The sinking of the Königsberg

Early on the morning of 10 April 1940, British Blackburn Skua aircraft of the naval air arm, the Fleet Air Arm, came in from the sea over the harbour of Bergen. They had taken off before dawn from Hatston airfield near Kirkwall in the Orkneys, some 530 kilometres away, at the very limit of their range. Their target was the German light cruiser Königsberg, which the day before had brought invasion troops to Bergen and, having been hit by Norwegian coastal artillery, was unable to return to Germany. At around 7.20 a.m. the aircraft began diving on the ship as she lay alongside the quay. Several bombs struck home and several more exploded just off her side. The cruiser began to list, her crew abandoned her, and before noon Königsberg capsized and sank at her berth. She was the first major warship of the war to be sunk by aircraft, and – leaving aside much smaller vessels – the first in history to be sunk by dive bombers. Her loss was also part of a wider picture: in the first days of the invasion of Norway the Kriegsmarine was paying for its successes ship by ship.

A cruiser in a trap

Königsberg, lead ship of a class of three K-class cruisers, had been commissioned in 1929. She carried nine 150 mm guns in three turrets but had weak deck armour, and throughout the 1930s she served mainly as a training ship for cadets. For Operation Weserübung she was assigned to Group 3 under Rear Admiral Hubert Schmundt, whose task was to seize Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city. Alongside Königsberg the group included her sister cruiser Köln, the gunnery training ship Bremse, two torpedo boats and a flotilla of motor torpedo boats with their depot ship, with soldiers of the 69th Infantry Division on board. The cruiser was commanded by Kapitän zur See Heinrich Ruhfus.

On the morning of 9 April the force entered the fjord leading to Bergen. The infantry quickly took the city, but the Norwegian coastal battery at Kvarven fort, armed with 210 mm guns, managed to open fire. Königsberg took three hits forward, and flooding and fires in her boiler rooms deprived her of propulsion and power. Bremse was hit as well. The Norwegians ceased fire only under pressure from German aircraft and from the infantry, who captured the fort. That evening Admiral Schmundt led the rest of the force back to Germany, leaving the damaged cruiser in harbour at the Skoltegrunnskaien quay. She was moored broadside-on to the harbour entrance, so that she could fire all her guns if British ships attacked. The plan was to patch her up and send her home.

The British knew that German cruisers were lying at Bergen. On the morning of 9 April the commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral Charles Forbes, sent four cruisers and seven destroyers against Bergen, but the Admiralty, unsure whether the Norwegian batteries were already in German hands, called off the attack. In the afternoon bombers of the German X Air Corps attacked the British fleet at sea: they sank the destroyer Gurkha, hit the battleship Rodney and damaged two cruisers. The same day Königsberg survived two ineffective RAF bombing raids. British bombs dropped in level flight from high altitude failed to hit the ship.

The Skua attack

The idea for the attack came from Lieutenant Commander William Lucy, commanding officer of 803 Squadron of the Fleet Air Arm. His unit and 800 Squadron, both assigned to the carrier Ark Royal, were then based ashore at Hatston, an airfield the Luftwaffe had already bombed a month earlier during the raid on Scapa Flow. Lucy read the intelligence reports of a German cruiser at Bergen and persuaded the commander of 800 Squadron, Captain Richard Partridge of the Royal Marines, to join in. The Skua was a two-seater designed as both a fighter and a dive bomber. It was too slow to be a good fighter, but it was well suited to dive bombing. Each aircraft carried a single 500-pound semi-armour-piercing bomb – about 227 kilograms – and extra fuel, without which the round trip would have been impossible.

Sixteen aircraft took off: nine from 803 Squadron and seven from 800. They flew across the North Sea by night and reached the Norwegian coast at dawn. One machine from 800 Squadron lost touch with the others on the way but, according to British accounts, found the target on its own. The German crew, worn out after the previous day, mistook the approaching aircraft for their own. By the time half the Skuas had completed their dives, only one anti-aircraft gun on the cruiser was still firing.

