A World at Arms (26 page)

The official German directive for the invasion had been given on March 1, 1940.
²⁶⁴
In the first days of April the German ships were loaded with troops and supplies, while the air force got ready for its role in the attack. The First Lord of the Admiralty in London, Winston Churchill, had long urged British action in Scandinavia and on March 14 had expressed to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax his dismay at the victory for Germany implicit in the end of the Russo-Finnish war while the Western Allies only waited on events.
²⁶⁵
The British would try by mines to force German ore transports from Narvik into open waters, but there was to be no Allied invasion. When, however, the naval attaché sent warnings from Copenhagen that German warships were headed for Norway, Churchill disregarded them, so that the British, like the Norwegians and Danes themselves, were surprised when Germany struck.
²⁶⁶
German officers had been sent to Oslo and Copenhagen ahead of time, traveling in civilian clothes, and there could meet the landing forces as they arrived.
²⁶⁷

The German forces moving into Denmark over land and also arriving at key points by sea quickly overpowered local resistance and overawed the Danish government. Within the day, Denmark had surrendered; and the Germans now controlled the exits from the Baltic Sea, the agricultural resources of Denmark, and a key stage on the sea and air route to Norway.

The Norwegian operation, on the other hand, did not go so easily. In view of Germany’s inferiority at sea, the only hope for success was seen as surprise. A series of separate but simultaneous landings would take place at the key centers of Norwegian population and port facilities, scattered over enormous distances because of the geography of the country.
²⁶⁸
These landings were both so far apart from each other and, especially at Narvik and Trondheim, at such a great distance from German bases that only fast warships could carry the assault troops. This, in turn, meant that the number of soldiers in the initial assault wave had to be quite small, and that it would greatly help if the surprised Norwegians could be persuaded to surrender rather than to fight.

Confusion within the German forces and some effective resistance by the forts defending the Norwegian capital, however, did more than lead to the sinking of Germany’s newest heavy cruiser, the
Bluecher,
by an ancient gun bought from Krupp and torpedoes purchased from pre-World War I Austria.
²⁶⁹
It gave the Norwegian government time to evacuate the capital and Quisling an opportunity to make his role public. That combination settled it: the government would not give in and the people would not submit to the eccentric from the fringes of Norwegian politics who had sold out his country. The Germans’ dropping Quisling
and appointing the Nazi district chief (
Gauleiter
) Josef Terboven from Germany in his place could not undo the damage; on the contrary, it only revealed to the Norwegians where a German victory would leave them.

If military victory at Oslo was accompanied by political defeat and naval losses, the rest of the campaign followed an extraordinarily similar pattern. Everywhere German surprise and initiative triumphed over the unprepared, inadequate, and poorly armed Norwegian forces. Having quickly seized the main ports and airfields, the Germans were in an excellent position to strike back at the British, French and Polish forces which landed north and south of Trondheim, at Namsos and Andalsnes, to assist the Norwegians. If the German command structure was confused, that of the Allies was chaotic and further hampered by examples of that gross incompetence on the part of British generals, which would continue to bedevil the British army, at least into the summer of I942.
ⁿ
The control of airports in Norway, secured in the first days by the Germans, allowed them to demonstrate dramatically and quickly early in the war the critical importance of land-based airpower as dominant over seapower and landing forces without their own land-based air force. The German units moving from Oslo and Trondheim toward each other joined, while the British, French and Polish troops in central Norway had to be evacuated.

In this portion of the campaign the Germans, though winning on land and in the air, had suffered substantial damage to their naval forces. In the far north, at Narvik, it was even worse. The ten destroyers–half of the German navy’s modern ships of this type–which had carried the landing force to Narvik were all destroyed as a result of two attacks into the fjords around Narvik by the British navy. Many of their crew members joined the troops which tried to hold the town against an Allied landing force, but the ships were gone. As it was, the Allies took Narvik at the end of May in an extraordinarily dilatory campaign, only to evacuate it because in the meantime the German offensive in the West made it seem advisable to pull all Allied forces out of Norway. The difficult situation of the German troops, a situation which had caused Hitler to panic at one point, was redeemed by the victory in the West; the naval losses could not be made good so quickly.

These were, furthermore, increased by the extraordinary reaction of the German naval command to the signs of victory in the West as well as in Norway. All the evidence available suggests that Raeder completely lost his head over what he, like so many Germans, saw as the prospect of imminent victory in the whole war. Forgetting his and the navy’s own prior emphasis on the
French
ports as the best base for Atlantic operations, and fearful that the war might end before he could demonstrate to Hitler’s satisfaction the great value of a battleship navy, he ordered the two available battleships into operations off the Norwegian coasts in late May and June 1940. Both the
Scharnhorst
(only just repaired from earlier damage in the Norwegian operation) and
Gneisenau
were torpedoed by British submarines in these prestige maneuvers; they would not be ready for operations in the Atlantic again until the end of December. And in the process another German admiral was canned by Raeder, while his successor was covered with reproaches.
²⁷⁰

At the end of the campaign, the Germans, who had employed practically their whole navy in the operation, had lost most of their larger surface ships, at least for some time. On July 1, 1940, the German navy could deploy for action one heavy and two light cruisers together with no more than four destroyers! All the other ships of destroyer size or larger had been sunk or damaged.
²⁷¹
As they faced the prospect of mounting an invasion of England in the critical summer and fall of 1940, they had to do so practically without a surface fleet. Neville Chamberlain was often mocked for his comment on April 4, 1940, that Hitler “missed the bus” by not launching a big offensive earlier.
²⁷²
The Norwegian campaign which followed a few days later was often held up as a sign that it was the Allies, not the Germans, who had missed it. The German strategic dilemma of the summer of 1940, which will be examined in the next chapter, may suggest that the answer is by no means so obvious.

