The Vågsøy raid

On the morning of 27 December 1941 British warships entered the Ulvesund strait off the west coast of Norway and opened fire on the German batteries on the islet guarding the harbour of Måløy at the southern tip of Vågsøy island. Under a smokescreen laid by RAF aircraft, some 570 commandos went ashore, among them a group of Norwegians from Captain Martin Linge’s unit. By early afternoon they had destroyed the cod-liver oil and fish-oil factories, warehouses, German positions and the ships lying in the harbour, and then sailed away with prisoners and with volunteers for the Norwegian forces in Britain. Operation Archery was the first large British raid in which the commandos had to fight their way through determined resistance from a German garrison, and one of the first actions in which land, sea and air forces operated together. Linge was killed in it – the founder of the Norwegian unit that afterwards took his name.

Raid after raid

After the first raid on the Lofoten Islands in March 1941, British raids on the coast of occupied Norway ceased for several months. In the autumn the leadership of Combined Operations Headquarters changed: in October Admiral Roger Keyes was replaced by Commodore Louis Mountbatten, who wanted to mount bigger and more frequent raids. Norway was the best place for them. Its long, ragged coastline was thinly guarded, and every raid forced the Germans to spread their forces along thousands of kilometres of fjords. After Germany’s attack on the USSR this counted doubly: soldiers tied down in Norway could not fight in the east. Winston Churchill backed these plans because he needed proof that Britain was not merely on the defensive.

Two simultaneous operations were planned for December. A larger naval force was to land commandos on the Lofoten Islands on 26 December, in Operation Anklet, and draw the Germans’ attention there. Meanwhile a smaller force was to strike at Vågsøy, at the northern end of the Sogn og Fjordane region, between Bergen and Ålesund. Måløy lay on the coastal shipping lane along which the Germans ran convoys up and down the Norwegian coast, and in and around the little town there were factories producing cod-liver oil, herring oil and tinned fish for the occupier. For the Germans fish oil was a source of glycerine for explosives and of vitamins for the army.

Command of the operation went to Rear Admiral Harold Burrough at sea and Brigadier Joseph Charles Haydon on land – the same Haydon who had commanded the Lofoten raid. The core of the land force was Lieutenant Colonel John Durnford-Slater’s No. 3 Commando, reinforced by two troops of No. 2 Commando, a medical section from No. 4 Commando, sappers from No. 6 Commando and a group of Norwegians from Norwegian Independent Company 1, a unit Linge had been building since the autumn of 1940 under the wing of the SOE. According to Norwegian tallies, 576 soldiers took part in the operation, including 33 Norwegians, although some British accounts speak of only a dozen or so. The troops were carried by two landing ships, Prince Charles and Prince Leopold; gunfire support came from the cruiser Kenya and the destroyers Onslow, Oribi, Offa and Chiddingfold, while the submarine Tuna served as a navigation marker at the entrance to the fjord. Aircraft were to lay smokescreens, attack nearby airfields and protect the ships from the Luftwaffe, which at that distance from Scotland was a serious challenge for the RAF.

The force left Scapa Flow on 24 December, but according to British accounts a storm forced it to wait out Christmas off the Shetlands and to postpone the attack by a day.

The fight for Måløy

At dawn on 27 December – which at that time of year comes late in Norway – Kenya fired star shells over Måløy islet (Moldøen), and moments later the ships smothered the German positions with several hundred shells. Handley Page Hampden bombers dropped smoke bombs, while Bristol Beaufighter and Bristol Blenheim fighters circled over the area of operations, also attacking Herdla airfield near Bergen and, according to some accounts, the airfield near Stavanger as well. The land forces were divided into five groups. The first was to seize the village of Holvik and the positions west of Måløy, the second the town itself, the third the islet with the battery, the fourth, carried further north by the destroyer Oribi, was to cut the road along which German reinforcements might come, and the fifth waited at sea in reserve.

The islet was taken within a quarter of an hour or so. Its garrison was stunned by the bombardment, and three of its four guns had been destroyed. The officer leading this party, Durnford-Slater’s deputy Major Jack Churchill, later a commando legend, is said in many accounts to have leapt from his landing craft playing the bagpipes. In the west and north the commandos likewise met little resistance. It was different in Måløy itself. The main group attacked along the waterfront street and at once came under heavy fire. Besides the permanent garrison, there were several dozen German soldiers in the town on Christmas leave – according to British accounts, battle-hardened mountain troops. The fighting turned into a struggle for every house. Durnford-Slater had to throw his reserve into Måløy, along with units that had already completed their tasks elsewhere.

