The Battle for Norway
ACROSS THE BALTIC, Denmark had capitulated fully. At the same time that the Norwegian government had been given the chance to accept German occupation, a similar offer was made to King Christian X, who accepted. Fighting still broke out, but the entire country was in German hands in a matter of hours, surely the fastest conquest of a country in history, and which included an airborne drop by German Fallschirmjäger and no fewer than five simultaneous naval landings. Swift, ruthless and utterly efficient, it was hard to fault German execution of the plan, no matter how unorthodox the planning might have been. And now the Germans had bases and airfields even closer to Norway.
Even so, the two countries, and Denmark especially, were militarily weak, and these swift conquests flattered to deceive. In any invasion, so long as it has been kept secret right up to the final moment, the attacker holds a number of aces: surprise and choice of where to strike, and the benefit of the confusion caused among the enemy as a result. Invasion day, 9 April, had gone pretty well, despite a few significant losses, and by nightfall the port of Stavanger and the nearby Sola airfield had been captured by the Fallschirmjäger in a further successful airborne drop. Kristiansand had been taken as well, Bergen and Trondheim were in German hands, and General Dietl’s mountain troops, the Gebirgsjäger, had successfully landed at Narvik, having evaded the Royal Navy. It was clear that the only ones who had missed any bus were the British, whose Navy had been completely wrong-footed by German intentions and who initially had assumed the Kriegsmarine had been attempting a massed breakout into the Atlantic.
Yet as General Walter Warlimont at the OKW was all too aware, planning had been done by von Falkenhorst’s staff, seconded from direct control of the Army, and the special team devised at the OKW. Halder and von Brauchitsch had been completely sidelined despite their preparations for Case YELLOW, so that entire divisions already planned to take part in the all-or-nothing strike in the West were taken away from them despite their objections. Göring, having thrown his toys out of the pram when he had discovered what was being planned behind his back, had then been given completely free rein with the Luftwaffe. The Navy, too, had refused to keep warships in Norwegian ports after the landings, to which Hitler had curiously acquiesced, even after his operational order had been issued. Warlimont had been appalled. Hitler’s micromanagement of WESERÜBUNG, he noted, ‘broke all the rules’. Somehow, these disparate services had all come together beautifully for the all-crucial launch of the operation, but there was no doubt that Allied failures and the military weakness of Denmark and Norway helped mask some serious flaws.
Nor did Germany have it all its own way in the days that followed. In fact, early the following morning, 10 April, the German naval force now at Narvik was surprised by the arrival of a British destroyer flotilla. At around 5.30 a.m., HMS Hardy unleashed torpedoes and blew up the German flagship, the Wilhelm Heidkamp, killing eighty-one, including the force commander. Another ship was repeatedly hit and set on fire, then, as more British destroyers joined the fray, a second ship was sunk. The action continued down the Vestfjord, and, although Hardy was sunk in turn and another destroyer badly damaged, all of General Dietl’s guns were sent to the bottom when a German supply ship was destroyed.
Over the next couple of days, the Royal Navy continued to get the better of the Kriegsmarine. At Narvik, the five remaining German destroyers were trapped and three days later, with the arrival of the British battleship HMS Warspite and a force of nine destroyers, were annihilated.
It should not have been so one-sided that day at Narvik. Lurking in the mouth of the fjord were both U-46 and U-48, part of the entire available U-boat fleet still operating around Norway. On board U-46, Erich Topp had been as alarmed as all the crew to find themselves trapped at Narvik with far too many British destroyers lurking and not enough room for their boat to manoeuvre. On the night of the 11th, they had taken up their position offshore from the town, when suddenly air raid sirens were blaring and then aircraft were overhead and bombing them. Everyone ran for cover apart from Topp and a couple of others who manned their machine gun. ‘Despite tremendous anti-aircraft fire we do not hit a single enemy plane,’ jotted Topp. He saw a bomb destroy a shed just fifty yards away on the shore. ‘Only 20 yards away one of our crew is instantly killed by another bomb, while another man is simply laid flat by the blast.’
