The Cruiser Blücher – 9th 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. I will drop the foreword, since it probably is of little interest to anyone but Norwegians. I’ll probably bother to translate it if requested at a later time. NOTE: This is the first book in a series of four – The cruiser Blücher(9th of april 1940), the King’s no (10th of april 1940), Attack at dawn – Narvik 9-10th of april 1940 and Bitter victory – Narvik, 10th of april – 10th of june 1940. I might do more of these if I get the time and there is interest.

PROLOGUE

Visst Fanden skal der skytes med skarpt! -By the Devil, we will open fire! Oscarsborg, 9th of april 1940 03.58 hours The messenger came running just before 4 o'clock. He was sent by the communications officer with a sharp telephonic request from the main torpedo battery’s central aiming tower on Nordre Kaholmen islet, 500 meters away. The essence was later formulated by the battery commander, Andreas Andersen, in the following manner: «I asked for an absolute order if the approaching vessels were to be torpedoed.»

If there is one moment in a human life that stands out truer than the rest, fortress commander Birger Eriksen had his at Oscarsborg this cold spring morning. On its face, it was a simple question, almost one to be answered with a simple yes or no. The way it was presented by an out-of-breath soldier on the hard gravel before the fortress' ramparts, it represented something deeper. It cut to the core of the colonel's life as a man and an officer: Should he, for the first time in the nation's young history, give the order to open fire against an unidentified intruder – with all that entailed of bloody losses on both sides? Should he alone take responsibility for standing up – not only toward a most likely overwhelming, heavily armed and brutal foe, but also against a pasifistic and anti-military tradition that had undermined the will of the defenders both materially and psychologically for 20 years? Twenty minutes earlier, Eriksen had been roused from his chair in the commander's house by a message from Filtvedt signal station: «Warships passing the station with lanterns extinguished.» It was just six nautical miles from Filtvedt to the gunnery positions on Søndre Kaholmen. Even if the vessels moved slowly through the thick fog, their contours would soon appear through the aiming reticule. The wait had been nerve-wracking. It was soon over, and it felt like a relief. As he wrote in a report in august 1940: «Full awareness of the situation was only achieved by messages at 03.38 and 03.40 from Filtvedt signal station. An attempt to force the Drøbak straits had to be considered likely.» He had stormed out and personally taken command over the main guns – the same way he har done it in 1905 when threat came from elsewhere. At the time he had been a young battery officer, and the three 28-cm cannon had been the pinnacle of artillery of their day. In the glow from the work lamps, they still looked like predators ready to pounce, but that was merely an illusion. They were rather ancient beasts – they had a deadly bite, but were slow and unmanouverable. Like himself they were aged through decades of anti-militaristic propaganda and ever-lessening grants of money. Rock bottom was hit in 1934, when a new defence scheme turned Oscarsborg into a secondary bastion. «One could be tempted to call the fortress a museum», wrote gunnery officer Ragnvald Rækken, who was a tax secretary from Brandbu and had signed up as a neutrality watchman in late february 1940. «The same cannons were in the same splace as when I first saw them in 1902. The fortress had a rundown look, and was in and of itself proof of the waning interest the country took in military matters.» If Eriksen looked up, he could see the gaunt sergeant at work at Cannon No. 1. Rækken was 56 years old and had passed middle age, but his fighting spirit was intact. Murmured commands could be heard in the dark. The gun crews groaned over the 90-ton monsters of Krupp steel, working pulleys, levers and wheels like they had done nothing else. That too, was an illusion. Only a handful of the artillerymen could be truly called that. They had trained and knew all the routines. The rest were new blood, cooks and medics that had never heard or seen a cannon been fired – and certainly not in anger. Only minutes left. Would they be able to fire on flesh and blood with deadly intent? Eriksen himself was closing on 65 years old, and would retire in November to a new home in Drøbak with his wife Kristiane and their polio-stricken daughter Borghild. Would he be able to live with the consequences, if he, his crews and their families lived through the coming hours of fear? Where did the line of duty go? Come daylight, there would probably be aerial attacks – in wave after wave. There would be no possibility of manning the open gun positions without risk to life and limb. “The concern, yes – the utmost indefensible part of the fortress’ fighting state, was that no thought was given to protection from airborne bombs.” he later wrote. “For the defence of the gun crews against aerial attack there was never even the slightest monetary grant.” There were direct phone lines between Oscarsborg and the Admiralty staff, but the lines were silent. No proclamation of either war or peace were sent, no order to mobilize, no fiery appeals, no good advice. Those responsible for political and military leadership had abandoned the battlefield. It was bitter, but not unexpected. As most other frontline officers, Eriksen knew what the politicians represented. “Our so-called defence consists of an army without manoeuvres, a navy with no vessels and fortresses with no guns. Our military is not just useless, but a danger. Perhaps the only danger to our country”, The Labour Party had furiously railed in the Storting in 1933. Foreign minister Halvdan Koht said it with more finesse: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.” It was all part of an anti-militaristic streak that had lasted throughout the 1930s and gradually destroyed the morale and fighting spirit of the military officers. “The corps of officers was basically demilitarized” wrote those who studied the physical and mental standard of the military of the 1930s. “The attitude of the government towards even the most minute upgrades to the military, had to give the military chiefs the impression that there was no serious will to defend ourselves in the governing bodies. The defeatist atmosphere was most suitable for depriving the military chiefs of any necessary confidence and security.”

