The British occupy Iceland

During the night of 9–10 May 1940 the inhabitants of Reykjavík were woken by the drone of an aircraft. Circling over the city was a Supermarine Walrus seaplane, catapulted from the British heavy cruiser HMS Berwick. Iceland had no military aircraft at the time and its airliners did not fly at night, so nobody doubted that something was afoot. Towards dawn warships approached the harbour, and at about five o’clock several hundred Royal Marines went ashore on the quay from the destroyer HMS Fearless. Operation Fork was carried out without a single shot. Neutral Iceland, which had no army, came under British occupation on the very day that the Wehrmacht struck at France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and that Neville Chamberlain stepped down as Prime Minister in London.

A kingdom without an army

Since 1918 Iceland had been a sovereign kingdom, linked to Denmark by a personal union: its king was Christian X, and Copenhagen conducted its foreign affairs on its behalf. The union agreement could be revised from 1941, and all the Icelandic parties wanted to terminate it at the first opportunity. The country of some 120,000 inhabitants had declared perpetual neutrality and maintained no armed forces. In May 1938, together with the Scandinavian states, it had adopted identical neutrality rules in case of war. Only the police were armed; in the capital they numbered about sixty men.

The island’s position, however, made it one of the key points of the North Atlantic. It lies on the routes from North America to Europe, between Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and closes from the west the passages through which German warships could break out of the North Sea into the ocean. German theorists of naval warfare, above all Vice Admiral Wolfgang Wegener, had argued since the 1920s that the German fleet would gain free access to the ocean only after taking control of Norway, Shetland, the Faroes and Iceland. In the 1930s Germany showed a great deal of interest in Iceland, and the German consul general in Reykjavík, Werner Gerlach, aroused particular suspicion in London. From the autumn of 1939 the British controlled Icelandic exports so that nothing reached the Reich, while their patrols at sea were fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.

After the fall of Denmark

On the morning of 9 April 1940 Germany occupied Denmark. That same day the Anglo-French Supreme War Council in London decided that the Faroe Islands must be occupied and Iceland assured of British protection. Chamberlain’s Cabinet proposed to the government of Hermann Jónasson that Iceland should enter the war “as a belligerent and an ally”, or at any rate make its ports and landing grounds available to the British. Reykjavík refused, citing its neutrality. On 10 April the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, declared that the occupied King could not exercise his constitutional duties and transferred them to the Icelandic government. The government also took over the conduct of foreign affairs. In practice Iceland had become fully independent.

Britain acted swiftly elsewhere: on 12 April its warships appeared off Tórshavn, and the next day Royal Marines occupied the Faroe Islands. Iceland was left alone for the time being. But when the Norwegian campaign began to go badly for the Allies and their troops were withdrawing from central Norway, the Admiralty concluded that it could no longer do without bases in Iceland. Above all it feared that the Germans, who had successfully moved troops by air in Norway, would do the same in Iceland. On 6 May the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, put the matter to the War Cabinet. He argued that further talks with the Icelanders might alert the Germans, and proposed landing troops without warning, presenting the government in Reykjavík with a fait accompli. The Cabinet agreed.

Colonel Sturges’s expedition

The expedition was prepared in enormous haste. Command went to Colonel Robert Sturges, a 49-year-old Royal Marines officer and a veteran of Gallipoli and Jutland. His force consisted of the 2nd Royal Marine Battalion, formed only in April and made up largely of recruits. Some of the men received their rifles just before departure and had never fired them. The unit was also given two mountain howitzers, four anti-aircraft guns and two coastal guns, whose crews likewise had had no chance to practise. Excluding an intelligence staff and a diplomatic mission, the expedition numbered 746 men. Maps were few and poor – one was reportedly drawn from memory – and nobody had a good command of Icelandic.

At four in the morning on 8 May the heavy cruisers Berwick and Glasgow, with the marines on board, sailed from Greenock on the Firth of Clyde, escorted by the destroyers Fearless and Fortune. The cruisers were not designed to carry troops; conditions were cramped, and many of the soldiers were seasick throughout the voyage. Weapons were test-fired on the way. One of the recruits took his own life.

The morning of 10 May

The flight of the Walrus, which was supposed to look out for German submarines and, according to its orders, not to fly over the city, destroyed the element of surprise. It alerted Prime Minister Jónasson and the police, but also Consul Gerlach. He drove to the harbour, identified the ships through binoculars and went home to burn his documents. At around 3.40 a.m. an Icelandic policeman reported warships approaching. The deputy chief of police, Einar Arnalds, concluded that they were British and, on the instructions of the Foreign Ministry, intended to sail out to their commander with a statement that he was violating the country’s neutrality. He was too late. A sizeable crowd had already gathered on the quay, and the British consul, who had been forewarned of the operation, asked the Icelandic police to move the onlookers back and let the soldiers disembark from the destroyer. The police did so. The Prime Minister instructed Arnalds not to hinder the British and merely to ensure that there were no clashes with the inhabitants.

