The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  When the Graf Spee was forced into the harbour of Montevideo, capital of neutral Uruguay, on 15 December by the pounding she had received, Langsdorff magnanimously released the Allied sailors he had captured from the ships he had sunk, who reported that they had been well treated. Trusting to BBC radio broadcasts about the imminent arrival of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battle cruiser HMS Renown, and unable to hire a small plane to see whether this was in fact so, Langsdorff sailed the Graf Spee to the entrance of Montevideo harbour just before dusk on Sunday, 17 December and scuttled her. The explosions were watched by over 20,000 spectators on the shore, and heard on the radio by millions around the world. In fact only the cruiser HMS Cumberland had managed to reach Montevideo; the BBC had patriotically taken part in a giant bluff. Five days later, Langsdorff shot himself.

  By the end of 1939, Britain had lost 422,000 tons of shipping (260,000 by mines) against Germany’s 224,000, but as a proportion of their total tonnages Germany at 5 per cent had lost more than Britain at 2 per cent. In the naval war of attrition that this was going to be, the relative proportions were more important than the sheer overall tonnages. Had Hitler given first priority in terms of funding to his U-boat fleet on coming to power in 1933, rather than to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, he might have built a force that would have strangled and starved Britain into surrender. Perhaps realizing this, on 15 February 1940 the Führer issued a directive to all U-boat captains stating that any ship, neutral or otherwise, sailing towards a British-controlled war zone, such as the English Channel, must be sunk without warning. For all the protests this new policy engendered from the neutral ship-owning countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway, it was if anything surprising that such orders had not been issued earlier. Besides, the level of respect that Germany felt for Scandinavian neutrality was to be spectacularly demonstrated only three weeks later.

  If Poland and Finland had merely demonstrated the impotence of Britain and France – with many Britons and Frenchmen concluding that the appeasing spirit of the 1930s had not been entirely expunged from their Governments’ souls – the Norway campaign represented a definite defeat for the Western powers. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder urged Hitler as early as 10 October 1939 to consider invading Norway as a way of protecting the transportation of iron ore from the Gällivare mines in northern Sweden to Germany, and establishing U-boat bases along the fjords, especially at Trondheim. Hitler ordered the OKW to start planning for an invasion in late January 1940. At that point Hitler did not want to divert troops from the attack he was planning in the west, and was persuaded to do so only by signs that the Allies were planning to invade Norway themselves, possibly using aid for Finland as a cloak for their actions.

  An incident on 16 February, in which the neutral Norwegians seemed to have taken the Royal Navy’s side when HMS Cossack daringly rescued 299 British prisoners from a German vessel, the Altmark, also persuaded the Führer of Norway’s iniquity. Telling General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, the commander of the corps which was to lead the expedition, that a British invasion of Norway ‘would lead them into the Baltic, where we have no troops nor coastal fortifications’ and eventually to Berlin itself, Hitler decided to strike.33 In order to simplify lines of communication, and prevent the Royal Navy operating in the Skagerrak and Kattegat Straits, Denmark would be invaded also.

  Although the Allies had lost any Finnish excuse for intervention in mid-March after the Treaty of Moscow was signed between Finland and the USSR, they did indeed plan to invade neutral Norway in order to deny the Gällivare ore fields to Germany, and had actually boarded troops at Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s base in the Orkney Isles, in order to do so, when the German attack began only twenty-four hours beforehand. (The British military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart later called the race to invade Norway a ‘photo-finish’.) Starting on 8 April, Allied planes dropped mines into the Norwegian Leads, the deep, sheltered waterways between the fjords and the islands along the coast from Stavanger to the Northern Cape, hoping to force German ore ships out into the Norwegian Sea where the Royal Navy could sink them. Operation Wilfred was a blatant incursion into Norwegian territorial waters that preceded Germany’s own, and was to lead to the sinking of twenty Norwegian vessels as well as twelve German ones, and when at the end of the Nuremberg Trials Admiral Raeder was given a life sentence for, in part, violating Norway’s neutrality, the hypocrisy led to accusations of ‘victors’ justice’.

