The King's Choice – 10Th of April 1940 Alf R. Jacobsen
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The King’s Choice – 10th of April 1940 Alf R. Jacobsen DISCLAIMER: This is a non-professional translation, done purely for the love of the subject matter. Some strange wording is to be expected, since sentence structure is not always alike in English or Norwegian. I'm also not a military nut after 1500, so some officer ranks, division names and the like may be different than expected because of my perhaps too-literal translation. Any notes of my own will be marked in red. This book is more of a political drama and a personal story for the royal family than a military book, but it has its moments of that as well. And it is a treasure trove of personal notes, unpublished stories and reports from those who were in the thick of it. The author has hunted down all the first-hand material he could get, from archives, private collections and family histories of those involved. Many quotes are taken from unpublished diaries and family sagas. The movie based on this book – by the same name, is also good. The movie makers were advised by both veterans who were present and the royal family for the sequences containing them. Chapter 1 The Attack Schleswig Land, Northern Germany The blackout made the darkness seem deeper when major Erich Walther mustered the two paratrooper companies on the staging ground. Fog swirled over the frozen ground, but a red glare in the horizon announced the coming of morning. The dull roar of tens of BMW engines came from the runway, who coughed and spluttered before starting up. The transport chief, lieutenant colonel Carl Freiherr von Gablenz was the director of Lufthansa in civilian life, and had scraped together several hundred Ju 52’s from all corners of the German Reich. Twenty-nine of them was at Walther’s disposal, and the smell of exhaust fumes, airplane fuel and lubricant oil lingered over the frozen grass like a powerful opiate. Aunt Ju was a rattletrap contraption of rifled metal and thin steel pipes. But the hull had been welded by German mechanics and represented the best of contemporary engineering. The three radial motors could lift a rifle section of 12-15 men in full gear over a distance of 1000 kilometres. That was sufficient to reach their target – and a lot more. The first battalion faced their baptism of fire, and Walther knew it would be hard going. But the paratroopers were Hermann Göring’s private, hand-picked army, which the corpulent and cynical Luftwaffe officer had placed at the Führer’s disposal. Most of the officers and NCOs were fervent Nazis, and many of them had participated in bloody street fights with communists and other political opponents in Berlin during the emergence of the Nazi party in the early 1930s. Now they faced the unknown, but the unknown was normal for the policemen, brownshirts and daredevils who made up the core of the First battalion of the First paratrooper regiment. Their spirits had perked once premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt saluted the paratroopers in the first company. “Never before have my morning speech received such a rousing answer: “Heil, Herr premier lieutenant!” he wrote in Die Fallschirmjäger von Dombås, published by the Ministry of Propaganda in 1941. “The enthusiasm of their cry made the closest windowpanes vibrate. Their faces lit up by the dutifulness which encapsulated them all. Before embarking on their planes, yet another threefold Sieg Heil rent the night – to our dear Führer, to our people and to our fatherland.” For himself, the thirty-eight-year-old Walther was the prototype of the new class of officer who had made his career in Nazi Germany – not through the traditional staff schools or military academies of Prussia, but through loyalty to Hitler and his party. He had started off as a police cadet in the small town of Oppeln in 1922 and had advanced to senior criminal investigator in the Berlin police force when the Nazis made their power grab that fateful summer of 1933. Hitler's handyman Hermann Göring had been made Prime Minister of Preussen, and had, with his finely-honed instinct for power play at once established a private terror group under the Nazi zealot Walter Wecke. Polizeiabteilung zum besonderes Verfügnung Wecke was on paper to work as life guards for Hitler, Göring and other top Nazis, but in the first year of totalitarian regime, there was a need for people who could do other things than shine shoes and close ranks. Opposition and neutrals in the police ranks were to be weeded out, Jews were persecuted, the remaining communists and social democrats were to be crushed, and Ernst Röhm’s homosexual agitators in the