Early Campaigns

On March 25, 1939, 10 days after he had completely dismembered Czechoslovakia, Adolf Hitler told the chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW), Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Wilhelm Keitel, and the commander in chief of the army, Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Walther von Brauchitsch, that the time had come to consider solving the Polish problem by military means. A week later, on April 3, Part 2 of the annual directive for the German armed forces, drafted by Hitler himself, set forth a strategic outline for an attack on Poland to be prepared by Sept. 1, 1939. On April 28, in his first open move, Hitler abrogated the Polish-German nonaggression treaty of 1934 and declared that the issue of Danzig must be settled. Hitler's turning against Poland surprised no one. On March 31, the British government, attempting to forestall the German dictator, had given a unilateral guarantee of Poland's territorial integrity. (France had a military alliance with Poland dating back to 1921.)

Without hesitating, Hitler pressed forward. At a staff conference held on May 23, he stated that a repetition of the Czech affair was not to be expected. Further successes and the expansion of German Lebensraum (space for living) could not be achieved without bloodshed. There would be war. Observers had noted after the Munich Conference of 1938 that the negotiated settlement had angered Hitler. He had wanted a chance to test the new Wehrmacht in action, and he was now determined to have it against Poland. This was the new element in the crisis which Hitler carefully nurtured through the spring and summer of 1939. He did not wish another Munich, but he did wish to cajole, frighten, or simply confuse the British and French sufficiently to keep them from intervening in the neat, small war that he intended to have with his neighbor on the east.

Poland, not a great power, with a population of 35,000,000 was also not a minor nation. In maintaining its national existence against foreign threats, it labored under several handicaps: approximately 10,000,000 of its people were non-Polish, its industrial base was weak, and it included in its boundaries on the north (Polish Corridor) and on the east territory to which Germany and the Soviet Union could lay strong claims on ethnic and historical grounds. Polish policy as conducted by President Ignacy Moscicki and Foreign Minister Jozef Beck was to stand firm against all of Hitler's demands. The Polish government drew encouragement from the French alliance, the British guarantee, and, apparently, from an underestimate of German strength and an overestimate of its own capabilities.

In the game Hitler started, the Soviet Union could, if it wished, play the last trump. Fear of a two-front war haunted the German military, and even Hitler would not at this time have risked fighting both the Western powers and the Soviet Union. In mid-April 1939, the USSR began negotiations with both sides. The British and French courted the Russians, but Joseph Stalinwas not eager for trouble with Germany. The Russians made the overtures to Germany, first suggesting that the ideological conflict between nazism and communism need not be a bar to a general agreement, and then hinting that the Soviet Union would consider another partition of Poland. Hitler was cool toward these proposals until he realized that the Russians were not merely trying to make use of Germany to raise the price they could extract from the British and the French. His bargaining position was strong: the Soviet Union might have to fight for the Western powers, but all it needed to do for Hitler was to remain neutral and gather in the spoils. How well the Russians appraised the situation was demonstrated on May 3, when Maksim M. Litvinov, a Jew and a long-time advocate of international measures to restrain aggression, was suddenly dismissed as commissar of foreign affairs and replaced by Vyacheslav M. Molotov.

In July 1939, under the guise of conducting summer maneuvers, strong German forces moved into assembly areas on the Polish border. Others were sent to East Prussia on the pretext that they were to take part in celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg (now Stebark). In the first three weeks of August, German-inspired civil disorders broke out in Danzig and the Polish Corridor, and the remaining units scheduled to participate in the attack moved up to the border. On August 22, Hitler assembled the generals who would command the larger units and told them that the time was ripe to resolve the differences with Poland by war and to test the new German military machine. He predicted that Great Britain and France would not intervene. He intended to begin the attack on August 26.

In Moscow on the night of August 23, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop agreed to the final wording of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Treaty, later known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact. A secret protocol placed Finland, Estonia, and Latvia in the Soviet sphere of interest and Lithuania in the German. The border of the Soviet and German spheres in Poland was established on the Narew (Narev), Vistula (Visla), and San rivers. Because time was pressing for Germany, the treaty was to go into effect as soon as it had been signed.

