The fighting for Trondheim

In mid-April 1940 the fate of central Norway was to be decided at Trondheim. The kingdom’s old capital, the place where Norwegian monarchs were crowned and the country’s third-largest city, with some 56,000 inhabitants, lay deep inside a long fjord, at the meeting point of roads and railways running south to Oslo, north towards Narvik and east to Sweden. The Germans had taken it without a fight on 9 April. For the Norwegians, who had lost their capital, recovering Trondheim was the only chance of keeping a seat of authority in the country and a base for Allied relief. For the British and French it was the nearest and most promising place for a counter-attack.

Brief accounts of the campaign say that on 16 April the British landed in Norway at further points, notably north and south of Trondheim, and that the struggle for the city lasted until 22 April. That is a simplification, but it captures the essence. On the evening of 16 April the first two battalions of the British 146th Infantry Brigade, which were to strike at Trondheim from the north, went ashore in the Namsos area, while at Åndalsnes in the south the first sailors landed on the evening of 17 April and the main body of the 148th Brigade on the night of 18–19 April. Trondheim itself, however, was never attacked. The direct assault from the sea was called off on 19 and 20 April, and both arms of the Allied pincers were halted far from the city: the northern one on 21 and 22 April at Vist and Steinkjer, the southern one on the same days at Lillehammer, more than 200 kilometres from its objective. The fighting in the Gudbrandsdalen valley went on for another week, but no longer for Trondheim – rather to stop the Germans breaking through northwards from Oslo.

The pincer plan and Operation Hammer

London’s first decisions concerned Narvik. Only on 12 April did the British government receive a telegram from its minister in Norway, Sir Cecil Dormer, saying that the Norwegian government urgently requested the recapture of Trondheim, without which it could not maintain its authority in the country. The same was wanted by the new commander-in-chief of the Norwegian army, Major General Otto Ruge, appointed on 10 April, when the king and the government rejected the German demands. Ruge asked for a British division and held two of his own battalions ready to attack the city from the south. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, assured him that the Allies were coming “as quickly as possible and in great strength”. On 16 April, through the British military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Edward King-Salter, Ruge again demanded a decision on Trondheim, and his staff advised forcing a way past the Agdenes forts at the mouth of the fjord.

After the Royal Navy’s victory at Narvik on 13 April a mood of optimism took hold in London. The plan taking shape in the Military Co-ordination Committee, chaired by Winston Churchill since 4 April, had three arms. From the north, out of Namsos, would come Major General Adrian Carton de Wiart’s Mauriceforce; from the south, out of Åndalsnes, Sickleforce; and in the centre the fleet was to force its way into the fjord and land troops right at the city. This direct assault was first named Boots, then Hammer. It was to involve the 15th and 147th Infantry Brigades, two Canadian battalions, carriers with about a hundred aircraft and the battleship HMS Warspite. On 17 April the committee set the date for 22 April.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Charles Forbes, had warned from the outset that German bombers would have time to attack the warships and transports in the narrow waters of the fjord. Bad luck also dogged the expedition’s commanders. Major General Frederick Hotblack, who received his instructions on 17 April, suffered a stroke that same evening, and his successor, General Henry Berney-Ficklin, was injured in an air crash on the morning of 19 April. A warning came from the fate of the cruiser HMS Suffolk, which on 17 April bombarded Sola airfield near Stavanger and then for seven hours fought off attacks from the air, barely limping back to Scapa Flow. On 19 April the Chiefs of Staff, backed by their deputies, recommended abandoning Hammer. Churchill supported them and announced that the Allies were moving “from a more dangerous to a less dangerous operation”: instead of storming the fjord, they would reinforce both arms of the pincers. The Admiralty formally cancelled the operation on 20 April at 11.40 a.m. The British official historian later judged that the forts would not have been a great obstacle, but that the risk of air attack on a fleet crowded into the fjord was real.

