Germany invades Norway

During the night of 8–9 April 1940 German warships entered the Norwegian fjords, and at dawn Wehrmacht soldiers went ashore at Oslo, Kristiansand, Arendal, Egersund, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. Paratroops and air-landed infantry seized the airfields near Oslo and Stavanger. That same morning other German forces marched into Denmark. Operation Weserübung, which Adolf Hitler had approved in his directive of 1 March, was meant to confront neutral Norway with a fait accompli within a few hours and force its government to accept the Reich’s “protection”. Within twenty-four hours the Germans had indeed taken all the country’s main ports and its capital. Their most important objective, however, escaped them: the king, the government, the parliament and the central bank’s gold reserve got out of Oslo in time, and the Norwegians rejected the German demands.

War chronologies record under 9 April that the Germans landed in several Norwegian ports and occupied Oslo, and that the Norwegian campaign was to last two months. Both statements are accurate: the fighting ended with the capitulation of the Norwegian army on 10 June. Some of them add that on this day the British began their campaign in Norway. That needs qualifying. On 9 April the Royal Navy fought at sea, and the governments in London and Paris decided to send troops to help the Norwegians, but the first British units set foot on Norwegian soil only several days later.

The race for Norway

Since the winter both camps had been preparing for operations in Scandinavia. The British and French were concerned with Swedish iron ore, which in winter was shipped to the Reich by rail to Narvik and from there by sea along the Norwegian coast, through the territorial waters of a neutral state. In February the Allies adopted a plan for an expedition through Narvik to Finland, but the Moscow Peace Treaty deprived them of their pretext. At that point an idea of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was revived: to mine Norwegian coastal waters and force the ore ships out into the open sea. This operation, Operation Wilfred, was to be accompanied by Plan R 4. If the Germans responded with force, British battalions were to occupy Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger. The troops were embarked on cruisers at Rosyth and on transports in the Firth of Clyde.

On the German side, the Altmark incident in February had convinced Hitler that Norway would not defend its neutrality against the British. On 2 April he fixed the day of the attack as 9 April and the hour of the landings as 5.15 a.m. German time, that is 4.15 a.m. Norwegian time. From 3 April disguised supply ships and tankers were sailing towards Norway. On 4 April Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared in a speech to the Conservatives that Hitler had “missed the bus”. The phrase was soon turned against him.

Early on 7 April warships carrying troops for Narvik and Trondheim left German ports. They were covered by the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau under Vice Admiral Günther Lütjens. British aircraft spotted them that same day, but the Admiralty concluded that the German fleet was trying to break out into the Atlantic. In the evening Admiral Charles Forbes’s Home Fleet left Scapa Flow and headed north, far from the places where the Germans were to land.

Before dawn on 8 April British destroyers laid mines at the entrance to the Vestfjord, the channel leading to Narvik. A second field, announced off Cape Bud, existed only on paper. Early in the morning the British and French governments informed Oslo and announced it to the world, and the Norwegian government protested. That day the question of the mines preoccupied Oslo more than the reports of German warships. Meanwhile the first clash took place at sea. The destroyer HMS Glowworm, which had left the escort of the battlecruiser Renown to search for a sailor washed overboard, ran into German destroyers in the fog and then into the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. Badly hit, she rammed the cruiser and sank. 109 of her crew were killed; the Germans picked up some 40 survivors. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope, drowned as he was being hauled aboard. After the war he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, partly on the strength of the account given by the captain of the Hipper. The Admiralty sent the Renown to the scene of the action and recalled to her the destroyers from the Vestfjord. The way to Narvik lay open. That same day Churchill ordered the troops of Plan R 4 to be disembarked from the cruisers at Rosyth so that the ships could join the fleet.

Around midday on 8 April the Polish submarine ORP Orzeł, which had escaped to Britain half a year earlier, sank the German transport Rio de Janeiro off Lillesand. Lieutenant Commander Jan Grudziński first called on the crew to abandon ship, then torpedoed her twice. Norwegian fishermen picked up over a hundred survivors in uniform, some of whom stated that they were on their way “to defend Bergen against the British”. According to most accounts some two hundred men died aboard the ship. The news reached Oslo, but neither the government nor the high command drew any conclusions from it. Late in the evening, at the mouth of the Oslofjord, the Norwegian patrol boat Pol III detected a German naval force, raised the alarm, rammed the torpedo boat Albatros and was destroyed. Her commander, Captain Leif Welding-Olsen, became the first Norwegian serviceman to die in the war.

