Rambling with Rolf

Oslo's Arizona

“Oslo’s Arizona” marks another historical tipping point
The Allied victory over the Nazis might have begun here

earl Harbor’s Arizona memorial (on right) is not only one of America’s most poignant war graves, it also marks a pivotal event, that day in December 1941 when the USA was pitched into the cauldron of world war two. 

In Norway there is another watery war grave, but one with no memorial, one that can only be “seen” as a radar blip on ships passing overhead.   Although little known, “Oslo’s Arizona” marks another historical tipping point, this time with an added twist of  “what if...”.   You know idea....What if you had married someone else....what if Robert E Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg and there was now the Dis-United States of America.

The bare bones of the saga are quickly told:   On 9th. April 1940, Hitler invaded Norway.   Britain tried a frantic rescue attempt, but this ended in in such a fiasco that she got herself a new prime minister- Churchill.  End of story - But one which so nearly had a different ending.   Let’s see why. 

The main spur for the invasion of Norway was probably Hitler’s experiences as a corporal in the first war, when he had seen the British naval blockade slowly strangling Germany and playing a large part in her eventual defeat.   To avoid making the same mistake again, he needed free access to the North sea, which meant control of Denmark and Norway. 

Small, flat and bordering Germany, Denmark was defenceless, but Norway was a different matter.  Any attack there had to be by sea, so Adolf went to his chief sailor, Admiral Raeder - who replied that such an expedition was impossible.

Because Norway was a tiddler in terms of population and military muscle, it’s often assumed that its defeat was as much a foregone conclusion as all the early Nazi victories.   Poland, Norway, Low countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece... a litany of places where allied defeat is now seen as more or less inevitable.

Not so.  Norway was entirely different from these other campaigns and Admiral Raeder’s reluctance to become involved in such a mad escapade was based on sober analysis:

1. Amphibious attacks are the most difficult and risky in all warfare.
2. To reach Norway, they had to cross at least part of the North Sea, which was effectively a Royal Navy pond.  German ships were liable to be slaughtered.
3. German shipping was geared to fighting, not transport.   Of the projected invasion force of about 105,000 men, only a tiny 9,000 could be carried on this crucial first wave - a pathetic number for an invasion.   For the same reason, the subsequent build-up would be very slow: it took two months  get their whole army to Norway
4. The panzers, backbone of all their campaigns, could not be carried in any numbers in the restricted shipping space and would anyway be much less effective in the Norwegian terrain. 
5. Although Norway’s coastline is very long, it has virtually no beaches, so getting their army ashore depended on finding suitable ports.  Unfortunately, every Norwegian port lies up a fjord, from where shore batteries could pour a lethal barrage down at them from pointblank range.

Admiral Raeder told Hitler: “this enterprise goes against all the rules of naval warfare, which state that success can only be achieved with command of the seas.   This we don’t have.   On the contrary, we’ll have to operate under the noses of the vastly superior British navy”.  

If this maritime prognosis wasn’t gloomy enough, prospects were little better if the army actually managed to get ashore. In recent centuries only two European nations have avoided invasion, both largely because they have these strong natural defences - Britain, with its “moat”, the channel, and Switzerland with its mountains. Norway has a “moat” - the North Sea - and mountains, combining the natural advantages of both Switzerland and Britain.  Any German assault on Norway would be not merely risky, but downright reckless.  So how did it actually come to be mounted and, even more surprisingly, how did it succeed?                        

Well, Hitler could be very persuasive: one didn’t say “No” to the Fuhrer for long.   Germany had just obliterated a Polish army of 45 divisions within a couple of weeks, whereas Norway had a miserable 6 divisions, none of them mobilised.   So, “don’t be a wimp, Grand Admiral”, was the Fuhrer’s message.   Just get back to your desk and prepare a plan for the invasion of Norway.

Admiral Raeder did just that and came up with a scheme which can only be described as brilliant:   to hit six Norwegian towns at precisely the same hour, 4.15am, which was first light and therefore calculated to bring them past the coastal batteries while it was still dark.   Many of the troops necessary to secure these towns would be lurking in the holds of apparently innocent German merchantmen, which would arrive in Norwegian ports during the preceding days.   They should then have a foothold in the major population centers, from where they could eventually control the whole country. 