The Germans in Trondheim

The Trondheim garrison initially numbered only about 1,700 men, mostly mountain troops of the 138th Regiment landed from destroyers and the cruiser Admiral Hipper. The Germans, however, had seized Værnes airfield and were flying in further battalions. On 15 April they set off along the railway towards the Swedish border and by the evening of the following day had secured it. Only the small fort at Hegra, defended by some 250 volunteers under Major Hans Reidar Holtermann, could not be taken and fought on until 5 May. By 20 April the garrison had grown to about four thousand men. That day Generalmajor Kurt Woytasch of the 181st Infantry Division took command of Group Trondheim, and on 18 and 21 April Adolf Hitler ordered, as the most important task, the closing of the isthmus at Steinkjer, through which the road from Namsos ran.

Dombås: paratroops at the crossroads

The Germans mistakenly believed that the British were already landing at Åndalsnes on 14 April. The Wehrmacht high command thereupon ordered a company of paratroops to be dropped on the railway junction at Dombås in the upper Gudbrandsdalen, where the line to Åndalsnes branches off the main Oslo–Trondheim line. On the evening of 14 April fifteen Junkers Ju 52 aircraft took off from Oslo in a snowstorm. Over the target they ran into fire from a Norwegian battalion that had happened to arrive at Dombås the day before. Eight machines were shot down or made forced landings, one of them as far away as Sweden, and the paratroops were scattered over several dozen kilometres. The badly wounded Oberleutnant Herbert Schmidt gathered some sixty men and blocked the road and the railway. The drop very nearly caught King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav, who were then at nearby Dovre and had to escape under the protection of local riflemen.

For five days the Germans cut the most important road in central Norway. The Norwegians brought up reinforcements and mortars and, on the night of 18–19 April, a Royal Marine howitzer from Åndalsnes as well. Before noon on 19 April, after a few rounds from it, the surrounded Germans at the Lindse farm fired three flares as a signal of surrender. According to Norwegian figures, 21 Germans and about 20 Norwegians were killed, and some 150 paratroops were taken prisoner. The German company ceased to exist, but it cost the Allies five precious days during which the road from Åndalsnes into the interior was closed.

The landings: Namsos and Åndalsnes

The landing at Namsos, described under 14 April, developed quickly. The first battalions of the 146th Brigade went ashore on 16 April and the third on the night of 17–18 April, and by the evening of 19 April their forward detachments had passed through Steinkjer and reached Verdal on the main Trondheimsfjord, less than a hundred kilometres from the city itself. On the night of 19–20 April Brigadier General Antoine Béthouart’s French demi-brigade of Chasseurs Alpins landed. But on 20 April German bombers burned down the wooden town of Namsos, destroying the quays, the railway and the stores, and Carton de Wiart reported that he saw no chance of any serious operations as long as the enemy commanded the air.

In the south everything took longer. A detachment of 680 sailors and Royal Marines under Lieutenant Colonel H. W. Simpson, first intended for Ålesund, was redirected at the Norwegians’ request to Åndalsnes, where it went ashore on the evening of 17 April to prepare a base. Brigadier Harold de Riemer Morgan’s 148th Infantry Brigade, made up of two Territorial battalions (the 1/5th Leicestershire and the 1/8th Sherwood Foresters), received four successive versions of its orders before sailing. During transhipment in a blacked-out port the brigade headquarters’ wireless set and all the Foresters’ mortar ammunition were left behind, and half of the Leicestershire battalion could not be fitted aboard the ships. About a thousand men, among whom only the brigadier and two officers had combat experience, landed on the night of 18–19 April at Åndalsnes and at Molde. Their orders were to secure Dombås and then to operate northwards against the Germans in the Trondheim area. On the way they received a further instruction not to leave the Norwegians fighting in the south without help.

Ruge and the British

The Norwegian army was at that time in a grave position. Many depots, and even mobilisation lists, had fallen into German hands, and in the end about 50,000 men reported for service, fewer than half the number envisaged in the plans. On 13 and 14 April some three thousand soldiers of the 1st Division from Østfold crossed into Sweden, where they were interned; at Kongsberg an infantry regiment capitulated; and on 15 April the 3rd Division surrendered without a fight in the Setesdal valley. Ruge, with his headquarters from 12 April at Øyer north of Lillehammer, was fighting a delaying action: the broken, improvised units of General Jacob Hvinden Haug’s 2nd Division were falling back from the Oslo area along Lake Mjøsa and the neighbouring valleys, blowing bridges to buy time until the Allies arrived. On 16 April the Germans used tanks for the first time in Norway, breaking through the defences at Haugsbygd, and General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst’s Group XXI ordered all its columns to converge on Lillehammer, at the mouth of the Gudbrandsdalen. In the face of this pressure Ruge brought the greater part of the 4th Brigade from near Voss in western Norway and threw it into the Valdres valley (sources date this order to 16 or 18 April). On 18 April Hamar and Elverum fell.