Six naval groups

The Weserübung plan provided for simultaneous strikes against six objectives, with the troops carried aboard warships, since only these were fast enough. According to German figures some 8,850 soldiers arrived by sea in the first wave:

• Group 1, ten destroyers under Commodore Friedrich Bonte, carried 2,000 mountain troops of the 139th Regiment of General Eduard Dietl’s 3rd Mountain Division to Narvik;
• Group 2, the Admiral Hipper and four destroyers, carried 1,700 mountain troops of the 138th Regiment to Trondheim;
• Group 3, the light cruisers Köln and Königsberg, the training ship Bremse and smaller vessels, sailed for Bergen with 1,900 soldiers of the 69th Infantry Division;
• Group 4, the light cruiser Karlsruhe with torpedo boats and motor torpedo boats, carried 1,100 soldiers to Kristiansand and Arendal;
• Group 5, the heavy cruisers Blücher and Lützow, the light cruiser Emden, torpedo boats and minesweepers under Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz, sailed for Oslo with 2,000 soldiers of the 163rd Infantry Division;
• Group 6, four minesweepers, carried 150 cyclist troops to Egersund, where the telegraph cable to Britain came ashore.

The air arm, X Air Corps with some thousand aircraft, more than half of them transports, was to capture the airfields at Fornebu near Oslo and Sola near Stavanger. In all, six divisions under General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst were assigned to the occupation of the country. The soldiers were to open fire only if they met resistance.

The Oslofjord and the capture of the capital

In the darkness Kummetz’s force passed the outer batteries of the Oslofjord without serious resistance. Some of the ships turned back to seize the batteries and the naval base at Horten, where the minelayer Olav Tryggvason sank a German minesweeper before the port capitulated. The main force sailed on towards Oslo. In the narrow strait at Drøbak, before dawn, the guns and torpedo tubes of Oscarsborg fortress opened fire on it. The Blücher, carrying the divisional staff and the officials who were to take over power in the capital, sank. The rest of the force turned back and landed its troops some tens of kilometres from the capital. The plan to enter Oslo from the sea at dawn had collapsed.

The capital was therefore taken from the air, and with a good deal of luck. Fornebu was first to have been seized by a parachute assault, but thick fog turned back the aircraft carrying the paratroops. Several Norwegian Gloster Gladiator fighters fought over the airfield; according to Norwegian figures they shot down several German aircraft and then, out of fuel and ammunition, landed wherever they could. As the first Junkers Ju 52 transports tried to land under machine-gun fire, German Messerschmitt Bf 110 heavy fighters, running out of fuel, landed on the still-defended airfield. Behind them the transports carrying infantry began to touch down. The handful of defenders ran out of ammunition and withdrew. Before noon the airfield was in German hands, and aircraft were bringing in further companies. The Norwegian troops in the capital offered no resistance, and Oslo was treated as an open city. In the afternoon, between 2 and 3 p.m. according to various accounts, small German detachments marched into the centre of Oslo along Karl Johans gate.

From Kristiansand to Narvik

Elsewhere the Germans took their objectives more quickly. At Kristiansand the guns of the fort on the island of Odderøya twice drove off the ships of Group 4, and shells also fell on the town. At the third approach the defenders held their fire, because they had been ordered not to fire on British and French ships and they took the approaching vessels for Allied ones. The Germans landed their troops, and before noon the town and the fort capitulated. Arendal was taken without a fight by a torpedo boat, Egersund by the minesweepers. Off Stavanger the destroyer Æger sank a German supply ship during the night, and in the morning was herself sent to the bottom by Ju 88 bombs. At about 9 a.m. a single company of paratroops seized Sola airfield. This is regarded as the first parachute assault in history on a defended airfield. By evening aircraft had flown some two thousand soldiers in, and Stavanger was occupied without a fight.

At Bergen the guns of Kvarven fort badly damaged the Königsberg and hit the Bremse. There were, however, no searchlights, and the torpedo battery could not be brought into action in time. The Germans landed troops on the shore and took the town early in the morning, and the fort, attacked from land and air, ceased fire. At Trondheim the Admiral Hipper and the destroyers raced at high speed past the guns of the forts at the entrance to the Trondheimsfjord and occupied the city without a fight. At Narvik Bonte’s destroyers sank two old coastal defence ships, Eidsvold and Norge, with the loss of more than 270 sailors. The garrison commander, Colonel Konrad Sundlo, a sympathiser of Quisling’s party, surrendered the town without a fight.

By the evening of 9 April the Germans held Oslo, Horten, Kristiansand, Arendal, Egersund, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. The price was not low. Besides the Blücher, that evening the Kriegsmarine lost the cruiser Karlsruhe, which on her way back from Kristiansand was torpedoed by the British submarine HMS Truant. Her crew were taken off by torpedo boats, and one of them finished off the wreck with torpedoes. The Königsberg lay disabled at Bergen.

The ultimatum and the flight from Oslo

During the night the Norwegian government met in Oslo. At about 4.30 a.m. the German minister, Curt Bräuer, handed the Foreign Minister, Halvdan Koht, a memorandum: the Reich was “taking Norway under its protection” against the British and French; the Norwegians were to offer no resistance and hand over to the Germans control of military installations, communications and ports. After brief deliberation the government rejected the demands. Koht declared that Norway wished to preserve its independence. Bräuer replied that in that case there would be fighting and nothing would save the Norwegians.

