The British occupy the Faroe Islands

On 12 April 1940 two British destroyers, Havant and Hesperus, dropped anchor off Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. Their commanding officers went ashore and demanded that the Danish governor of the archipelago prepare the islands to receive British marines. The next day, 13 April, the heavy cruiser Suffolk entered the harbour and landed some two hundred men of the Royal Marines. The operation, code-named Valentine, passed off without a shot being fired. It is usually dated to 12 April, and that date is right for the start of the occupation: on that day the British appeared at Tórshavn and set out their terms. The landing itself, however, took place a day later, which is why some studies give 13 April. The Faroe Islands, which had belonged to Denmark for centuries, remained under British occupation until the end of the war.

An archipelago cut off from Copenhagen

In 1940 the Faroe Islands were a Danish county (amt) with a population of just under 30,000, who lived mainly from fishing. They were governed by a prefect (amtmand) appointed in Copenhagen, Carl Aage Hilbert, alongside whom sat a local parliament, the Løgting, which, however, had a largely advisory voice. For years the islands had been divided over their place in the kingdom: the People’s Party and other supporters of self-government demanded wider rights and recognition of their own flag, the Merkið, which the Danish authorities would not allow on ships.

On the morning of 9 April 1940 Germany occupied Denmark. The telegraph link between the Faroes and Copenhagen was suddenly cut, and news of the capitulation came by radio. Some three thousand Faroese who happened to be in Denmark at the time would not return home until after the war. On 10 April Hilbert spoke on the radio in Tórshavn: Denmark’s capitulation, he said, was not the capitulation of the Faroe Islands, and he and the Løgting continued to exercise authority. He was followed by the speaker of the Løgting, Kristian Djurhuus. In those same days the People’s Party tried to push a declaration of the islands’ independence through parliament, but the other parties, which had a majority, rejected the idea (sources date this attempt variously to 10 or 12 April).

Meanwhile an episode occurred that was to set the tone for the whole period of the occupation. The Royal Navy had orders to stop ships from occupied Denmark. When, off the Orkneys, a British warship stopped the fishing vessel Eysturoy from Klaksvík, bound for Aberdeen with a cargo of fish, it ordered her to lower the Danish ensign and asked her skipper, Hans Mikkelsen, whether he had another. Mikkelsen hoisted the Merkið and was allowed to sail on. In Aberdeen the crews of the Faroese boats lying there did the same, and the word DANMARK on their hulls was painted out and replaced with FØROYAR – FAROES.

The decision in London

The British had long known that the fate of Norway and Denmark was not a matter of indifference for the Atlantic. Since the 1920s German naval theorists, above all Vice Admiral Wolfgang Wegener, had argued that the German fleet would be able to reach the open ocean only once it had a footing on the coast of Norway and, in the longer term, in the Shetlands, the Faroes and Iceland. Were the Germans to establish themselves in the Faroe Islands, their U-boats and armed merchant cruisers could threaten the British blockade in the north and the routes leading to the Western Approaches to the British Isles, where the Battle of the Atlantic had been under way since the autumn.

As early as the afternoon of 9 April, when the Supreme War Council met in London with the prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Paul Reynaud present, it was agreed that the Faroe Islands should be occupied. The council met on the day the Germans also struck at Norway, and the Allies’ attention was entirely fixed on the Norwegian coast, which had earlier been the target of their own plans for intervention in Scandinavia. The next day the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, wrote to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, that it was necessary “to make use of our assets in the Faroes”.

On 11 April the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Tom Phillips, gave command of the expedition to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Sandall of the Royal Marines. According to British returns, the so-called Force Sandall numbered 13 officers and 180 men, armed among other things with two 3.7-inch mountain howitzers. The detachment embarked at Scapa Flow on the heavy cruiser Suffolk, a ship of the County class. With it sailed the new British consul in Tórshavn, Frederick Mason, who was to replace Valdemar Lützen, honorary consul on the islands for thirty years.

