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World War 2:
War in Norway and Denmark
German Planning
Allied Intentions
German Landings
Norwegian Campaign
German Planning
When the campaign in Poland ended, the Germans, contrary
to widely held opinion at the time, did not have a clear idea of what
to do next. In a conference held on Sept. 23, 1939, Hitler raised the
question of measures to be adopted "in case" the war against
Great Britain and France had to be fought to a finish. The possibility
of unrestricted submarine warfare, to be proclaimed as a "siege
of Britain," was considered.
If Hitler had decided on the siege of Britain, it would
have had to be executed by the German Navy and Air Force. On October
3, the commander in chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, told
his staff that he believed the navy could operate more effectively against
the British Isles if it were to acquire one or two bases in Norway,
possibly at Trondheim and Narvik. His thinking reflected the opinion,
common in German naval circles after World War I, that the German Navy
would have made a better showing in that conflict if, instead of being
bottled up in the North Sea, it had had Norwegian bases to use as sally
ports on the Atlantic. When it investigated the question of Norwegian
bases on Raeder's orders, the Naval Staff learned that the chief of
the Army General Staff, Col. Gen. Franz Halder, was pessimistic. He
did not think that the army could either take or defend bases in Norway.
The Naval Staff itself concluded that it was to Germany's advantage
to keep Norway neutral, especially since the navy lacked sufficient
ships to use the proposed bases for full-scale sea warfare. By taking
the bases, it decided, Germany might lose more than she gained. While
Norway remained neutral, its territorial waters afforded safe routes
for German blockade-runners and for ships bringing Swedish iron ore
down from Narvik. The German war industry was completely dependent on
Swedish ore, which in winter, when the Baltic Sea froze, could be shipped
only via Narvik.
During October and November, Hitler devoted all of his
attention to plans for invading France and Belgium. Raeder tried to
interest him in the Norwegian bases but failed until December, when
he persuaded Hitler to grant an interview to Vidkun Quisling, who led
a Norwegian copy of the Nazi Party. Quisling claimed to know that the
Norwegian government had secretly agreed not to oppose a British invasion.
After talking to Quisling, Hitler, on December 14, ordered the OKW Operations
Staff to investigate the possibility of occupying Norway.
That Hitler began to think about Norway was not entirely
Quisling's work. Soviet aggression against Finland had aroused strong
sympathy for the Finns and had unleashed a wave of antiGerman sentiment
in Scandinavia. While Germany took a neutral stand that favored the
Soviet Union, the Allies had begun talking about sending troops to help
the Finns. If troops were sent, the shortest route would be through
Narvik and across northern Sweden, directly past the KirunaGallivare
ore fields so important to Germany.
In January 1940, the Foreign Political Office of the
Nazi Party undertook to maintain contact with Quisling and provide financial
support for his party. Ignoring Quisling, OKW continued its planning
on a small scale and in secret. Hitler did not show any real enthusiasm
for the Norwegian venture until after February 16. On that day the British
destroyer Cossack entered Norwegian territorial waters and took 300
captured British seamen from the German tanker Altmark. The Altmark
had been the supply ship for the ill-fated commerce raider Admiral Graf
Spec. Hitler became convinced that the British no longer intended to
respect Norway's neutrality. On February 21, he called in Gen. (later
Col. Gen.) Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, commanding general of the 21st
Corps, and gave him the mission of planning and (if it were to be executed)
commanding an operation against Norway.
Signs that the British and French intended to use the
Russo-Finnish War as an excuse to intervene in Scandinavia added urgency
to German planning in late February and early March. On March 7, Hitler
assigned 8 infantry divisions and a motorized brigade to Falkenhorst.
Toward the middle of the month radio intercepts indicated that troop
transports were loading in British ports. Another intercept, on March
15, revealed that the Soviet-Finnish armistice had spoiled the Allied
plans. The armistice also deprived Hitler of his excuse for moving against
Norway, and some of the officers in the planning group began to doubt
whether it was worthwhile to go ahead. On March 26, however, Raeder
told Hitler that, although Allied landings need not be expected in Norway
in the near future, Germany would have to face the question sooner or
later. He advised that Germany act as soon as possible, because the
nights in northern latitudes would be too short to afford good cover
for naval forces after April 15. Hitler agreed. On April 2, after reviewing
the plans and learning from the air force and navy that the weather
would be satisfactory, he named April 9 as the day for the landings.