It was decided that the king, the government and the parliament would leave the capital. At about 7.30 a.m. a special train left the East Station for Hamar. On board were King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav and his family, the government of Johan Nygaardsvold and many members of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. The train reached Hamar before noon, and parliament met there that same day. At the same time Norges Bank took almost 49 tonnes of gold out of Oslo: it had been loaded onto lorries from early morning, and the last of them left for Lillehammer at roughly the moment the Germans were entering the city centre. All this was possible only because the warships carrying troops had not reached Oslo at dawn. In the evening the leader of the Norwegian fascists, Vidkun Quisling, announced on the radio that he was forming his own government, and the Norwegian authorities moved on to Elverum.

Norwegian resistance was weakened by chaos over mobilisation. The Chief of the General Staff, Colonel Rasmus Hatledal, had been demanding for several days that the reservists be called up. The government agreed only during the night of 8–9 April, between 3.30 and 4 a.m., at the request of the Commanding General, Kristian Laake. What was ordered, however, was a partial mobilisation, of four of the six field brigades, and under the regulations this was carried out quietly: the call-up notices went by post, and the first day of mobilisation was 11 April. Most ministers were convinced they had ordered a general mobilisation, and the Defence Minister, Birger Ljungberg, the only one who knew the procedure, did not explain the difference. The radio did not call up the reservists. Even so, thousands of Norwegians reported of their own accord to barracks and assembly points, often only to find Germans there, since in the first hours they had seized many arms depots.

The Allied response

On the first day the Allies fought only at sea and in the air. Early in the morning off the Lofoten Islands, Vice Admiral William Whitworth’s HMS Renown ran into the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in a snowstorm. She hit the Gneisenau in the rangefinder position and the after turret, and was herself struck by two shells that failed to explode. The German battleships used their superior speed to draw away to the north, but the Renown could no longer interfere with the landing at Narvik.

The Home Fleet turned south, and in the morning Forbes sent cruisers and destroyers to attack the German ships at Bergen. The Admiralty called off the attack. In the afternoon dozens of Ju 88 and He 111 bombers appeared over the fleet. The destroyer HMS Gurkha was sunk, the battleship Rodney was hit by a bomb that failed to penetrate her armoured deck, and cruisers were also damaged. For the Admiralty it was a lesson: in the waters off southern Norway, within range of German airfields, heavy ships could not operate without fighter cover. The south was left to submarines and aircraft, and the fleet concentrated on the north. In the evening Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, whose destroyers were guarding the Vestfjord, reported that he would attack the Germans at Narvik at dawn the next day, and the Admiralty approved.

In the afternoon Chamberlain told the House of Commons that Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway, that Bräuer had demanded Norway’s capitulation and that his government had assured the Norwegians of “full assistance”. He rejected the argument that the Reich had merely responded to the British mines: an operation of this size, with landings in many ports at once, must have been prepared long in advance, and German ships had been sailing for Trondheim before the first mines were laid. That same day the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, and the Defence Minister, Édouard Daladier, flew to London for an extraordinary meeting of the Supreme War Council, which decided to send troops of both countries to Norway.

Place in the war

On 9 April 1940 the Phoney War in the west came to an end. The Reich had been the first to strike at states that wished to remain neutral, and in a single day it had won what the Allies had been arguing about since the autumn: the ports from which the ore was shipped and a coastline open to the Atlantic. Contrary to German expectations, Norway did not give in. The next day the king rejected the demand that Quisling be made prime minister, and the government endorsed his stand. General Otto Ruge took command of the army, with the task of delaying the Germans until help arrived.

The campaign lasted two months. From 14 April British, French and later also Polish troops landed at Namsos, at Åndalsnes and in the Narvik area. In central Norway they were defeated by German superiority in the air and withdrew at the beginning of May. The Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade also fought at Narvik, and the Polish destroyers Grom and Błyskawica operated in Norwegian waters. On 28 May the Allies captured Narvik, but in the face of defeat in France they evacuated at the beginning of June. On 7 June the king and the government sailed from Tromsø to Britain, and on 10 June the Norwegian army capitulated. Norway nevertheless kept a lawful government in exile, its gold and one of the largest merchant fleets in the world, which sailed for the Allies until the end of the war. The country remained under occupation until May 1945, ruled by a German Reich Commissioner with the participation of Quisling’s collaborationist administration.

For Germany the victory meant bases for U-boats and aircraft on the North Sea and the Atlantic, and later positions along the route of the Arctic convoys to the USSR. At the same time it tied down hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Norway for the whole of the war. The Kriegsmarine paid for it with the loss of the Blücher, two light cruisers and ten destroyers at Narvik, and with damage to most of its heavy ships. These losses weighed on the plans for an invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940. In London the failure in Norway became the occasion for a debate after which, on 10 May, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill, himself one of the principal authors of the ill-fated expedition, became Prime Minister.