  The British Admiralty believed that with Britain’s naval superiority in the Norwegian Sea it was impossible for the Germans to effect an amphibious invasion of Norway, and so were caught utterly by surprise when at dawn on Tuesday, 9 April Operation Weserübung (Weser Crossing) successfully landed troops – initially no more than 2,000 in each location – and soon secured Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik (the railway terminus for the Gällivare iron-fields). It was one of the great coups of the Second World War. Paratroopers also captured Oslo and Stavanger airfields by daybreak. The British simply could not believe the news that a place as far north as Narvik – 1,200 miles from Germany – had fallen, thinking it must be a mistransmission of the name Larvik, a town near the mouth of the Oslo fjord. The Norwegians, who at the time were concentrating more on the threat to their sovereignty from the Allies than on that from the Axis, were caught by surprise as much as anyone and had no time to mobilize. The Norwegian defence budget of the early 1930s was 35 million kroner, which had increased to only 50 million (£2.5 million) by the time she was invaded. Her Navy was entirely for coastal defence and the Army was small too.34 Employing only three divisions – although one of those was General Eduard Dietl’s crack 169th Mountain Division – but supported by 800 warplanes and 250 transport planes, the Germans had achieved every objective by the end of their first day. The hazy weather, intricate coastline and German inter-service co-ordination and efficiency, as well as the considerable distances involved, meant that the Allies were unable to interdict the German operation.

  Bergen was taken by the light cruiser Köln tricking its way into the harbour by using British radio signals. Two brave Norwegian coastal vessels fought back at Narvik, but were sunk. At Trondheim, the Admiral Hipper blinded coastal batteries with searchlights, and destroyed one that managed to open fire. Off Bergen, the Luftwaffe’s X Air Corps sank the destroyer HMS Gurkha and damaged the cruisers HMS Southampton and HMS Glasgow and the battleship HMS Rodney. Allied strategists took this, and the further battering the Royal Navy was to receive from the Luftwaffe during this campaign, as the foremost lesson of Norway: that power had tilted towards the air and away from the sea. With only one of its four active aircraft carriers, HMS Furious, in the region – and for reasons of time she had sailed with her torpedo bombers on board but without her fighter squadron – the British could not match the Luftwaffe. Although HMS Ark Royal and HMS Glorious were sent post-haste from Alexandria to assist the Allied counter-attack, they didn’t arrive until 24 April.

  The RAF never managed to deploy more than a hundred planes during the campaign, against more than a thousand German, flying from aerodromes as close as Oslo and Stavanger. When the RAF did set up makeshift airfields in Norway its planes had to be kept running around the clock, and ‘had to be refuelled with jugs and buckets’.35 The news that the two battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were supporting the operation in the Norwegian Sea also distracted Admiralty minds from the possibility of sinking smaller troop-carrying warships.36 The Allied response to Germany’s invasion was swift enough, but haphazard and badly disorganized, and the plans changed more than once as they were being put into practice, with confusion and occasionally chaos resulting. The British troops who were embarked for the invasion of Norway had to be disembarked in Scotland so that the battle cruisers could be chased, leading one military historian to argue that ‘the Admiralty saw the whole operation through blinkers’.37 When they were later re-embarked for the counter-invasion, but without the correct equipment, a sense of incomp
etence began to attach itself to the campaign which was only to get worse, and which was eventually to help bring down the Chamberlain Government.

  Although on 9 April artillery from the Oscarburg fortress near Oslo sank the cruiser Blücher – one of the very few victims of coastal guns during the Second World War – the Norwegian capital fell. It nonetheless gave King Haakon VII and his Government time to escape and make a long, brave fighting retreat northwards, with the impressive Otto Ruge being appointed the new Army chief of staff in the process. By contrast, King Christian x of Denmark had no opportunity to flee. As he woke up at 5.15 a.m. that day, he was handed a list of thirteen ultimata by the German Minister (soon to be Plenipotentiary) Cecil von Renthe-Fink. After the deaths of twelve Danes, and appreciating that his country was encircled and unable to resist in any meaningful way, he and the Cabinet prevented a massacre by ordering a general surrender. A fiction was concocted by which it was announced that Denmark had agreed ‘to place her neutrality under the protection of the Reich’, a somewhat tautological construction but one that allowed the country to retain her non-Nazi government. When the Führer’s appeal to Denmark was about to be read over Danish radio, it was discovered that the appeal to Norway had been provided instead, one of the only inefficient aspects of the whole operation, so the announcer had to rewrite it hurriedly just before going on air.38 With Denmark’s collapse in under four hours, the vital Aalborg airfield in North Jutland could now be used by the Luftwaffe to pour supplies and troops into Norway. It also meant that the Royal Navy could not enter the Skagerrak with anything other than submarines.