In a last attempt to intimidate Hitler, Great Britain announced on August 25 that she had entered into a full-fledged alliance with Poland. On the same day, Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini informed him that Italy would not be able to take part militarily in any forthcoming war. These two reverses were not significant enough to deter Hitler, but they did cause him to hesitate. He canceled the August 26 starting date for the attack. For the next six days all of his moves were directed toward two objectives: the division of Poland and the West by various schemes and proposals for negotiations which he knew the Poles would not accept; and the undermining of French and British confidence by means of the recent agreement with the Soviet Union.

On August 31, Hitler signed Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War. During the night, SS units staged "incidents along the border, of which the most notorious was an alleged raid on the radio station at Gleiwitz (now Gliwice) in Silesia. Before sunrise on the next morning, Sept. 1, 1939, the war began as the German armies marched into Poland. Two days later, when Great Britain and France declared war, Hitler said to Ribbentrop, " it does not mean they will fight.

German War Plan

The fundamental concept of the German plan was to fight a short war that would be over before the British or French armies could get into action--over, in fact, before the Western powers could even make up their minds to fight. The plan was given its final form in an operation order issued by the Army High Command ( Oberkommando des Heeres or OKH) on June 15. The order provided for two groups of armies, Army Group North commanded by Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Fedor von Bock and Army Group South under Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Gerd von Rundstedt.

Army Group North was to strike eastward from Pomerania (Pomorze) into the Polish Corridor with one of its two armies, the Fourth Army. The other, the Third Army, would strike westward from East Prussia into the corridor and southward toward Warsaw (Warszawa). When the armies had made contact in the corridor, they would both turn their full strength toward the capital. Army Group South, with the Eighth, Tenth, and Fourteenth armies, was to advance to the northeast from Silesia and Slovakia. The Tenth Army, the strongest of the three, would strike directly toward Warsaw, while the Eighth and Fourteenth armies covered its left and right flanks, respectively. The junction of the Tenth Army with elements of Army Group North at Warsaw would complete the encirclement of any forces in western Poland that had not been destroyed before then. This presumably would end the war. Bock proposed extending the arms of the encirclement east of Warsaw to prevent Polish troops' escaping into the Pripet (Pripyat) Marshes, but nothing was done about this suggestion until after the campaign had begun.

The strength of Army Group North was 630,000 men; that of Army Group South, 886,000. Army Group North was supported by the First Air Force, which controlled 500 bombers, 180 dive bombers (Stukas), and 120 fighters. The Fourth Air Force supported Army Group South with 310 bombers, 160 dive bombers, and 120 fighters. The Air Force High Command (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe or OKL) held in reserve 250 Ju-52 transports for paratroop operations. The navy intended to use the World War I battleship Schleswig-Holstein, 3 cruisers, and two flotillas of destroyers to bombard shore installations at Gdynia and Hel (Hela).

Polish Defense Plan

The one chance that Poland might have had to counter the German invasion successfully was to fight a delaying action back to the Narew-Vistula-San line and to hold there until the Western powers could bring their forces to bear. This strategy would, however, have sacrificed the country's industrial base and so carried with it the seeds of eventual defeat. The Polish General Staff chose instead to defend all of its frontiers with seven armies and several smaller groupings in territorial deployment. It thereby eliminated at the outset the possibility of concentrating its strength at the most gravely threatened points. The planners apparently believed that the war, following older patterns, would begin with border skirmishes that would only gradually evolve into full-scale battles.

The Polish commander in chief was Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, inspector general of the armed forces. The army's full potential strength was about 1,800,000 men. Mobilization began in July, and apparently more than 1,000,000 men were called up, about 800,000 of them west of the German-Soviet demarcation line. Most of the weapons in the army's stocks dated from World War I, and its armor, except for a few light tanks, consisted of some companies of armored scout cars. The air units had 935 aircraft, less than half of which were modern. The navy consisted of 4 destroyers, 5 submarines, and some smaller craft.

Campaign

On the morning of September 1, the Luftwaffe struck at the Polish airfields, destroying nearly all of the planes before they could get off the ground. It then set about systematically disrupting the railroads and lines of communications. Before the day ended, the Polish leadership was helpless. Mobilization could not be completed, and large-scale troop movements were impossible.

