War and Game

In his meeting with Hitler on October 10, 1939, Raeder warned that the British might have imminent designs of their own on neutral Scandinavia. Should they stage a coup de main and capture Norway, “the northern part of the North Sea would then be flanked on both sides by the British Fleet and Air Force, which could definitely deny it to our use except for submarines. Our surface ships would no longer have any chance of reaching the Atlantic, and with enemy mine barriers set like those in World War I, the exit even for submarines would be extremely hazardous.” Furthermore, any occupation of Norway by Britain “would put tremendous pressure on Sweden” to join the Allies, thus denying Germany its ore supplies.

Hitler was at first resistant. Determined to attack France and the Low Countries the following spring, he did not wish to stretch his commitments further. Moreover, seizure of a nation whose coastline extended nearly eight hundred miles would be a staggering undertaking for Germany’s minuscule navy, no matter what help could be expected from the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. But Raeder returned to the Reichschancellory in mid-December with further arguments, and the appearance in Berlin of a Norwegian named Vidkun Quisling who was eager to do the Nazis’ bidding served to turn the führer’s mind. Hitler was further made uneasy by Churchill’s invitation on January 20, 1940, to all “northern neutrals” to join the Allies. Although the first lord’s call was rejected, it certainly indicated the direction of British thinking, and in German eyes British seizure of the supply ship Altmark in a Norwegian fjord several weeks later confirmed the impression that London would never allow Norway to remain truly neutral. According to a source within the German supreme command, “Hitler chose to solve the [Norwegian] problem by military methods.”

Staff planners from all three German services worked with greater closeness, harmony, and imagination than ever before or again to craft orders for a sudden assault to seize Oslo and all of Norway’s North Sea and Atlantic coast port towns from Kristiansand to Narvik. For the first time in history, warfare would be integrally conducted in all three dimensions: air, land, and sea. Norway would set the pattern for later Allied operations in North Africa and Europe and Japanese and American activities in the Pacific. Then, days before “Operation Weser” was to take place, Raeder suddenly got cold feet. His entire surface navy would have to be dedicated to the enterprise, and the prospect that it could be sunk in toto could not be dismissed. The grand admiral therefore begged his führer to try to ensure continued Norwegian neutrality by diplomatic means alone. But as Raeder soon realized, preparations were too far advanced to be reversed. With a somewhat heavy heart he therefore recommended invasion day as April 7 (when the moon would be full). Hitler decided to wait a further forty-eight hours.

Enjoying interior lines of communication, the Germans mounted the Norwegian campaign primarily from the sea, supplemented by limited parachute assaults. The navy embarked more than ten thousand troops on cruisers, destroyers, and small merchantmen and successfully landed them at Oslo, Kristiansand, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik. The task forces assigned to seize Trondheim and Narvik in northern Norway were given distant support by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which acted as decoys to keep the Royal Navy away from the Norwegian coast. To ensure air control over the Norwegian battlefields and adjacent seas, the Wehrmacht invaded Denmark and seized several airfields.

In its opening stages Weser proved a stunning success. Interservice cooperation among the assaulting forces was outstanding. Only at Oslo did the invasion fleet suffer stiff opposition, with the brand-new heavy cruiser Blücher going down before the guns and torpedoes of the outer fortresses. In the first twenty-four hours, the Germans seized all their objectives before the Anglo-French could react. Thereafter, the navy’s job was simply to keep the enemy sufficiently off balance to allow the army to complete its work of subduing two million widely scattered Norwegians. With essential support from the Luftwaffe, the navy performed its task brilliantly.

Hitler had, in fact, beaten his Anglo-French enemies to Scandinavia by less than a day. The British War Cabinet, and especially Winston Churchill, had been as mindful of Norway’s importance as Raeder had guessed. Churchill was determined to reverse the unhappy trend at sea, and throughout late 1939 and early 1940 he pondered several schemes to get the Royal Navy on the offensive. The first lord not only contemplated an attack against Norway but also pondered forcing the Skagerrak and Kattegat with a powerful battle fleet to control the Baltic. Correlli Barnett has sneeringly dismissed Operation Catherine as belonging to “the same category of Churchillian cigar-butt strategy as his 1915 brainwave of capturing the Friesian island of Borkum, or even the Dardenelles expedition itself: glibly attractive when arrowed broadly on a map of Europe, but a nonsense in terms of the technical means and military forces available.” Certainly, the poor showing of the Home Fleet off Norway lends credence to Barnett’s biting skepticism. And aviation historian Allen Andrews has argued that the Luftwaffe would have massacred any warships that Churchill might have sent to the north German coast. But a quick British thrust into the Baltic in the first days or weeks of the war to disrupt German naval exercises and perhaps bombard the Hanseatic towns might have been worth the gamble (even with the loss of a precious battleship or two) in stiffening Scandinavian resolve to stand up to Hitler. Instead, Denmark and Norway remained strictly neutral (though clearly sympathetic to the British), while Sweden continued to supply Berlin with iron ore.

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The Anglo-French forces reacted as swiftly as they could, but it was too late. By the time ships could be again combat-loaded and sent north, the Germans were ashore and well entrenched and the Allied riposte proved too little and too late. A daring British naval thrust up the Vest and Ofoten Fjords led by battleship Warspite destroyed a half-dozen German destroyers and bounced the small Nazi invasion force out of Narvik for a time, permitting an Allied counterlanding in the area. But the Luftwaffe kept British reinforcements, including carriers and their aircraft, from effectively supporting the shore party, and Forbes was so intimidated by initial German air attacks against his ships that he kept his fleet far at sea. Gneisenau and Scharnhorst periodically lurked about to keep the British further off balance without subjecting themselves to a decisive naval engagement. Churchill meddled disastrously in the arguments between the senior army and navy commanders at Narvik, while the Luftwaffe, “using bombers, transports and seaplanes with the utmost flexibility,” had demonstrated brilliantly that “a country could be laid open for occupation by ground forces although the attackers were faced by a superior naval power.” The overall result was to neutralize whatever effect the Royal Navy might have had on the campaign. When Hitler unleashed his offensive in the West a month after the Scandinavian invasions, Anglo-French forces were promptly pulled out of northern Norway, but as they left Narvik the always aggressive Admiral Marschall, in Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, fell upon the unsuspecting carrier Glorious (having just missed Ark Royal) and blew it out of the water, despite gallant and futile attacks by the carrier’s destroyer escorts that previewed the actions of American small boys at Leyte Gulf four and a half years thence. Barnett is caustic about the Allied disaster. Although Norway portended the vast amphibious operations of 1942–1945, “those later maritime operations were thoroughly prepared and planned beforehand.” Combined task forces “working together to cover and support major expeditionary forces ashore . . . were organised and rehearsed for their roles in good time.” In contrast, Churchill “precipitately” threw the fleet and British army into a campaign that neither was prepared to wage.