It was a grim time, with grim attitudes. Freedom and the honour of the flag was praised in speeches, but some still thought it was better to live in servitude, rather than die standing. Even the neutrality watch regulations were clouded. On the one hand, any intruding vessels were to be stopped with “all possible force”, but not until they were hailed and protested. The main attitude was passive: “There will be no use of force without orders from the commanding admiral, or when under attack”. But there would be no time to consult with the commanding admiral when the vessels appeared off Småskjær reef. Eriksen would have to act on his own, without superior officers backing him up. Could he trust his betters in political positions and the military? Would he face condemnation if he followed his instincts and used live shells? Would they support him if he tried the easy route, and merely fired warning shots? In the icy snow behind the ramparts, there were not only the glories of 1905 which were on Eriksen's mind. He also recalled November of 1914, when the German merchant raider Berlin had snuck past Agdenes fortress at the approach to the Trondheimsfjord. The passivity of the fortress had triggered a political scandal. The commandant had been ridiculed, removed from his position, and sent to languish at Bergenhus. When Eriksen took over command there in 1915, it was to raise the fortress from its earlier disgrace.

Should he risk an equivalent disgrace now – after forty years of spotless service? The defences of the Outer Oslofjord had failed, but Oscarsborg was the bottleneck. If he let the intruders pass, the way was open straight to the capital, and an unprepared government. These were grim prospects, and Eriksen only trusted one thing – his sense of duty and loyalty to his country. He stood alone on the wind-tossed ramparts and knew that he only had once choice – no matter the cost. When he turned toward the messenger, his order was crystal clear just like the way it was entered into the communications post logbook: “The torpedo battery will open fire.” Orally, it was even clearer: “By the Devil, we will open fire!”