  The Royal Navy could punish the Kriegsmarine once it had landed the invasion force, and in two battles in the fjord off Narvik, on 11 and 13 April, no fewer than nine German destroyers were sunk or put out of action, most of them by the battleship HMS Warspite. But the fear that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were at Bergen or Trondheim meant that the chance of recapturing the ports early on was lost, even though, as it transpired, the German battle cruisers were not there. Instead the Allies landed 125 miles north of Trondheim at Namsos on the night of 18 April, and 190 miles south of it at Åndalsnes the same day, hoping to cross the snowy wastes in between and take it from the land. After being briefed on this operation at the Admiralty, its designated commander, Major-General Frederick Hotblack, had a heart attack on the Duke of York’s Steps on the Mall, on his way back to his club. His successor’s plane then crashed on its way to Scotland.

  After the Allied force landed at Namsos, under Major-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart vc, ceaseless heavy pounding from Heinkel bombers ended hopes that it might take Trondheim. ‘The town was destroyed, the timber houses burned, the railhead and everything on it obliterated. Electricity and water supplies were cut off, even the wharves were wrecked,’ records one who was there. ‘Namsos had ceased to exist.’39 The bombing in ‘the land of the midnight sun’ seemed to be round the clock, and was demoralizing for the Allied troops, as was the fact that a French ship carrying skis, snow-shoes, guns and tanks proved too large to get into the harbour.40 The one-handed, one-eyed, sixty-year-old de Wiart was one of the bravest British officers of the twentieth century. Wounded during earlier wars in the ankle, hip, ear and leg, his body was a virtual scrap-metal yard. He even had shrapnel lodged in his head that he said tickled every time his hair was cut. Yet even he saw no possibility of moving southwards without any RAF support. Namsos was evacuated on 2 May, by which time the British force had already evacuated Åndalsnes.

  Up at Narvik the Allied force, which had landed at Harstad in the Lofoten Islands on 14 April, soon numbered 20,000 to the Germans’ 4,000. Although inter-Allied co-operation worked well, relations between the British Army and Navy collapsed at Narvik because they were, incredibly enough, acting under contradictory instructions. Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery had been ordered to take Narvik whatever happened, whereas the commander of the land forces, Major-General Pierse Mackesy, had been authorized to wait for the thaw before taking the town. While the admiral and the general argued, and Mackesy tried to pull Cork out of the battle, German supplies reached the town, gun emplacements were built and enemy morale soared. Mackesy, whose troops had inexplicably had their snow-shoes offloaded in Scotland, had a point, however, as Cork discovered for himself when he went out to reconnoitre the position and slipped up to his waist in snow.41 These inter-service problems were soon dealt with, but reflected badly on the Chamberlain Government at the time.

  Some fine Polish mountain troops, two battalions of the French Foreign Legion and General Béthouart’s Chasseurs Alpins, as well as the British and the Norwegians, were finally to take Narvik on 27 May, capturing a well-equipped airfield with wire-mesh landing strips and camouflaged shelters. However, after Hitler’s victories in France and the Low Countries, such a tiny Scandinavian foothold was untenable, and the Narvik force was evacuated between 2 and 7 June, along with the Norwegian royal family and Government, but not Otto Ruge, who decided to stay with his men and was imprisoned. The Germans ran Norway directly until February 1942 when the Norwegian Nazi Vidkun Quisling was appointed minister-president and was permitted to run the most autonomous of all the Reich’s puppet governments, because the Germans knew they could trust him ideologically. He had made his name as a humanitarian during the Russian famines and Armenian refugee crises of the 1920s, although his dreams of world federation under Nordic leadership never appealed to the Norwegian electorate, and his small Nasjonal Samling party was only ever a marginal force in the 1930s.42 The Norwegians despised him throughout his period of rule, and had the court trying him for high treason somehow not imposed the death penalty upon him in 1945, his prison guards had agreed among themselves to murder him anyhow.

