The second Battle of Narvik

On 13 April 1940, four days after the Germans had seized Narvik, the British fleet returned to the fjord where it had fought the first battle three days earlier. This time it sent not a flotilla of light destroyers but the battleship Warspite and nine destroyers under Vice Admiral William Whitworth. In the space of a single afternoon the force destroyed all eight German destroyers still lying at Narvik, and the battleship’s floatplane sank the U-boat U-64. It was the first clear Allied victory of the Norwegian campaign. The town itself, however, was not taken that day, and that decision weighed heavily on the subsequent fighting for Narvik.

A flotilla in a trap

Narvik lies at the head of the long Ofotfjord, a fjord reached through the broad Vestfjord, about a hundred nautical miles in all from the open sea. It was the most important port for shipping Swedish iron ore from Kiruna in winter, when the Baltic port of Luleå froze. On the morning of 9 April, when the Wehrmacht invaded Norway, ten German destroyers under Commodore Friedrich Bonte landed some two thousand mountain troops of General Eduard Dietl’s 3rd Mountain Division here, sinking the Norwegian coastal defence ships Eidsvold and Norge on the way.

The destroyers were supposed to return to Germany on the evening of 9 April, but could not, because they had run short of fuel. Of the two tankers sent to Narvik only one, Jan Wellem, arrived; the other, Kattegat, was sunk off the Norwegian coast. A single tanker with primitive pumps could refuel at most two ships at a time, and it took many hours. Dawn on 10 April brought an attack by the British 2nd Destroyer Flotilla under Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee. The Germans lost Wilhelm Heidkamp and Anton Schmitt, Bonte was killed and several ships were damaged, while the British, on their way out, destroyed the freighter Rauenfels, carrying ammunition and heavy equipment for Dietl. Command of the eight surviving destroyers passed to Fregattenkapitän Erich Bey.

Bey was unable to get out of the fjord. On the evening of 10 April the two serviceable ships, Wolfgang Zenker and Erich Giese, tried to break out, but turned back on sighting a British cruiser and destroyers in the Vestfjord. On the night of 11–12 April Erich Koellner ran onto rocks and damaged her bottom, and Zenker damaged a propeller. Diether von Roeder, badly hit on 10 April, lay immobilised in the harbour and could now serve only as a floating battery. The crews patched up their ships, while ammunition and torpedoes were running out on board. The approaches to the fjord were watched by four German U-boats, which were to defend Narvik against a British return.

The Admiralty’s decision

In London there was a wish to finish the job. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, pressed for a decisive blow, and the Admiralty and the commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral Charles Forbes, decided to send a battleship into the narrow fjord. It was a bold and risky move: a large ship in confined waters between steep mountainsides, exposed to torpedoes from U-boats, destroyers and any coastal batteries there might be. But it brought overwhelming firepower. Warspite, a veteran of Jutland rebuilt before the war, carried eight 381 mm (15-inch) guns. Whitworth, who on 9 April had engaged Gneisenau from the battlecruiser Renown, transferred his flag to her.

The battleship was accompanied by nine destroyers: four large Tribal-class ships (Bedouin, Cossack, Punjabi and Eskimo), Kimberley, and Hero, Icarus, Forester and Foxhound. Air support was to come from aircraft of the carrier Furious, which had already attacked Narvik on the evening of 12 April, to little effect and with the loss of two machines.

A floatplane over the fjord

At around noon on 13 April the force entered the Ofotfjord. The destroyers went ahead, close to both shores, with the battleship behind them. In front of the ships flew a Fairey Swordfish floatplane catapulted from Warspite. Its three-man crew was to look out for German ships and attack any targets of opportunity. It did so with unexpected success. First it warned the admiral where the German destroyers lay in wait, and then, in the Herjangsfjord, an arm of the fjord north of Narvik, it spotted the U-boat U-64 lying a few dozen metres from the shore. The aircraft dived and dropped two anti-submarine bombs. One struck just abaft the conning tower. U-64 went to the bottom with the loss of eight men, and the 38 survivors were picked up by German mountain troops from the shore. The British official history called it the first such success of the war: it was the first German U-boat sunk by an aircraft, and the only one ever sunk by an aircraft from a battleship.

The British very nearly suffered the opposite fate. At the entrance to the fjord the U-boat U-46 was preparing to attack the battleship when, at the last moment, she struck an underwater rock and had to surface. She managed to withdraw unseen.

The destruction of the destroyers

The first to go was Erich Koellner. Damaged and capable of only a very low speed, she was to lie in ambush close inshore and attack passing ships with torpedoes. The floatplane gave away her position, and a few minutes later the destroyers Bedouin, Punjabi and Eskimo smothered her with shells and hit her with a torpedo. When one gun was still firing, Warspite added her weight. The ship sank, and the survivors of her crew were taken prisoner by Norwegian troops.

Wolfgang Zenker, Bernd von Arnim and Hans Lüdemann now came out of Narvik to meet the British, joined by Hermann Künne. In the widest part of the fjord a manoeuvring fight developed at long range, hampered by smoke and poor visibility. A shell severed a steam pipe in Punjabi, which had to withdraw from the action for a time. Zenker fired torpedoes at the battleship but missed. Ten Swordfish from Furious attacked the German ships with bombs but scored no hits and lost two aircraft. At around 2.30 p.m. Georg Thiele also came out of the harbour.