SA were to be brought under control. Blood had flowed, and cries of pain from the torture chambers of Colombia Haus had reached across the street to the barracks which housed Wecke’s police-soldiers. But the Nazi grip on power had been secured, and Erich Walther had been there from the start in February 1933 until Hermann Göring was made chief of the Luftwaffe two years later and turned the police unit into Regiment General Göring. Inspired by the developments in the Soviet Union and the USA, they had implemented parachute training. By the late 1930s, the tough streetfighters from the back alleys of Berlin had been transformed into Nazi Germany’s first airborne military elites. The slim and sinewy Walther had been made company chief, and had taken part in the Anschluss, the march into Sudetenland and the conquest of the rest of Czechoslovakia. He was of moderate height, and his brown hair was wild and had to be brushed back often. His eyebrows were dark, his mouth thin and resolute, like in a sparrow hawk. Beneath the officer’s cap, his face radiated authority, an authority born from experience. Walther had seen it all. He was one of Fat Hermann’s chosen men, and that gave him respect. “He was calm and intelligent”, the fallschirmjäger Ernst Mössinger told to the writer Cato Guhnfeldt. “He was not a hard man, though he could become furious and shout orders loudly”. The first battalion had been on guard duty and had not joined in the victorious campaign in Poland in the autumn of 1939. While others had been praised and decorated, the top-trained paratroopers had seen the blitzkrieg from a teeth-gnashing distance. It made Walther and his men burn with impatience. “The mood was excellent”, Schmidt wrote. “Everyone hungered for the first paratrooper duty.” The officers had been taken in on the plan the night before: Norway and Denmark were to be brought to their knees. First battalion staff and the first and second companies were to jump out at Fornebu airport in Oslo and secure the airport for the first wave of ordinary infantrymen who would be landing in transport planes soon after. The total force was around 300 men, who would knock out any resistance with light weapons in minutes, clear the runways and stop any counterattack. The operation had been as cut from a textbook in strategic surprise attacks, but there was a weakness: The theory had never been tested. As Hitler’s chief of operations general Alfred Jodl had proclaimed to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in a conversation in the Reich Chancellery the same day: “It is the most daring enterprise in the history of war. The stakes and risks are monstrous – with an equal chance of payoff! If we can keep our intentions hidden until dark, victory will be half ours already.” Walther and his men were experts in crowd control and street fighting, and Jodl and Goebbels had high expectations. “The attack on Norway is the most difficult because it will happen in the immediate vicinity of the British fleet”, Jodl had said. “But we have the paratroopers in reserve!” The list of small neighbouring countries that had been harassed and cowed by the megalomaniacal gamblers in Berlin was growing. En route, a basic truth had been learned: The main blow had to hit the central government, fast and brutal. Cut the head off your opponent, and the rest would follow. Hitler and his closest advisers did not see the pacifistic cabinet of Nygaardsvold as a problem. They were stuck in the tradition of the broken rifle, and had not even managed to mobilize what was left of the Army after the ravages of the 1930s. “In Oslo, they are slightly alarmed”, an exalted Hitler had told Goebbels while on a walk in the Reich Chancellery garden on the evening of April 8th. “But they still know nothing.” The aging King Haakon was more of an unknown. He was a navy man, married into the British royal family and an enthusiastic admirer of the Royal Navy. It explained why the detailed instructions crafted by Jodl’s staff included a separate piece on the head of state: “It is of particular importance that the Norwegian king is not permitted to escape abroad during the takeover. It will be necessary to survey his location at once. As an emergency measure, he must be stopped from leaving his palace.” To Goebbels, Hitler said it with more cynicism: “If the king behaves properly, he can stay. But we will never give back the country.” They were unmistakeable words: King Haakon was a figurehead of great importance. If he would not bend the knee and surrender to the Nazi regime, then he was to be captured and held hostage in his own home. At precisely 04.30, the first transports took off from Schleswig Land in an ear-splitting roar.