Meanwhile, during its entire time in Norwegian waters, U-48 had been unable to hit a single ship, even though there had been no shortage of targets. Nor was it alone. Time and again, U-boats had fired their torpedoes only to discover they then failed to explode. U-47, which had sunk the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow back in October, should have made it two, when she fired two torpedoes at Warspite, only for them to miss and for her to be nearly sunk in turn by vengeful destroyers. In fact, Warspite was attacked no fewer than four times, British cruisers were fired at fourteen times, and ten destroyers and ten transport vessels were also attacked without success. The problem, it seemed, was with the torpedoes’ detonation devices. German torpedoes used magnetic pistols, which enabled a torpedo to detect its target by its magnetic field. This then triggered the fuse for explosion. The trouble was that in such northern waters the magnetic pistols were not working properly. Other torpedoes, equipped with contact pistols, which detonated on impact, had been insufficiently tested beforehand and were also failing. The net result was that golden opportunities to sink significant numbers of British warships had been let slip, and normally fearless U-boat captains lost confidence – possibly the single most important attribute needed for the successful submarine skipper.
U-46, on the other hand, did not even have a chance to try and attack. After being repeatedly bombed and depth-charged, running aground, and then finally slipping out of Narvik, it had finally reached the open sea on the 18th having somehow escaped what Erich Topp could only describe as a ‘witches’ cauldron’. When the U-boat eventually made it back to Kiel, its flotilla commander had looked very grave. ‘Was it the sight of our pale, hollow faces that got to him?’ Topp wondered. ‘Or sympathy for our exhausting, unsuccessful mission?’
While impotent U-boats failed to make much of a mark, the Royal Navy and RAF were able to take their toll on Germany’s surface fleet. The cruiser Königsberg was sunk, as was the Karlsruhe. Lützow had also been hit on 11 April and had to be towed back to Kiel, so badly damaged there was no chance of her being used in the Atlantic any time soon.
While the British Navy had swiftly recovered its composure, the Allies’ own invasion plans never really recovered, even though, with the fleeing Norwegian Government now only too happy for their help, they at least had the opportunity to proceed without any further moral conundrum.
For most of the troops earmarked for the previously planned landing at Narvik, these were confusing and frustrating days. Most were Territorials – the regulars were all in France. British infantry regiments were broken down into battalions; the 1st and 2nd were usually the Regular battalions, while the 5th and even the 7th – if needed – tended to be made up with Territorials; this was the case with the Leicestershire Regiment, and it included local men like the 21-year-old Joseph ‘Lofty’ Kynoch, who had been brought up in the village of Thorpe Acre near Leicester and had joined the TA a couple of years earlier. His call-up papers had arrived the day he had returned from annual summer camp; he had reported to the TA centre in Leicester the day the Germans had marched into Poland.
After training throughout the winter near Durham in the north of the country, and despite rumours that they would be heading to Finland, it was not until the beginning of April that suddenly and dramatically they were on the move. Late on 6 April, Kynoch and his pals of 2/5th Leicesters boarded a train, and after an interminable journey of numerous and lengthy halts they finally reached Scotland on Sunday the 7th. In Edinburgh, the battalion was split up. Kynoch, the Bren carrier platoon and the rest of Headquarters Company disembarked at Leith, Edinburgh’s port, while the rest went on to Rosyth. Waiting for them was the merchant vessel Cedarbank, while drawn up in a line along the quay were brand-new lorries and tracked carriers. The men drove them on to nets and then watched them hoisted on board.
Even once the troops were aboard, Kynoch and his mates were still none the wiser as to what was going on.
‘It’s just an exercise, Lofty,’ one assured him. ‘After all, the war in Finland is over.’
Later that day, they were told to disembark and were sent on lighters across the Forth to the liner Orion. At this point, Kynoch and many others parted company with their kit bags. They were never to see them again.
Since the German invasion had completely wrong-footed the Allies, the confusion was perhaps understandable. The truth was, the Allies had anticipated a completely different order of events: they would mine the Leads, then Germany would react, which would take them time, and then British and French troops would land, with Norwegian blessing, and secure key ports, not least Narvik. There was an astonishing naivety to this, as though no variation of this scenario were remotely possible. In part, this was because the war leaders of both Britain and France were still feeling their way as partners, and while the broad strategy was agreed, geo-politically they were in different positions and so had different agendas. It was the British who were leading the Norwegian operations, and yet there was no overall Allied commander as there was in France. The British Chiefs of Staff were also still settling slowly into their wartime modus operandi, and tending to put their own service interests first rather than thinking and acting as the integrated team that was necessary. With French politicians bickering, British Chiefs of Staff jockeying for position, and national sensitivities also playing their part, the net result was a joint decision-making process that was a little cumbersome, to put it mildly.