The marines occupied the post office, the telephone and telegraph exchange, the radio station and the meteorological service, to prevent the news from reaching Berlin. They were in a particular hurry to reach the German consulate. Gerlach opened the door to them and protested, reminding them that Iceland was a neutral country. He was told in reply that Denmark had been neutral too. Upstairs the consulate’s papers were burning in a bathtub; the British put out the fire and saved a good part of them. Gerlach and several dozen other Germans were detained and then shipped to internment camps in Britain. The 62-man crew of the German freighter Bahia Blanca also surrendered without resistance; the ship had earlier been wrecked on an iceberg in the Denmark Strait and its crew rescued by an Icelandic trawler. British intelligence suspected that they were reserve U-boat crews.

Within an hour the marines had deployed around the capital, and by evening, using requisitioned cars, they had reached the fjord of Hvalfjörður, where a fleet base was to be built, and the landing grounds at Kaldaðarnes and Sandskeið. A platoon with most of the battalion’s machine guns waited at Kaldaðarnes for German paratroopers, of whom there were reportedly to be as many as two thousand. None appeared. In the following days a detachment was also sent to Akureyri in the north, and anti-aircraft guns were set up in Reykjavík.

Protest and fait accompli

On the evening of 10 May the Icelandic government protested. It wrote that the country’s neutrality had been “flagrantly violated” and its independence infringed, and announced that it would claim compensation for all damage. Jónasson explained to his compatriots on the radio what had happened and called on them to remain calm and to behave correctly towards the foreign soldiers. The new British minister, Charles Howard Smith, who had arrived with the expedition, promised on behalf of his government compensation, favourable trade agreements, non-interference in Iceland’s internal affairs and the withdrawal of all troops after the war. The Icelandic authorities accepted the situation. Formally the country remained neutral and did not enter the war; in practice it co-operated with the occupier.

An army brigade instead of marines

A small, poorly armed and untrained unit could not defend the island against a real landing. Over the following two weeks the marines also noticed that the inhabitants were growing cooler, fearing that the British presence would bring German bombs down on Iceland. On 17 May the troopships Franconia and Lancastria reached Reykjavík with the 147th Infantry Brigade of the 49th (West Riding) Division – between 3,700 and 4,000 men, according to various tallies. War chronologies often record under 19 May that the British “completed the invasion”. This roughly matches the course of events: the withdrawal of the marines began on 19 May, and according to most accounts by 21 May all of them, apart from the coastal gun crews, had left the island. The occupation of the island by the army was thus complete, though this did not mean the end of its garrisoning.

In the following weeks the 146th Brigade and the headquarters of the 49th Division under Major General Henry Curtis arrived (sources differ on the dates of their arrival). The British garrison, named Alabaster Force, adopted as its emblem a polar bear on an ice floe. On 18 May London asked Canada to help garrison the island, and on 16 June the first units of the Canadian “Z” Force landed in Reykjavík. The Lancastria, which had brought soldiers to Iceland, was sunk a month later off Saint-Nazaire during the evacuation of troops from France.

Significance

The occupation of Iceland closed the chain that Britain had begun to build in April in the Faroe Islands. Germany never prepared a landing on the island: after the war General Walter Warlimont said that Hitler had wanted to take it, but in the study “Ikarus”, drawn up after the British landing, German staff officers concluded that although a landing might succeed, supplying the island would be impossible. The British forestalled a threat that proved smaller than they had believed, but they gained what they wanted: bases in the middle of the North Atlantic.

The British and Canadian garrison grew to some 25,000 men. Airfields were built at Reykjavík and Kaldaðarnes, and Hvalfjörður became a base for convoy escorts. In July 1941, with the consent of the Icelandic government, the defence of the island was taken over from the British by the Americans, who were still formally neutral; their forces later grew to several tens of thousands of men. In May 1941, in the nearby Denmark Strait, the Bismarck sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood, and the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union sailed from Hvalfjörður, among them PQ 17. Aircraft based in Iceland helped to close the “air gap” over the middle of the ocean, where U-boats had for years hunted with impunity.

For the Icelanders the occupation meant the end of the unemployment of the Depression years and the building of roads, harbours and airfields, but also a sense of lost sovereignty and bitter disputes over relationships between local women and the soldiers. On 17 June 1944, while the war was still on, Iceland dissolved the union with Denmark and proclaimed itself a republic. The last American soldiers left the island in 1947, but after Iceland joined NATO they returned in 1951 and remained at the base at Keflavík until 2006.