The Lofoten raid

On the morning of 4 March 1941 British warships entered the waters of the Vestfjorden and put troops ashore at four fishing settlements in the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago lying north of the Arctic Circle off the coast of occupied Norway. Some five hundred men of No. 3 and No. 4 Commando, sappers of the Royal Engineers and 52 Norwegians from Captain Martin Linge’s unit landed at Svolvær, Stamsund, Henningsvær and Brettesnes almost unopposed. Within a few hours they had blown up and set fire to cod-liver and herring-oil factories, fuel tanks and ships in the harbours, and had taken more than two hundred prisoners, a group of local members of Vidkun Quisling’s party and more than three hundred volunteers who wished to fight with the Norwegian forces in Britain. The British did not lose a single man. The operation, codenamed Claymore, was the first major raid by British commandos. Its most valuable prize long remained a secret: from the burning German armed patrol trawler Krebs, sailors from the destroyer Somali carried off spare rotors for the Enigma cipher machine and the German naval cipher keys for February, which went to Bletchley Park.

It is sometimes stated under 4 March that British commandos attacked oil installations at Narvik. That is not what happened. The raid did not touch Narvik, which lies at the head of the Ofotfjord on the far side of the Vestfjorden, but the Lofotens, and its main target was not oil installations but the factories that turned fish into cod-liver oil and fish oil. Fuel tanks were among the installations destroyed, but the chief concern was the fish fat from which the Germans obtained glycerine.

Commandos in search of a target

After the evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940, Winston Churchill demanded of the Chiefs of Staff that Britain, though driven off the Continent, should begin to harry the Germans on the occupied coasts. He wrote of specially trained troops who would spread terror along the enemy’s shores. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, adopted a scheme put forward by Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, who proposed raising small units of volunteers for raids from the sea. They were called commandos, after the Boer mounted units of the war in South Africa. The first actions, however, were a damp squib. On the night of 24–25 June 1940 a raid on the French coast ended with two German sentries killed, and Operation Ambassador on German-occupied Guernsey, on the night of 14–15 July, achieved nothing at all. In July the direction of raiding was entrusted to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, a veteran of Gallipoli and of the Zeebrugge raid of 1918, who was placed at the head of Combined Operations Headquarters. In the autumn the volunteers were gathered into the Special Service Brigade under Brigadier Joseph Charles Haydon. All winter the commandos trained in Scotland while one planned operation after another was cancelled. Among the men who had volunteered for “hazardous service”, disillusionment was growing.

The target for the first large-scale action was suggested by the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, who was also responsible for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). On 14 January 1941 he sent Churchill a minute proposing a surprise raid on the Norwegian coast: landing small parties, destroying the cod-liver and herring-oil factories, sinking the ships in the harbours, overwhelming the small German garrisons and carrying off local collaborators. Churchill liked the idea and passed it to Keyes.

Why the Lofotens

The Lofoten Islands were one of the main centres of the Norwegian fishing industry. Every winter, from January to April, huge shoals of cod came to spawn off the archipelago, followed by thousands of fishermen from all over northern Norway. Cod-liver oil was made from the livers, and oil and meal from other fish. After the German invasion and Norway’s capitulation, much of the output went to the Reich. What chiefly interested the British was that fish fat yielded glycerine, a raw material for nitroglycerine and explosives. Destroying the factories would therefore strike at the German war economy and at the same time be a show of strength that would lift morale in Britain and in occupied Norway.

The archipelago lay far away, some 1,400 kilometres from Scotland, and for that very reason the Germans held it only lightly. There was scarcely any garrison: the settlements housed individual soldiers, sailors, airmen from a seaplane base, officials and the crews of merchant ships. The nights north of the Arctic Circle, still long in early March, gave the attackers the cover of darkness on the approach, while by morning there was enough light for operations ashore.

The expedition

Command of the whole operation went to Rear Admiral Louis Hamilton. The escort was formed by Captain Clifford Caslon’s 6th Destroyer Flotilla: four Tribal-class ships, Somali, Bedouin, Tartar and Eskimo, together with Legion. The troops were carried in two former Dutch passenger ferries, Queen Emma and Princess Beatrix, newly converted into landing ships, with landing craft slung from their davits. More distant cover, in case German warships put to sea, was provided by cruisers and heavy units of the Home Fleet. Brigadier Haydon’s land force comprised about 250 men each from Lieutenant Colonel John Durnford-Slater’s No. 3 Commando and Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Lister’s No. 4 Commando, a section of sappers from 55th Field Company, Royal Engineers, and four officers and 48 other ranks of the Norwegian Independent Company 1, the unit that Captain Linge, a pre-war actor, had been building up since the autumn of 1940 under the wing of SOE. The Norwegians were to serve as guides and interpreters, identify local collaborators and persuade their compatriots to leave for Britain.

