176: The End and Beginning of Norwegian Resistance

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The campaign was almost over, but for the people of Norway the war was just beginning.

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Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War episode 176 - The Invasion of Norway - The End and the Beginning of Norwegian Resistance. Patreon-William, Micah, and Mike. On May 28th the Allied forces in Norway had accomplished one of the key goals of the campaign, to recapture the port of Narvik from the Germans. And yet, by the time that the message was sent from Narvik that the city had been captured, the decision had already been made in London to wind down the campaign and to evacuate as many men and as much material as possible. The root of this decision was probably in a May 20th report from the Inter-Service Planning Staff to the Chiefs of Staff, a British planning body that prepared information for higher level decision making bodies within the British government and military. The report was written up in the shadows of the absolute disasters that were at that very moment occurring in France. The German invasion had began over a week before, and a week later, on May 26th the evacuations from Dunkirk would begin. This new situation caused British leaders to complete re-evaluate the importance and viability of the fighting in Norway. Here is a quote from the report: “Support by home-based aircraft for our land-forces in the Narvik area was not possible, as that area was out of range of all but the few Coastal Command flying boats. Bomber Command aircraft were no longer available for operations over Norway when the German attack on the Low Countries began. […] It was clear that we could not afford to spare a single man or gun, much less one aircraft for what was regarded as a secondary theatre when the disaster upon disaster was overtaking our forces in the West.” Even with the change in priorities that were already underway, and the decision to evacuate Norway in the near future, the attack on Narvik still went forward. There were a variety of justifications that were given for this action. British leaders wanted to ensure that the port facilities of Narvik were destroyed, this would prevent their use by the Germans and prevent the flow of Swedish Iron Ore through Narvik, which was one of the primary reasons the invasion had occurred in the first place. There was also the idea that by neutralizing the German forces at Narvik it would be easier and safer to execute the evacuation. But General Béthouart was probably closer to the truth when he wrote later that the real reason that Narvik was captured was because all of the Allies needed a victory, they needed something to go their way because that certainly was not going to happen in France. Along with the evacuation plans, just as had occurred in Central Norway, there was also an order not to tell the Norwegians what was happening. This would be very challenging for the officers working closely with the Norwegians, for example General Béthouart who would say “I am operating with Norwegian troops whom for reasons of national honor, I will not abandon in difficulties on the battlefield.” To prevent information from reaching the Norwegians, attempts were made to keep the number of people who knew what was happening as low as possible. Those who were read into the plan were also given a list of various things to answer questions with, primarily around the idea that British and French forces were being repositioned in Norway now that the Narvik had been recaptured. It was a good excuse for why units were preparing to leave, although also completely dishonest. This lie was completely unsustainable, for the same reasons it had been weeks earlier in central Norway, and eventually the Norwegians would have to be told, but as the evacuation grew nearer Churchill made the decision to delay letting Norwegian leaders know until June 1, when the first evacuations would begin on June 3, giving them just 2 days to determine what the path forward would be for Norway.

After they were informed on June 1st, the civilian government in Tromso would summon the military leadership, General Ruge and Fleischer, for a meeting to really determine the future of Norway. There were three basic options available for the Norwegian leaders all with their own risks and consequences. The first option was for the government to stay in the country and seek an immediate peace with Germany, it does not appear that this option was seriously considered by the Norwegian leaders. The second option was to stay in the country and continue to resist, a decision that would only result in defeat due to a lack of support from the Allies but might allow for the Norwegian military to control part of northern Norway for some period of time. The third option was to take the government into exile and continue the war, but to give all of Norway and its people over to Germany during the remainder of hostilities. This final option would be the one selected by the assembled Norwegian leaders, with the plan that would develop being that the government and some members of the military, including General Fleischer, would be evacuated to Britain. Meanwhile General Ruge and the bulk of the Norwegian military would stay behind to continue to resist while the evacuations occurred and then immediately after. However, there was the recognition that this resistance would soon end and then General Ruge would be responsible for seeking a way to surrender the Norwegian military on the best possible terms. Ruge would be given complete authority for whatever happened in Northern Norway, and able to make any decisions he felt necessary, with these new responsibilities being given to him on June 7th.

