The Allies withdraw from central Norway

On 27 April 1940 the British and French high command accepted what had been plain for several days in the valleys of central Norway: the attempt to retake Trondheim had failed. The troops landed a fortnight earlier north of the city, at Namsos, and south of it, at Åndalsnes, were to be taken off again by sea. The evacuation order, approved in London that day and signed by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, went out to both forces in the early afternoon. General Adrian Carton de Wiart at Namsos received it that same night; General Bernard Paget, commanding in the Gudbrandsdal valley, on the morning of 28 April. A few days later – on the night of 1–2 May from Åndalsnes and on the night of 2–3 May from Namsos – the last units sailed away. Central and southern Norway were abandoned to the Germans, and the Norwegian troops, who for three weeks had fought on in expectation of Allied reinforcements, laid down their arms over the days that followed.

The date

The start of the British withdrawal from central Norway is often dated to 27 April. It is a good date for the decision, with one qualification. According to the British official history of the campaign (T. K. Derry, The Campaign in Norway, 1952), the evacuation was settled by the Military Co-ordination Committee on the morning of 26 April, and the War Cabinet accepted its arguments the same day; on 27 April the final instructions were approved and France gave its consent. The troops themselves began to pull back on 28 April, and the main evacuations took place on the nights from 30 April to 3 May.

Three weeks before Trondheim

When the Germans invaded Norway on 9 April, Trondheim, the country’s third city and the key to its central region, fell into their hands without a fight. For the Allies, recovering the city, with its port and the airfield at Værnes, was an obvious objective. The plan envisaged a direct attack from the sea into the Trondheimsfjord, Operation Hammer, supported by the two arms of a pincer: from the north out of Namsos and from the south out of Åndalsnes. The Royal Navy and the Chiefs of Staff, however, judged an attack up the fjord too risky in the face of the German air force, and on 19 April it was finally called off. Only the pincers remained.

The landing at Namsos, begun on 14 April, gave Carton de Wiart the British 146th Infantry Brigade and three battalions of French Chasseurs Alpins. They had neither proper anti-aircraft artillery nor fighter cover. On 20 April German bombers burned down the wooden town of Namsos, and on 21 and 22 April the British, who had reached Verdal on the Trondheimsfjord, lost the engagement at Vist and were driven out of the bombed town of Steinkjer. From then on the northern force stood still.

In the south the fighting for Trondheim quickly turned into a struggle for the survival of the Norwegian army. The British 148th Infantry Brigade, landed at Åndalsnes in mid-April, instead of advancing north towards Trondheim was sent south, at the request of General Otto Ruge, commander-in-chief of the Norwegian army, into the Gudbrandsdalen valley, where German columns from Oslo were pushing the Norwegians back towards Dombås. The poorly trained and ill-equipped Territorials were routed at Lillehammer and, on 23 April, at Tretten. The regular 15th Infantry Brigade under Paget, which arrived after them, fought better and on 25 and 26 April held the Germans at Kvam for two days, but it too had to fall back. A squadron of Gloster Gladiator fighters that had landed on the frozen lake of Lesjaskogsvatnet on 24 April was almost entirely destroyed within two days. At the same time the German air force, above all X Air Corps operating from airfields in Norway and Denmark, was wrecking the ports through which supplies came in: from 23 to 26 April Åndalsnes burned, and Molde, where the king and the government were staying, was bombed as well.

The decision in London

On 22–24 April London was still talking of Trondheim as the main objective. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and especially the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, returned to the idea of an attack from the sea. The plan known as Hammer 2 envisaged seizing the forts at the mouth of the fjord and then striking at the city, but it required two brigades of regular infantry from France, ten days of preparation, and aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and ships that Britain did not have. On 25 April the Chiefs of Staff deliberated over it at length, and Neville Chamberlain had even issued preliminary instructions. On the morning of 26 April the Military Co-ordination Committee, chaired since mid-April by the prime minister himself, decided to abandon it and to evacuate central Norway. The War Cabinet accepted its arguments, adding one more: a serious defeat might induce Italy to enter the war. The conclusion it reached was belated but simple: British resources were not sufficient to take both Trondheim and Narvik at the same time.

The French took the decision very badly. Only four days earlier, on 22 April, the Supreme War Council had discussed sending further French light divisions to Scandinavia, and the second of them was just then sailing to assemble in Scotland. The Commander-in-Chief, Maurice Gamelin, flew to London on 26 April to protest, pointing above all to the blow to Allied morale. Matters were made worse when, on the morning of 27 April, the Cabinet heard from General Hugh Massy – the nominal commander of Allied forces in central Norway, who had never once left London – that the evacuation would have to be carried out much faster than had been thought a day earlier. The only alternative was a long, five-week withdrawal beginning around 10 May. At a meeting of the Supreme War Council held in London the same day, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, admitted that a “technical mistake” had been made in sending troops where there was neither a good port nor airfields, and agreed to an evacuation once it became a military necessity. He still hoped, however, that the French at Namsos would not have to embark but could make their way overland north towards Narvik. Just after midnight on 27–28 April Ironside wrote to Gamelin that the evacuation must take place at the earliest possible moment. The French learned that their soldiers were already being embarked on the night of 28–29 April.