On the afternoon of 19 April King-Salter came to Morgan at Dombås and announced that without immediate help Norwegian resistance would collapse. He added that the War Office had placed the brigade at Ruge’s disposal. This was not true: the telegram referred only to lorries for the British. Morgan drove to Øyer. Ruge received the news of the plan to retake Trondheim, of which he had so far been told nothing, coolly, and declared that it was he, as commander-in-chief of the country under attack, who must decide on strategy. Trondheim could wait. What mattered most was the front at Lillehammer, because as long as it held, the Allies might one day break out onto the plains of eastern Norway. Morgan reluctantly agreed. The next morning he found a telegram from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, who, now that Hammer had been cancelled, agreed that the brigade could help the Norwegians but stated that it remained under London’s orders. At a conference on 20 April Ruge produced a written statement that if the British did not submit to his will, he would resign. King-Salter held back delivery of Ironside’s telegram, and Morgan brought about a compromise. Instead of advancing on Trondheim, his soldiers went south by rail, more than 200 kilometres from the objective that was supposed to justify the whole expedition.

Lillehammer and Tretten

The British were split up among Norwegian groups on both sides of Lake Mjøsa, along which a German group under Generalleutnant Richard Pellengahr of the 196th Infantry Division, some four thousand men with artillery, was advancing. On the afternoon of 21 April two companies of the Leicesters were to relieve Norwegian dragoons at Åsmarka, on a snow-covered slope south-east of Lillehammer. They came under mortar and gun fire at once, could not move off the beaten road, and after an hour the Norwegian commander judged the position lost. The same day the Germans also attacked at Steinkjer. After almost eight months of war, leaving aside patrol clashes on the French front, British infantry fought the Germans in the field for the first time.

Hvinden Haug decided to withdraw beyond Lillehammer. There were not enough lorries for the British, so two companies had to march 22 kilometres through the snow at midnight. During the night of 21–22 April a German motorised machine-gun battalion burst into Lillehammer, and in the morning the Germans cut off some of the marching men together with the stores at the station. Some 650 British troops remained in position at Balbergkamp near Fåberg, without communications and without the Norwegian skiers Morgan had asked for. The Germans outflanked them over the high ground, and one of their ski patrols even attacked brigade headquarters. The British fell back in disorder, and the Foresters lost most of two companies. Hvinden Haug called this setback the first serious defeat of the war. The day before, the brigade’s second echelon had reached Åndalsnes, but its vehicles, half its anti-aircraft guns and its reserves of ammunition went down off the coast with the torpedoed freighter Cedarbank.

On 23 April Morgan’s exhausted men, who had gone a day and a half without sleep or food, took up position with the Norwegians in the gorge at Tretten, which Ruge had ordered to be held for at least a day so that Colonel Dahl’s Norwegian group from Gjøvik could join up. In the afternoon three German tanks drove along the road into the main position. British anti-tank rifles could not penetrate their armour. The forward companies were cut off, and King-Salter, wounded, was taken prisoner. By evening all that was left of the 148th Brigade was nine officers and 300 men, who escaped by bus 70 kilometres up the valley.

Vist and Steinkjer

In the north the sea was decisive. The British and Colonel Ole Getz’s Norwegian 5th Brigade had counted on the ice in the inner fjord holding up German ships for some time yet, but the ice was melting. At dawn on 21 April a German destroyer and smaller vessels passed through the strait into the inner part of the fjord. A battalion of mountain troops came ashore at the sawmill at Kirknesvåg on the Inderøy peninsula, a dozen or so kilometres south-west of Steinkjer, and further units, after three hours of fighting in a blizzard, took Verdalsøra from north and south. At the village of Vist, a few kilometres from Steinkjer, the Lincolnshire battalion tried to seal the neck of the peninsula, but the Germans outflanked its positions along farm tracks, brought up mortars in motorcycle sidecars and hauled mountain guns up onto the hills. To the south, aircraft bombed Steinkjer, where the headquarters were located, and by evening the town was in flames. The Germans probably did not have numerical superiority, but they had support from the sea and the air and soldiers accustomed to mountains and snow.