During the assault on the Ulvesund Hotel, which housed the German headquarters, Martin Linge was killed – a pre-war actor and officer who had already been wounded in the fighting near Åndalsnes in April 1940. Several British officers leading attacks also fell. Local people helped the commandos, carrying ammunition and explosives and bringing out the wounded. Meanwhile the sappers blew up the factories, the stores of fish oil, fuel and ammunition, and the telephone exchange. When the Germans, although they still held some of the buildings, stopped offering organised resistance, Durnford-Slater ordered a withdrawal at around 1.45 p.m. An hour later, as dusk fell, all the troops were back aboard the ships, and smoke from burning buildings hung over Måløy.

At sea the destroyers hunted ships in the Ulvesund strait. Some crews ran their vessels aground or tried to scuttle them so that they would not fall into British hands. According to various tallies, between eight and ten ships totalling some 15,000 GRT were sunk, and boarding parties took documents from them, among them, according to some historians, German naval cipher material. One of the three 130 mm guns on the shore hit the cruiser Kenya, without doing her serious damage. Over the coast air battles were fought against German fighters and bombers trying to reach the ships.

The balance sheet

According to British figures, the commandos lost 17 killed and 53 wounded, and the navy 4 killed and 4 wounded. Norwegian studies speak of 18 dead in the landing force. The RAF lost between eight and eleven aircraft, according to various tallies. German losses are estimated at about 120–150 killed. The British took away 98 prisoners and a few members of Nasjonal Samling, and with them about 70–77 Norwegians who wanted to fight in the armed forces in exile. One Norwegian civilian was killed, struck by a shell splinter. Many houses in Måløy were damaged and more than twenty burned down.

In the Lofotens, meanwhile, Operation Anklet went ahead without fighting. On 26 December some three hundred men from No. 12 Commando and Linge’s company occupied the settlements of Reine and Moskenes on Moskenesøya. Rear Admiral Louis Hamilton’s force also included the Polish escort destroyers ORP Krakowiak and ORP Kujawiak. A boarding party from the destroyer Ashanti captured an Enigma cipher machine from a German patrol boat. When on 27 December a bomb from a German seaplane exploded alongside the cruiser Arethusa and damaged her, and the force had no air cover of its own, Hamilton ordered a withdrawal, taking with him more than two hundred Norwegian volunteers.

German and Norwegian reactions

In Britain the raid became a propaganda event. The photographers and cameramen who accompanied the commandos brought back pictures of the street fighting in Måløy, which went round the press and the newsreels at a time when nothing but bad news was arriving from the Far East. For the British, however, what mattered more than a few burned factories was how Adolf Hitler would react. He reacted just as they had hoped. He became convinced that the Allies were preparing an invasion of Norway, which in the following weeks he called the “zone of destiny” of the war. According to some historians, after the December raids he ordered the Norwegian garrison to be reinforced by about 30,000 men and the construction of coastal fortifications to be accelerated. Fear for Norway was also one of the reasons why in January 1942 he moved the battleship Tirpitz there, and in February ordered the heavy ships at Brest to break through to Germany via the English Channel (Operation Cerberus). The forces under Nikolaus von Falkenhorst grew year by year.

For the people of Måløy and for the Norwegians in London the raid left a bitter taste. Those who had helped the commandos were left alone after they had gone to face the reprisals of the occupier, headed since September 1940 by Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven. The Norwegian members of Linge’s company, shaken by what happened to the local population after both December raids, protested openly, and the government of Johan Nygaardsvold demanded of Churchill that operations on Norwegian territory be agreed with it. The British promised, but kept the promise poorly. Linge was posthumously awarded the War Cross with Sword and the British Distinguished Service Cross.

Place in the war

The Vågsøy raid was a turning point in the history of the British commandos: their first action against a defending enemy, coordinated with naval gunfire and air support. The experience of Måløy was drawn on in planning later landings, from the Dieppe raid in August 1942 to the landings in Sicily, Italy and Normandy, in which many Måløy veterans fought. The most important consequence, however, was strategic. Norway became an obsession for Hitler: by 1944 some 370,000 German soldiers were stationed there, taking no part in any of the decisive battles of the war. The growing number of raids also led Hitler in October 1942 to issue the Commando Order, which required captured participants in such operations to be killed. Linge’s unit, known thereafter as Linge Company (Kompani Linge), went down in the history of the Norwegian resistance for its sabotage operations, the most famous of which was the destruction of the heavy water plant at Vemork in 1943.