Geography fated Norway to become a theater of World War II. In peacetime, Germany imported more than a third of its iron ore from mines in northern Sweden. For most of the year the ore was transported by rail to the Swedish port of Lulea then by ship through the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic to Germany; but the gulf froze from December through April, and during these months the ore traffic moved to the Norwegian port of Narvik and south through the Leads, a ribbon of territorial waters between the mainland and the fringe of offshore islands.
The advantage the Allies would derive from interdicting this traffic was self-evident, and within two weeks of assuming office as First Lord of the Admiralty (equivalent to U.S. Secretary of the Navy) in September 1939, Winston Churchill began urging his colleagues in the British War Cabinet to authorize the mining of the Leads. Such action would force the ore ships into international waters, where the Royal Navy could intercept them. Unfortunately, it would also violate Norwegian neutrality, and the cabinet, apprehensive of the effect on neutral opinion, declined to approve it.
The Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November cast the Scandinavian situation in a new and, it appeared, morally manageable light. At that moment, the introduction of Allied forces into the region could be presented as a defense rather than a violation of neutral rights. In succeeding months the British made plans to occupy Narvik as a base for supplies and reinforcements to be sent overland to Finland, and—“incidentally,” as Churchill wrote in his memoirs—to take control of the Swedish ore fields. Not surprisingly, Norway and Sweden balked at this program, which collapsed when in March 1940 Finland accepted Soviet armistice terms. By that time, however, the idea of taking some sort of action in Norway had been accepted, and later that month Britain and France agreed to mine the Leads. The date set was 8 April. To forestall a German riposte, troops would land at Narvik and three other Norwegian ports.
Ironically, after so many months of deliberation, the Western Powers timed their action 24 hours too late. As early as September 1939 German counterintelligence had warned Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the Kriegsmarine’s commander in chief, that according to all indications, Britain was planning to land troops in Norway, a warning Raeder relayed duly to Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Other indications appeared following the outbreak of the Russo-Finnish War, and on 14 December Hitler ordered the Armed Forces Supreme Command to prepare plans for the invasion of Norway. From a German standpoint, the ideal solution would have been a neutral Norway; the question was whether Norway could maintain her neutrality. To Hitler this question seems to have been answered on 16 February 1940, when a British destroyer intercepted and boarded the German naval auxiliary Alt- mark in Norwegian waters. On 20 February, Hitler named General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst to command the invasion of Norway; on 1 March, he decided it would precede the offensive in France; and on 16 March, he scheduled the invasion for 9 April. The German high command allocated eight divisions for the operation.
The seizure of Denmark, urged by the Luftwaffe to provide intermediate airfields for flights to Norway, was a simple matter. In contrast, the attack on Norway confronted the Germans with the problem of conducting a seaborne invasion under the nose of the British Home Fleet. Their answer was to substitute surprise and speed for command of the sea. Warships employed as high-speed transports would carry troops to six landing sites: Oslo, Egersund, Christiansand and Arendal, and Bergen in the south; Trondheim midway up the Atlantic coast; and Narvik in the far north. The Kriegsmarine’s every available U-boat would screen this movement. Simultaneously, airborne formations would seize the airfields at Oslo and Stavanger, to which the Luftwaffe would ferry reinforcements. The forces in the south would then push overland to link up with the enclaves at Trondheim and Narvik.
The first German ships put to sea on the afternoon of 7 April. Although British aerial reconnaissance spotted the intruders, the Admiralty assumed that their objective was to break out into the Atlantic. In consequence, the troops already embarked to land in Norway were marched ashore, and the Home Fleet sortied in anticipation of action on the high seas. The next day the Admiralty concluded that the Germans were bound for Narvik and withdrew the four destroyer-minelayers that had begun laying mines there that morning. A plan to blockade the port with a stronger force miscarried after the admiral in command decided that the weather was too bad for the enemy to enter it. He was wrong. At 0415 on 9 April ten modern German destroyers commanded by Commodore Friedrich Bonte reached Narvik, sank the 40-year-old coastal defense ships Eidsvold and Norge, and landed 2,000 alpine troops. Later that day a projected attack by the Home Fleet on the German vessels at Bergen was cancelled at the last minute.