The British official history admits that the ally was informed in a “roundabout” way, and explains this by a reluctance to state plainly a bitter decision that meant the loss of any hope of wresting the initiative in Norway from the Germans. It sums up the whole three weeks in a single chain of causes: having no airfield, the Allies could not assemble the air power to capture one, and having no proper base, they could not gather the men and equipment to capture a base.

Paget with Ruge

The hardest task fell to General Paget. Under an agreement with Ruge he had taken command of the whole front in the Gudbrandsdalen, including the Norwegian units fighting there. On the morning of 28 April, the day his 15th Brigade was putting up a stubborn defence at Otta, he drove to Ruge’s headquarters, a remote farm a dozen or so kilometres south of Dombås, and gave him the news of the evacuation. The Norwegian commander-in-chief, who for weeks had been asking the British not when they would leave but when the next troops would arrive, at first refused to accept the decision. He sent Ironside a telegram of protest, recalling that only the promise of Allied help had enabled him to keep his exhausted soldiers fighting for three weeks, and warning that a postponed recapture of Trondheim would become “a great and serious matter”. Paget protested too. The reply from London was unequivocal: the evacuation would go ahead, because air cover could not be provided.

Paget took his obligation to the Norwegians seriously. He agreed to cover the withdrawal of some four thousand Norwegian soldiers from the Dombås and Romsdal area, which meant that the British had to hold Dombås for two days, until the last Norwegian unit falling back from Hjerkinn had passed through. On the evening of 28 April the 15th Brigade broke contact with the Germans at Otta, and the engineers blew the road in the Rosti gorge. On 30 April at Dombås the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry battalion, supported by four Norwegian field guns, inflicted heavy losses on the attacking Germans. During the night the troops left by train for the coast. Near Lesjaskog the train ran into a bomb crater and eight soldiers were killed; the rest marched across the snow-covered plateau to Verma station, from where, after dark on 1 May, they reached Åndalsnes.

The king leaves Molde

The Allied withdrawal also sealed the fate of the Norwegian authorities. King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav and the government of Johan Nygaardsvold, who after rejecting the German demands had wandered for two weeks through the valleys of eastern Norway, had for several days been staying at Molde on the Romsdalsfjord. The town was being bombed ever more heavily. On the evening of 29 April the British cruiser HMS Glasgow entered the burning harbour. She came alongside with her fire hoses playing and, during the night raids, took on board the king, the crown prince, members of the government, representatives of the Allied legations and part of the gold reserves of the Norwegian central bank, which had been taken overland out of Oslo as early as 9 April. Where to sail was decided by the government by a vote once already at sea. Tromsø was chosen. Near the town the passengers were transferred to a Norwegian vessel, and on 1 May the king and the government arrived in Tromsø, which until the beginning of June was the de facto capital of free Norway.

Ruge demanded to be taken not to Scapa Flow but straight to northern Norway, and he left Molde aboard a British destroyer only on the night of 1–2 May.

The evacuation from Åndalsnes

By the last days of April Åndalsnes was a heap of rubble. The concrete quay survived, the only place where warships could come alongside. On the night of 30 April – 1 May Vice Admiral George Edward-Collins arrived with four cruisers and six destroyers. The cruisers Galatea, Arethusa and Sheffield took off some 1,800 soldiers, described in reports as “dead tired and famished”. The following night, 1–2 May, Vice Admiral Geoffrey Layton took off the rest: first nearly 1,300 men, then more than 750 soldiers who had been forgotten in the confusion, and finally a 240-strong rearguard, embarked in seven minutes. At around 2 a.m. on 2 May the quay was empty. A few hours later the Germans entered Åndalsnes.

The evacuation was completed with surprisingly light losses, partly because the Germans failed until the end to grasp what the British intended. The fighting in the valleys, however, had cost the southern force, according to the British official history, 1,402 men killed, wounded, missing and taken prisoner, most of them from the shattered 148th Brigade.

The evacuation from Namsos

At Namsos the situation was simpler, because Carton de Wiart’s troops had been out of contact with the Germans since the defeat at Vist. First, on the night of 28–29 April, men of the 53rd Battalion of Chasseurs Alpins boarded two French supply ships. The rest were to fall back in “leapfrog” fashion, so that the French would sail first. The French at Namsos were commanded by General Sylvestre Audet, who was still preparing a counter-attack with Norwegian units. Its cancellation had to be explained to the Norwegians without revealing the truth. They were therefore told that the French were regrouping for an attack on the forts at the mouth of the Trondheimsfjord.

The port was under constant bombardment during this time. On 30 April Ju 87 dive bombers sank the sloop HMS Bittern, and on 1 May three anti-submarine trawlers. Vice Admiral John Cunningham’s force, which had left Scapa Flow on 29 April, was to take off half the troops on the night of 1–2 May and the rest the following night, but on 1 May at sea, forty miles short of the rendezvous at the Kya lighthouse, it ran into thick fog and the first night of the evacuation was cancelled. Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten’s four destroyers got through to Namsos, but over the town itself the sky was clear, and German bombers forced them to withdraw without any troops on board. Matters were not helped by Chamberlain’s statement in the House of Commons on the afternoon of 2 May, from which it was evident that Åndalsnes had been abandoned; the Germans could guess what was being prepared at Namsos.