On the command bridge aboard the Blücher, 5000-6000 meters to the south, Rear admiral Oskar Kummetz was totally oblivious to Eriksen’s dilemma. If he had known, the weathered sea-officer might have curled his lips in a sardonic grin. While Oscarsborg was a monument to Norwegian naiveté, disarmament and misplaced idealism, his flagship was a monument to to the polar opposite: Hitler’s bloodthirst, cynicism and urge for conquest. By the summer of 1934, when Forsvarsordningen av 1933 (defence plans of 1933) reduced the Norwegian defence budget to 34 million kroner, the German naval architect Erich Raeder had contemptibly pushed aside the Versailles treaty and ordered a 14 000-ton cruiser from Deutche Werk in Kiel. The price was 85 million Reichsmark, which alone equalled 140 million kroner, or close to five Norwegian defence budgets. When the cruiser was launched in 1937 and named Blücher, Hitler had already set Germany on the path to war. Meanwhile, at Oscarsborg, a frustrated Eriksen had to remove one of his 200-kroner-a-month salaried phone operators. “Oscarsborg telephone central has had round the clock service for a generation. But last year one of our telephone operators were removed, and we can no longer stay open at night”, he wrote in a despairing letter to the First Sea Defence district in Horten in 1938. “The commander cannot understand how this can continue. Civilians do not understand it, and public opinion gets a distorted view of the benefits of the military when it becomes known that Oscarborg is closed at night, and the fjord lies open.” Eriksen fought on doggedly against the department’s pettiness to the last. He was not granted the men he had begged for. His crew were few in number and without any real training, the anti-air weapons almost non-existent. But he had triumphed somewhere: The fortress was not closed at night. The cannons were loaded, and the lines of communication were open. For Kummetz, the interwar years were different, and far more glorious. He was born in Illowo, in Imperial East Prussia in 1891 and belonged to a generation marked by the bloody introduction of the 20th century. When he left the naval academy as a cadet in 1910 and joined the armoured cruiser Victoria Louise, the world seemed to lay at Germany’s feet. The industrial revolution had turned the country into a great power, and the imperial navy rivalled the Royal Navy for hegemony of the seas. The first world war had changed all that. Germany had suffered a bitter defeat, their high seas fleet had been sunk, and the terms of the Versailles Treaty had reduced the German Empire to an impoverished republic teetering on the edge of political and economic ruin. His hometown of Illowo had become part of Poland, and Lieutenant Kummetz joined up with the other homeless veterans bitterly waiting for a new chance to strike. He clung on to a few insignificant postings in the torpedo wing of the reduced Kriegsmarine, and saw the light when Hitler came to power in 1933 with his program of Nazification. When the negotiations around Blücher were ongoing in 1934, Kummetz was one of thousands of officers, who with arm raised, swore oaths of allegiance. Not to the constitution, but to Der Führer personally: “I swear that I will serve the Führer of the German people and Reich with loyalty and obedience.” Kummetz was rewarded for this, and was immediately named Fregattenkapitän and Führer der Torpedoboote - responsible for the country’s destroyers and torpedo boats. Through a series of far-reaching political and economic dictates, Hitler had turned Germany into a totalitarian state focussed on a singular monstrous target: A new Germanic thousand-year Reich, which with military power would break the bonds of the Versailles treaty and make all rivals bend the knee. Any opposition should be broken with force and terror, and unwanted peoples would be scoured from the earth. Hitler's megalomaniacal project had one weakness: Even if all of Germany’s power were mobilized for war, and all resources placed under Nazi control, it would not be enough. The country was rich in coal, but lacked everything else: ore, oil and foodstuffs. The dream of Gross-Deutchland depended on the conquest of ever-expanding territories outside of Germany’s borders, with a massive plundering of raw materials to bring back home. On Blücher’s bridge this April night in 1940, Kummetz alone was responsible for the next step of Hitler’s project of conquests – after the fall of Poland six months earlier. Norway and Denmark were to be attacked in a lightning action and cement Nazi Germany’s position on the northern flank with forward bases for the Kriegsmarine. Through this assault, the production capacity of the two small neutral states were to be assimilated into the German Grosswirtschaftsraum and secure the vital flow of iron ore from Sweden down to the foundries in the Ruhr. It was a cynical plan, but Kummetz had no objections. He had made a lightning-quick career, and for a few short and euphoric months served as chief of staff for the fleet commander, admiral Hermann Boehm. By the fall of 1939 however, Boehm had fallen from grace, and Kummetz followed his boss out the door, into a more anonymous posting as an inspector in the torpedo forces. It was a blow to him, but Hitler helped his friends. Kummetz, now rear admiral, was headed for Oslo as commander of Operation Weserübung’s secondmost important element, Gruppe 5 – which were to conquer the Norwegian capital and take care of the king and government. It was his first operative command at sea for more than 10 years, but he felt no unease. This because he shared Raeder’s view, the way the Grand Admiral had expressed himself to Hitler a few weeks earlier: “The operation breaks all the rules of naval warfare, which presupposes hegemony of the seas. We do not have it. On the contrary, our goal is to carry on the operation in spite of the British naval superiority. I am certain the transportation of troops can and will succeed – if we keep the element of surprise.” The events so far showed Raeder he was right. They had crossed the Skagerrak without the intervention of the Royal Navy, and with the majority of their troop transports undamaged. Now only the last hurdle remained – Oscarsborg, which dominated the approach to Oslo. But the Grand Admiral knew of the uncertainty plaguing the Norwegian government, and went all in. “A critical moment will come at the passage of the coastal forts towards the harbours. We expect the surprise attack to succeed, and that the Norwegians will not be able to decide in time whether to fire or not.” On the bridge of the Blücher, Kummetz stared into the dark across the Drøbak straits. The fog was still thick, and he could see nothing. Everything indicated that the Grand Admiral was correct once again. The Norwegian officers were demoralized and suffered under a pacifistically-minded and indecisive command system. They would not decide to fire before it was too late and the fleet had passed them by. There was only one factor Raeder had overlooked: The stubbornness and strength of will of the fortress commander, who calmly marched back and forth on the darkened ramparts a few thousand meters in front of Blücher’s bow. It was close to 04.00, the night of April 9th, 1940. Colonel Birger Eriksen had made his decision. It was done – no matter the consequences.

Part I A few days earlier...

Chapter 1 Storm clouds

Berlin and Oscarsborg, monday 1st of April, 1940 Adolf Hitler’s milky blue eyes shone with hypnotic force, and had the ability to captivate and control. Among the gathered officers in the mahogany-panelled map room of the Reich chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse in the heart of Berlin he was in his element. He was refreshed and red-faced from his Easter holiday at Berghof in the Bavarian alps at the end of March. His uniform was freshly pressed and without distinctions – save the iron cross on his left breast. The brownshirts recruited from all walks of life, but the Wehrmacht elite was still a closed social club, snobbish and prejudiced. A former corporal would normally have no chance among the Prussian nobility, but Hitler had removed all opposition with murderous determination, and moved freely through the lofty halls of the Radziwill Palace. The candelabras in the council hall had once illuminated Bismarck and Hindenburg, now the vagabond and loser from the muddy trenches of Flanders had taken their seat. Hitler had become the acclaimed master builder of the thousand-year Reich, and wielded unrestricted power. A single glance from Der Führer could bring even the most arrogant general to his knees. “The breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his thought made a strong impression on all of us”, wrote one of the attending officers from Gruppe 21, Lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlmann. “The same goes for his daring and cunning.”