On 22 April the British had to fall back. The battalions escaped encirclement by night marches through deep snow; the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry battalion covered 93 kilometres in 42 hours. That evening the Germans shelled the burning town of Steinkjer from the fjord and began landing troops there. According to Norwegian findings, the bombs reduced most of the town to ruins and more than two thousand inhabitants lost their homes. By 24 April the Germans held the whole isthmus. Carton de Wiart reported that his brigade had been “very roughly handled”. The counter-attack planned by the French and Norwegians never got under way.

Kvam: the second brigade

On the night of 23–24 April the regular 15th Infantry Brigade landed at Åndalsnes and Molde, and on 25 April the new commander of the whole force, Major General Bernard Paget, arrived. On 24 April eighteen Gloster Gladiator fighters of the British No. 263 Squadron landed on the frozen lake of Lesjaskogsvatnet. The next day German bombers destroyed them one after another on the ice as they waited for fuel and ammunition, and by the evening of 26 April the squadron had only one serviceable aircraft left.

Meanwhile Ruge was sending alarming telegrams: his soldiers were utterly exhausted, the front might fall apart, and “if help does not come immediately, there will be a catastrophe”. Before noon on 25 April Pellengahr’s column, reinforced to some 8,400 men, with tanks and heavy infantry guns, struck the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry battalion at Kvam, where the valley turns at a right angle. The British, dug in on an island in the river and on the hillside, with anti-tank guns that disabled several tanks, held out for two days. The forward company alone lost nearly 90 men on the first day. On 26 April the Germans outflanked the position over the high ground, attacked from the air and set the woods on fire, and in the evening the British withdrew to the next line at Kjørem. The battle of Kvam is regarded as one of the hardest fights in southern Norway. At a meeting on the morning of 26 April Ruge agreed to hand over to Paget command of the whole front in the Gudbrandsdalen, together with the remnants of the Norwegian units.

Significance

The fighting for Trondheim was lost before a single shot had been fired near the city itself. Many causes contributed: the chaos of decision-making in London, where the objective and the order of the expeditions were changed several times in a week; Territorial brigades without artillery, transport or winter equipment, landed in tiny ports without cranes or warehouses; the lack of a common plan with the Norwegian high command; and above all German command of the air. The Luftwaffe burned the bases at Namsos and Åndalsnes and destroyed bridges and trains, while the British had neither airfields nor anti-aircraft guns. For the first time in this war it became clear that ground forces and a fleet without air cover could not hold out against an enemy who commanded the skies.

The dispute over Trondheim also brought the first clash in this war between the strategies of two allies. Ruge wanted to defend the heart of the country and his mobilising army; the British were thinking of a port and of iron ore. For both sides it ended in defeat. On 26 and 27 April the British government decided to withdraw its troops from central Norway. Paget, whose 15th Brigade had still beaten off the Germans at Otta on 28 April, embarked his men at Åndalsnes at the turn of April and May, and Carton de Wiart at Namsos a few days later. On 30 April the German columns advancing from Oslo and from Trondheim met at Berkåk, and the encircled groups of the Norwegian 2nd Division capitulated on 29 April in the Gausdal valley and on 3 May in the mountains above Romsdalen. The king, the government and Ruge moved north to Tromsø, where the fighting went on until June.

The defeat had its most far-reaching consequences in London. The failure at Trondheim became the main charge in the great debate in the House of Commons on 7 and 8 May 1940. The anger of MPs fell on Chamberlain, although many of the decisions had been taken by Churchill, and on 10 May, the day of the German offensive in the west, it was Churchill who became prime minister. At Trondheim the Allies paid for a lesson they were to remember for the rest of the war: never land troops where they cannot be given air cover.