The force assembled in the second half of February at Scapa Flow, where the troops grew used to the ships and landing craft. It sailed on 1 March, refuelled that evening in the Faroe Islands and headed for Norway by a roundabout route far to the north to avoid the German air force. The sea was rough, and the cramped quarters and seasickness took their toll on the men. The day before reaching the target the force sighted a German aircraft, but its report provoked no reaction.

Six hours in the Lofotens

The ships reached the Lofotens before four in the morning on 4 March. The navigation lights at the entrance to the Vestfjorden were burning, proof that the Germans expected nothing. The landing was put back by a quarter of an hour to avoid going ashore in the dark, and by about 6.50 a.m. all the commandos were ashore. Troops of No. 4 Commando landed at Svolvær, the main town of the island of Austvågøy, and at Brettesnes; No. 3 Commando landed at Stamsund on the island of Vestvågøy and at Henningsvær. The landing craft came straight alongside the icy quays. Surprise was complete. Some of the inhabitants, on their way to work, took the activity in the harbours for a German exercise. When they realised what was happening, many came out into the streets to welcome the soldiers and offer them coffee.

The sappers and commandos set to work according to the prepared plan. At Svolvær they blew up a dozen or more cod-liver and fish-oil factories, at Henningsvær two, and at Stamsund a cod-processing plant. They set fire to tanks of cod-liver oil, fish oil, paraffin and fuel. According to Haydon’s report, 11 factories and processing plants were destroyed and some 800,000 gallons, more than 3.5 million litres of oil, went up in flames, equivalent to about 3,600 tonnes. Norwegian tallies speak of 18 businesses destroyed, counting smaller works and stores as well. Clouds of black smoke hung over Austvågøy for many hours.

In the harbours the commandos and the destroyers’ guns sank the ships working for the Germans – between five and ten vessels according to different tallies, totalling some 18,000–19,000 GRT. The largest was the German fish-factory ship Hamburg, sunk in Svolvær harbour. The freighters Pasajes, Felix Heumann, Eilenau, Gumbinnen and Bernhard Schulte also went to the bottom; the Germans later raised and repaired some of them. There were Norwegian casualties too. The destroyer Bedouin tried to stop the Hurtigruten coastal steamer Mira, which had sailed into the area of the operation. When she failed to stop after warning shots, the British opened fire and sank her. Several people were killed; wreck registers give two dead, while local Norwegian accounts speak of seven. The British explained it as an unfortunate accident and picked up the survivors.

There was hardly any armed resistance. A party of commandos under Captain Lord Lovat commandeered a bus, drove to the seaplane base near Svolvær and accepted the surrender of its personnel, whose commander afterwards protested at the British troops’ “unmilitary” conduct. Lieutenant R. L. Wills sent a telegram from the telegraph office at Stamsund to “A. Hitler, Berlin”, reminding him of his promise that German troops would meet the British wherever they landed and asking where his soldiers were. Linge’s men, lists in hand, sought out members of Nasjonal Samling and local informers. The only British casualty was an officer who accidentally shot himself in the thigh with his own weapon.

By about 1 p.m. both landing ships had all the troops back on board, and the force set off for home. It took with it prisoners whose number different sources give slightly differently: according to Haydon’s report there were 225, including 213 Germans (mostly merchant seamen, but also a few members of the Kriegsmarine, the army and the Luftwaffe, two SS men and civilians) and 12 Norwegians regarded as collaborators. Some contemporary British accounts speak of about sixty “Quislings” detained, probably counting all the suspects taken aboard the ships. Also sailing with the British were 314 volunteers, among them several women, ready to join the Norwegian armed forces in Britain. On 6 March the force returned to Scapa Flow.

The Krebs and the Enigma rotors

The only German vessel that put up a fight was the armed patrol trawler Krebs. When she sighted the British ships in the morning, she fired a few rounds at the destroyer Somali. The destroyer replied, the trawler caught fire, and her commander, Lieutenant Hans Kupfinger, was killed together with part of the crew. Before he fell he managed to throw the cipher machine overboard. The British boarding party that climbed onto the burning wreck nevertheless found what Kupfinger had not destroyed: spare Enigma rotors and documents, among them the key tables for the German naval cipher used in coastal waters (Heimische Gewässer, known at Bletchley Park as “Dolphin”) for February 1941. The trawler was then sunk.

For the codebreakers of Bletchley Park this was a priceless gift. The naval version of Enigma had held out against them longest, because the Kriegsmarine used more rotors than the army and the air force and, in addition, enciphered its message settings with bigram tables. Hut 8, in which Alan Turing worked, had been waiting for months for captured material that would allow it to make headway. The keys from the Krebs made it possible to read the February traffic retrospectively and, from it, to reconstruct the bigram tables, which by the end of March were almost complete. From then on the method that Turing had devised at the end of 1939, developing the ideas of the Polish cryptologist Jerzy Różycki, began to produce regular results. Further captures in the spring and summer of 1941, taken from German weather ships and from the U-boat U-110, completed the work. From the summer of 1941 the British were reading German naval signals, including those to the U-boats, with only a short delay, which allowed convoys to be routed away from the wolf packs.

