditions, none of which was met. The first was a Finnish request for help. The Allies needed a public appeal from the government in Helsinki so that, before the world and before the Scandinavians, they could appear as executors of the League of Nations resolution rather than as invaders. The government of Risto Ryti and the Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner, hesitated. Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim needed tens of thousands of trained soldiers, artillery and aircraft immediately, whereas the Allies were promising a dozen or so thousand men who could reach Finland in April at the earliest. The Finns also feared that calling in the Allies would drag the country into the great war and close the road to negotiations with Moscow, which were already under way through Stockholm.

The second condition was the consent of Norway and Sweden. Stockholm consistently refused. In mid-February the Swedish government turned down a Finnish request to send regular troops, and on 19 February King Gustaf V confirmed the refusal publicly. The Swedish Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson, and the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Halvdan Koht, understood that letting Allied troops through would bring a German attack down on their countries, and that the presence of foreign troops at the mines would mean war on their own territory. When on 2 March 1940 Britain and France formally requested the right of transit, Sweden refused on 3 March and Norway on 4 March.

The third condition was time. On 1 February, four days before the Paris meeting, the great offensive of Semyon Timoshenko’s forces began on the Karelian Isthmus; it had been in preparation since he took command of the front. In mid-February the Mannerheim Line was broken. Finland needed help within weeks, not months. On 29 February the Finnish government decided to open peace negotiations. The Allies tried to stop them. At the beginning of March Daladier promised the Finns 50,000 soldiers and a hundred bombers if they appealed for help, and London agreed to send the first troops even without the explicit consent of the Scandinavians, in the hope that the Norwegians would not open fire. The British cabinet approved the instructions for the commanders only on the evening of 12 March. That same night the Finns signed a peace treaty in Moscow which ended the Winter War on 13 March.

From Avonmouth to Narvik

On 14 March the British cabinet, with the reluctant agreement of the French, concluded that in view of the Finnish–Soviet peace further preparations were pointless. The troops assembled for the expedition were dispersed and the Guards ski battalion was disbanded. The political consequences came swiftly. In France the government was accused of abandoning Finland after Poland. In a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies a majority of members abstained, and on 20 March Daladier resigned. The new Prime Minister was Paul Reynaud, an advocate of more vigorous action, who demanded a return to the Scandinavian question.

The Allies therefore went back to Churchill’s original idea. On 28 March the Supreme War Council decided to mine Norwegian coastal waters and, in case of a German reaction, to prepare landings at Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger. The minelaying (Operation Wilfred) began on the morning of 8 April. The next day, 9 April 1940, Germany attacked Denmark and Norway. Its plan, worked out in the OKW staff since January under the code name “Weserübung”, forestalled the Allies by a matter of hours. In Berlin, reports of the Allied preparations for Finland, passed on among others by the followers of Vidkun Quisling, strengthened Adolf Hitler’s conviction that the British were about to land in Norway at any moment.

The units prepared in February for the Finnish expedition did eventually reach Norway, but to fight the Germans. French Chasseurs Alpins, legionnaires of the 13th Demi-Brigade and Polish Podhale riflemen fought in May 1940 in the battle of Narvik, which the Allies recaptured on 28 May, only to abandon it a few days later because of the defeat in France. The failure of the Norwegian campaign brought down Chamberlain’s government on 10 May 1940. The new Prime Minister was Churchill, one of the principal authors of the Scandinavian plans.

Place in the war

The decision of 5 February 1940 is one of the most controversial episodes of the Phoney War. It showed that Britain and France were prepared to violate the neutrality of small states if they judged it the key to victory, although, unlike Germany, they wanted at least the appearance of consent and did not intend to fight their way through Norwegian resistance. It also showed the limits of Allied strategy: a plan that was meant at once to save Finland, cut Germany off from ore, avoid provoking the USSR into full-scale war and avoid alienating the neutrals could not succeed, because none of these assumptions depended on the Allies alone. Had the expedition gone ahead, Britain and France would have found themselves at war with the Soviet Union, and perhaps also fighting Germany on Swedish soil, though little was said of this in Paris in February 1940.

The Nuremberg tribunal later ruled that the Allied plans did not justify the German attack on Norway, since Germany had prepared it independently of them. There is no doubt, however, that the race for Scandinavia began on both sides in the winter of 1939–1940, and that the Paris meeting was an important stage in it. For Finland the help promised in February came too late, and the memory of it was ambiguous: in Helsinki it was well understood that the Allies had been thinking more about ore than about Karelia. When Finland entered the Continuation War in June 1941, it did so at the side of Germany, the very power against which the expedition through Narvik was to have been directed.