Allied Intentions
A British-French staff paper of April 1939 on strategic
policy recognized that in the first phase of a war with Germany economic
warfare would be the only effective Allied offensive weapon. In the
light of this fact and of World War I experience in blockading Germany,
Norway inevitably assumed a special importance for the Western powers
as soon as war broke out. Before mid-September, the British government
had made its first attempt to secure from Norway a "sympathetic"
interpretation of its rights as a neutral.
The Soviet attack on Finland at the end of November
aroused the hope that Norway and Sweden, motivated by sympathy for Finland
and by their duty as members of the League of Nations, might permit
Allied troops sent to aid the Finns to cross their territory. Such an
undertaking could be made to include the occupation of Narvik and of
the Swedish ore fields almost automatically. After Field Marshal Mannerheim
appealed for aid on Jan. 29, 1940, the Allied Supreme War Council decided
to send an expedition timed for mid-March. The plan, while ostensibly
intended to bring Allied troops to the Finnish front, placed its emphasis
on Norway and Sweden. The main force was to land at Narvik and advance
along the ore railroad to its eastern terminus at Lulea, Sweden. Only
after two brigades were firmly established along that line would a third
brigade be sent into Finland. The preparations moved slowly, and the
two governments never quite faced the question what they would do if
Norway and Sweden refused transit rights or decided to fight. After
Finland accepted the Treaty of Moscow on March 12, the whole project
collapsed.
On March 21, Paul Reynaud became the head of a French
government committed to a more aggressive policy, and a week later the
Supreme War Council again raised the Scandinavian question. A new plan
called for two related operations: the laying of minefields in Norwegian
waters; and landings at Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and Stavanger, to
be justified by the expected violent German reaction to the minelaying.
After some delays the mines were laid on the morning of April 8, but
by then the German Fleet was already advancing up the Norwegian coast.
German Landings
The initial German invasion force for Norway totaled
10,500 men. Provisions were made to introduce an additional 16,700 men
through Oslo in the first week and 40,000 more thereafter. The plan
called for a peaceful occupation of the country, allegedly to protect
Norwegian neutrality. Falkenhorst's staff concluded that landings at
Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, Stavanger, Kristiansand, Egersund, Arendal,
and Oslo would place the major centers of population in German hands
and effectively crush Norwegian attempts to mobilize. The earlier planners
had considered that it would be sufficient to extract several bases
from Denmark by diplomatic pressure, but Falkenhorst decided that it
would be safer to take military possession of the country as a land
bridge to Norway. To this task he assigned, under Gen. Leonhard Kaupisch,
the headquarters of the 31st Corps, 2 infantry divisions, and a motorized
brigade.
The first plans had called for an attempt to sneak troops
into the Norwegian ports aboard merchant ships. Falkenhorst's staff
considered this project too dangerous and decided instead to transport
all of the landing teams ( except the one for Stavanger, which was to
go by air) in warships. Merchant ships were restricted to carrying supplies
and troops for landings on the Danish islands, where they would not
have to venture outside the German-controlled Baltic Sea. The decision
to use warships made the landings the most hazardous phase of the operation:
if the vastly superior British Fleet had put in an appearance, it might
have destroyed virtually the whole German Navy.
The first two groups of warships sailed on April 7,
escorted by the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; 10 destroyers
were bound for Narvik, and the cruiser Hipper and 4 destroyers for Trondheim.
Nine other warship groups sailed at intervals that depended on their
speeds and on the distances they had to travel. They consisted of the
heavy cruiser Blucher and the pocket battleship Lutzow bound for Oslo,
several older cruisers, training ships, torpedo boats, and a variety
of smaller craft carrying landing parties to Denmark. A British aircraft
sighted the first two warship groups six hours after they sailed, but
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes, commander in chief of the Home
Fleet, concluded that the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were
setting out on a raiding mission into the Atlantic and sent his own
ships steaming northward behind them, leaving the North Sea open for
the remaining German warship groups.