Churchill’s words

On the same day, 11 April, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons. The House was shaken and angry, because the Germans had seized Norway under the nose of the British fleet, and the criticism fell above all on the Admiralty. Churchill defended the navy, argued that Hitler had made a great strategic blunder by extending the war to the north, and announced: “We are at this moment occupying the Faroe Islands, which belong to Denmark and which are a strategic point of high importance, and whose people showed every disposition to receive us with warm regard. We shall shield the Faroe Islands from all the severities of war and establish ourselves there conveniently by sea and air until the moment comes when they will be handed back to the Crown and people of Denmark, liberated from the foul thraldom in which they have been plunged by the German aggression.” Of Iceland he spoke more cautiously: the matter required further thought, but no German would set foot there with impunity. His announcement was broadcast by the BBC, and that was how the Faroese themselves learned of it. That day a British reconnaissance aircraft flew over Tórshavn.

12 and 13 April in Tórshavn

On 12 April Havant and Hesperus first searched the waters around the islands for submarines and then, around noon, stood off Tórshavn. Their commanding officers met Hilbert in the presence of Djurhuus. The British demanded that preparations be made for marines to land in the capital and in Skálafjørður on the island of Eysturoy, a fjord formerly known as Kongshavn, where they intended to establish an anchorage. Hilbert concluded that he had no choice. An extraordinary session of the Løgting was called that same day.

On 13 April Suffolk, escorted by destroyers, entered the harbour. Sandall and Mason met Hilbert. The prefect made what Sandall took to be a formal protest, while noting that, with Denmark under occupation, he could not officially represent its government. He accepted the British terms on one condition: the occupiers would not interfere in the islands’ internal affairs. The Løgting also lodged a protest. Both sides treated it as a formality. According to accounts from those days, the islanders were relieved that it was the British, not the Germans, who had come. A blackout was introduced in Tórshavn and neighbouring Argir, together with censorship of the post, telegraph and radio and a ban on driving at night without a pass. In the afternoon the marines came ashore. On 14 April part of the detachment moved to Skálafjørður, and headquarters was set up in the old Skansin fort above the harbour in Tórshavn, where British naval guns still stand today.

Suffolk did not stay long in the islands. A few days later she bombarded the German-held Sola airfield near Stavanger and on the way back was badly damaged by German bombers.

A flag in place of the Dannebrog

The flag turned out to be the only matter in which the British intervened in the islands’ internal life. When fishing boats began returning from Aberdeen under the Merkið on 21 April, Hilbert tried to replace it with a green signal flag, which provoked stormy demonstrations in Tórshavn. The Admiralty would not accept the Danish ensign on vessels that were now sailing to British ports, and after talks with the islands’ authorities and the Danish legation in London it recognised the Merkið on 25 April 1940 as the ensign of Faroese ships. The BBC broadcast the news the same day. Ever since, 25 April has been Flag Day in the Faroe Islands. The British, it seems, did not realise that in doing so they had settled an old political dispute between the Faroese and Copenhagen.

Significance

The occupation of the Faroe Islands was the first link in the chain with which Britain, in response to the German attack on Scandinavia, closed off the North Atlantic. On 10 April the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, assumed the powers of the king and the conduct of foreign affairs, and on 10 May 1940 British troops landed in Iceland without a fight. In April 1941 the Danish minister in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, placed Greenland under the protection of the United States. The Greenland–Iceland–Faroes–Shetland line became a barrier to German ships heading out into the ocean and a base for convoy escorts.

The occupation passed off peacefully. At the end of May 1940 the marines were relieved by the Scottish Lovat Scouts, and from 1942 by the Cameronians. In 1942–1944, according to various sources, up to 8,000 British soldiers were stationed on the islands. Army engineers built an airfield on the island of Vágar, today’s Vágar Airport. German aircraft attacked the islands several times, but no invasion ever came. The highest price was paid by the fishermen, who supplied a large share of the fish eaten in Britain: according to various tallies, between about 130 and more than 200 Faroese seamen were killed by mines, torpedoes and bombs.

Cut off from Denmark, the archipelago governed itself for five years: the Løgting received full legislative power, and the islands had their own banknotes and their own exchange rate for the krone against the pound. Churchill, however, refused to agree to any change in their status for as long as Denmark remained under occupation. After the liberation of Denmark in May 1945 the Løgting sent King Christian X a telegram assuring him of its loyalty, the occupation came to an end, and the last British troops sailed away in September. A return to the pre-war role of an ordinary county, however, proved impossible: after the independence referendum of 1946, the Faroe Islands were granted autonomy within the Kingdom of Denmark in 1948.