The Altmark incident

Late in the evening of 16 February 1940 the British destroyer HMS Cossack, commanded by Captain Philip Vian, entered Jøssingfjord, a small, ice-bound fjord on the south-west coast of Norway. Lying there was the German supply ship Altmark, in whose holds seamen from merchant ships sunk by the Admiral Graf Spee had been held for months. A British boarding party leapt onto the German ship, seized her after a brief fight and freed 299 prisoners. All this took place in the territorial waters of neutral Norway, in full view of Norwegian torpedo boats, which protested but did not open fire.

The figure of 303 British prisoners is often given. Some publications use it, but most sources, including Norwegian and German studies and Geirr H. Haarr’s monograph on the naval war of 1939–1940, speak of 299 freed. The official citation for Vian’s decoration rounds it to “three hundred British prisoners”. Most of them were British merchant seamen rather than prisoners of war in the strict sense, a point the Germans stressed by calling them internees.

A prison ship

The Altmark was one of five modern tankers built for the Kriegsmarine to supply warships operating far from their bases. She could carry more than 9,000 tons of fuel as well as ammunition and provisions. She was commissioned in August 1939 and almost immediately, even before the outbreak of war, put out into the Atlantic. She was commanded by Captain Heinrich Dau, a merchant navy officer and veteran of the First World War. After taking on fuel at Port Arthur, Texas, the Altmark met the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee south-west of the Canary Islands on 1 September 1939, and for the following months served as her floating base.

During the Graf Spee’s raid in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, Captain Hans Langsdorff kept to the prize regulations: he stopped ships, took off their crews and only then sank them. He kept the masters and some of the officers aboard his own ship and transferred the rest of the men to the Altmark at regular meetings in remote waters. On the tanker, which was not designed to carry people, makeshift quarters were fitted out for them in the holds. The Altmark changed her appearance and her name, posing as a Norwegian or American ship. On 9 October 1939 an aircraft from the carrier Ark Royal spotted her flying the US flag as the Delmar, but the force hunting the raider had no destroyers with it and decided against an inspection.

The two ships met for the last time at the beginning of December. A few days later the Graf Spee fought the Battle of the River Plate, took refuge in Montevideo and on 17 December was scuttled by her own crew. The masters released in Montevideo, who had been held aboard the pocket battleship, told the British about the supply ship and the hundreds of their men in her holds. From then on the Royal Navy searched for the Altmark, without knowing exactly what she looked like or where she was heading.

Escape along the Norwegian coast

Captain Dau sat out the first weeks of the search in the empty waters of the South Atlantic. When water began to run short on board, he headed north at the end of January 1940. He passed west of the British Isles, sailed close to Iceland and on 14 February entered Norwegian territorial waters north of Trondheim. The plan was simple: to sail south along the inner coastal route, sheltered by a chain of islands and protected by Norwegian neutrality, and then, on a dark night, to cross the Skagerrak and take shelter behind the German minefields. German ore ships from Narvik took the same route in winter, which since the autumn had been one of London’s chief worries.

The ship hoisted the German state service flag, her weapons were stowed below deck, and the prisoners were forbidden to come up and the portholes were blanked off. The Norwegian navy stopped the Altmark several times – three times on 14 and 15 February according to most accounts, four times according to some. First, officers from the torpedo boats Trygg and Snøgg came aboard; then, near Bergen, envoys of Rear Admiral Carsten Tank-Nielsen, commander of the coastal defence district, who had arrived in the destroyer Garm. Dau claimed that he was in command of a state vessel carrying fuel from America, that there were no prisoners on board, and refused to allow a search. The Norwegians took him at his word and did not look into the holds, even though the seamen locked inside were shouting and making a din to draw attention to themselves.

Tank-Nielsen did not trust the German and wanted to deny him passage through the war zone of Bergen harbour. His superior, the commanding admiral Henry Diesen, overruled him after consulting the Foreign Ministry. It was accepted that the Altmark was a state vessel, and it was decided that she should leave Norwegian waters as quickly and quietly as possible. The ship continued south escorted by Norwegian torpedo boats. Historians, among them Gerhard Weinberg and Geirr Haarr, judge that Captain Dau, by concealing the prisoners and the armament, had himself violated the Norwegian neutrality regulations, and that the decision at Bergen was a mistake for which Norway paid very dearly.