The first phase of the campaign, the breakthrough on the borders, ended on September 5. By September 7, the point of the Tenth Army was 36 miles southwest of Warsaw. The Eighth Army on the left had kept pace, executing its mission of protecting the flank, while the Fourteenth Army on the right had captured the Upper Silesian industrial area. By September 5, the two armies in Bock's Army Group North had cut across the corridor and had begun turning to the southeast, and two days later elements of the Third Army reached the Narew 25 miles north of Warsaw. The Poles fought gallantly, but cavalry was no match for tanks. On September 6, the Polish government left Warsaw for Lublin; later it moved close to the Romanian border, which it crossed on September 16.

The second phase of the campaign completed the destruction of the Polish armed forces. According to the German plan, this was to have been accomplished in a single giant encirclement west of the Vistula. After intelligence reports indicated that the government and large numbers of Polish troops had fled across the river, the plan was changed in accordance with Bock's earlier proposals. The OKH, on September 11, ordered a second deeper envelopment, reaching eastward to the line of the Bug (Western Bug) River.

In the meantime, the closing of the inner ring at Warsaw had created the first and only genuine crisis of the war. The Polish Poznan Army, bypassed in the first week, at the beginning of the second week felt the German pincers closing behind it. Turning around, it attempted to break through to Warsaw. For several days after September 9, staffs of the German Eighth and Tenth armies were put to a severe test as they swung some of their divisions around to meet the attack coming from the west. The Poles did not break through, however, and the ring gradually closed. On September 19, the Poznan Army, numbering 100,000 men, surrendered, ending the last resistance by a major Polish force.

The most spectacular feature of the outer envelopment was the advance of Gen. (later Col. Gen.) Heinz Guderian's panzer corps from East Prussia across the Narew to Brest (Brest-Litovsk), which it took on September 17. Elements of the corps then continued past the city to make radio contact with the Tenth Army spearhead at Wlodowa, 30 miles to the south.

The war ended for all practical purposes on September 19. The fortress at Lwow (now Lvov) surrendered two days later. Warsaw itself held out until September 27. Modlin capitulated on September 28, and the last organized resistance ended on October 6, when 17,000 Polish troops surrendered at Kock. In the whole campaign the Germans took 694,000 prisoners, and an estimated 100,000 men escaped across the borders into Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania. The Germans lost 13,981 killed and 30,322 wounded; Polish losses will probably never be known.

Soviet Intervention

Hastening to end the war before the Western powers could act, the Germans on September 3 requested the Soviet Union to move against Poland, but the Russians were not ready. The German speed had taken them by surprise. After the German ambassador in Moscow submitted a second request on September 10, the Soviet government apparently became concerned lest the war end before it could enter it and the Germans refuse to honor the secret protocol and evacuate the territory east of the demarcation line.

On September 17, two Soviet army groups, the White Russian Front in the north and the Ukrainian Front in the south, each with two armies, marched into Poland. They met little Polish resistance and concentrated their efforts on shepherding the Germans out of the Soviet zone. A last-minute German attempt to secure control of the oilfield south of Lwow in the Soviet zone had aroused suspicion. Approximately 217,000 Polish troops fell prisoner to the Russians. Many of them survived to fight Germany again either in the west or in Soviet service, but some thousands, mostly officers, found their graves in Katyn Forest.

Partition

In formulating the secret protocol to the nonaggression treaty, both Germany and the Soviet Union had assumed that a truncated independent Polish state would be allowed to survive. On September 25, however, having made a hint to this effect six days earlier, Stalin proposed that the conquerors divide Poland between them. In Moscow, on September 28, Ribbentrop signed a Soviet-German treaty of friendship. A secret protocol revised the demarcation line. Germany received the Province of Lublin and the Province of Warszawa eastward to the Bug River, and as compensation the USSR included Lithuania in its sphere of influence. The Soviet Union also agreed to deliver to Germany 300,000 tons of crude oil annually, the estimated output of the Polish fields. The revision placed the Soviet border approximately on the Curzon Line and gave Germany nearly all of the ethnically Polish territory. On the same day, Ribbentrop and Molotov issued a statement claiming that the settlement had created a basis for a lasting peace in eastern Europe and calling for an end to the war between Germany and the Western powers.