For decades nobody was allowed to speak of this part of the raid. It was revealed only in the 1970s, when the first works on Ultra were published. Some historians believe that later raids on Norway, especially the second foray to the Lofotens in December 1941, were planned largely as cover for such “pinches” – the capture of German cipher material without betraying that this was the real objective. The Norwegians who took part in the operation knew nothing of the haul from the Krebs and could not take it into account in their assessment of the raid.

Reprisals

The German response was swift and harsh. Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven, the country’s de facto ruler since September 1940, flew to Svolvær by seaplane; according to Norwegian accounts, he had orders from Adolf Hitler to burn the town down. He did not go that far, because Svolvær as a fishing port was too valuable to the Germans themselves. He did, however, have the houses burned of families whose members had sailed away with the British: according to local sources, eight in Svolvær and one in nearby Kabelvåg. Nearly a hundred people were arrested. The 97 detainees, held for four days on a ship in Svolvær harbour, were taken via Trondheim to Oslo, to the prison at Møllergata 19, and on 15 March to the camp at Åneby in Hakadal, the first German camp in the vicinity of the capital. Some were released. In June 1941 the rest were moved to the newly opened Grini camp near Oslo, where 64 “Svolvær hostages” received the first prisoner numbers. The inhabitants of Austvågøy also had to pay a levy of 100,000 kroner, and the local police warned that any demonstration against the Germans would bring immediate punishment on those responsible and reprisals against the whole population.

The reprisals struck the families of those who had left and people who had had nothing to do with the raid. In Norway, therefore, the raid was received with mixed feelings: joy at the first humiliation of the occupier since April 1940 was mingled with bitterness that the local people had paid the price for a few hours of freedom. The poet Inger Hagerup gave voice to this in her poem “Aust-Vågøy”, one of the best-known Norwegian works of the occupation years.

The verdict in London

In Britain the raid became a great propaganda event. The press and newsreels showed burning tanks, prisoners and smiling Norwegian volunteers, and Churchill himself sent all the participants his congratulations on a “very satisfactory operation”. After months of defeats and bombing, it was the first sizeable action on occupied soil in which British troops had fully accomplished their task and come home without loss. Durnford-Slater later wrote that it had been an exceptionally successful operation and a good start for the raids to come. Many commandos, however, felt let down: they had trained to fight and had not met the enemy. The Ministry of Economic Warfare and SOE judged the action a success, and British commanders stressed that such raids would force the Germans to keep far larger forces in Norway than the occupation alone required.

The Norwegians were more cautious. Linge and his men doubted whether a few hours on the coast were worth the reprisals that would fall on the population, and the Norwegian authorities in London, King Haakon VII and Johan Nygaardsvold’s government, wanted more say over operations conducted on their country’s territory. They could not then learn of the haul from the Krebs, which in the final reckoning outweighed everything else in the value of the raid.

Place in the war

The Lofoten raid was the first major British commando operation and a model for those that followed. It did not change Norway’s situation, but it had two consequences far greater than the destruction of a dozen or so fish-oil factories. The first was the haul from the Krebs, which helped Bletchley Park break the German naval cipher at a critical stage of the Battle of the Atlantic, when the Germans were harrying the convoys with ever more U-boats. The second was Hitler’s reaction. The raid confirmed his conviction that the Allies were preparing to land in Norway, which he soon began to call the “zone of destiny” of this war. According to the Store norske leksikon, in the wake of the raid he ordered 160 coastal artillery batteries to be sent to Norway, which marked the beginning of the build-up of fortifications later known as “Festung Norwegen”. The forces of Nikolaus von Falkenhorst grew year by year, and in 1944 some 370,000 German soldiers were stationed in Norway, fighting on none of the decisive fronts.

In December 1941 the British and Norwegians repeated the raid. In Operation Anklet they occupied the western part of the Lofotens for several days, and in the simultaneous Operation Archery they attacked Vågsøy and Måløy, where Martin Linge was killed on 27 December. His unit, named Linge Company after him, went on to carry out the most famous sabotage operations of the war in Norway, while Lord Lovat and his commandos fought at Dieppe in 1942 and landed in Normandy in 1944. The multiplying raids enraged Hitler. In October 1942 he issued the Commando Order, which required that participants in such operations who were taken prisoner be killed, even if they were in uniform and had surrendered. For passing it on and carrying it out in Norway, Falkenhorst was sentenced after the war by a British military court. For the people of the Lofotens, 4 March 1941 remained the day on which they regained their freedom for six hours and then paid for it with burned homes and hostages in Grini.