Pohlman was one of around a hundred officers whom the staff cars had brought to the Chancellery courtyard that very morning. After a simple luncheon at noon, the marathon meeting had been initiated by a straightforward and daring agenda: The assault on Denmark and Norway. The planning was complete. Now each of the group commanders and regimental leaders had to convince the despot that their evil deed was without weakness. “I was called to the table”, wrote Lieutenant colonel Wilhelm Weiss of the 3rd mountain division. “On the opposite side stood Hitler amid a group of higher officers from the Wehrmacht’s upper command structure who dealt with Operation Weserübung. After a while, he moved over to my side to better study the map.” Hitler already looked upon himself as a political and military genius, and for the next five hours he listened attentively to the fronline commanders’ detailed planning, only interrupting with a few short questions and comments. “He demonstrated a finesse and flexibility that were lacking in the later phases of the war”, remarked Pohlmann. “Hitler, as he appeared in 1943/45 was a different man to the one who planned and implemented the campaign against Norway in 1940.” Even the measured leader of Weserübung, Colonel-general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst, could not hide his admiration for Hitler’s leadership capabilities. “Hitler questioned each and every man thoroughly, who in precise terms had to explain his objective. He left nothing to chance, and discussed with the shipmasters if they were landing their troops to the left or to the right of a given target. It was his idea, his plan and his war.”

Barely four months earlier – Tuesday the 12th of December 1939 – Hitler had again intervened in the war plans in a decisive manner. Poland had fallen after a seventeen-day long blitzkrieg, and the first shipments of grain and ore had long since reached Berlin from the eastern steppes. The non-aggression pact with Stalin came with a comprehensive trade deal which secured Nazi Germany raw materials worth billions each year. But the English and French declarations of war and blockades that followed, had ruined their calculations and isolated them from the world market. “The monthly numbers for the volume of imported raw material showed a surprising collapse”, wrote the economic historian Adam Tooze in his work The Wages of Destruction. “A few months after the outbreak of war, Nazi Germany’s imports were reduced to a fraction of what was needed to keep up a large-scale armaments production.” Despite the fact that significant amounts of Germany’s resources had been channelled into the armed forces since Hitler’s takeover six years earlier, the Third Reich was far away from its wildly unrealistic goals by the autumn of 1939: a mobile army of 3,6 million men, a navy of near 800 oceangoing vessels and an air fleet of 21 000 fighter planes. Hitler had provoked a war – a war that had to be won quickly to avoid another humiliating defeat. “Hitler knew time was not on his side”, wrote Tooze. “He had a desperate need for a quick and decisive victory in the west. For that, he was willing to risk all.” The plans to force England and France to their knees were already laid. But the army general staff had persuaded Hitler with several postponements, and would rather wait until the strict and snow-rich winter of 1940 had ended. Discussion with the unwilling generals had put the Führer in a foul mood, and it did not brighten when the new statistical information came in: The stockpile of foreign currency was at a critical level, the depots of strategic metals were shrinking, and Allied warships were throttling their access to overseas imports like oil, rubber, cotton, saltpetre and other vital resources. Many other world leaders would have tried political solutions in such a situation, but for Hitler there was no compromise. The terror, persecution of Jews and the notorious mendacity of his regime widened the cleft between Nazi Germany and the western democracies. The bridges were burned, and a battle to the death would soon follow. When he signed his first fateful Führerforderung the 12th of December, he took yet another step closer to the edge: He demanded a total mobilization of the workforce and resources for war aims, and insisted that the production of ammunition alone should be quintupled in a short time. The demand shocked the supply staff, who quickly calculated that the rebuilding of the Luftwaffe and the ammunition program would use 60-70 percent of the armaments industry’s production capability – and shunt aside the needs of the army and navy. A production increase to four million shells a month, plus millions of rounds of lighter ammunition would devour half a million tons of steel, 8000 tons of copper and copious amounts of gunpowder, which would stretch their production capabilities to the utmost. As Tooze put it: “The basic problem was resources. Next to airplane production, the German economy’s greatest problem was the enormous demands for ammunition called for by modern warfare.” Hitler brushed aside all protests – despite the fact that his demands once again placed a vital, but distant source of raw materials at the centre of attention: The iron mines in Kiruna, in northern Sweden. With an iron content of 65 percent, the ore was one of the richest veins in the world, and in great demand by the warring powers. The yearly import by Nazi Germany had by the late 1930s reached 10 million tons. That alone met half the needs of the steel industry, and made the Swedish ore play an essential role in Hitler’s calculations: The supply lines from Luleå in the summer and Narvik in the winter had to stay open – if the acceleration of the weapons industries at all were to be accomplished. When Hitler two days later received the Norwegian renegade Vidkun Quisling, there could be no doubt that Scandinavia was at the forefront of his mind. Admittedly, the initiator of the meeting, Grand Admiral Raeder was more concerned with the Norwegian coastline as a future base of operations for German surface vessels and submarines, and Hitler took the role of a spectator. The invading armies were facing the Maginot line, and he was ready to cross his general on short notice if the weather services reported acceptable flying weather across Alsace. Relative to the reckoning he faced off to with the French army and the BEF, the North was a sideshow. Hitler would rather the Nordic countries remained neutral. At that moment he therefore had little to spare for Quisling’s dreams of a great federation of countries with Germany and a possible political coup by the new year. The leader of Nasjonal Samling (National Gathering, Quisling’s Nazi-collaborating political party) was led out of the Reich Chancellery after a few hours, with no binding promises of any kind. There was however one argument of Quisling's that stuck in Hitler’s head. His guest was certain that ther was “Overhanging danger of a British occupation of Norway immediately”. If the former minister of defence (Quisling) was right, the situation was critical. The Baltic sea was freezing up, and with Luleå port closed off, the armaments industry of Ruhr would be totally dependent upon the iron ore from Narvik – if the production of steel were to be increased to the level Hitler demanded. A British operation against the Norwegian coast would thereby both undermine Hitler’s ambitious ammunition program and reduce his chances of a successful campaign in the west. These were disturbing ideas, which demanded immediate action. Minutes after Quisling left the Reich Chancellery, the chief of the Wehrmachtsführungsstab, General Alfred Jodl, had orders to draft up what military possibilities could be had for such an occasion. As Jodl wrote in his personal diary: “17.15: Der Führer commands that how, with the least possible staff, it is possible to take possession of Norway.”