The landings were executed on time on April 9 everywhere
except at Oslo. There the old guns (Krupp model 1905) of the Oscarsborg
fort 18 miles south of the city sank the Blucher and held the rest of
the ships off until the following day. The delay gave the Norwegian
king, Haakon VII, and the government time to escape from the capital
and made conclusive the failure of the plan to occupy the country without
a fight.
In the case of Denmark everything went exactly according
to plan. On April 9, one division and the motorized brigade advanced
northward across the border into Jutland (Jylland) , and the other division
staged landings on the islands. Early the same morning, the German minister,
Dr. Cecil von Renthe-Fink, presented himself at the Foreign Ministry
in Copenhagen (Kobenhavn) with a demand for surrender and assurances
that the country would be permitted to retain much of its internal sovereignty.
After he added that planes were on their way to bomb the city, the Danish
government capitulated at 7:20 A.M.
In executing the Norwegian landings, the German surface
fleet achieved its greatest success of the war. It also suffered near-crippling
losses. The cruisers Konigsberg and Karlsruhe were sunk before they
could leave Norwegian waters, and in two battles (April 10 and 13) British
ships sank the 10 destroyers which had taken troops to Narvik.
Norwegian Campaign
On the morning of April 9, Norwegian Foreign Minister
Halvdan Koht told Dr. Curt Brauer, the German minister in Oslo: "We
will not submit. The battle is already in progress." But how to
fight was another matter. The Norwegian Army's total strength was 15,320
men, and half of them were stationed in the Arctic as an aftermath of
the Russo-Finnish War. On April 9, the Germans captured a good share
of the army's equipment and all the key communications centers. Two
days later, from his headquarters at Rena north of Oslo, the Norwegian
Army's commander in chief, Gen. Otto Ruge, had effective control of
only one division. With that he planned to delay the German advance
north from Oslo and hold open a field of operations in the interior
for an anticipated Allied expeditionary force.
The first problem for the Germans was to establish land
contact between Oslo and the landing parties in the other coastal cities.
By April 16, Falkenhorst had units advancing northward toward Trondheim
through the two great valleys, the Gudbrandsdal and the Osterdal. Between
April 18 and 23, two British brigades, totaling about 6,000 men, landed
at Andalsnes south of Trondheim. Another 6,000 British and French troops
went ashore at Namsos to the north of the city. At Tretten on April
23, the Germans defeated one British brigade which had advanced southward
into the Gudbrandsdal from Andalsnes, and thereafter the British withdrew
to Andalsnes, where their last troops were evacuated on May 2. The German
units coming from Oslo had made contact with their Trondheim detachment
the day before. In the meantime, the British and French had decided
also to evacuate Namsos, which they did on May 3. The last Norwegian
resistance in the area south of Trondheim ended on the same day, when
the 2d Division surrendered on the Dovrefjell.
At Narvik events at first took a different course. The
city could not be reached by land except through Sweden, and it was
not within easy range for the Luftwaffe. The German commander in Narvik,
Gen. (later Col. Gen.) Eduard Dietl, had 2,000 mountain troops and 2,600
sailors, survivors from the sunken destroyers. Beginning on April 14,
British and French troops joined the Norwegian 6th Division in a seven
weeks' siege that eventually drove the Germans out of Narvik and back
to the Swedish border. By the last week in May, Dietl's force faced
24,500 Allied troops, but by then the British and French armies in France
were collapsing, and the Allied command had decided to withdraw from
Norway. After destroying the port installations at Narvik, the Allied
troops began boarding ship on June 4, and the rear guard sailed on June
8.
On June 9, the Norwegian Army command agreed to an armistice,
which ended the campaign at midnight that day. Although Norway was not
again a scene of active operations, except for Commando-style raids
and resistance activity, it remained in the forefront of the war until
May 1945. Hitler regarded it as the northern bastion of his Fortress
Europe and maintained a 300,000man army there throughout the war.
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