The end of the City of Flint affair

On 4 November 1939 the American freighter City of Flint came to the end of an odyssey lasting almost a month, which had begun when she was seized on 9 October by the German “pocket battleship” Deutschland. The day before, on 3 November, the German prize crew had brought the ship into the port of Haugesund on Norway’s west coast, claiming that one of the sailors was ill. The Norwegians held that international law recognised no such ground. During the night of 3–4 November a party of armed sailors boarded the ship, arrested the Germans and handed command back to her American master, Captain Joseph A. Gainard. Chronologies spread these events over two days: on 3 November the ship anchored at Haugesund, and on 4 November the Norwegians freed her. American diplomatic documents date the recovery of the ship to the night of 3–4 November. Some accounts state that the ship returned to American hands only on 6 November, but the reports of the American legation in Norway and the captain’s own account both speak of the night of 3–4 November.

Along the Norwegian coast

On the evening of 28 October the City of Flint, flying the German flag, left Murmansk, where the Soviet authorities had first interned and then released the eighteen-man prize crew under Lieutenant Hans Pussbach. The Germans wanted to bring the ship home to the Reich. The only reasonably safe route ran along the Norwegian coast, inside Norway’s territorial waters, where British warships could not stop the prize. The Hague Conventions of 1907 allowed the warships and prizes of belligerent states mere passage through neutral waters, so Norway made sure that the ship kept moving without stopping. She was escorted by Norwegian destroyers and later by the minelayer Olav Tryggvason. According to accounts cited in Norwegian and British sources, on 2 November the British cruiser HMS Glasgow approached the ship, but a Norwegian warship forced her to leave territorial waters.

The British, however, were waiting for the prize at sea, just beyond the limit of Norwegian waters, because the final stretch of the voyage to Germany led across the open sea. Captain Gainard later recounted that near Bergen a German ship came alongside the City of Flint and someone on her deck shouted an order to Pussbach to anchor at Haugesund.

Haugesund

On 3 November, ignoring warnings from Norwegian warships, the City of Flint entered the port of Haugesund. The Germans explained that one of the sailors needed a doctor. This time the government of Johan Nygaardsvold, with Halvdan Koht as foreign minister, had no doubts. The Thirteenth Hague Convention allowed a prize to enter a neutral port only because of unseaworthiness, stress of weather, or want of fuel or provisions. If she entered for any other reason, the neutral state was to release her together with her officers and crew and intern the prize crew. It was the same rule that American diplomacy had invoked in vain in Moscow a week earlier.

Late in the evening some thirty armed sailors from the Olav Tryggvason, led by the ship’s second-in-command, Captain Bernt Dingsør, boarded the City of Flint. The Germans offered no resistance. They surrendered the weapons they had on board, including hand grenades, rifles and a machine gun, and were taken ashore. Command of the ship returned to Captain Gainard, who since 9 October had been sailing as a prisoner aboard his own vessel. The eighteen German sailors were interned in the fortress at Kongsvinger in eastern Norway.

Berlin protests

The Reich government reacted sharply. In notes to Oslo the Germans accused Norway of breaching its neutrality in Britain’s favour and demanded the release of the prize crew and the return of the ship. Norway rejected the protest, citing the Hague Convention. Berlin took note that neutral Norway could not be used unhindered as a safe corridor for German ships.

In the United States the end of the affair was received with relief. The conduct of the Norwegians stood in marked contrast to that of the Soviet authorities in Murmansk, who had not allowed the embassy to contact the crew and had hidden behind vague explanations. As late as 3 and 4 November the ambassador in Moscow was still exchanging explanations with the Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vladimir Potemkin, which the State Department under Secretary Cordell Hull considered unconvincing. On 8 November, however, officials of the department concluded that pressing Moscow further would achieve nothing. On 6 November Gainard described the voyage in a radio broadcast from Bergen to America. There the City of Flint unloaded the cargo originally bound for Britain and returned home in ballast, and her captain became a hero of the American press for several months; in March 1940 the weekly Life published his account of the voyage.

On the same day, 4 November, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the new Neutrality Act. The combat zone designated under it also covered the coast of Norway south of Bergen. Ships that had set out before the act came into force could complete their voyages, but no American freighter could now sail to Britain with a cargo as the City of Flint had done.

Significance

The City of Flint affair was a minor episode in the war at sea, but it showed Norway’s position clearly. Its territorial waters, stretching along a long coastline, were a sheltered north–south route for the Germans and a gap in the blockade for the British. Each side accused Oslo of favouring the other. As early as 10 October Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had argued to Adolf Hitler that bases in Norway would give the Kriegsmarine access to the Atlantic. The Haugesund incident strengthened the conviction in Berlin that Norwegian neutrality could not be relied upon. When in February 1940 the Norwegians allowed the German supply ship Altmark, carrying British prisoners, to pass along their coast, and the British destroyer Cossack freed the prisoners in Jøssingfjord, both sides concluded that Norway was unable to guard its neutrality. On 9 April 1940 Germany invaded Norway. That day the Olav Tryggvason fought in the harbour at Horten; captured by the Germans, she then served in the Kriegsmarine as the Brummer.

The City of Flint went on sailing in the Atlantic and sank in January 1943, torpedoed by the German submarine U-575. The United States, which in 1939 had withdrawn its ships from the war zones to avoid incidents of this kind, was two years later escorting convoys itself, and in December 1941 found itself at war with Germany.