While Hitler listened intently, bowed over the charts and maps in the old Reich Chancellery in the afternoon of April 1st, a Swedish diplomat shivered in the cold wind blowing over the canals of Stettin, 150 kilometres northeast of Wilhelmsstrasse. Karl Yngve Vendel had turned 45 years old only a few days earlier, and had just taken up his position as consul in the old port town by the banks of the Oder. His welcoming ceremony in the Swedish embassy in Berlin earlier that day had been short. There were strong rumours that troops and equipment were being loaded aboard a large amount of transport ships in Stettin and other northern German ports, aiming to take the Swedish ore deposits by force. Ambassador Arvid Richert had at once sent Vendel and the naval priest Hultgård eastwards to check out the rumours. “Since the loading of important war materiel concurrent with the latest information usually happens at night, I spent around three hours hanging around the dock gates”, Vendel wrote in an intelligence report to Richert two days later. The winter of 1940 was the worst in a generation, and icy slush and large ice floes still filled the lower inlets of the Oder and the Stettin lagoon. A Soviet passenger steamer had arrived a few days earlier as the first ship arriving from the west since the Baltic sea froze around the new year. “The conditions of the ice are so bad that no vessel can hope to reach the harbour without the help of an icebreaker”, noted the naval priest. Armed guards patrolled the harbour area, and Gestapo had eyes and ears everywhere. The stakeout was therefore both icy cold and risky, but it paid off: With assistance from Hultgård, Vendel identified 15 cargo ships commandeered for war purposes. The vessels had their chimneys painted black, their shipping company flags were painted over and they were clearly under military command. Conversation with the crews aboard the Swedish steamer Konung Oscar and the Norwegian ship Kora clarified it: “Tanks, trucks, field guns, airplane parts, bales of hay and other military equipment” had been loaded aboard those ships since Easter. Mingling in the many taverns of the third largest port city in Nazi Germany also gave clear clues: “Hotels and restaurants are abuzz with military officers of every kind, and clutches of troops are gathering, especially in the port areas, who seem to have no connection to Stettin.” Several different sources told of the same destination for the ships, who had a collective tonnage of 150,000 tons: Scandinavia. Or as a German soldier remarked to a sailor from Kora, “The Norwegians had better decide if they entered on the side of Germany or England, because the Germans were loading up.”