The chase and Jøssingfjord

The British knew that the Altmark was close. During the day on 16 February Lockheed Hudson patrol aircraft from RAF Thornaby spotted the tanker off the Norwegian coast. Captain Vian’s 4th Destroyer Flotilla, made up of modern Tribal-class ships, put to sea together with other Home Fleet vessels. In the afternoon, near Egersund, where the sheltered route among the islands ended and the Altmark had to sail close to the open coast, she was caught by the destroyers Intrepid and Ivanhoe. They signalled her to come out into international waters, and Intrepid fired warning shots. Dau did not comply; he outmanoeuvred Ivanhoe, which was trying to come alongside, and at about 5 p.m. took refuge in Jøssingfjord, a narrow inlet some three kilometres long between rocky walls.

The entrance to the fjord was barred by the Norwegian torpedo boats Kjell and Skarv and the patrol boat Firern. The commander of Kjell, Lieutenant Halvorsen, went aboard the Cossack, which had meanwhile come up, and protested vigorously against the violation of Norwegian waters. He declared that the ship had been searched and had no prisoners aboard, and warned that if she were boarded the Norwegians might use torpedoes. The British ships withdrew into international waters, and Vian asked the Admiralty for instructions.

The reply came from the First Lord of the Admiralty himself, Winston Churchill, who since the autumn had been pressing for a hard line on German shipping in Norwegian waters. If the Norwegian torpedo boat would not agree to escort the Altmark to Bergen with a joint Anglo-Norwegian guard on board, Vian was to board the ship, free the prisoners and take possession of her pending further orders. If the Norwegians interfered, he was to warn them. If they opened fire, he was not to reply unless the attack was serious, and in that case was to defend himself using no more force than necessary. The order ended with the advice to suggest to the Norwegians that “honour is served by submitting to superior force”.

“The Navy’s here!”

In the evening the Cossack again entered Norwegian waters. Vian proposed to Halvorsen a joint inspection of the ship and an escort to Bergen. The Norwegian refused, citing the instructions of his government, which had ordered him to protest but not to offer armed resistance. Vian therefore went up the fjord. The Altmark’s crew dazzled the British with a searchlight, and the ship went full ahead, then full astern, trying to ram the destroyer and push her onto the rocks. In the course of these manoeuvres she ran her own stern aground. Late in the evening, between 10 and 11 p.m. (sources give different times), the Cossack came alongside, and a boarding party under Lieutenant Bradwell Turner jumped aboard.

There followed a short, chaotic fight with the crew and armed guards. Some of the Germans fled across the ice of the fjord to the shore and were fired on. Seven German seamen were killed (some sources count eight, including one who died later) and several were wounded; on the British side one seaman was wounded. The often-repeated story that this was the last cutlass action in the history of the Royal Navy finds no confirmation in the accounts of those who took part. The dead were buried in the cemetery of the municipality of Sokndal above the fjord.

The British went down to the bolted holds. According to the accounts of the freed men, the first sign was a shout: “Any British down there?” When a chorus of voices answered from below, there came the words that went round the whole of Britain: “Well, the Navy’s here!” Two anti-aircraft guns and machine guns were also found on the ship, which contradicted Dau’s assurances that the voyage was purely commercial. The freed men were transferred to the Cossack, which left the fjord shortly after midnight, on 17 February. The Germans and the stranded ship were left where they were. The Norwegian warships protested but did not intervene. The government in Oslo later explained that under international law a neutral state is not obliged to resist a force many times superior to its own. On 17 February the destroyer landed the freed men at the Scottish port of Leith, where they were greeted by crowds and the press.

The dispute over neutrality

From a legal point of view the matter was tangled. Article 10 of the Thirteenth Hague Convention of 1907 stated that the mere passage of belligerent warships and prizes through territorial waters did not compromise a state’s neutrality. London conceded that carrying prisoners through neutral waters was permissible and that the Royal Navy had done so itself. It argued, however, that the Altmark had gone hundreds of miles out of her way solely in order to avoid British warships under cover of Norwegian neutrality, and had thus abused the right of passage, and that Norway, by accepting the captain’s lies without verification, had failed in its duties as a neutral state. Yet the British warships had undoubtedly violated Norwegian waters.