The response to the German invasion was a case in point, as plans were discarded, then changed, then changed again, all of which was costing precious time – time in which the German position in Norway, on land if not out at sea, was getting stronger by the day.
The revised plan, as agreed by both the British and the French, was that a force of British troops and French chasseurs alpins – mountain troops – would be sent to Narvik, and a further British component to Namsos, north of Trondheim, and Åndalsnes to the south. The idea was that these latter two forces would advance on Trondheim, in between Namsos and Åndalsnes, in a pincer movement. The whole of the north of Norway would then be in Allied hands.
A further problem was that these troops had been originally only lightly equipped – it had been expected that the Norwegians would help with guns and vehicles. There was also little air support, as it had been also supposed that around Narvik, especially, the fighting would be too far north for either side. So more guns, trucks and even troops had had to be hurriedly found. The French had bolstered their contribution, for example, by sending an entire light division to Narvik, although these would not arrive there until a week after the British. Not much could be done about the lack of air support, so that although in terms of men on the ground the Germans did not have an overwhelming advantage, in guns and aircraft they most certainly did. All in all, prospects for the Allies in Norway, despite successes at sea, did not look promising.
Even so, as far as Britain was concerned, it was not a lost cause just yet. The RAF may not have been able to send much in the way of fighters, but it was willing to use its bomber force. Among those flying on 11 April was Pilot Officer Tony Smyth, who had recently been transferred from flying Blenheims to the bigger, heavier Wellingtons. Smyth was twenty-four and had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve back in 1937; having realized it was the perfect way to avoid working for the family paint firm, Manders, he had applied and was accepted for a permanent commission a year later. An intrepid cyclist and mountaineer, he had travelled throughout Europe – and Nazi Germany – and climbed many of its highest peaks. Flying had been treated as yet another adventure and, as he was discovering, it was already more than living up to the billing he had given it.
Small, wiry and with quick, sharp eyes and a sweep of strawberry blond hair, Smyth was a man able to think on his feet and apply his highly practical brain to most given situations. This had been very useful when his Wellington had lost an engine soon after take-off back in March. New to the squadron, he was only the second pilot, but after the plane had crash-landed in flames, he had escaped miraculously unhurt only to then go back into the burning wreckage and pull out the wireless operator, navigator and centre gunner, and then, despite blistering to his face from the heat, with the captain, ‘Darkey’ Powell, rescued the rear gunner as well.
With all their crew now in hospital, Smyth and Powell and the rest of the sub-flight had been hurriedly posted temporarily from 101 Squadron to 115 Squadron, based at Kinloss in Scotland. Attached to A Flight, they had been sent to bomb a reported German cruiser in Kristiansand, only to be recalled, but now, on the evening of the 11th, they were approaching the Norwegian coast and Stavanger, along with five other Wellingtons, in what was to be the first intentional bombing raid of the European mainland by Bomber Command since the start of the war.
Flying low, and in formation, they overshot, so Powell, at the controls, banked and went around for another run. This time, streams of tracer and puffs of flak lit up the fading light. Smyth saw an aircraft on fire on the ground, but again their line was too far awry and so they went around again, for a third attempt. By now, every gun and small arm on the ground was firing at them and Powell was forced off his run yet again, this time by having to dodge radio masts that suddenly loomed towards them. Smyth saw one of their fellow Wellingtons hit and burst into flames, then a moment later there was a deafening and blinding explosion in the cockpit of their own plane. They had been hit by several cannon shells, one piece of shrapnel hitting Powell in the side, another hitting a buckle on Smyth’s shoulder and a third, very small piece hitting his cheek.
‘I’ve had enough, I’m going home,’ Powell told Smyth, climbing and then safely jettisoning their still undropped bomb load. Meanwhile, Smyth went back to see what other damage there was. It seemed the Wellington had been hit along the fuselage too. The rear gunner had been badly injured and had to be hastily bandaged and given morphine, while the hydraulics had been shot away so that both the flaps and the undercarriage were now inoperable. This was bad luck for Powell, who, already wounded, now had to fly all the way back to Scotland – unable to trim the plane as he was, there was no real way of swapping places with Smyth.