FINLAND: THE WINTER WAR

Beginning in the last two weeks of September 1939, the Soviet Union forced the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to enter negotiations leading toward mutual assistance treaties granting rights to station Soviet troops and build Soviet bases on their territories. On October 5, the day Latvia signed its treaty, the Soviet government extended its diplomatic offensive to the north with a demand that Finland send plenipotentiaries to Moscow to negotiate political questions raised by the outbreak of the war. When the negotiations began on October 12, the Russians demanded a mutual assistance pact, a 30-year lease on a base at Hango (Hanko), several islands in the Gulf of Finland, the western half of the Rybachi Peninsula, and a broad strip of Finnish territory on the Karelian Isthmus. The talks continued into November without producing agreement on the two main questions: Hango and the Karelian Isthmus.

On November 26, the Russians staged an "incident, an alleged Finnish artillery attack, at Mainila on the Karelian Isthmus. Two days later, they abrogated their nonaggression treaty with Finland, and on November 30 opened the war with heavy air raids on Helsinki and strong attacks by ground forces at several points from the border north of Leningrad to the Arctic Ocean. On December 1, in (as it developed) an extremely premature move, the Soviet government announced that it had created a People's Democratic Republic of Finland under an old-line Bolshevik, Otto W. Kuusinen.

The lengthy preliminaries had given the Finnish Army ample time to complete the mobilization that it had begun on October 14. During the summer volunteers had started building field fortifications on the Karelian Isthmus, but nothing resembling the mythical "Mannerheim Line, which the Russians later invented to excuse their reverses. Finland mobilized 9 divisions and some single companies and battalions, or a total of 175,000 men. Plans had called for 15 divisions, but lack of weapons and equipment made this goal unattainable. In the course of the war, Finnish strength rose to about 200,000 men, and foreign volunteers, including a 300-man Finnish-American Legion, added another 11,000. The Lotta Svard, an auxiliary force of 100,000 women, performed invaluable service in relieving men for frontline duty.

The Soviet High Command deployed four armies under the command of Gen. (later Marshal) Semyon K. Timoshenko on the Finnish frontier: the Seventh Army on the Karelian Isthmus, the Eighth Army north of Lake Ladoga, the Ninth Army in the Reboly (Repola)-Ukhta (Uhtua)-Kandalaksha (Kannanlahti) sector, and the Fourteenth Army on the Arctic coast. The total Soviet troop strength was about 1,000,000 men in 30 divisions. Approximately 1,000 tanks and 800 aircraft lent weight to the offensive.

The Finnish commander in chief, Field Marshal (later Marshal of Finland) Baron Carl G. E. Mannerheim, assembled 6 of his divisions on the Karelian Isthmus, stationed 2 divisions on a short line north of Lake Ladoga, and held 1 division in reserve. Nearly 600 miles of frontier northward to the Arctic coast could be screened only by scattered companies and battalions. Mannerheim had no choice but to mass his forces on the isthmus, the most direct route into the heartland of Finland, the narrow coastal strip between Helsinki and Viipuri (now Vyborg).

Most alarming for the Finnish High Command were the strength and speed with which the Soviet forces moved against the long frontier north of Lake Ladoga. In what at the time seemed a near miracle, two Finnish regiments under Col. (later Gen.) Paavo Talvela beginning on December 12 attacked and destroyed the Soviet 139th Division at Tolvajarvi (now Tolvayarvi), and then defeated the 75th Division. In a nearly month-long battle that began on December 11, a second small force under Col. (later Gen.) Hjalmar F. Siilasvuo encircled the Soviet 163d Division at Suomussalmi and destroyed the 44th Division, which had come to break the encirclement. These victories put an end to Russian attempts to sweep around Lake Ladoga from the north and to cut across the waist of Finland to the Gulf of Bothnia, and they also raised Finnish morale.

During the early fighting the Finns developed their celebrated motti (literally, a bundle of sticks) tactics. The mottis were small, tight encirclements suited to the heavily forested Finnish terrain. In one of the later battles the personnel of a single Soviet division was trapped in 10 separate mottis.

The Finnish divisions on the Karelian Isthmus fought a delaying action in early December, withstood a full-scale assault on their main defense line at mid-month, and on December 23 counterattacked. The counterattack failed to gain much ground, but it took the Soviet command by surprise, and during the entire next month the fighting on the isthmus subsided into positional warfare.

In January 1940, Marshal Kliment Y. Voroshilov assumed over-all command, and Timoshenko took command on the isthmus, where the Thirteenth Army had been moved in on the right of the Seventh Army. The Soviet setbacks had resulted from a combination of supply problems, a winter of record cold, rigid and unimaginative leadership, and a lack of coordination between the various services. Mannerheim described the Soviet attacks in December as similar to a performance by a badly directed orchestra. In January, the Soviet High Command pulled out units and retrained them immediately behind the front.