On 17 February the Norwegian envoy in London, Erik Colban, delivered a sharp protest to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and demanded the return of the freed men and reparation. Halifax replied with accusations against Norway and demanded that the Altmark be interned. The Foreign Minister, Halvdan Koht, called the Cossack’s action the most flagrant violation of Norwegian neutrality in this war, but he also accused the Germans of dragging the war into Norwegian waters through the Altmark’s voyage. The government of Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold, which had been steering between the great powers since the outbreak of the Winter War, came under pressure from both sides at once. Germany protested in Oslo against Norway’s tolerance of a British “act of piracy”, and German propaganda, including the broadcasts of William Joyce, known as “Lord Haw-Haw”, harped for weeks on the “British pirates”.

In Britain, after months of the Phoney War, in which the only resounding success had been the victory off the River Plate, the freeing of the prisoners was greeted with enthusiasm. “The Navy’s here!” became a newspaper slogan and the title of books and songs, and Vian became a national hero. The British government parried criticism with a moral argument: men held in ships’ holds had to be freed if the neutral state had been unable to find them.

Hitler’s reaction

In Berlin the incident was taken as proof that Norway would not defend its neutrality against Britain, and the escort of Norwegian torpedo boats, which had not fired a single shot, looked to Hitler like open connivance. Since the autumn of 1939 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had been arguing to him that the British were about to seize the Norwegian ports, and in December the Norwegian far-right politician Vidkun Quisling had assured him that the government in Oslo would secretly consent to this. On 27 January 1940 the OKW took over the planning under the code name “Weserübung”, but work was proceeding slowly.

After 16 February Hitler demanded haste. On 19 February, as the head of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, noted in his diary, the Führer pressed energetically for the operation to be speeded up and for ships and units to be made ready. He also demanded that a commander be appointed, and on 21 February entrusted the preparation of the operation to General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst. Denmark was soon added to the plan, and on 1 March Hitler signed the directive for Operation Weserübung. Historians agree that the decision to attack had been taken earlier and for other reasons – above all Swedish ore and Atlantic bases for the fleet. The British politician Maurice Hankey remarked that the incident “does not seem to have given Hitler the pretext he was looking for”. Nevertheless, the Altmark quickened the pace and confirmed Hitler in his conviction that he could not afford to wait.

The incident cut the other way too. For Churchill it was proof that the Germans were using Norwegian waters with impunity, and it strengthened his pressure for the Norwegian coastal route to be mined. This was being discussed at the very time when the Allies were planning an expedition to Scandinavia under the banner of aid to Finland. On the Norwegian side the affair exposed the weakness of a navy that had been able neither to inspect the German ship nor to stop the British destroyer, and the government’s disbelief that either of the great powers would attack the country.

Place in the war

The Altmark, later refloated, returned to Germany. In August 1940 she was renamed Uckermark. At the beginning of 1941 she supplied the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during their Atlantic raid, and on 30 November 1942 she blew up in the port of Yokohama, destroying the armed merchant cruiser Thor as well.

Seven weeks after the incident, on 9 April 1940, Germany attacked Denmark and Norway. British mines had begun to be laid in Norwegian waters the day before. Vian and his destroyers also fought in the Norwegian campaign. The occupiers turned Jøssingfjord into a propaganda site and put up a memorial there to the victims of the “British pirates”. Supporters of the collaborationist Nasjonal Samling party, whom their compatriots called “quislings” after the party’s leader, tried to hit back by contemptuously calling opponents of the Germans “jøssings” – cowards who had failed to defend their own neutrality at Jøssingfjord. The word changed its meaning at once: in occupied Norway “jøssing” became a proud term for a patriot, an opponent of the occupation and of collaboration, so much so that, according to Norwegian studies, the authorities banned its use in official texts in 1943. The pair of words “quisling” and “jøssing” has survived in Norwegian memory as shorthand for the choice the occupation forced upon the country.

The Altmark incident was a small operation by a single destroyer, but it closed the epilogue of the Admiral Graf Spee’s raid, gave the British one of their few successes in the first winter of the war and showed how fragile was the neutrality of states lying between the warring powers. From Jøssingfjord a straight road led to April 1940, when the war came to Scandinavia in earnest.