Raeder emphasised that a precondition for success was absolute secrecy.  This was unusual.  Until then, Hitlers’ adventures had been well flagged in advance by his propaganda chief, Josef Goebbles, who had deluged the airwaves with horror stories of minority Germans being maltreated in those countries they were about to attack.  Everyone had known pretty well what was coming.  

A sleeping victim awaits the Nazis

The same formula would be disastrous with Norway.   The Norwegian army might be small, but would greatly outnumber the mini-army available to the Germans for their initial assault.   What the Germans were counting on was that Norway would have no army at all, because it was manned by ordinary citizens and existed only on paper until mobilised.   If Norway became sufficiently concerned to puts guns into the hands of these citizens, the German campaign would be lost before it even started.

By the same token, if the coastal batteries, which were permanently mobilised, got a whiff of what was afoot, they would have their cannons ready to blow the German ships out of the water.  

The German assault was therefore planned on a “need-to-know” basis, many of  the top Nazis being kept out of the loop.   And it was codenamed not as an “operation”, the normal word for an attack , but simply as Weserubung - Weser exercise, nothing more sinister.

It’s now time to move our investigation from Germany to England and to get personal...  to my father, who was not a career officer, but belonged to that accursed generation, which got caught in a lifetime of conflict and chaos:  first the horrors of the Great war, then the depression of the 1930s, followed by six more years of war and finally the painful aftermath of austerity Britain.

In Norway we saw the danger, Danzig was a clue

When war broke out in 1939, my father, as a reservist, was already in uniform.   We, however, - mother sister and myself  - were across the North Sea, with grandma in Oslo, which was then presumed to be safer than England.

This was the period of the so-called phoney war, when Hitler had gobbled up Poland and was taking a break before his next meal.   With no useful slaughter to occupy them, my father said that the RAF at that time was rather like a gentleman’s club, and it was after a round of golf and a drink in the mess, that one of his colleagues invited him to take a look at some pictures.   These turned out to be aerial recce shots of lots of ships in a harbor.   “Where?”   asked my father.   “Danzig” was the reply.   “And what are all those ships doing in Danzig”?   “We think Hitler is going to have a go at Norway”. 

Forewarned, we made our escape in time, but why was my father, about the lowest form of officer life, well enough informed to drag his family out of harms way, while both the British and Norwegian governments seemed oblivious to the danger?   For all the secrecy surrounding Weser exercise, you can’t simply sweep an armada under the carpet.   It’s inconceivable that the reconnaisance photos, seen by my father, were not also noted at higher levels.

Of course, Britain knew perfectly well that something was afoot, but assumed the German activity was in response to Churchill’s public announcement that he was about to mine Norwegian waters.   No doubt Churchill thought the Germans were dancing to his tune, whereas in reality they were putting into action a plan they had been hatching for at least two months.  This misapprehension - that the British were controlling events and the Germans reacting, when in fact it was the other way round, lay at the heart of the Norway fiasco.

A warning bell ignored

As for the Norwegian side, the first warning bell had sounded a full seven weeks before the invasion, when the supposedly innocent German merchantman, the Altmark on right, had been boarded by the British navy in a Norwegian fjord, and found to contain 300 British seamen being taken back to Germany as prisoners of war.  Instead of admitting they had been conned by the Germans, the Norwegians only complained about Britain’s violation of its territorial waters.   This incident put Hitler’s plans into top gear, and, because such plans could not be completely hidden, resulted in a stream of diplomatic warnings back to Oslo.  

On the day before the attack, when there was still just enough time to do something, the Norwegian foreign minister told the cabinet about “reports that Germany was about to turn on Norway”, and then - inexplicably - told the army staff to go home.

But perhaps the most astonishing example of Norwegian negligence came in the “Rio de Janeiro” incident.   At midday on 8th. April, still some 16 hours before “Weser-hour”, the German troopship Rio de Janiero was torpodeoed off Norway’s south coast.   Many of these troops were drowned, but some 100 dripping and miserable Germans were rescued by Norwegian coastguards, who reported this to Oslo, adding that the Germans said they were on their way to Bergen.   And still the Norwegians did nothing!

In the face of this flood of evidence that the roof was about to fall in on them, the failure of the Norwegians to take any action can only be explained as the ostrich-like attitude of a small, frightened neutral country, desperately hoping that if they put their heads deeply enough into the sand, all this nastiness would go away. 

