force embarked at British ports, ready to sail to Norway if the Germans responded to the Royal Navy’s initiative. London was oblivious of the fact that a German fleet was already at sea. For months, Hitler had been fearful of British intervention in Norway, because of its implications for his iron-ore supplies. His agitation acquired urgency on 14 February 1940, when the Royal Navy’s destroyers pursued the Graf Spee’s supply ship Altmark into a Norwegian fjord to free 299 captive British merchant seamen. Determined to pre-empt a British initiative to seize a foothold in Norway, on 2 April he gave the final order for the invasion fleet to sail.
British ships and planes observed Germany’s intense flurry of naval activity, but naval commanders were so preoccupied with their own impending mining operation that they failed to realise that these movements presaged German action rather than reaction. The Admiralty decided that Admiral Raeder’s warships intended a breakout into the Atlantic to attack British sea lanes; this caused them to deploy much of the Home Fleet many hours’ steaming from Norway. Before dawn on 8 April, the Royal Navy indeed laid a minefield in Norwegian coastal waters. A few hours later, however, the Germans commenced air and naval landings to occupy the entire country. The Phoney War was over.
3
Blitzkriegs in the West
1 NORWAY
The smaller nations of Europe strove to escape involvement in the war. Most resisted association with Germany, which required acceptance of Hitler’s hegemony, but even those that favoured the objectives of the democracies were wary of joining them in belligerence. Historic experience argued that they would thus expose themselves to the horrors of war for small advantage: the fate of Poland and Finland highlighted the Allies’ inability to protect the dictators’ chosen victims. Holland and the Scandinavian countries had contrived to remain neutral in World War I. Why should they not do so again? In the winter of 1939–40, all took pains to avoid provoking Hitler. The Norwegians were more apprehensive about British designs on their coastline than German ones. At 0130 on 9 April, an aide awoke King Haakon of Norway to report: ‘Majesty, we are at war!’ The monarch promptly demanded: ‘Against whom?’
Despite repeated warnings that a German invasion was imminent, the country’s tiny army had not been mobilised. The capital was quickly blacked out, but old General Kristian Laake, Norway’s commander-in-chief, responded feebly to news that German warships were approaching up Oslo Fjord: he ordered reservists to be mustered by mail – which would assemble them under arms only on 11 April. His staff officers remonstrated, but Laake was in flight from reality: ‘A little exercise should do these units no harm!’ he declared indulgently. German warships entered ports and began to disembark troops. The Norwegians, French and British had alike deluded themselves that Hitler would never dare to invade Norway in the face of the Royal Navy. Yet poor intelligence and misjudged deployments caused the Admiralty to forfeit its best opportunities to wreak havoc, as the Germans landed on 9 April. Thereafter, although the invaders suffered severe attrition at sea, so too did the Royal Navy at the hands of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Norway’s nearest coastline lay four hundred miles from Britain, beyond range of land-based air cover. The vulnerability of ships to bomber attack was soon brutally exposed.
The most dramatic development that first morning of the campaign took place in Oslo Fjord shortly after 0400, as the new cruiser Blücher, carrying thousands of German troops, approached Oscarsborg. The ancient fortress’s two nineteenth-century cannon, named ‘Moses’ and ‘Aaron’, were laboriously loaded. Local commander Colonel Birger Eriksen, knowing the gunners’ limitations, held his fire until the last moment. The cruiser was only five hundred yards offshore when the antique weapons belched flame. One shell hit the cruiser’s anti-aircraft control centre, while the other smashed into an aviation fuel store, causing a pillar of flame to leap skywards. After suffering two further hits from shore-launched torpedoes, within minutes Blücher was engulfed in fire and listing heavily, her ammunition exploding. The ship sank with the loss of a thousand German lives.
Confusion and black comedy then overtook Norway’s capital. The designated assault commander, Gen. Erich Engelbrecht, was a passenger on the stricken Blücher. He was rescued from the fjord by Norwegians who took him prisoner, leaving the invaders temporarily leaderless. Gen. Laake fled the city in the wake of his staff, first taking a tramcar, then attempting unsuccessfully to hitchhike, at last catching a train. The Norwegian government offered its resignation, which was rejected by the king. The national parliament, the Storting, entered emergency session, with fierce arguments about the merits of surrender. Ministers suggested demolishing key bridges to impede the invaders, but several deputies dissented as ‘this would mean destroying valuable architectural works’. The British ambassador delivered a message from London promising aid, but was vague about when this might materialise. German paratroopers secured Oslo airport, and most of Norway’s south-western ports were soon in enemy hands. The first elements of six divisions disembarked and deployed, while the government fled northwards.
Among stunned spectators of the invaders’ arrival was a nineteen-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee named Ruth Maier. On 10 April, in the Oslo suburb of Lillestrøm, she described in her diary a scene that was becoming a tragic commonplace of Europe: ‘I think of the Germans more as a natural disaster than as a people…We watch as people stream out of basements and crowd together in the streets with perambulators, woollen blankets and babies. They sit on lorries, horse carts, taxis and private cars. It’s like a film I saw: Finnish, Polish, Albanian, Chinese refugees…It is so simple and so sad: people are “evacuated” with woollen blankets, silver cutlery and babies in their arms. They are fleeing from bombs.’
The Norwegians displayed implacable hostility to their invaders. Even when compelled to acknowledge subjection, they were unimpressed by explanations. Ruth Maier heard three German soldiers tell a cluster of Oslo residents that 60,000 German civilians had been murdered by the Poles before the Wehrmacht intervened to save their ethnic brethren. Ruth laughed:
[The man] turns to me and says: ‘Are you laughing, Fräulein?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And our Führer!’, he goes all misty-eyed. ‘Obviously he’s a human being like the rest of us, but he’s the best, the best we have in Europe.’ The [soldier] with the sky-blue eyes – also misty now – nods: ‘The best…the best …!’ More people come over to listen. The Norwegian says: ‘Are we really to believe that you’ve come over here to protect us?…That’s what it says here!’ He points to [a] newspaper…‘Protect you? No, we’re not doing that.’ But the blond interrupts him. ‘Yes, of course that’s what we’re doing.’ The brown-haired one thinks for a moment and then says, ‘Yes, actually, if we’re honest about it…we’re protecting you from the English.’ The Norwegian: ‘And you believe that?’
The faith of most Germans in the virtue as well as the expediency of their mission was fortified by its swift success. The invaders closed their grip on southern Norway, having secured communications with the homeland by occupying the intervening Danish peninsula almost without resistance. The Norwegian Storting met again in the little town of Elverum, forty miles north of Oslo, where its deliberations were sharpened by news that the Germans had nominated a traitor to lead a puppet regime in Oslo. ‘We now have a Kuusinen government,’ declared the prime minister contemptuously: he alluded to Finnish communist Otto Kuusinen, who collaborated with Stalin’s invasion of Finland. But Norway’s counterpart, Vidkun Quisling, would become much more notorious, his name passing into the English language.
Four busloads of German paratroopers on their way to Elverum came under fire from a roadblock manned by members of a local rifle club; the Norwegians drove the attackers back in disarray, mortally wounding the German air attaché Captain Eberhard Spiller, who had been tasked to arrest the nation’s leadership. The royal family and ministers decamped to the little village of Nybergsund. King Haakon VII was a tall, gaunt, sixty-seven-year-old Dane, elected monarch when the Norwegians gained independence from Sweden in 1905. In 1940, he displayed dignity and courage. At a government council held amid the deep snow of Nybergsund
