The British land at Harstad

On the morning of 15 April 1940 three large transports, escorted by the battleship HMS Valiant and nine destroyers, entered the waters off Harstad, a small port on the eastern shore of the island of Hinnøya in the Vesterålen archipelago. That day the 1st Battalion Irish Guards, most of the 1st Battalion Scots Guards and the headquarters of the 24th Guards Brigade went ashore, followed the next day by the 2nd Battalion South Wales Borderers. It was the first sizeable body of ground troops that Britain sent to northern Norway after the German invasion of 9 April. Its task was to wrest from the Germans Narvik, the port through which Swedish iron ore was shipped.

The landing of British troops at Harstad near Narvik is dated to 15 April. The date needs two qualifications. The commander of the expedition, Major General Pierse Mackesy, arrived with a small advance party a day earlier, on 14 April, and that same day landed two companies of Scots Guards on the mainland near Sjøvegan on the Salangen fjord. The British official history of the campaign therefore says that the British set up their headquarters at Harstad on 14 April, while the main force landed on 15 and 16 April. “Near Narvik”, moreover, has to be understood loosely: Harstad is about 55 kilometres from Narvik as the crow flies, and considerably further by sea through the Tjeldsund strait and the Ofotfjord.

An expedition prepared for a different war

The troops who went ashore at Harstad had not been assembled to fight the Germans. Since February Britain and France had been preparing an expedition that was to land at Narvik, travel along the Ofoten Line railway to the Swedish mines at Kiruna and go on to Finland. After the Finnish–Soviet peace the plan was shelved, but in the first week of April it returned in a pared-down form. The British were to mine Norwegian waters (Operation Wilfred) and, should the Germans respond by entering Norway, land troops at Narvik and at three ports in the south. The force destined for Narvik bore the code name Avonmouth. It was commanded by Mackesy, commander of the 49th Division and a veteran of the British military mission in South Russia in 1919–1920. Its first echelon was Brigadier William Fraser’s 24th Guards Brigade, formed in February from three battalions; the second was to consist of Chasseurs Alpins and other French and Polish units.

The instructions of 5 April stated that the aim of the expedition was to secure the port of Narvik and the railway as far as the Swedish border. Two conditions were attached: the troops would not land in the face of serious Norwegian opposition, and they would observe rules intended to rule out the bombardment of civilians. The Scots Guards were already aboard ship in the Clyde when, on 8 April, news came of German warships at sea and the expedition’s departure was cancelled. A day later the Germans were in Narvik. In the first Battle of Narvik on 10 April British destroyers sank two German destroyers, and in the second battle on 13 April the battleship HMS Warspite and her escort destroyed the remaining eight. General Eduard Dietl’s garrison, some 2,000 mountain troops of the 3rd Mountain Division, was cut off from the sea.

In London the expedition was being reworked on the move. Within a week Mackesy received three successive versions of his instructions. The final version, brought to him at Scapa Flow on 11 April, ordered him “to eject the Germans from the Narvik area and establish control of Narvik itself”. It named Harstad, a Norwegian military centre, as the first landing place and forbade a landing in the face of serious opposition until “sufficient forces” had been assembled. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, added in his own hand that there were about 3,000 Germans in Narvik, who “must have been knocked about by the naval action”, and that Mackesy might have a chance to exploit the navy’s success. “Boldness is required,” he concluded. In the documents of those days the Narvik expedition already appears under the code name Rupert.

Two commanders, two sets of orders

On 12 April Mackesy, with two companies of Scots Guards and a small staff, sailed from Scapa Flow in the cruiser HMS Southampton. That same day the transports carrying the rest of the Guards brigade and the 146th Infantry Brigade left the Clyde, and from Rosyth, aboard the cruiser HMS Aurora, sailed the commander of the naval side of the expedition, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cork – William Boyle, 12th Earl of Cork and Orrery. He was a sixty-six-year-old officer with a reputation for swift action, senior in rank to the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Charles Forbes, whose post he had himself held in 1933–1935. In the autumn of 1939 Churchill had brought him into the Admiralty to work out Plan Catherine, a fleet expedition into the Baltic. For the Narvik expedition Lord Cork received no written instructions at all. On 10 and 11 April he was briefed orally by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, by a meeting of the Military Co-ordination Committee and by Winston Churchill himself, who talked to him in the car on the way from the Admiralty to Parliament. The admiral left London convinced that Narvik had to be taken as quickly as possible. The general left with orders not to land against opposition, and with troops wholly unprepared for any such landing.