The first set of evacuations would begin on the night of June 3rd, and as with every such evacuation it would be a challenging dance. It would take some time to get everyone out of Norway, and so it was important to try and prevent the Germans from learning what was happening. There were around 25,000 troops to be evacuated and they would be divided into a series of different groups. To try and lessen the risk of air attack, the transports that had been dispatched to Northern Norway for the purpose were only sent into the area 2 at a time, with the larger rendezvous being over 200 kilometers offshore. When the transports arrived close to shore the men and equipment was moved to them via destroyers and local Norwegian fishing ships. By the end of June 6th six transports had been loaded up, representing almost 15,000 troops which would begin to make their way back to Great Britain. The final seven transports would be loaded up over the next two days before they also started on their way back to Britain as well. Along with the vital troop transports, there were also two separate groups of transports that were sent that were dedicated to evacuating supplies and equipment. In the aftermath of Dunkirk these supplies and equipment gained new importance, as the evacuations from Dunkirk had left all of the equipment behind. All of these evacuations went very well and by June 9th everything was on its way away from Norway.

While these evacuations were taking place, the last major naval engagement of the Norwegian campaign would occur on June 8th. In the afternoon of June 8th the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were moving through the North Sea when a lookout on the Scharnhorst spotted smoke 45 kilometers way. The smoke was from the British carrier Glorious, one of the battlecruiser to carrier conversions that had been completed by the Royal Navy during the interwar period. When the Glorious realized what was happening, when the German ships appeared and were chasing her, the carrier was suddenly in a difficult position. The Glorious had a hanger full of aircraft that would attack the German ships, but as with other carriers during the war, the Glorious would have to turn into the wind to being flight operations. Turning onto such a course would require the Glorious to steam directly towards the German ships. The Glorious’ captain instead decided to try and run away, but it would prove to be impossible. At 5:32PM at a range of over 25,000 meters the Scharnhorst would open fire. The shells quickly found their mark and the Glorious caught fire. The two destroyers that were with the carrier also quickly came under fire, with the Ardent being hit early in the engagement. The Casta would have a bit more time, and the destroyer would be able to launch some torpedoes two of which would hit the Scharnhorst. But it was only a matter of time for the small British destroyer, and soon the captain gave the order to abandon ship. The action was over quite quickly, and in that time over 1,500 men of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were lost. Only a tiny number of survivors would be picked up over the following days, with the Germans able to rescue just 6 and then 39 more being found by a Norwegian steamer. It was a disaster of the highest order, only slightly offset by the damage done to Scharnhorst which would have to make its way to Trondheim for emergency repairs before going back to Germany. Gneisenau would also be attacked by a British submarine later in in the month, which would put both German ships in port until January 1941.

On the same day that the Glorious would encounter the German battleships the process of surrendering the Norwegian military to the Germans was underway. On June 7th the final meeting was held on Norwegian soil by the Norwegian government, military leaders, and the King. The government leaders would be on a British cruiser just a few hours later. At this meeting the final orders were given out to Norwegian forces, with all of the naval vessels, aircraft, and merchant ships that could leave for Britain being told to do so. Over the previous days that had been plans put in place for one final Norwegian attack in the areas around Narvik, but this attack never occurred. Instead, in the late hours of June 8th a message was sent to the German military leaders in Norway, that the Norwegians were prepared to negotiate a ceasefire. Shortly after this message was sent to the Germans, orders were sent out to Norwegian forces to begin the demobilization process, with most of the troops moved out of their forward positions. The first message received back from General von Falkenhorst set the deadline for an end to hostilities as 4PM on June 9th, which the Norwegians successfully moved to midnight. While the fighting would end, negotiations began for the official surrender of Norwegian forces, with General Ruge and his staff surrendering to Dietl in Northern Norway on June 12th. The Germans allowed the previously orders Norwegian demobilization plans to continue without interruption, as men were removed from the front and either demobilized in place and sent home or were transported back to their home regions before handing in their equipment and going home. With the conclusions of negotiations the invasion of Norway, and the organized resistance by the Norwegian military in Norway, was over by the end of June 9th, just two months after the first German troops had come ashore.