On February 1, the Russians opened their final offensive on the Karelian Isthmus. By that time, Soviet propaganda had inflated the Mannerheim Line into something like a super-Maginot Line. The offensive made steady if not rapid progress. On March 4, Soviet units on the west side of the isthmus began attacking across Viipuri (Vyborg) Bay, where the ice had frozen thickly enough to carry tanks. A few miles farther, and the Russians would have reached the open country north of the isthmus. On March 6, the Finnish government sent a deputation to Moscow, and on March 12 the Treaty of Moscow was signed, ending the war. The Finnish Army was still holding well, but, since it had suffered casualties of 24,923 killed and missing and 43,557 wounded, lacked manpower to continue much longer. The Russians probably lost about 200,000 men killed in battle or by the cold.

The terms of the treaty were onerous. Finland was forced to cede the Karelian Isthmus, including Viipuri and a strip of territory northeast of Lake Ladoga, the islands in the Gulf of Finland, the western half of the Rybachi Peninsula, and territory around Salla (now Kuolayarvi) and Kuusamo. The Soviet Union also acquired a 30-year lease on Hango for use as a naval base. Finland lost its most defensible territory and had to absorb 400,000 refugees into an already badly shaken economy.

NORWAY AND DENMARK

German Planning

When the campaign in Poland ended, the Germans, contrary to widely held opinion at the time, did not have a clear idea of what to do next. In a conference held on Sept. 23, 1939, Hitler raised the question of measures to be adopted "in case the war against Great Britain and France had to be fought to a finish. The possibility of unrestricted submarine warfare, to be proclaimed as a " siege of Britain, was considered.

If Hitler had decided on the siege of Britain, it would have had to be executed by the German Navy and Air Force. On October 3, the commander in chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, told his staff that he believed the navy could operate more effectively against the British Isles if it were to acquire one or two bases in Norway, possibly at Trondheim and Narvik. His thinking reflected the opinion, common in German naval circles after World War I, that the German Navy would have made a better showing in that conflict if, instead of being bottled up in the North Sea, it had had Norwegian bases to use as sally ports on the Atlantic. When it investigated the question of Norwegian bases on Raeder's orders, the Naval Staff learned that the chief of the Army General Staff, Col. Gen. Franz Halder, was pessimistic. He did not think that the army could either take or defend bases in Norway. The Naval Staff itself concluded that it was to Germany's advantage to keep Norway neutral, especially since the navy lacked sufficient ships to use the proposed bases for full-scale sea warfare. By taking the bases, it decided, Germany might lose more than she gained. While Norway remained neutral, its territorial waters afforded safe routes for German blockade-runners and for ships bringing Swedish iron ore down from Narvik. The German war industry was completely dependent on Swedish ore, which in winter, when the Baltic Sea froze, could be shipped only via Narvik.

During October and November, Hitler devoted all of his attention to plans for invading France and Belgium. Raeder tried to interest him in the Norwegian bases but failed until December, when he persuaded Hitler to grant an interview to Vidkun Quisling, who led a Norwegian copy of the Nazi Party. Quisling claimed to know that the Norwegian government had secretly agreed not to oppose a British invasion. After talking to Quisling, Hitler, on December 14, ordered the OKW Operations Staff to investigate the possibility of occupying Norway.

That Hitler began to think about Norway was not entirely Quisling's work. Soviet aggression against Finland had aroused strong sympathy for the Finns and had unleashed a wave of anti-German sentiment in Scandinavia. While Germany took a neutral stand that favored the Soviet Union, the Allies had begun talking about sending troops to help the Finns. If troops were sent, the shortest route would be through Narvik and across northern Sweden, directly past the Kiruna-Gallivare ore fields so important to Germany.

In January 1940, the Foreign Political Office of the Nazi Party undertook to maintain contact with Quisling and provide financial support for his party. Ignoring Quisling, OKW continued its planning on a small scale and in secret. Hitler did not show any real enthusiasm for the Norwegian venture until after February 16. On that day the British destroyer Cossack entered Norwegian territorial waters and took 300 captured British seamen from the German tanker Altmark. The Altmark had been the supply ship for the ill-fated commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee. Hitler became convinced that the British no longer intended to respect Norway's neutrality. On February 21, he called in Gen. (later Col. Gen.) Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, commanding general of the 21st Corps, and gave him the mission of planning and (if it were to be executed) commanding an operation against Norway.