Thus, despite timely information of enemy movements, the Royal Navy failed to contest a single landing. Whatever resistance the Germans encountered came from the Norwegians. This was by no means negligible. Coastal batteries sank the heavy cruiser Blucher and crippled the light cruiser Konigsberg; a Fleet Air Arm strike finished off the latter the next morning. In addition, on the night of the 9th a British submarine claimed the light cruiser Karsruhe on her way back to Germany. But these were acceptable losses, for the invasion had achieved all its initial objectives.
Nevertheless, a dangerous situation was developing at Narvik. Convinced that any ship failing to clear port immediately upon landing her troops would risk being trapped and sunk by a rampaging Royal Navy, the German Naval War Staff had arranged to have two tankers waiting for Bonte’s thirsty destroyers. Unfortunately for the Kriegsma' line, only one tanker had reached Narvik, and it could not refuel more than two destroyers every seven or eight hours. While he might have sent his two replenished ships to sea that evening, Bonte chose to hold his entire command at Narvik until all ten could finish refueling, which would be around midnight on 10 April.
The delay proved fatal. At 2130 on the 9th, Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee led the five vessels of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla up Vestfjord toward Narvik in aggressive accordance with discretionary instructions to attack the German ships there. Aided by a snow storm that masked his approach, Warburton-Lee took five destroyers he found nestled at Narvik completely by surprise. Around 0430, 10 April, a torpedo from his own ship, HMS Hardy, sparked a magazine explosion that blew the stern off the German flagship, the Wilhelm Heidkamp, killing Commodore Bonte and 80 others. Another of Bonte’s ships was sunk, a third disabled, and a fourth badly damaged. Then the other five German destroyers, which had been anchored in outlying fjords, came to the rescue, and the tide of battle turned. A shell that blotted out the Hardy’s bridge mortally wounded Warburton-Lee. His last signal was appropriately Nelsonian: “Keep on engaging enemy.” Two British vessels—the Hardy and the Hunter—were lost, but during their withdrawal, their fellows damaged two more enemy destroyers and exploded a German munitions ship that had picked the wrong moment to enter Vestfjord.
The Germans spent the next day repairing their battered ships and completing the tedious process of refueling. That night, following orders from the homeland, two intact destroyers attempted to slip out to sea. The sight of a British cruiser and two destroyers patrolling the entrance to Vestfjord deterred them. Thereafter, the destroyers at Narvik could do nothing except continue repairs and wait. At 1010 on 13 April an intelligence report from Naval Group West at Wilhelmshaven advised them that their wait would soon be over. Two-and- a-half hours later, a British formation consisting of the battleship Warspite, a modernized veteran of the Battle of Jutland, and nine destroyers with air support from the carrier Furious appeared off the port. The German destroyers fought bravely, seriously damaging three of their counterparts, but around 1330 they began to run out of ammunition, and in the end all eight were scuttled or sunk. For various reasons, including defective torpedoes, four U-boats present in Vestfjord or its branches failed to influence the course of the action, and a British aircraft sank the U-64. The 2,500 surviving destroyermen were organized into ground units that more than doubled German troop strength at Narvik.
The Allies refused to accept the occupation of Norway as a fait accompli. While no one thought it possible to eject the invaders from the south, many believed the north could be saved, and in mid-April forces were landed outside Trondheim and Narvik. These exertions proved unavailing. Local reverses led to the evacuation of the units around Trondheim on 2-3 May; and by 28 May, the day when 24,000 British and French troops finally drove the Germans out of Narvik, the alarming progress of the recently commenced enemy offensive in France revealed that the Allies could not afford a Norwegian sideshow. After demolishing the port installations, they withdrew. The Germans held Narvik for the remainder of the war.
For further reading: Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. I: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948); Captain Peter Dickens, Narvik: Battles in the Fjords (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1974); R.K. Lochner, Als das Eis Brach: Der Krieg zur See um Norwegen 1940 (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1983)