The Third Reich at War (21 page)

5. Soviet Territorial Gains, 1939-40

In the meantime, however, the conflict in Finland, and the Anglo-French failure to intervene, turned Hitler’s attention to Norway. The country’s coastal ports could be sites for vital bases for German submarine operations against Britain. They could also provide an essential channel for the export of much-needed iron ore from neutral Sweden to Germany, especially during winter, when Narvik remained ice-free. The lack of any immediate prospect of invading France and the evident possibility of a pre-emptive invasion by the British made a strike against Norway all the more urgent in Hitler’s eyes. The head of the German navy, Grand Admiral Raeder, mindful of the consequences of Germany’s failure to control the north-west European coast in the First World War, was already pressing such a course upon Hitler in October 1939. To prepare the ground, Raeder made contact with the leader of the Norwegian Fascist Party, Vidkun Quisling. Born in 1887, Quisling, son of a pastor, had passed out from the military academy with the highest marks ever achieved, and joined the army General Staff at the age of twenty-four. In 1931-3 he served as Minister of Defence in a government led by the Agrarian Party, a nationalist group formed not long before to represent small farming communities in this country of 3 million people. Rapid industrialization had led to the rise of a radical, pro-Communist labour movement in the cities, which created great alarm among the peasantry. By this time, Quisling was openly proclaiming the superiority of the Nordic race and warning against the threat of Communism. He presented himself as an advocate of peasant interests. In March 1933, when the government fell, he founded his own National Unity movement, adorning it with ideas such as the leadership principle, borrowed from the newly installed Nazi regime in Germany.
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Quisling’s movement failed to make any headway in the 1930s. It was undermined by the turn of the Norwegian Social Democrats to a centrist position, based on reconciling the interests of workers and peasants. This brought the Social Democrats a parliamentary majority from 1936 onwards. Quisling took up contacts with the Nazis, visiting Hitler early in 1940 to try to persuade him to back a fascist coup led by himself. The Germans were sceptical, in view of the evidently complete lack of support for Quisling among the Norwegian population. However, Quisling did convince Hitler that an Allied invasion of Norway was likely, and two days after their meeting, Hitler ordered planning for a pre-emptive German strike to begin. Quisling travelled to Copenhagen on 4 April 1940 and met a German staff officer to whom he provided details of Norway’s defensive preparations and indicated the best places to invade. Disastrous though it was Quisling’s treachery was to prove useful to Allied propaganda in one respect: perhaps because his name was easy to pronounce, it quickly became a handy term for traitors of every kind, replacing the more cumbersome ‘fifth columnist’, first used in the Spanish Civil War, which British propagandists thought most people had probably already forgotten.
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On 1 March 1940, Hitler issued a formal order for the invasion (dubbed ‘Weser Exercise’), which for obvious geographical reasons was to encompass not only Norway but also Denmark as well. Brushing aside the objection that the Norwegians and Danes were neutral and likely to remain so, he noted that only a relatively small force would be necessary in view of the weakness of the enemy defences. On 9 April 1940, German forces crossed the land border into Denmark from the south at 5.25 in the morning, while an airborne landing at Ålborg secured the principal base of the Danish air force, and a seaborne invasion took place at five different points, including Copenhagen, the defenders of which were taken completely by surprise. The only problem occurred when the battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
ran aground. At 7.20 a.m., recognizing the inevitable, the Danish government ordered resistance to cease. The invasion had been successfully completed in less than two hours.
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In Norway, however, the invading forces encountered more serious resistance. German transport ships on their way to Trondheim and Narvik managed to evade the waiting British, but bad weather scattered the accompanying fleet of fourteen destroyers, two battleships (the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
) and a heavy cruiser, the
Admiral Hipper
. The British battle cruiser
Renown
encountered the two German battleships and damaged them severely enough to cause them to withdraw, but crucially, the British ships were too far away from the Norwegian coast to stop the main German force from entering the Norwegian fjords. Some damage was caused by coastal batteries, and a newly launched battle cruiser, the
Blücher
, was sunk, but this was not enough to stop German troops taking over all the major Norwegian towns, including the capital. Even so, it was not all plain sailing, and two attacks by the British fleet sank ten German destroyers anchored in and around Narvik on 10 and 13 April 1940. The Germans also lost fifteen transport vessels, forcing them to use a fleet of 270 merchant ships to carry the back-up force of 108,000 troops and their supplies across from Denmark while a further 30,000 were airlifted in. Dependence on airlifting and lack of troop ships meant that the initial invasion was unable to use the overwhelming force it really needed. Coupled with the difficulties of Norway’s mostly mountainous terrain, this gave the Norwegians the chance to put up a fight against the invading German forces.
²²