Signs that the British and French intended to use the Russo-Finnish War as an excuse to intervene in Scandinavia added urgency to German planning in late February and early March. On March 7, Hitler assigned 8 infantry divisions and a motorized brigade to Falkenhorst. Toward the middle of the month radio intercepts indicated that troop transports were loading in British ports. Another intercept, on March 15, revealed that the Soviet-Finnish armistice had spoiled the Allied plans. The armistice also deprived Hitler of his excuse for moving against Norway, and some of the officers in the planning group began to doubt whether it was worthwhile to go ahead. On March 26, however, Raeder told Hitler that, although Allied landings need not be expected in Norway in the near future, Germany would have to face the question sooner or later. He advised that Germany act as soon as possible, because the nights in northern latitudes would be too short to afford good cover for naval forces after April 15. Hitler agreed. On April 2, after reviewing the plans and learning from the air force and navy that the weather would be satisfactory, he named April 9 as the day for the landings.

Allied Intentions

A British-French staff paper of April 1939 on strategic policy recognized that in the first phase of a war with Germany economic warfare would be the only effective Allied offensive weapon. In the light of this fact and of World War I experience in blockading Germany, Norway inevitably assumed a special importance for the Western powers as soon as war broke out. Before mid-September, the British government had made its first attempt to secure from Norway a "sympathetic interpretation of its rights as a neutral.

The Soviet attack on Finland at the end of November aroused the hope that Norway and Sweden, motivated by sympathy for Finland and by their duty as members of the League of Nations, might permit Allied troops sent to aid the Finns to cross their territory. Such an undertaking could be made to include the occupation of Narvik and of the Swedish ore fields almost automatically. After Field Marshal Mannerheim appealed for aid on Jan. 29, 1940, the Allied Supreme War Council decided to send an expedition timed for mid-March. The plan, while ostensibly intended to bring Allied troops to the Finnish front, placed its emphasis on Norway and Sweden. The main force was to land at Narvik and advance along the ore railroad to its eastern terminus at Lulea, Sweden. Only after two brigades were firmly established along that line would a third brigade be sent into Finland. The preparations moved slowly, and the two governments never quite faced the question what they would do if Norway and Sweden refused transit rights or decided to fight. After Finland accepted the Treaty of Moscow on March 12, the whole project collapsed.

On March 21, Paul Reynaud became the head of a French government committed to a more aggressive policy, and a week later the Supreme War Council again raised the Scandinavian question. A new plan called for two related operations: the laying of minefields in Norwegian waters; and landings at Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and Stavanger, to be justified by the expected violent German reaction to the minelaying. After some delays the mines were laid on the morning of April 8, but by then the German Fleet was already advancing up the Norwegian coast.

German Landings

The initial German invasion force for Norway totaled 10,500 men. Provisions were made to introduce an additional 16,700 men through Oslo in the first week and 40,000 more thereafter. The plan called for a peaceful occupation of the country, allegedly to protect Norwegian neutrality. Falkenhorst's staff concluded that landings at Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, Stavanger, Kristiansand, Egersund, Arendal, and Oslo would place the major centers of population in German hands and effectively crush Norwegian attempts to mobilize. The earlier planners had considered that it would be sufficient to extract several bases from Denmark by diplomatic pressure, but Falkenhorst decided that it would be safer to take military possession of the country as a land bridge to Norway. To this task he assigned, under Gen. Leonhard Kaupisch, the headquarters of the 31st Corps, 2 infantry divisions, and a motorized brigade.

The first plans had called for an attempt to sneak troops into the Norwegian ports aboard merchant ships. Falkenhorst's staff considered this project too dangerous and decided instead to transport all of the landing teams (except the one for Stavanger, which was to go by air) in warships. Merchant ships were restricted to carrying supplies and troops for landings on the Danish islands, where they would not have to venture outside the German-controlled Baltic Sea. The decision to use warships made the landings the most hazardous phase of the operation: if the vastly superior British Fleet had put in an appearance, it might have destroyed virtually the whole German Navy.

