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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.
Earl F. Ziemke
Historian, Office of the Chief of Military History
Department of the Army.
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