Naval and air campaigns, 1941-1945.

(This is the fourth in a series of posts on the Norwegian experience during World War Two.)

The Norwegian bases proved especially vital after June of 1941--for in that month Germany, in complete violation of the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, invaded the Soviet Union.

The German invasion of Russia meant that two very different countries--democratic Britain and the communist Soviet Union--were allies in a fight against Nazi Germany.   The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, despised communism but recognized that if Hitler conquered Russia, it would mean German domination of Europe.  Thus, Churchill directed that Britain begin sending convoys of ships to provide supplies to Russia.  These Arctic convoys sailed from the British Isles or Iceland, through the waters off Norway up to the Russian ports of Archangel, Murmansk, and Molotovsk. 

German submarines and aircraft based in Norway took a terrible toll on these convoys--over the course of the war, more than seven percent of the ships headed to Russia via this route were sunk. ("Arctic convoys").

German submarines in their base at Trondheim, on the Norwegian coast.  Photograph taken after the end of the war in May 1945.  Imperial War Museum photo BU 6376.

Any sailor who had failed to make it into a lifeboat after his ship had been torpedoed could not expect to live long in the icy waters.   German surface ships (such as destroyers and cruisers) also posed a threat.  In particular, the British worried that the German battleship Tirpitz would venture from its base in Norway and target merchant shipping.

The battleship Tirpitz in January of 1942 in a fjord.  Imperial War Museum photo HU 50947.

One particularly disastrous convoy, code-named PQ17, sailed from Iceland for Russia in the summer of 1942.  Summer was particularly bad time make the arctic voyage, as the extended daylight hours of northern latitudes made it easier for German forces to locate and attack Allied ships.  PQ17 had started its voyage with an escort of warships to keep German forces at bay.  But the British concluded, based on their reading of German radio communications, that the Tirpitz was in position to strike at PQ17.  The British commander, fearing that the German battleship would wreak havoc on the convoy, then withdrew the escort of warships and instructed the convoy to break up and spread out.   The scattered cargo ships, lacking escorts, were now much more vulnerable to German submarines and aircraft.  Fewer than a third of PQ17's ships made it to Russia (though none were attacked by the Tirpitz), and 153 sailors in the convoy perished.  ("Arctic convoys").  

Shaken by their losses, the British put a temporary stop on their convoys to the Soviet Union.  When Churchill flew to the Soviet Union to meet with Joseph Stalin that August, the dictator taunted the British prime minister, and through a translator queried, "has the British navy no sense of glory?" (Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, 447)

Artist Edward Sorel imagines the conference between a pipe-holding Stalin and cigar-holding Churchill in August of 1942.
Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc0178.html

The arctic convoys were resumed, and by the conclusion of the war had brought 4.43 million tons of supplies to Russia. 

The Allies received a tremendous boost from the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941.  Up to that point, America had remained officially neutral, but the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, worried about Nazi expansion, had provided war supplies to both the British and Soviets.  In December of 1941, following the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Germany declared war on the United States, and the American Congress in turn declared war on Germany. 

American entry into the war marked an important turning point, in part because American war industry went into high gear, producing tremendous numbers of ships, airplanes, tanks, artillery, and all of the supplies needed to maintain a mechanized army in the field.  America's industrial contribution to the war was especially appreciated in the Soviet Union, and was key to the mobility of the Soviet army, as many Russian troops rode in American-made trucks.   Russians became familiar with the American concoction Spam as well. (Glantz and House, 150-151, 285-286)

The importance of American and British supplies to the Soviet Union--and the importance of the naval convoys that brought these supplies to Russian ports--becomes even more apparent once one realizes the vital contribution that the Soviet Union made to the victory over Germany.  According to military historians David Glantz and Jonathan House, more than seventy percent of German military losses (military personnel killed, wounded, captured, or missing) occurred fighting the Soviet Union. (Glantz and House, 284)

The naval convoys that brought Anglo-American supplies to the Soviet Union continued to suffer losses, but eventually the Allies were able to master the German u-boat menace, in part by providing escorts to convoys.   Allied aircraft also patrolled the ocean, bombing German submarines when they surfaced.  The following photograph shows a German submarine off Norway that was under attack from a British seaplane in July of 1944. 

Imperial War Museum photo C 4590.

The British made repeated efforts to sink the Tirpitz as well.  Below is a photo of the battleship under attack from British carrier aircraft in April of 1944.  

Imperial War Museum photo A 22633.

Later in 1944, the Tirpitz capsized after being hit in an attack by British heavy bombers. 

 The capsized battleship in Norwegian waters in March of 1945.  Imperial War Museum photo C 5148.

The British also launched airstrikes against shipping in Norwegian waters, as seen in the photograph below taken in March of 1945.

Imperial War Museum photo C 5117.