Consul Vendel had scored an intelligence coup. The fleet of transports he and Hultgård had observed, made up one of the main elements of operation Weserübung and would in a few days leave Stettin, headed for Oslo, Kristiansand, Stavanger and Bergen – loaded to the gunwales with the cargo of a deadly assault: heavy artillery, live ammunition and battle- ready soldiers. The seed sown in the Führer’s mind four months earlier by Raeder and Quisling had grown large. “Hitler’s decision to prepare a pre-emptive attack on Norway as a thought exercise reached us by the end of the year”, wrote Major-General Bernhard von Lossberg, of many considered the brains of the operations staff of Oberkommando Wehrmacht. He was the army representative in what later became Hitler’s personal staff, and worked directly under Jodl and his deputy, artillery general Walter Warlimont. “The job was left to a group of three junior officers from differing military branches, who conducted the study independently from us.” The idea – called Studie Nord - was ready partway into January 1940 and demonstrated that an attack on Norway would be a daring venture of breakneck format. Admittedly, it would be an easy task to occupy Oslo and the central parts of eastern Norway through a lightning assault, but that would no doubt trigger an Allied occupation of the West Country and Northern Norway and cut Hitler off from his main strategic objective: The ore city of Narvik. “There was only one alternative: To strike all objectives on the Norwegian coast at the same time”, wrote von Lossberg, who identified the colossal risk in his situation analysis. “From the beginning there was no doubt that the undertaking was more than daring, and risked the fate of the invasion force and the entire fleet. The British were so toweringly superior at sea that they could easily destroy all our ships – if the Royal Navy ever learned of their departure and their goal.” Hitler, who in his command train Amerika moved between Berlin and the stationary western front while waiting for spring to melt the snows – had no stomach for additional risk – so long as the Nordic countries were ready to defend their neutrality. But the gallant rescue of three hundred British sailors aboard Altmark by the destroyer HMS Cossack in the Jøssing fjord 16th of February 1940 changed the Führer’s mood once again. The Norwegian guard ships sent to protect Norwegian neutrality looked on from ringside seats without firing a single shot. Foreign minister Koht excused the passivity by claiming that there was no use in fighting a superior force. “We could not use force against the neutrality violators, because of their supreme power – a whole collection of British destroyers facing off against two torpedo boats.” he said in a lecture in Trondheim the day after the boarding action. He followed it up in the Storting the 19th of February: “It would have been at cross purposes of all military thought to fight such a force. It would have done no good and been totally senseless.” It was the crawling language of defeatism and disarmament, and his forumations laid the groundwork for what was soon to happen. The globetrotting peacemaker Koht had built his business on an illusion, and lacked the character to turn it around. The clock was five minutes to midnight (figuratively speaking). Instead of exhorting a fiery resistance of neutrality, he chose to defend his own and the administration’s failed policies with words that further undermined the country’s morale and fighting spirit. As Lieutenant colonel Harald Høiback wrote in the brilliant study Command and Control in Military Crisis: “Koht made a basic error when he, facing both the Germans and the Storting, stressed that we could do nothing when facing bad odds. Through this statement, he invited in all the world’s bullies. If the Norwegians had made a massive fight of it, and been shot to pieces by the intruders, or if Koht had frothed with rage from the Storting’s pulpit and threatened the next aggressor with a sound beating, the situation would have been different. If we had clearly shown a strong will to defend our independence, none of the warring parties would have chanced an occupation of Norway. Unfortunately, we did the opposite.” Hitler had exploded with rage when the news of the humiliation in the Jøssing fjord reached him, and accused the crew of Altmark of cowardliness and treason. Six months after the outbreak of war, the Führer was seemingly under pressure from every direction. His conflict with the generals about the western front was climaxing, and the production numbers showed that he was far from reaching his rearmament goals. “Hitler was red hot”, wrote Adam Tooze, “First, the army leaders Brauchitch and Halder had sabotaged his plan for an immediate attack on France in November 1939. Now, the entire war effort was threatened by the arrogance and ineptness of the central supply staff.” When he spoke in Munich’s Hofbrauhaus the evening of Saturday 24th of February, as part of the 20-year anniversary of the Nazi party, he expressed his frustration in hateful words: “The only accident I have had in my struggles, is that I have had to fight against underachievers and nobodies!” Even if he mainly aimed it at “The Jewish/Plutocratic robber barons” of the west, there can be little doubt he also talked about parts of his own military elite. He was in no way ready to stop the war before he had secured the German Lebensraum. “In the economic arena, Germany had prepared monstrously. Years of work laid the groundwork for the German autarchy. In 1914, German blockade protection was almost non-existent. Today, Germany is invulnerable economically, and cannot be conquered by military or monetary means.” That was a bold lie, and few knew better than Hitler how vulnerable Germany’s economy really was – if the flow raw materials to the armaments industry dried up. If the Royal Navy took action against the ore shipments from Narvik with the same kind of determination they had shown in the Jøssing fjord, the Norwegians would soon put their hands up. “If we in this case could not guard our neutrality, that does not mean that the country that suffered damages, Germany, has any right to take the war into our waters. I have not heard of any such thoughts from the German administration.”, Koht had said after the Altmark affair. He was wrong. Only two days after the distant minister’s statement to the Storting, Hitler had called one of his most seasoned staff officers to the Reich Chancellery. Nicolaus von Falkenhorst (55) had worn the uniform for more than forty years, and had served the emperor, the Weimar republic and Hitler with the same prussian zeal. The thickset infantry general was chief of the 21st army corps on the western front and was called Wotan by his subordinates. It was not however, his disciplinarian style that brought him to Berlin, but his part in the Finnish Civil War in the spring of 1918. As a young captain, von Falkenhorst had followed Major general Graf von der Goltz and the Baltic sea division’s landing on Hangö island and their victorious march on Helsingfors fighting the Bolsheviks. It made him one of a few German officers experienced in combined operations in Nordic terrain. “Sit down and tell me everything about your campaign in Finland”, Hitler told him when he reported to the Chancellery. Normally, Hitler did not have much patience for officers of the nobility, but the story of his fight against the Reds made an impression. “As soon as I was done, he led me to a table covered in maps. He said: We now know that the British mean to land troops in Norway. We urgently need to forestall them.” The supreme commander of the army, general Walter von Brauchitch and his chief of staff, Franz Halder were not in Hitler’s good graces. Neither of them were consulted when Hitler with a handshake made Falkenhorst responsible for the attack on Denmark and Norway – with orders to begin detailed planning at once. “I knew nothing of Norway”, Falkenhorst coquettishly wrote later. “Therefore, I bought a Baedeker travel handbook and shut myself inside my room at Hotel Kaiserhof. When I reported to Hitler at 18 the same night, I had the outline of a plan.” Four days later, on Monday the 26th of February, Falkenhorst had installed himself and his staff from the 21st army corps near to the Wehrmachtsführungsstab headquarters on Bendlerstrasse in the centre of Berlin. “Militarily, the next weeks were my most interesting at my time at central command” wrote Bernhard von Lossberg, who coordinated between the Wehrmacht supreme command – Hitler, Jodl and Keitel, and Falkenhorst’s planning staff, using the previous Studie Nord as a base material. “There was little time, and the lack of room aboard the ships was the most pressing matter of all.”