On the evening of 14 April, when the convoy was about 130 nautical miles from its destination, the Admiralty changed its composition. The whole of the 146th Brigade was diverted to Namsos, where that same day the first Allied troops meant to strike at Trondheim had begun landing. Mackesy, who had counted on seven battalions within a week, had for the time being only three.

Meanwhile Lord Cork, approaching the Norwegian coast, read a signal from Vice Admiral William Whitworth, the victor of 13 April. Whitworth estimated that there were 1,500–2,000 Germans in Narvik and that a small landing party would take the town without serious resistance if supported by a naval force as strong as that of the previous day. The admiral at once planned an assault for the morning of 15 April: 350 guardsmen from Southampton and 200 sailors and Royal Marines from the ships. Radio communications in the mountains of northern Norway, however, were appalling, and the order reached Southampton only when the guardsmen were already ashore elsewhere. Mackesy replied that he doubted the plan would succeed, and the Admiralty signalled that the admiral and the general were to act together and not attack without agreeing with each other. The attack was abandoned, and on the night of 14–15 April Aurora moved to Harstad.

The landing

Mackesy was in the Vågsfjord off Harstad early on the morning of 14 April. He kept his troops below decks and cautiously made contact with the town’s civil authorities. He learned that there were no Germans in the area and that the population would welcome the British. He then crossed to the mainland and by 2 p.m. had landed two companies of Guards near Sjøvegan. From there it was about 30 kilometres to Fossbakken, where Norwegian patrols were holding up the German advance north from Narvik towards Bardufoss airfield. In his report Mackesy wrote that early contact with British troops had a great effect on the spirit and determination of the Norwegians. Northern Norway was defended by General Carl Gustav Fleischer, commander of the Norwegian 6th Division, whom the German attack on 9 April had caught on an inspection in distant Vadsø in Finnmark; he reached Tromsø by seaplane only the following day. From there he proclaimed general mobilisation and declared the north of the country a theatre of war. His plan was simple: first destroy the Germans at Narvik, then move the division south to face the Germans advancing from Trondheim.

On the morning of 15 April, as the convoy approached Harstad, the escorting destroyers HMS Fearless and HMS Brazen detected the U-boat U-49 and sank her with depth charges. The British picked up 41 survivors and seized documents showing the dispositions of German U-boats in the North Sea. That day the guardsmen came ashore on the quays of Harstad. The British official history notes that never before in their long history had the Guards found themselves north of the Arctic Circle. The Norwegians admired their bearing and discipline, but could see at once that they knew nothing of winter warfare.

Far more men went ashore than three battalions, because the convoy also carried divisional, base and rear-echelon units, including a railway construction company intended for Narvik. The ships, however, had not been tactically loaded – that is, in the order in which the equipment would be needed on land – and every load had to be sorted on the quayside, with some of it sent on to Namsos. Each soldier had three kitbags holding seventeen kinds of special clothing prepared for Finland. There was no artillery, hardly any mortar bombs, and no landing craft or motor vehicles. A light anti-aircraft battery was landed without its guns. Harstad had fewer than 4,000 inhabitants and three quays built for coastal shipping, only one of which had cranes. German aircraft from Trondheim appeared over the port while unloading was still under way, and the first two anti-aircraft guns were not set up ashore until a week later. Eventually some 120 Norwegian fishing boats were gathered to carry men and supplies from the island to the mainland. The fleet base was established at Skånland on the Tjeldsund strait, 25 kilometres south of Harstad.

The dispute over an assault

On that same 15 April Lord Cork and Mackesy met for the first time. As the admiral recorded, they discovered that they had left Britain with “diametrically opposite views” of what was to be done. Cork wanted to strike at once, while the Germans were still shaken by the loss of their ships. Two of Whitworth’s destroyers, which had reconnoitred the harbour at Narvik that day, reported that a landing on the far side of the town would meet no permanent defences and could be covered by naval gunfire.

Mackesy believed that his orders required him first to reach an understanding with the Norwegians and then to draw up a careful plan. His troops were only just coming ashore and had to sort out their equipment, and they had neither guns nor landing craft. The shore of the Narvik peninsula consisted of rocks broken by small beaches, ideal for machine guns, and from the hills on the far side of the narrow fjords, at Ankenes and Øyjord, the Germans could fire into the backs of the landing troops. Everything lay under snow, in places waist-deep, and the guardsmen had neither skis nor snowshoes. Mackesy later wrote that an attack in such conditions would have turned “the snows of Narvik into another version of the Passchendaele mud”. He was supported by many senior officers on the spot, naval ones among them.