The British and Americans never invaded Norway--it remained occupied by Germany until the conclusion of the war.  The British did launch a number of commando raids along the Norwegian coastline.   

British soldiers during a raid on Vaagso, Norway, in December of 1941.  Imperial War Museum photo N 459.

These raids, while militarily insignificant in and of themselves, may have helped convince Germany that the Allies were contemplating a more serious invasion of Norway.

Indeed, the British deliberately fed the Germans false information to encourage them in their belief that there would be an Allied invasion of Norway.  This campaign of disinformation may have shaped German strategy--to the end of the war, Germany kept a large number of its soldiers stationed in Norway to fend off a seaborne invasion that never came.   These soldiers, of course, would have better served the Nazi cause elsewhere--fighting the Soviet army on what was known as the Eastern Front, or fending off the Anglo-American invasion that did come on the beaches of Normandy in France in June of 1944.

During the war, Hitler overestimated the strategic significance of Norway, and stationed troops there that would have more effectively used elsewhere.  As Thaddeus Holt writes in The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War, "the fact remains that three times as many Germans were kept there [in Norway] as would have been needed merely for occupation duties."  (p. 780)  Holt examines how the British and Americans worked to deliberately confuse the German high command as to where the Allied invasion of western Europe would take place.

In November 1942, British and American forces staged landings in North Africa to drive out German and Italian armies; in 1943, the British and Americans likewise invaded Italy, and in June of 1944, British, Canadian, and American armies crossed the English Channel to invade Normandy, a region in western France.  All this time, the Allies found it convenient to encourage Hitler that they were actually instead preparing for an amphibious invasion of Norway.

By doing this kind of "head-fake," the Allies hoped to encourage the Germans to maintain a large army in Norway--away from the places where the Allies would actually make seaborne landings.   How did the Allies go about attempting this deception?   In part by using double agents.   A double agent is an spy who tells one country that he is spying for them, but who is actually working on behalf of a second country.   For example, a number of German spies in Britain were captured by the British, and then "turned," that is, compelled or coaxed into supplying false or misleading information to their superiors back in Germany.  The German spy network believed that it was receiving valuable information from its agents in Britain, but in reality it was simply being fed false and misleading data generated by British intelligence agencies. 

British-controlled double agents were an important aspect of their campaign to confuse the German high command.  In 1942, for example, the British inaugurated operation SOLO I, whose job it was to convince the Germans that Scotland was to serve as a base for an impending invasion of Norway. 

As Holt explains, "Double agents reported public speculation that Norway would be invaded and retailed tales of energetic military activity in Ayrshire [Scotland], of special Commando training going on, and of stockpiling of tire chains and antifreeze, plus hints that Swedish collaboration was being sought.   Rumors were spread in Stockholm that the British were training special pioneer companies of Canadian lumberjacks while the United States Army was on the lookout for Scandinavian speakers among its personnel....twenty thousand shoulder flashes reading Norge were ordered, arctic kits and maps of Norway were issued, the troops were lectured on the dangers of frostbite, and rumors were spread about woolen underwear and special windproof jackets."  (Holt, 264).  The Allies conducted a similar simultaneous effort, code-named OVERTHROW, to convince Germany that the site of the landings would be France.  

Luckily for the Allies, as Holt explains, Hitler believed Norway to be of tremendous significance for the outcome of the war; in January of 1942, he had declared, "The fate of the war will be decided in Norway." (Holt, 174).  The German dictator's Norwegian fixation may have made the British ruse more plausible.

How effective was SOLO I?  It's always hard to judge such matters, but as Holt writes, "On October 19 [1942], the Führer ordered Narvik reinforced and its approaches specially protected.   On November 2, all central and northern Norway went on full alert.  As the winter nights lengthened, Hitler worried lest the Allies take advantage of them for a surprise descent upon northern Norway; as late as December 22, he fretted that January would be the most dangerous month for Norway.   The bottom line was that in 1942 no German ground forces were withdrawn from Norway for service elsewhere, and that was the object of SOLO I." (Holt, 268) And, as it turned out, the actual Allied landings in November 1942 occurred in North Africa rather than Norway.

Another such deceit, code-named FORTITUDE NORTH, came in 1944, in the hope of masking the impending invasion of Normandy, France that June.

While the British and Americans never invaded Norway, the Soviet Union, starting in October of 1944, began a limited invasion into northern Norway.  The liberation of most of the nation, however, had to wait until Germany's surrender in May of 1945.

Sources

"Arctic convoys," in The Oxford Companion to World War II. Ed. I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online.

Churchill, Winston, The Hinge of Fate (volume IV of The Second World War), New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. 

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House.  When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. 

Holt, Thaddeus.  The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War.  New York: Scribner, 2004.

Riste, Olav, "Norway," in The Oxford Companion to World War II. Ed. I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online.