It was a strategic assault without equal in modern military history that was being planned. In all, eight divisions were to be moved from the western front and used to cow the two small neutral countries to the north – two to Denmark and six to Norway. The entire operative strength of the Kriegsmarine – around one hundred warships with the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in front – along with fifty commandeered merchant ships acted as transport, supported by an air fleet of around five hundred planes. The main strategic objective, Narvik, was to be taken by ten destroyers carrying a contingent of 2000 gebirgsjägers from the 3rd mountain division under the command of Hitler’s old friend, the Nazi general Eduard Dietl. The second main target, Oslo, was to be taken by a squadron of cruisers and torpedo boats with the brand new Blücher as flagship, carrying 2000 men and supported by a company of fallschirmjägers earmarked for the taking of Fornebu airport. The forces were unjustifiably small, which illustrated the planners’ greatest problem: Even if they used the fleet’s full capacity, the first attack wave would only contain 12 000 – 15 000 men and small quantities of ammunition and equipment. The rest of the invading army of 100 000 and most of the heavier materiel would have to follow in the days and weeks following the landing. “For every ship, the loading and crossing times had to be meticulously planned, whether they were destroyers or cargo ships” wrote von Lossberg. “The precondition of a successful action was total secrecy. The ship movements had to be measured carefully in every single case and written down on a timetable. While the faster destroyers could leave their home base comparatively late, the slower transport ships had to move at an earlier time, camouflaged as coal steamers and dry goods ships. “The number of larger vessels available to the Kriegsmarine was modest, and included 2 battlecruisers, 7 cruisers and 14 destroyers. The rest were torpedo boats, minesweepers and a miscellaneous selection of support vessels and guard boats with no armour and weak armaments. Facing that was the British Home Fleet, who on short notice could mobilize 5 battleships, 1 hangar ship, 13 cruisers, 60 destroyers and 24 submarines. The disparity in numbers was daunting, and could lead to the destruction of the entire invasion force long before they reached their goal. “We are dealing with one of the most audacious enterprises in the history of modern warfare”, Hitler acknowledged after a meeting with his frontline officers on the 1st of April. He had a gambler’s instinct and added immediately: “And therein lies the key to success!” He followed the commanders’ plans section by section and declared himself satisfied. The loading of war materiel in Stettin, Hamburg and Bremen were proceeding well. Only hours left before the final decision had to be made – if the element of surprise was to be preserved. Every day, the danger of leaks increased, which could lead to devastating British countermeasures. if the Royal Navy blocked the North Sea and the Skagerrak straits, the whole thing would be over before it could begin. It was high stakes poker, which required nerves of steel – and a reward that justified the effort. To the majors and lieutenant colonels gathered in the Reich Chancellery, he could of course not put forward the facts of the import- and production statistics. That would tear down the myth of the Third Reich’s economic invincibility. Hitler summoned forth another apocalyptic vision – of the Western powers’ stubborn wish to keep the Germans mired in poverty and dependency. The time had come to break those supposed chains. For that cause, the occupation of Norway was a “necessary preventive action” that would help cement Nazi Germany’s position in the world. Weserübung was therefore not a grievous crime against international law and a small neutral neighbouring country, but of something entirely different: A life or death struggle for future Lebensraum - with the British Empire as their main opponent. If Hitler failed, doom was at hand. If he succeeded, the joyous thousand-year Reich beckoned in the distance. As he expressed it to his officers: “Sooner or later, a clash with England will be unavoidable. That is a war that will have to be fought to the end. It is no less that the war of the fate of the German people.”