On 16 April Lord Cork reported that the attack planned for that day had been called off. London kept up the pressure. On 17 April the Admiralty and the War Office jointly called for an immediate assault, since Warspite could stay only another two or three days and the promised Chasseurs Alpins had been diverted to central Norway. On 18 April the general agreed, though clearly reluctantly, to hold his troops ready to land should a bombardment from the sea break the defence. After a personal reconnaissance from Aurora, however, he reported on 20 April that a bombardment could not be effective and that a landing from open boats would mean “not the neutralisation but the destruction of the 24th Guards Brigade”. A bombardment might induce the Germans to surrender only if it extended to the town itself and its inhabitants, and for that there was no Cabinet approval. On 21 April the government in London gave Lord Cork supreme command of the entire expedition.

On the German side the situation was worse than was believed at Harstad. Dietl, reinforced by some 2,600 sailors from the sunk destroyers, had received none of the three supply ships he was expecting, and his mountain guns had been washed overboard from the destroyers’ decks during the voyage. According to the diary of the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, a few days after the second Battle of Narvik Hitler wanted to order Dietl to withdraw into Sweden and accept internment, and as late as 23 April the garrison was instructed to prepare for evacuation if necessary. The British official history later concluded that an improvised attack of the kind Lord Cork wanted would almost certainly have taken Narvik on the evening of 13 April, had the troops been sent from home in time. With every day that followed, its chances diminished.

The weeks that followed

The British battalions were deployed around the Ofotfjord: the Irish Guards at Bogen on the northern shore of the fjord, the South Wales Borderers at Skånland, half of the Scots Guards in reserve at Harstad and the other half at Sjøvegan. On 24 April, in a snowstorm, Warspite, cruisers and destroyers bombarded military targets in and around Narvik for three hours. The Germans gave no sign of wanting to surrender, and the guardsmen, who had already embarked so as to leap ashore in the event of a capitulation, were stood down. The same day a Norwegian attack began at Gratangen. One Norwegian battalion, surrounded in the village on 25 April, lost about a hundred killed and wounded and some 150 taken prisoner, but after a few days the Germans withdrew from their positions there.

The first significant reinforcements arrived on 28 April: the 27th Demi-Brigade of Chasseurs Alpins under General Antoine Béthouart, who conferred with General Fleischer before landing. At the end of April the British also crossed to the southern shore of the Ofotfjord, near Ankenes. Mackesy’s plan was to close in on Narvik overland from three sides, cut the railway to Sweden and wait for the town to fall into Allied hands “like a ripe plum”.

Place in the war

The landing at Harstad opened the longest phase of Allied operations in Norway. For eight weeks Harstad was the expedition’s main base; it survived some 140 air raids and received successive contingents: at the beginning of May legionnaires of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the Foreign Legion, and on 9 May four battalions of the Polish Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade under Colonel, soon Brigadier General, Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko. Polish warships also fought in the Narvik area, and on 4 May German bombs sank the destroyer ORP Grom in the Rombaksfjord. Troops were carried by the Polish liners Batory and Chrobry, the second of which sank after an air attack in mid-May on her way to Bodø. On 13 May General Claude Auchinleck took over command of the land forces, and Mackesy returned home and never held a command again. Churchill, prime minister from 10 May, regarded his caution as one of the causes of the failure, although historians still argue over whether an assault in mid-April would have been a bold victory or a bloody disaster.

Narvik was finally taken by the French, Norwegians and Poles on 28 May, six weeks after the landing at Harstad. By then the Germans had already broken through the front in France, and London had decided to withdraw its troops from Norway. The evacuation was completed on 8 June, and on 10 June the last Norwegian units capitulated. The delay of April thus had a decisive consequence: victory at Narvik came too late to have any strategic significance. The dispute between admiral and general, the unclear orders from London, an expedition loaded for a different war and the lack of unified command gave ammunition to critics of the conduct of the war in the May debate in the House of Commons, after which Neville Chamberlain’s government fell; for the British staffs they were the first costly lesson in conducting operations jointly by army, navy and air force.