From the German perspective the operations in Norway had been a major success. The German forces had been able to capture all of Norway, with all of the benefits provided by the long Norwegian coastline without impacting the success of the larger German operations in Western Europe that occurred in the spring of 1940. It was also a major showcase of involving all German military arms in one operation, and they would generally work together very well. In their evaluations of the enemies they had faced during the fighting in Norway the Germans were generally complementary of the average Norwegian soldier, and the actions of the small Norwegian units that they often faced during the fighting. This positive evaluation was not shared with the larger Norwegian units, and the Germans felt that the Norwegians had not handled the larger operations of the campaign well, which was really just indicative of a lack of large Norwegian training exercises during the 1930s. The French forces that the Germans faced received generally high evaluations, which were not shared at all by the British forces which the Germans remarked had low morale, poor self-reliance, and a general lack of solid fighting qualities. The overall impacts of the Norwegian campaign would be felt for the rest of the war, although not always in the most obvious ways. One of the more important but less obvious impacts of the campaign was the impact it would have on Hitler’s position in military decisions and his belief in his own military decision making acumen. Norway was an operation that was planned by military officers, but Hitler felt that he had instigated the overall campaign, and that it just proved once again that he was a military genius. It is true that Hitler had overridden some of the concerns of the German military leaders who did not want to disperse German strength with the invasion of France scheduled for just a month after the start of the Norwegian adventure. These concerns would prove to be unfounded, and Hitler would take that as a sign that he knew more about military matters than the German military. The impact that this had on the overall power dynamics among the military high command was similar to the impact of the Anschluss and the remilitarization of the Rhineland on the power dynamics in German politics. In all three instances Hitler had gambled, taken a major risk and it had paid off, and in doing so it solidified his position as the person who had better instincts than others. These actions were similar because they were bold actions that other nations did not expect Germany to take, and those bold strokes would pay off. This would encourage further bold strokes, but there would soon be a day when they would stop paying off, and this did not cause Hitler to re-evaluate his instincts and instead just caused him to lose even more faith in the leaders of the German military, a theme which would become critical after the invasion of the Soviet Union a little over a year after the end of the operations in Norway. A more obvious and immediate impact of the actions in Norway was the disastrous problems that that the German navy would face in the weeks and months that followed the operation. One of the primary reasons for the invasion had been to obtain Norwegian bases for the Kriegsmarine, a goal that had been accomplished. The problem was that there was not a lot of Kriegsmarine left to take advantage of these new bases. Among its surface fleet the Kriegsmarine had lost almost half of its strength, one of its two heavy cruisers, two of its six light cruisers, and 10 of its 20 destroyers and many of those that were not lost outright had suffered damage that required time in port to resolve. Due to the availability of resources and construction priorities the German surface forces would largely never recover from the actions in Norway, even though the most powerful German ships the Bismarck and Tirpitz would enter the fleet later in the war. The U-boats also did not escape the bloodletting, with 6 U-boats being lost in operations around Norway during the invasion. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau would also be damaged heavily in operations directly related or immediately following the invasion which meant that for most of 1940 there would be no significant Kriegsmarine operations. Even worse, events in France would largely negate the utility of the Norwegian ports, as ports like Brest, Lorient, and St. Nazaire on France’s Atlantic coast were far better positioned for U-boat operations and as staging ports for surface raiders. The Norwegian ports would be useful when attacks on convoys on their way to the Soviet Union began in 1941.

In terms of casualties the failed defense of Norway would be costly for all involved. The British would suffer about 2,000 casualties on land, and around 2,500 at sea with the French and Polish forces suffering about 530. Around 850 Norwegian soldiers were killed along with 400 civilians. The exact number of wounded Norwegians is harder to determine due to the German occupation that would follow and the related difficulties in record keeping. Against these casualties the Germans lost about 4,000 men, with the majority of those coming among the Kriegsmarine due to the number of ships that were damaged and destroyed, about 1,300 were killed during the land campaign. Looking ahead at the Allied war effort, the loss of Norway was really just one of many losses that would occur during the summer of 1940. France and Norway were of course lost to German occupation, but also the entry of Italy into the war would cause severe problems for the British war effort going forward. Looking back, some of the mistakes on the Allied side, and particularly the British side of the decision making, seem obvious. The first problem was actually around Allied planning in the lead up to the German invasion, planning in which the Norwegians were not involved, the planned Allied invasion of Norway. During this planning there were actions being taken without a full consideration of the situation in which the British and French found themselves at the start of 1940. They were in general too optimistic that they would be able to pull German attention away from France, while not truly committing the forces required to truly pose a threat to any real through to German forces anywhere actually important. The second problem would simply be the inability of British intelligence to learn anything of what the Germans might be doing. They did know that ships had left German ports and had sailed into the North Sea, but until there were confirmed reports of Germans landing in Norwegian ports the assumption among the leaders of the Royal Navy was that the Germans were simply trying to break out into the Atlantic. If their purpose had been ascertained earlier the actions of all of the Allied forces may have been drastically different. The third major problem is that once the intentions were clear the Allies refused to commit the forces necessary to truly meet the German challenge. There was a hesitancy to move troops and aircraft out of Britain and France resulted in a situation where there was a lot of risk placed on the troops that were on the ground, along with the Royal Navy to support them, without there being enough troops to actually find a path to victory. These were the major problems, there were numerous other smaller problems at a tactical level, particularly around amphibious operations and a failure to properly appreciate the dominance that German air superiority could provide, and how much airpower would be required to prevent that dominance from causing defeat on the ground.