  On 8 June, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau intercepted the British aircraft carrier Glorious (carrying two squadrons of aircraft, including Hurricanes) and her escort destroyers Acasta and Ardent, and sank all three, although not before the skipper of Acasta, Commander C. E. Glasfurd, had sailed his ship straight at the enemy and managed to launch a torpedo that damaged Scharnhorst moments before she was herself sunk by a salvo from the cruiser’s 11-inch guns. The only man in Acasta to survive the sinking, after three days on a raft in the North Sea, Leading Seaman C. G. ‘Nick’ Carter, recalled: ‘When I was in the water I saw the captain leaning over the bridge, take a cigarette from a case and light it. We shouted to him to come on our raft, he waved “Goodbye and good luck” – the end of a gallant man.’43

  A number of factors had coalesced to make the Norway campaign a disaster for the Allies, including frequent changes of plan, radio sets that General Sir Claude Auchinleck thought worse than the ones used on India’s North-West Frontier, and 1919-era Arctic boots that were several sizes too large, meaning that ‘days were devoted to doctoring’.44 Although the Allies were humiliated in Norway, and the myth of the invincibility of the Führer and his master race that had been sedulously promoted since the remilitarization of the Rhineland was further boosted, the German victory came at a high cost. Compared to the 6,700 British, Norwegians, French and Polish killed (1,500 on Glorious) and the 112 aircraft destroyed, the Germans lost 5,660 killed and 240 aircraft in the Norwegian campaign. While the Royal Navy lost one aircraft carrier, one cruiser (with three more damaged), eight destroyers and four submarines, and the Poles and French one destroyer and one submarine each, the Germans lost three cruisers, ten destroyers, four U-boats and several months in which Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were out of action. These figures may seem almost even, but the much smaller Kriegsmarine could ill afford such losses compared to the Allies, especially when General Franz Halder’s plans to invade southern England on a wide initial front, codenamed Operation Seelöwe (Sealion), required much naval support.

  Once France fell in June 1940, the Germans had the Alsace-Lorraine iron-ore fields and the Atlantic ports that took the place of Gällivare and Trondheim. But 125,000 square miles of Norway still needed to be garrisoned for much of the rest
of the war by at least twelve German divisions, totalling around 350,000 men. Hitler expected an attack on Norway for several years after 1940, and kept an inordinate number of troops idle there who could have been far better employed on the Eastern Front; it was not until after D-Day in June 1944 that they were brought south. He was right to fear an attack there, however, as Churchill always wanted to secure northern Norway for the Allies and prevent its use by the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe in their interdicting of the convoys that were sent to Murmansk after Hitler had invaded Russia. The ice-free ports of the Northern Cape were certainly useful to Germany in that respect.

  The German invasion of Denmark legitimized the Allies’ capture of Reykjavik and the Faroe Isles the following month, which were to yield air bases vital to the anti-submarine campaigns of the battle of the Atlantic. Furthermore, no fewer than 4.6 million tons of shipping – Norway had the fourth-largest merchant navy in the world in 1939 – were added to Allied resources, and used from Murmansk to the Pacific.45 Since the entire aggregate of all Allied losses by submarines did not exceed that figure until December 1941, the Germans had to pay a high price for violating Norwegian sovereignty twenty-four hours before the Allies did.

  Speaking of Adolf Hitler in the Central Hall, Westminster on 4 April, only five days before the German invasion of Norway, Neville Chamberlain said: ‘One thing is certain – he missed the bus.’ Along with his prophecy of ‘Peace in our time’ after meeting Hitler at Munich, it was one of his less impressive predictions, but he was not the only person to have spoken too soon. Churchill also told the House of Commons on 11 April that ‘We are greatly advantaged by… the strategic blunder into which our mortal enemy has been provoked.’ The Norway campaign was a serious setback for the Allies, but if it achieved nothing else, the two-day House of Commons debate on the subject on 7 and 8 May 1940 did at least destroy the Chamberlain Government, and bring to power an energetic coalition under the premiership of Churchill, ironically enough the Briton most directly responsible for the Norway expedition and the Admiralty’s unimpressive part in it.