On the night of 2–3 May the heavy cruiser HMS York, three large French transports and five destroyers entered the Namsosfjord. Some 5,400 troops were embarked within a few hours, partly at the stone quay and partly from destroyers and trawlers. The rearguard from the Hallamshire battalion blew the bridge at Bangsund only after midnight, with a dozen or so kilometres still to cover. The last to leave was the destroyer HMS Afridi, shelling the lorries and equipment abandoned on the quay as she went. On the morning of 3 May German aircraft caught the convoy far out at sea, beyond the reach of British fighters. At around 10 a.m. a bomb hit the French destroyer Bison and set off her forward magazine. Between just over a hundred and 136 men were killed, according to various sources, among them the ship’s captain. Afridi, which had picked up the survivors and finished off the wreck with gunfire, was herself hit twice after rejoining the convoy at around 2 p.m. and sank. About a hundred men died: more than 50 members of her crew, 13 or 14 soldiers of the rearguard and some 30 of the Frenchmen rescued earlier. These were the only losses among the troops during the seaborne evacuation from central Norway. On 5 May the convoy reached Scapa Flow. According to the British official history, the northern force’s losses in the whole campaign amounted to a mere 157 men.

The Norwegians are left alone

For the Norwegians the evacuation was a blow that the British could do nothing to soften. South of Trondheim Paget had at least covered the withdrawal of the Norwegian units, so that the 2nd Division was able to prepare for demobilisation in an orderly way. In the north there was not even that. Ruge was warned orally on 29 April, but he had no contact with the units around Namsos. The headquarters of Colonel Ole Getz’s Norwegian brigade learned of the evacuation only at around 10.30 p.m. on 2 May, when the ships were already loading, from a letter from Carton de Wiart and a longer one from General Audet. In it the Frenchman assured them that he was “a victim of the necessities of war” and could do nothing other than carry out his orders. Most of the equipment promised to the Norwegians was burned or lost in the confusion.

The consequences were immediate. Norwegian troops in Østerdalen and in the mountains west of the Gudbrandsdalen stopped fighting as early as 29 April, and on 30 April the German columns advancing from Oslo linked up with the Trondheim garrison south of Støren. The same day the 4th Brigade, fighting in Valdres, capitulated, and on 1 May General William Steffens disbanded what remained of his 4th Division in western Norway. General Jacob Hvinden Haug’s forces south of Trondheim signed a capitulation at 5 a.m. on 3 May, and Colonel Getz’s forces north of the city the same day, with effect from 2 p.m. on 4 May. On 5 May at 5.15 a.m. the white flag was hoisted over the old fortress of Hegra near Trondheim, whose improvised garrison had held out since the first days of the campaign, and the same day in Telemark the fighting at Vinjesvingen came to an end. Organised resistance in southern and central Norway had ceased to exist. The war now went on only in the north, around Narvik, where the British had been landing since mid-April and where the French and Poles were soon to join them.

Place in the war

The withdrawal from central Norway was Britain’s first serious defeat on land in this war and a foretaste of what was to come. For the first time British and French troops had faced the Wehrmacht on land and lost, above all because they had nothing with which to fight the Luftwaffe. Without airfields and fighter cover, the ports of Namsos and Åndalsnes became traps. The British official history regarded this German air superiority as sufficient reason for the sudden change of policy. The German commander, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, had within three weeks joined up his forces and taken control of the whole country south of Trondheim.

In London the defeat had political consequences. As recently as 4 April Chamberlain had declared that Hitler had “missed the bus”. On 2 May he had to announce the withdrawal from Åndalsnes in the House of Commons, and on 7 May, in the speech opening the debate on the conduct of the war, to present the withdrawal from Namsos as the end of one phase of the campaign. The debate of 7 and 8 May, known as the Norway Debate, turned into an indictment of the government’s entire war policy. Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, who had demanded an attack on Trondheim from the sea, came to the House in uniform, and the Conservative Leo Amery, quoting Cromwell, called on the prime minister: “In the name of God, go!” On 8 May the government won the vote by 281 to 200, but with several dozen of its own members in revolt it was a moral victory for the opposition. On 10 May, the day of the German offensive in the west, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became prime minister, even though as First Lord of the Admiralty he had been one of the chief architects of the failed campaign.

For Norway the retreat from Trondheim meant that the country would be conquered. The Allies concentrated on Narvik, which was retaken on 28 May by the French and Norwegians, with the Polish Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade fighting south of the town. But the defeat in France forced them to abandon northern Norway as well. On 7 June King Haakon and the government sailed from Tromsø to Britain, and on 10 June the Norwegian forces on the mainland capitulated. The experience of Namsos and Åndalsnes was soon repeated on a far larger scale at Dunkirk, and in 1941 in Greece and on Crete: seaborne evacuations under German bombs became a hallmark of Britain’s war in those years, and the lesson about the importance of command of the air was one of the most important the Allies drew from the first year of the war.