Had they ordered mobilisation even as late as the 8th. April - put guns in the hands of their citizens and alerted the coastal batteries - it’s highly unlikely that the invasion would have succeeded.  Hitler would have been held up to ridicule and all the pain and grief of the subsequent five years might have been avoided.

If we remember the Norwegian campaign at all, it’s about the battles around Narvik and the belated British efforts in central Norway, but the crux of the German attack was Oslo.   If they could sneak into Oslo on time, they should catch the king and government in their pyjamas and persuade them, with guns at their heads, that any further resistance was useless.   Norway might just be a one-day war.

Norway awakes, but too late

It was not to be.   Admiral Kummetz, leader of the assault force, was just entering Oslofjord, when all marine lights suddenly went out:  at last someone on the Norwegian side was beginning to wake up!   This posed a dilemma for the admiral.  If he sailed up the fjord in the dark, without guiding lights, he might well end up on the rocks.   So he went only as far as a wide part of the fjord at Moss and there he waited for daylight before attempting to navigate the narrows.  

It was to be a costly delay, because the fleet had been spotted and a phone call had reached Colonel Birger Eriksen, Commandant of Oscarsborg fort on the right, which commanded the narrows.   This gave Eriksen the vital time he needed to prepare his defences, and, above all, to think.

Because Eriksen, like his German opposite number, faced a dilemma.    Churchill had threatened to mine Norwegian waters and then fired off a stiff diplomatic note - hardly very friendly gestures.   So the ships coming up the fjord might be British.   Or they might be German.   Eriksen simply couldn’t  tell.  It was the fog of war.   Except it wasn’t war.  His country was still officially at peace. Was he justified in firing on these ships?   Especially as he didn’t know their identity.

On paper it was an uneven contest.   Eriksen’s main battery was so short-staffed it could only hope to fire off one round each from two very ancient guns - so ancient they had been nicknamed Aaron and Moses.  Another battery had just had a shift-change and its commander was on leave.   Oscarsborg fort could muster just 3 effective artillery pieces against Kummetz’s 24 large calibre guns.  

As for manpower, the Norwegians had 261 poorly trained men against over three thousand battle-ready Germans.   However, the German task force was already seriously delayed, having had to wait for daybreak to negotiate the Oscarsborg narrows, and couldn’t afford the further delay of a battle with the fort.   Admiral Kummetz had to cross his fingers and hope the Norwegians would be too confused to open fire.

To his eternal credit, Eriksen didn’t hesitate.   When the German flagship, the Blucher, was at point-blank range, he gave the order.  The only two rounds fired by the main battery both found their marks, turning the Blucher into an inferno.  Torpedos then finished her off, sending the German flagship, with most of the top brass and gestapo, to the bottom of Oslofjord, where they still lie.   The surviving ships turned tail and fled.

That should have been that.   End of invasion.  Especially as 80% of the infantry due to occupy Oslo had gone down with the Blucher, leaving a mere 400 or so men to secure Norway’s capital city.   However, the Germans had the advantage of a plan, whereas the Norwegians not only had no plan, but in most cases were still asleep.  Again, we can only speculate on the result had the Norwegian army been mobilised the previous day and ready for action.   As it was, the Germans recovered their nerve, landed troops where they could, and told them to drive like hell for Oslo.

They were helped by another saga of Norwegian inaction, the “Fornebu incident”.   A small Luftwaffe formation was on its way to Oslo’s airport Fornebu, when news came through of the Blucher disaster.   As Fornebu would now be alerted, a signal went out to recall these planes - a signal which never reached the Germans, who in blissful ignorance of the disaster down the fjord landed at Fornebu - where everyone totally ignored them!   Eventually, feeling they should be doing something, this Luftwaffe detatchment decided they might as well take an Oslo city tour, where they helped swell the ranks of the depleted Wehrmacht contingent coming up from the south.

Enter the Norse King and Grieg

 Until now I have been pretty hard on the Norwegians, but that’s about to change.   We already have our first hero, Colonel Birger Eriksen, who on his own initiative had delayed the Oslo-bound armada.   Let me now introduce another:   the Norwegian king  on the right.

It’s difficult for us here, in peacetime and with all the facts at our disposal, to grasp just how confusing it must have been to wake up one morning and find yourself - totally unexpectedly - at war.  King Haakon was one of the few people who from the first never seemed to harbour any doubts.   Germany was the enemy and Norway must fight.   The King became Norway’s royal backbone.