The difficulties of the invasion were compounded by the decision to proclaim Quisling head of a new pro-German government as soon as Oslo was occupied on 9 April. Several of the erstwhile supporters he named as his ministers refused publicly to join him, and the legitimate government roundly condemned his action. The King called for resistance to continue, and left Oslo with the cabinet. He was supported by the army and the great mass of the Norwegian people, outraged by the installation of an obvious German puppet who lacked any kind of significant electoral support. Quisling’s proclamation of a ‘national revolution’ on May Day 1940, when he branded the King and the government as traitors who had sold out to the Jews who ran Britain, and dedicated Norway’s future to what he called the ‘Germanic Community of Fate’, met with nothing but derision.
²³
Norwegian troops played a significant part in the fighting around Narvik and the other western ports in the wake of the German invasion. Things were clearly not going as planned for the Germans. But they were even more disastrous for the British. On 14 and 17 April, British forces landed at two points midway along the coast, supported by troops from the French Foreign Legion and a number of Polish units. But there was confusion about where they should go. Many of the soldiers were poorly equipped for winter fighting, and had no snowshoes: others were so overburdened by their winter equipment that they could hardly move. Crucially, they had no effective air support. German airplanes bombarded them mercilessly. After many delays, the Allies occupied Narvik on 29 May 1940, but German reinforcements now finally began to arrive, and a surprise attack that sank the British aircraft-carrier
Glorious
on 4 June along with all the aircraft on board underlined the difficulties of the British position. The Allied forces to the south of Narvik had already withdrawn, and after destroying the harbour, the force occupying Narvik itself sailed for home as well, on 8 June 1940. The day before, the King of Norway and his government had gone into exile on the cruiser
Devonshire
, leaving orders for a ceasefire behind, but making it clear that a state of war would continue between their country and the Third Reich until further notice.
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Despite the difficulties they had encountered, the Germans had triumphed through an unprecedented, co-ordinated attack by air, sea and land. They now held a large part of the north-western coast of the Continent, where they established a series of major naval bases, especially for the submarines that were so vital to the disruption of British supplies from America. Not only were Swedish ore deliveries to Germany now assured, but Sweden itself, still nominally neutral, had effectively been reduced to the position of a German client state. Even during the Norwegian campaign the Swedish authorities had allowed German supplies to be transported across Swedish territory; subsequently they permitted the transit of hundreds of thousands of German troops as well. Swedish shipyards built warships for the German navy, and the Swedish economy became the source of supply for practically anything the Germans chose to demand so long as they had it. By contrast, the entire Allied operation had been, as William L. Shirer noted in his diary, a ‘debacle’. British plans to lay mines outside the key Norwegian harbours had been repeatedly postponed until it was too late. Co-ordination between the British army and the Royal Navy had been poor. Military planning had been confused and inconsistent. The British forces had been forced to undertake a humiliating withdrawal shortly after landing. In Narvik they had dithered fatally before advancing, thus surrendering the element of surprise and allowing the Germans to bring in reinforcements. None of this seemed to bode well for the future of the British war effort.
²⁵
Indeed, as early as 21 March 1940, the army officer Hans Meier-Welcker noted in his diary a general optimism amongst ordinary Germans that the war would be over by the summer.
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Recriminations in London were swift. Defending his conduct of the war in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sounded lame and unconvincing. The leader of the Labour Party opposition, Clement Attlee, came straight to the point. ‘It is not Norway alone,’ he said. ‘Norway comes as the culmination of many other discontents. People are saying that those mainly responsible for the conduct of affairs are men who have had an almost uninterrupted career of failure. Norway followed Czechoslovakia and Poland. Everywhere the story is “too late”.’ Attlee’s typically blunt assessment of the situation was shared by many. The opposition Labour Party decided to force a vote on the issue. 486 members out of 615 voted: some 80 Conservatives were thought to have abstained by staying away from the debate, while 40 of them who were present voted with the Opposition. A government majority of 213 was slashed to 80. The next day, bowing to the inevitable, Chamberlain decided to resign, a broken man. Within a year he was dead.
²⁷
The politician regarded by most as his obvious successor, Foreign Secretary Edward, Lord Halifax, a member of the Upper House, declined to serve because he considered, rightly, that it would be impossible to lead the country from the House of Lords. The choice therefore fell on Winston Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill had been formally responsible for the Norwegian debacle, but, despite having had to defend the government’s record during the crucial debate, he had largely escaped criticism because of a widespread feeling that his boldness had been hamstrung by the caution of others. Aged sixty-five at the time of his appointment, Churchill had seen action in the Sudanese War at the end of the nineteenth century and 1914-18. He had held many government offices over the years, but, by the time the Second World War broke out, he had been sitting on the back benches for the best part of a decade, isolated from the government by his reputation as a maverick, and above all by his strident criticisms of the Third Reich and his relentless advocacy of rearmament. He immediately broadened the government into one of national unity. His message to the House of Commons in his first speech after his appointment was uncompromising. Britain, he declared, would fight to the end.
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IV

The German assault on Denmark and Norway heralded the launching of a far larger operation against France and the Benelux countries. Discussed over many months, the armed forces’ initial, rather conventional, plan for a three-pronged attack on France, Belgium and Holland was reduced to a two-pronged attack, then had to be amended again when the plan fell into enemy hands after the capture of a staff officer who had made a forced landing in Belgium and failed to destroy the documents before he was arrested. Going back to the drawing-board, Hitler began to argue for a single, concentrated, surprise thrust through the Ardennes, a wooded, hilly area generally considered unsuitable for tanks and as a consequence only lightly defended by the French. This would have the advantage of avoiding having to attack strong French defensive emplacements in the heavily fortified Maginot Line, which stretched for many miles along the Franco-German border. The initial doubts of the army high command were overcome when the detailed advocacy of the new, improvised plan by General Erich von Manstein was confirmed by war games and simulations carried out by the General Staff. An officer whose ambition was so irritating to General Halder that he had him transferred to field duties in Stettin, Manstein, born in 1887, was a close aide of General Gerd von Rundstedt, who had led the planning for the invasion of Poland. One of the secondary aims of his new plan was to give Rundstedt’s Army Group South the lion’s share of the invasion of France. Meeting with Hitler on 17 February 1940, Manstein demonstrated that it was possible with careful planning to move a major motorized force through the Ardennes. Once through, the main body of the German forces should head for the Channel, cutting the Allied forces off from the south. Meanwhile another invasion force further north would enter Belgium and Holland, deceiving the Allied armies into thinking that this was where the main thrust was coming. The British expeditionary force and the French army would thus effectively be surrounded from the north and south and pinned up against the sea.
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