Sources differ on the number of hits. German figures speak of three heavy hits, British ones of three hits and three near misses, and other studies of at least five. One bomb pierced the thin deck, passed through the hull and exploded in the water beneath the ship; another wrecked the auxiliary boiler room, and the near misses tore open the plating. Fires broke out and the electrical supply failed. The ship at once heeled over and her captain ordered her abandoned. Her death throes lasted several hours, which allowed the wounded and the dead, as well as some of the ammunition and equipment, to be carried ashore. According to German records Königsberg capsized at 10.51 a.m. (some studies give an earlier hour) and sank alongside the quay. Eighteen sailors were killed and more than twenty wounded. The British lost one aircraft of 803 Squadron together with its crew. Lucy and Partridge were awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

What was “first”

The sinking of Königsberg is usually described as the first sinking of a major warship by aircraft in wartime. The claim needs qualifying. As early as 3 September 1939 German Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers had sunk the Polish destroyer ORP Wicher in the harbour at Hel during the defence of Hel, and in September 1937 Japanese aircraft had sunk two small Chinese cruisers, Ning Hai and Ping Hai, on the Yangtze. The day before, the Luftwaffe had sunk Gurkha off Norway. None of these ships, however, came close in size to a cruiser of some 6,000 tons. In that sense the attack of 10 April was the first proof that a dozen or so light carrier aircraft could destroy a large warship.

Kriegsmarine losses

Königsberg was the third German cruiser lost in two days. On the morning of 9 April the heavy cruiser Blücher went down in the Drøbak Narrows on her way to Oslo. On the evening of the same day the British submarine Truant torpedoed Königsberg’s sister ship Karlsruhe off Kristiansand as she was returning to Germany after landing her troops. The cruiser took on water and lost propulsion; after about two hours her captain ordered her abandoned, and an escorting torpedo boat finished her off with two torpedoes. On the very morning that the aircraft were sinking Königsberg, British destroyers off Narvik attacked Commodore Bonte’s German destroyers, two of which were sunk and the rest damaged.

On the night of 10–11 April the submarine Spearfish, commanded by Lieutenant Commander John Forbes, torpedoed the heavy cruiser Lützow, formerly Deutschland, in the Skagerrak as she returned from Oslo. The torpedo wrecked her stern and rudders. She was towed to Kiel, where repairs took more than a year. On 13 April off Narvik the British destroyed the last eight German destroyers, and aircraft from the battleship Warspite sank the U-boat U-64. On 14 April the submarine Sterlet torpedoed the gunnery ship Brummer in the Skagerrak; she sank off the Norwegian coast the following day. Earlier, on 8 April, the Polish submarine Orzeł – the same boat that in the autumn had broken out to Britain – had sunk the transport Rio de Janeiro, carrying invasion troops, off Lillesand. On top of this came damage: the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper was rammed on 8 April by the British destroyer Glowworm, and the battleship Gneisenau was hit on 9 April by shells from the battlecruiser Renown. In the last days of April the fleet lost further torpedo boats and more U-boats.

Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had warned that Weserübung ran counter to the principles of naval warfare, since Germany did not command the sea. The landings succeeded, but the price was paid by a fleet that was in any case many times weaker than the British one.

Place in the war

By the end of the Norwegian campaign the Kriegsmarine had lost three cruisers, ten destroyers, about six U-boats and many smaller vessels and transports, and in June both battleships of the Scharnhorst class were damaged as well. According to a frequently quoted tally, in the summer of 1940 the German fleet had only one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers and a handful of destroyers ready for action. When Hitler ordered preparations for a landing in England, the naval command stressed from the outset that it had nothing with which to cover the crossing. The losses of April 1940 were one of the reasons why the plan never got beyond the preparatory stage.

The attack on Königsberg also mattered for the conduct of naval warfare itself. It showed that a ship without fighter cover and with inadequate anti-aircraft defences was helpless against aircraft, even obsolete ones. In the weeks that followed, the Royal Navy learned the same lesson off the coast of Norway, where its ships within range of the Luftwaffe suffered heavy losses from bombs. In November 1940 Fleet Air Arm aircraft attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto; in December 1941 the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor, and a few days later sank the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse at sea. The era in which air power decided command of the sea was heralded by a modest raid on a quayside in Bergen.

Not all the men who took part in the attack lived to see the end of the campaign. Lucy was killed in air combat off the Norwegian coast in May 1940. On 27 April Partridge, after shooting down a German bomber, had himself to make a forced landing on a frozen mountain lake, and in June, during an unsuccessful attack on Scharnhorst at Trondheim, he was taken prisoner. The Germans raised the wreck of Königsberg in 1942 and used it as a pier for U-boats. In 1944 she capsized again, and after the war she was cut up for scrap.