A more plebian hero was the poet Nordahl Grieg on right, born to a distant branch of the same family as composer Edvard Grieg, and my mother’s cousin.   He will be our eyewitness from the Norwegian side.

Nordahl was in the capital, working up a new play, when  aircraft started roaring overhead and a German officer appeared in the lobby of his hotel enquiring after Quisling.   More than a little worried, Nordahl rushed off to the war office, to find out where he could join up, only to find a notice in red stating “no information about mobilisation available here”.   He banged on the door, which was opened by a huge commissionaire, his chest aglow with medals, which proclaimed what a good sportsman he had been some years back.   This official told Nordahl to go home.

Nordahl’s other reason for being in Oslo was to visit the dentist.  With the premonition that there would be few chances in future for such peaceful pursuits, he decided to keep his appointment. No sooner had the dentist finished drilling and filled his mouth with cotton wool, than he suddenly lost interest in Nordahl’s teeth.   Wondering what was going on,  Nordahl sat up and saw some soldiers talking to about twenty mounted police.  There was something very sinister about those helmets and when a couple of the soldiers started setting up a machine gun, Nordahl realised that what he was witnessing - from the dentist’s chair - was the surrender of Oslo.

In every unexpected catastrophe the natural reaction is to say “This can’t be happening to me”.   Nordahl admitted to this feeling of unreality and wrote:   “We had lived in peace for over a century.   It took us half a day to work out that other people were no longer something we could talk to, but simply something we might have to go out and kill.”.

The delay to Admiral Kummetz’s invasion force, plus the snail-like invasion build-up - totally unlike the normal German blitzkrieg - gave the king and government time to escape.   Oslo might have surrendered, but Norway had not.   Nordahl became part of the general exodus, commenting that “we became soldiers of a sort in five minutes, just grabbing the weapons we needed:   no one asked us for name, rank or number”.

After a few days, he found himself at Lillehammer, in later years the winter olympics town.  His job was to load a seemingly endless stream of crates onto a northbound train.  Each crate was sealed in red  and stencilled “NB” in black.   It didn’t take them long to work out that they were handling Norway’s entire gold supply, which they were to spend the next 7 weeks guiding to safety. 

The King and Grieg make it to England

King Haakon and the Norwegian government eventually made it to exile in Britain and America, so that Norway became the only occupied country to have a democratically elected government not under the thumb of the Germans.

Nordahl also crossed the north sea, where his part in the “gold rescue” soon became an legend.   He then wrote what was to become Norway’s definitive war poem, which did much to boost morale in those dark days.   He later died in a bomber over Berlin.

Looking back, we can now see how risky the Norwegian invasion was for the Germans and how it so nearly failed.  A single act by Norway - timely mobilisation, would probably have strangled Hitler’s ambitions.   As it was, Norway took three times longer to subdue than Poland, even though the Poles had 45 well-prepared divisions and fought with reckless bravery, whereas the Norwegians were caught totally on the hop and effectively without an army at all.

Of all the “What ifs...” of this story, none is more tantalising than “what if the German fleet had reached Oslo as scheduled at 4.15 am on 9th. April”?   They would then almost certainly have caught everyone who mattered in bed, and these sleepy-heads, as they looked down the barrel of a revolver, might well have been persuaded that surrender was the only option.  

Which begs another question:   what would then have been the status of ships flying the Norwegian flag shown on right?    This is no idle speculation, because the Norwegian merchant fleet in 1940 was a priceless asset, the third biggest in the world, after Britain and the USA.

Nordahl Grieg had called one of his plays “Our Pride and our Power”, and in those days before flags of convenience this was an apt description for the Norwegian merchant marine.   Had these ships been denied to the allies, or even worse been allocated to their new German protectors, the Battle of the Atlantic could well have been lost, as German U-boats starved Britain into submission.

So let’s give a salute to the commander of Oscarsborg fort, Colonel Birger Eriksen, who by sinking the Blucher, when he had no direct orders to do so, crucially delayed the Germans and so ensured that the allies at least did not lose the war.    

Although we can today visit Oscarsborg fort, unlike the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, there is no memorial to the sunken Blucher.   History is written by the victors and there is no demand in Norway to commemorate the Nazi invaders.  

By Rolf Richardson,  11 Wootton road,  Henley. Oxon.  RG9 1QD, UK. Rolfrich@aol.com