For the Norwegian government and military the campaign had of course been a complete disaster. It is hard to see what they could have done differently though, they were almost entirely at the whims of the nations that were already at war. The easy thing to criticize is that they did not join the Allies earlier, but it is hard to see how that would have improved things given the fact that the British and French were going to attack them before the Germans were. The government in exile would find its reputation tainted by the fact that it had failed to keep Norway out of the war and then had lost Norway to the Germans. But they were helped by the totally incompetent measures taken by the Germans to try and set up some kind of new Norwegian government to replace it. This government of collaboration, with Quisling at its head, held no legitimacy in anyway, but was put in place by the Germans and was under the leadership of Quisling, who was a known collaborator. There would be serious attempts to trickle down this central control through the use of new local elections, with the local government being almost entirely free of German influence. The Quisling led government would completely squander what was generally a period of relative calm throughout most of 1940. During those months the largest portion of Norwegian people, businesses, and local leaders just kind of went along with the new government because they were not pushing Nazification very hard and were not necessarily pushing the boundaries of their control. However, during the summer of 1940 the Norwegian Supreme Court would resign under pressure from the Quisling government to give it more power and legitimacy. This began a very quick slide towards an active resistance from the Norwegian people, which would only strengthen over the following 5 years of occupation. As would so often be the case, the resistance took two different forms there was the violent kind of resistance but almost more importantly there was the non-violent resistance from many different angles. For example around Norway the teachers in schools would be a focal point of resistance in early 1942 when they refused to conform with the new teaching standards that were set forth by the Quisling government which pulled heavily from the Hitler Youth and would in fact form a new National Youth organization modeled directly after the German equivalent. Of the 14,000 teachers in Norway 12,000 of them would join in active protests against the new guidelines and when they were threatened with dismissal almost none of them gave in. 500 teachers would eventually be sent to a hard labor camp in northern Norway until they agreed to give up the protest, which they only did in August when the weather was about to make their situation completely untenable. But this act of resistance had already had its intended effect, and the guidelines for the new National Youth organization had been changed, with the government retreating to the idea that it was never meant to be a political organization, a clear statement of victory for the protesters. This type of grassroots resistance, from what were really just common Norwegians, was in my mind the bravest type of resistance. These were not fighters, soldiers, or even people trying to do violence, they were people just trying to resist the new Nazi led government in the only way that they could, even at great personal risk, to try and shield the younger generation of Norwegians from what was happening. There were certainly flashier ways to resist, and in Norway there would be plenty of daring sabotage and clandestine violence, but the passive and active resistance from those within occupied Norway was, in my mind, the stuff that heroes are made of. But this would come at a cost, and over the course of the war somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 Norwegians would be arrested for political reasons. Over 1,300 Norwegians would die in concentration camps, and the Norwegian resistance organizations would lose over 2,000. The legacy of this violence, death, and suffering would live on for generations of Norwegians, and it would cause a fundamental shift in the viewpoints of Norway as a nation. It would be one of the charter members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, forsaking the neutrality that it had clung to during the early decades of its existence. That neutrality had betrayed it in 1940, for a whole host of reasons, but over the following 5 years Norway would be a critical contributor to final allied victory. One important way in which this was done was through the use of almost 4.8 million tons of Norwegian shipping which was made available to Britain, helping it through the worst of the times to come, and bridging the gap to the American assistance that would begin arriving in 1942. Norway would not be the first nation captured by the Nazis, and certainly would not be the last, but it would stand in concert with its allies for the rest of the war, and would join in the celebrations of victory.