The Germans were soon running out of ammunition. At around 2.50 p.m. Bey ordered a withdrawal into the Rombaksfjord, a narrow, dead-end arm of the fjord east of Narvik, in places only a few hundred metres wide. The captain of Hermann Künne failed to read the signal and headed into the Herjangsfjord. There the crew ran the ship aground and set demolition charges. Eskimo, following her in, fired a torpedo at her as well. It is not known whether the ship was blown apart by the torpedo or by her own charges.

Two ships remained in the harbour. Erich Giese, plagued by engine trouble, came out at around 3 p.m. and at once came under the battleship’s fire. She fired torpedoes, which missed, and after taking many hits was abandoned by her crew. The immobilised Diether von Roeder fought on at the quayside. Her accurate fire badly damaged Cossack as she entered the harbour; the British destroyer lost steering and ran aground near Ankenes, where a gun on the shore kept her under fire until the next day. Roeder’s crew abandoned their ship and blew her up at around 4.20 p.m. The British had intended to board her from Foxhound, but machine-gun fire from the shore forced them to turn back, which saved the destroyer from the explosion.

The final act was played out in the Rombaksfjord. Eskimo entered it in pursuit and, at its narrowest point, ran into an ambush by Georg Thiele and Hans Lüdemann. A torpedo from Thiele blew off her entire bow, but the ship stayed afloat. Thiele, smothered by shells from Forester, Hero and Bedouin, ran herself onto the rocks. Zenker and Bernd von Arnim were scuttled by their own crews at the head of the fjord. Lüdemann was abandoned by her crew, and the British who boarded her judged her too badly damaged to take away and finished her off with a torpedo from Hero. Of the German vessels at Narvik only the U-boat U-51 survived.

The balance sheet

The British did not lose a single ship that day. According to the British official history they had 28 killed and 55 wounded. Eskimo, without her bow, and the badly damaged Cossack returned to service only after lengthy repairs, and Punjabi needed repairs as well. German casualties are usually given as about 130 killed and 70 wounded. Most of the sailors, however, reached the shore.

For the Kriegsmarine it was a painful blow. At Narvik it had lost ten destroyers – half of all it then possessed, since two had already been lost on 22 February 1940 in the North Sea, bombed by their own air force and mined. And destroyers were the ships the German navy used most often. Together with Blücher, Karlsruhe and Königsberg, lost in the first days of the operation, and the damage to its heavy ships, this meant that the German surface fleet was incapable of major operations for many months. Something else came to light as well: what Karl Dönitz later called the torpedo crisis. Time and again the U-boats at Narvik fired at British warships, and their torpedoes either exploded prematurely or ran beneath the target. As early as 14 April U-boats fired again at the departing Warspite, and again to no effect.

Sailors on land

The survivors of the destroyers – between about 2,100 and 2,600 men, according to various sources – became soldiers. They armed themselves from the Norwegian mobilisation depot at Elvegårdsmoen near Bjerkvik, captured in the first days of the invasion: thousands of Krag-Jørgensen rifles and several hundred machine guns. They took the anti-aircraft guns off the ships. The improvised naval battalions formed from them, known informally as the “Marine-Bataillon” or “Gebirgsmarine” and commanded by Korvettenkapitän Hans Erdmenger, captain of Heidkamp, doubled Dietl’s strength. They were not trained for mountain warfare, but they manned defensive positions, guarded the railway to Sweden and relieved some of the mountain troops.

Why Narvik was not taken

After the battle Narvik lay defenceless from the sea before the British ships. In a signal sent at 5.42 p.m. Whitworth wrote that he had considered landing a party drawn from the ships’ companies, since resistance appeared to have died down. He decided against it because, as he put it, the men at his disposal were too few and too tired to risk a clash with two thousand German soldiers whose morale would quickly recover, especially if Warspite could not remain off the town, exposed to U-boats and aircraft. That evening, however, he reported his impression that the enemy in Narvik was “thoroughly frightened” and recommended that the main landing force occupy the town without delay. The next day he added that, with the support of ships such as his own force, even a small detachment could do the job.

No such detachment was at hand. The British brigade earmarked for Narvik was still at sea in a convoy from Britain, and its commander had orders not to land under fire. In the following days the troops were put ashore at Harstad, several dozen miles from Narvik, rather than in the town itself. The German side, meanwhile, was in crisis. Dietl expected a landing and was reconciled to losing the town. In Berlin, on hearing of the defeat, Hitler fell into a state of nervous agitation and was ready to let Dietl cross into Sweden and be interned. He was talked out of it only by the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, and Dietl was ordered to hold out for as long as possible.

Place in the war

The second Battle of Narvik gave the Royal Navy complete command of the waters around the town and was one of the few bright moments in a Norwegian campaign that went badly for the Allies. The news of the destruction of the German flotilla was received with enthusiasm in Britain. Yet the chance to take the town at once slipped away within a few days. A dispute between the naval commander, Admiral Lord Cork, who wanted to strike directly from the sea, and the commander of the land forces, General Pierse Mackesy, who preferred a cautious approach, delayed the attack. Narvik was retaken only on 28 May by Norwegian, French and Polish troops, among them the Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade, in the Allies’ first victory on land in this war. Some two weeks later, faced with the defeat of France, the Allies evacuated northern Norway, and Dietl, saved by the turn of events in the west, became a hero in Germany. The Kriegsmarine never fully replaced the destroyers lost in the Ofotfjord, which soon limited its options during the preparations for the invasion of Britain.