What was obvious, however, was that the Allies had suffered a visible defeat under circumstances in which by the views of the ordinary person they should have won. The end of the Russo-Finnish war in Soviet victory and without Allied intervention had led to the fall of the Daladier government in France in March; the Norwegian campaign would end the government of Neville Chamberlain. The debate in the House of Commons in early May was bitter; an accumulation of dissatisfaction, disappointment, personal animosity and partisanship washed over the government in spite of the defense Chamberlain and Churchill put up. The government’s majority dropped substantially as many Conservatives voted against it and even more abstained. Knowing that the other parties would not serve under his leadership–he had asked them at the outbreak of war only to be refused – Chamberlain promptly decided to
resign. The new German offensive in the West, just launched, made a national coalition government essential. His own expectation and that of most others was that Lord Halifax would succeed him, but Halifax himself did not want to take the position of Prime Minister. Churchill was the obvious choice under these circumstances, and the other parties as well as Neville Chamberlain and Halifax agreed to serve under him.
^o
The new leadership will be examined in the context in which it came to power in May of 1940; its succession was occasioned by the allied debacle in Norway.

There would be several further occasions when the British were called upon at the last minute to rescue some country unexpectedly invaded by the Axis powers, and when they had held off Allied assistance until too late in the vain hope that neutrality provided some protection against attack. In all such cases there would again be considerable criticism in London of the British government–rather than of the poor judgement of Germany’s most recent victim–but never again would the ensuing disasters bring down the government.

If the Norwegians lost their independence, the British their government, and the Germans most of their surface fleet–at least for the time being–what did the invaders gain? The most tangible immediate benefit was the assurance of iron ore from Sweden. Not only did control of Norway mean that the Germans could ship iron ore to Narvik by train and from Narvik to Germany in winter, but combined with the occupation of Denmark the occupation of Norway provided a strong position to extort from Sweden almost anything the Third Reich wanted. Already during the fighting the Swedes had allowed German specialists and supplies to travel across Sweden to aid in the fighting at Narvik. Now the Swedes would feel obliged to agree to a whole series of concessions to Germany. Not only would iron ore be delivered in vast quantities, everything possible would be done to assure supplies for German war industry including draft deferments for those Swedes working in the mines. Vast numbers of German soldiers would be allowed to travel on Swedish trains, hundreds of thousands by the end of the war, as Swedish “neutrality” was modified to accommodate German demands. The German navy could order warships built in Swedish yards, and the Swedish economy would
operate on rations set in Berlin.
²⁷³
It was, and remained, easier for the Germans to exploit Sweden in this fashion for her own war effort than to run the risks and costs of occupation. If Germany won the war, as she confidently expected, then Sweden’s independence would follow that of Denmark’s and Norway’s into the trashcan; if she lost, Sweden could reorient her policy once again, as she in fact began to do in 1943–44 once this looked safe.

The Germans could also begin the process of incorporating Norway as well as Denmark into their new empire. The first steps along these lines were taken during the war; others would follow after victory. Here were some real Germanic types who could add their numbers and skills to those fine Nordic Aryans who had brought them into a greater fold. In the thousand-year Reich there would be plenty of time and opportunity to integrate the people along with the splendid scenery; in the meantime those so inclined could be recruited into the special Germanic formations of the SS which Himmler was developing. A special unit, eventually a full division, would be recruited from these Nordics.

A more substantial benefit in the war was assumed to be attained by the acquisition of those bases on the Norwegian coast which the German navy had long sought. In the short run, this meant opportunities for German submarines and surface ships to use Norwegian ports in the war on British shipping. In the intermediate time period–the later stages of the war–bases for ships and planes in Norway would be of enormous assistance in attacking Allied efforts to supply the Soviet Union by the Arctic route, a subject to be reviewed in its context later. Finally, in the long run, Trondheim was to become a German city, joined by a four-lane highway to the German heartland, and offering a permanent base for Germany’s blue-water navy in its world-wide role.
²⁷⁴
This project was being built on as late as 1943, but by that time another aspect of the commitment to Norway was becoming apparent: it called for ever greater investment of German troops and materiel, most of both being held there until the surrender of 1945.

The Soviet Union had isolated herself from the campaign in Norway by restoring Petsamo to Finland at the end of the Russo-Finnish war. She happily congratulated the Germans on their victory, a victory assisted by the Soviet provision of a naval base for the key supply ship to Narvik. Whether Stalin was as clever as he thought himself in assisting the Germans to drive the Allies out of Northern Europe, just as he would soon help the Germans drive them out of Western Europe, is another matter.

The American government and public were shocked by the invasion
of Denmark and Norway. This dramatic ending of the “phony war” immediately occupied the headlines and the news reels. Once again Germany had attacked, in this instance two countries which obviously had done nothing against her. The speed of events and the inability of the Allies to stop Germany were ominous. The alarm as well as the revulsion caused by this step were accentuated by a factor which, as far as the evidence shows, had been ignored by the Germans. Greenland was under Danish sovereignty, and if not visible from Berlin was highly visible from Washington. Steps were taken to develop direct relations with that great island and later to include it in the Western Hemisphere neutrality zone. In Washington as well as in London there was also great concern about the fate of Iceland, tied as it was to the Danish crown and strategically located in the North Atlantic.
²⁷⁵

The Allied inability to halt the Germans in Norway reinforced Roosevelt’s already dim view of their military power at the same time as the American public began to obtain a clearer view of what the concept of “neutrality” meant to the leaders of Germany. Even before the campaign in Norway ended early in June, there would be further dramatic evidence on both counts: the military weakness of the Allies and the attitude of the Germans toward neutral countries.