The main compass had also been smashed, but they not only managed to make it back to Kinloss, but Powell was able to safely belly-land the Wellington. ‘I went to bed,’ noted Smyth, ‘troubled only by the thought that in three weeks, of the eighteen aircrew in the sub-flight, twelve were dead, five were in hospital, and I alone was on my feet.’
Also flying that day had been Guy Gibson and seven other Hampden crews from 83 Squadron. He had found his first operation back in September a terrifying proposition, but after months of very little activity he and the rest of the squadron were now chomping at the bit. ‘To say that we were all keen,’ he noted, ‘would be a masterpiece of understatement.’ They took off around 11 p.m., with 1,500lb magnetic ‘M’ mines strapped in the bomb bays and instructions to reconnoitre Danish towns and ports to hide the real purpose of the trip. Gibson thought the plan seemed sensible enough – from Kiel to Norway, German ships had to pass through one of three fairly narrow channels, so mining these was a good idea. ‘Everyone,’ he noted, ‘was very optimistic.’
The trip was remarkably uneventful. They crossed the North Sea, stooged around Denmark, then found the right spot and dropped the mine, clearly seeing it, in the pale night light, gurgle into the dark water. It was a long trip, however. Having flown all night, Gibson and his crew did not land back down again until breakfast the following morning – they had been airborne about eight hours and Gibson himself clambered out feeling pretty cramped.
Three nights later, on the 14th, Gibson and his crew were minelaying again, but this time the weather was atrocious and really they should never have been sent out. Despite high winds, rain and a low cloud base, they somehow managed to find their target, which was a narrow strip of water at Middelfart in the Baltic off the Danish mainland. Flying so low they were almost touching the water, Gibson suddenly spotted Middelfart Bridge directly up ahead; it was too late to fly over it, so Gibson went underneath it instead. Immediately, the bomb bay was opened, and the two mines were dropped, and then suddenly a flak ship was firing at them. ‘We were only about one hundred feet,’ noted Gibson, ‘but we soon pulled up in to cloud.’
They headed for home, the Hampden buffeted and bucked about and crackling with static electricity. After more than seven hours in the air, they touched down not at Scampton, but at Manston, on the tip of Kent. Gibson was exhausted, but while he and his crew had safely made it, another from 83 Squadron had been unable to find Manston and had disappeared, presumably into the sea. Nothing was ever heard of them again.
They were not alone. Losses were being suffered on most operations – one here, two there – but because Bomber Command was still so small, every one was felt. In fact, there is no question that the comparative lack of activity up to the invasion of Norway had been a godsend to the command, as it had allowed crews the chance to train in relative peace. However, Air Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, the commander of Bomber Command, had also recognized that as the command expanded, so more instructors would be urgently needed to train recruits and work up reserves – and these could only realistically be drawn from existing squadrons. And so he took the drastic, but entirely necessary, measure of reducing the front line of Bomber Command in order to help the rapid expansion that was planned. Soon after the outbreak of war, no fewer than seventeen squadrons had been withdrawn and converted to Operational Training Units instead. It had caused consternation at the time, but had been a shrewd policy; and it was one of the reasons why Bomber Command had been so quick to agree to refrain from unrestricted air warfare and to spend time carrying out reconnaissance and leaflet dropping instead. It had given the command a chance to cut its teeth and for the old hands to train up new blood.
Despite British naval successes at sea, the Norwegian venture was unravelling fast for the Allies. Even if they were now able to secure Narvik and the north of the country, the truth was that German forces were swallowing up much of the southern half. Just how Allied troops were going to keep this planned northern redoubt while the Germans with their much shorter lines of supply held the south was something no one back in London appeared prepared to consider, although there was no denying that securing the northern – and frankly pretty remote – part of Norway made more sense than any venture further south, where the advancing Germans clearly now held all the aces.
What was certainly true was that the only hope of successfully taking and keeping hold of Narvik was by putting as many forces there as possible, something Churchill repeatedly stressed. As he pointed out, at least careful plans had been made for Narvik; Trondheim was altogether a much more speculative proposition. However, the French were urging that troops be sent to Trondheim to take both the port and the railway that went right across the peninsula. Both Halifax and Chamberlain agreed to this plan. Troops would still land at Narvik, but Trondheim would be the main effort.