The first two groups of warships sailed on April 7, escorted by the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau; 10 destroyers were bound for Narvik, and the cruiser Hipper and 4 destroyers for Trondheim. Nine other warship groups sailed at intervals that depended on their speeds and on the distances they had to travel. They consisted of the heavy cruiser Blucher and the pocket battleship Lutzow bound for Oslo, several older cruisers, training ships, torpedo boats, and a variety of smaller craft carrying landing parties to Denmark. A British aircraft sighted the first two warship groups six hours after they sailed, but Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes, commander in chief of the Home Fleet, concluded that the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were setting out on a raiding mission into the Atlantic and sent his own ships steaming northward behind them, leaving the North Sea open for the remaining German warship groups.

The landings were executed on time on April 9 everywhere except at Oslo. There the old guns (Krupp model 1905) of the Oscarsborg fort 18 miles south of the city sank the Blucher and held the rest of the ships off until the following day. The delay gave the Norwegian king, Haakon VII, and the government time to escape from the capital and made conclusive the failure of the plan to occupy the country without a fight.

In the case of Denmark everything went exactly according to plan. On April 9, one division and the motorized brigade advanced northward across the border into Jutland (Jylland), and the other division staged landings on the islands. Early the same morning, the German minister, Dr. Cecil von Renthe-Fink, presented himself at the Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen (Koslash;benhavn) with a demand for surrender and assurances that the country would be permitted to retain much of its internal sovereignty. After he added that planes were on their way to bomb the city, the Danish government capitulated at 7:20 am

In executing the Norwegian landings, the German surface fleet achieved its greatest success of the war. It also suffered near-crippling losses. The cruisers Konigsberg and Karlsruhe were sunk before they could leave Norwegian waters, and in two battles (April 10 and 13) British ships sank the 10 destroyers which had taken troops to Narvik.

Norwegian Campaign

On the morning of April 9, Norwegian Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht told Dr. Curt Brauer, the German minister in Oslo: "We will not submit. The battle is already in progress. But how to fight was another matter. The Norwegian Army's total strength was 15,320 men, and half of them were stationed in the Arctic as an aftermath of the Russo-Finnish War. On April 9, the Germans captured a good share of the army's equipment and all the key communications centers. Two days later, from his headquarters at Rena north of Oslo, the Norwegian Army's commander in chief, Gen. Otto Ruge, had effective control of only one division. With that he planned to delay the German advance north from Oslo and hold open a field of operations in the interior for an anticipated Allied expeditionary force.

The first problem for the Germans was to establish land contact between Oslo and the landing parties in the other coastal cities. By April 16, Falkenhorst had units advancing northward toward Trondheim through the two great valleys, the Gudbrandsdal and the Osterdal. Between April 18 and 23, two British brigades, totaling about 6,000 men, landed at Andalsnes south of Trondheim. Another 6,000 British and French troops went ashore at Namsos to the north of the city. At Tretten on April 23, the Germans defeated one British brigade which had advanced southward into the Gudbrandsdal from Andalsnes, and thereafter the British withdrew to Andalsnes, where their last troops were evacuated on May 2. The German units coming from Oslo had made contact with their Trondheim detachment the day before. In the meantime, the British and French had decided also to evacuate Namsos, which they did on May 3. The last Norwegian resistance in the area south of Trondheim ended on the same day, when the 2d Division surrendered on the Dovrefjell.

At Narvik events at first took a different course. The city could not be reached by land except through Sweden, and it was not within easy range for the Luftwaffe. The German commander in Narvik, Gen. (later Col. Gen.) Eduard Dietl, had 2,000 mountain troops and 2,600 sailors, survivors from the sunken destroyers. Beginning on April 14, British and French troops joined the Norwegian 6th Division in a seven weeks' siege that eventually drove the Germans out of Narvik and back to the Swedish border. By the last week in May, Dietl's force faced 24,500 Allied troops, but by then the British and French armies in France were collapsing, and the Allied command had decided to withdraw from Norway. After destroying the port installations at Narvik, the Allied troops began boarding ship on June 4, and the rear guard sailed on June 8.

On June 9, the Norwegian Army command agreed to an armistice, which ended the campaign at midnight that day. Although Norway was not again a scene of active operations, except for Commando-style raids and resistance activity, it remained in the forefront of the war until May 1945. Hitler regarded it as the northern bastion of his Fortress Europe and maintained a 300,000-man army there throughout the war.

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