British troops were thus steaming towards this land of mountains and fjords, with the situation highly fluid and with plans still being changed even as the men were being shipped over the North Sea. While Brigadier D. R. Morgan and the first few battalions of 148th Brigade were making the crossing, he was given yet another set of orders. ‘Your role to land Åndalsnes,’ the signal told him brusquely, ‘then operate northwards and take offensive action against the Germans in the Trondheim area.’
It made it sound so simple. But Morgan had just one lightly equipped brigade, some of whom, like Lofty Kynoch, were still in Scotland, and had no air cover and no tanks or vehicles. With these Territorials, he was expected to defeat the German forces now surging up the Gudbrandsdal Valley in central Norway, then, having seen them off, turn on Trondheim. It was ludicrously over-optimistic.
This latest change of plan had come at the behest of the Norwegians, whom the Allies were now keen to oblige, even though fire-fighting and dissipating forces was never an ideal military policy. The Norwegian Army had few Regulars and so, like France, was dependent on a mass mobilization. However, such had been the surprise of the attack that these plans had also been thrown into confusion and many of those who might have answered the call found themselves occupied before they had the chance. As it was, the entire Army was infantry with neither tanks nor anti-tank guns. One of the last acts of the Government as it had fled Oslo had been to sack the Commander-in-Chief and replace him with Oberst – hastily promoted to General – Otto Ruge, who was younger, more vigorous and determined to fight on. His men had been battling their way through the centre of the country, delaying the German advance but little more. It was his appeal to the British military attaché that had brought about the latest change of plan; 148th Brigade was to help the Norwegians block the German advance north. The reason for focusing on the town of Dombås was that German paratroopers had landed there on 14 April. The Norwegians were battling hard against these isolated German troops, but Ruge wanted British help and as quickly as possible.
One of those trying to resist the Germans was Gunnar Sonsteby, who with a friend had decided that even though Nazi swastikas were fluttering over Oslo, they would head out of the city and join the fight. On Friday the 11th, they had taken a train – which amazingly was still running – and, armed with their skis, had headed to Grua, some thirty miles to the north of Oslo. There they met up with Lieutenant Philip Hansteen, a reservist, at his mountain hut. The following day, Friday, 12 April, with more than a dozen now gathered with Hansteen, they pushed north again, to Brandbu, on the edge of Lake Randsfjord, where there was a depot acting as a mustering station. By the evening of the next day, Saturday, there were more than a thousand men, who were hastily organized into makeshift military units.
Sonsteby was told to remain with Lieutenant Hansteen, his men now formed into a special ski company of four platoons of thirty men each; Sonsteby was put into 4 Platoon under Hansteen’s brother, Axel. So began for Sonsteby and these men a long, desperate retreat. ‘We continually saw burned farms and blown bridges,’ noted Sonsteby, ‘the latter the act of our withdrawing forces, the former the vengeful work of the Germans.’
Meanwhile, the rest of 148th Brigade was making its way across the North Sea. Late on 20 April, Lofty Kynoch and the second half of the 2/5th Leicesters finally set sail, on yet another ship, not from Rosyth or even Leith, but Aberdeen in the north-west of Scotland. The following afternoon, as the ship rolled in a rising swell, Kynoch was awoken from a fitful sleep to learn that the Cedarbank, with all their equipment stored aboard, had just been torpedoed. Clambering to his feet, he looked across the water to see the vessel slip beneath the waves amid a swirl of foam. Moments later there was a huge explosion that shook every timber and rivet on their own ship and caused a hum of consternation from the men. It was a depth charge from one of the destroyers escorting them; on this occasion, the U-boat’s firing pistols had obviously worked. ‘Whatever else had been on the Cedarbank,’ wrote Kynoch, ‘we now had only our rifles, a few anti-tank rifles and Bren guns to face the enemy with, also the clothes we stood up in.’ He had about a hundred rounds for his rifle, and that was it.
They finally reached Åndalsnes at around 8 a.m. on the morning of 22 April. Little did they realize that the situation in Norway was now even worse.