At Oscarsborg the very same Monday, spring filled the air, and there was hectic activity. After months of frost, the Fimbulwinter was finally losing its grip. “At the time of writing, the sun is shining intensely in a cloudless sky, and the temperature is impeccable” the Aftenposten paper reported in its afternoon edition. “The weather service reports that today was the first frostless night in Østlandet (The East Country - The eastern parts of Norway). The lowest temperature was plus one degree Celsius at Blindern. Eight o’clock this morning there was up to six degrees in some places. The foreshadowed rainfall came earlier than expected. There has been some rain in different places this night, mostly around Halden with around six millimetres.” It had been a quiet weekend, and only two of the soldiers in the fortress had to spend the night in the detention cells. The flag was hoisted at exactly 08.00, the guard clock had been wound, and the temperature and height of the water had been measured and reported to the communications central. All according to the routines set by the neutrality watch, and colonel Birger Eriksen had to have felt satisfied as he walked from the commander’s house in the sunshine and saw the fjord lying quiet before him – in a low western breeze, carrying the scent of the sea and rotting snow. He had finished his morning ritual, which included a stretch and bend: Straight knees and palms touching the floor. Eriksen was 1,90 meters and was lithe and strong despite his 64 years that past November, and would soon hang up his uniform for good. It was a duty to keep in shape – if he were to face the trials of the day. Against his protestations, the commanding admiral had decided to use Oscarsborg as a school for Coastal Artillery recruits, and more than 400 youths from towns and villages across the country were moving in on April the 2nd. Barracks and cafeterias had to be cleared and made ready for dressing up and drills. “My repeated correspondences about a plan that could free us of all these boys and make room for our own trained crews were refused”, he later wrote. “It was an enormous and fatal flaw.” Those who met Eriksen, hardly noticed if his state of mind changed from spring optimism and to a darker premonition. Usually the commander was a silent and closed-off person, who rarely gave away his feelings. “Father was a happy and even-tempered person, but he wore a visor”, his son later wrote in a memoir. Or as it was written in his obituary in Kystartillery-nytt (Coastal Artillery News) in 1958: “Colonel Eriksen had a strong personality. His energy and capacity for work seemed boundless. Under a seemingly hard surface, he was warm and caring.” It is possible that his closed-off and pedantic appearance was a reflection of what he had experienced in childhood, growing up as the son of a fishing village owner in Lofoten. When he was born as third eldest son in a family of later eight children in 1875, his parents Jensine and Caspar Eriksen lived in considerable wealth as owners of the village of Moskenes – with servants, cattle, a fishery and boats commuting between Lofoten and Bergen carrying dried fish and cod liver oil. But Caspar died when Birger was only eight years old, and his widow made a drastic choice in 1890: She rented out the fishing village for 4000 kroner per year and moved with her still living chidren to an apartment on Schweigaard street in Oslo. “Jensine went away so that her children could receive schooling”, wrote the family chronicler, Kjetil Arntzen in the family history. “It was no small feat. She had little schooling of her own, and could barely write her own name. She brought along furniture and six children and sailed their sloop to Bergen, and from there to the capital. It was told that her living room smelled of dried cod for two years.” His firstborn brother had died, and the second emigrated to America, which meant that Birger became the man of the house while in Oslo – with all the duties it entailed. He buried his own wants, grew with the responsibility and worked hard. Among society at large, there were drastic developments. A patriotic wind blew across the country, the union with Sweden was coming apart at the seams, and the consulate affair (The main reason Norway split from Sweden) put forth fear of war. When Birger passed his exams at Christiania Cathedral School in the spring of 1893, he was one of many young men that submitted an advance test and quickly sought a career in the military. He was seventeen and lit with the fervour of patriotism and independence. The photographs taken of the newly minted First Lieutenant with an exam in the upper reaches of the War Academy show the contours of the future warrior. The round features of youth were gone. Under his officer’s cap shone bright blue eyes. His lips were tight, his chin put forward in a wilful expression. “You understand, he is quite the personality”, said Kristiane Sæhlie, who he met after the turn of the century, after advancing to captain and transferring from the infantry to the newly established Coastal Artillery. The dainty and dark-haired Kristiane was the eldest daughter of the filthy rich farmer, distillery owner and Right party politician Andreas Olsen Sæhlie, who owned the great manor of Sæhlie in Vang. The wedding of the tall officer from Northern Norway and the heiress from Hedmark the autumn of 1903 was a grand affair. Kristiane had borne three children and followed him through the rise from the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905 until the end of the first world war in 1918. Those were the heydays of the Coastal Artillery, and Birger Eriksen had been one of its most promising young officers. He had been made fortress commander at Agdenes in 1915, and the expectations had been great. But the Great War was followed by a revolutionary tidal wave, and the new labour parties looked upon the officer corps with hate, and distained them as class enemies. There was a long way to fall under a rising tide of antimilitary sentiment, and the top jobs in the rapidly disarming mini-defence were closed off to men of Eriksen’s conservative ways. “The woman is the bedrock of family life”, he told his son Andreas in trying to explain to him his political views. “The government rests upon the families, and even the old empires fell into ruin when that bedrock gave way when proper conduct and morals failed.” That was a philosophy that did not elicit sympathy from the intellectual cadre of socialists, and Eriksen was slowly excluded from social circles. When he arrived with Kristiane at Oscarsborg as colonel and fortress commander in 1933 – the same year the defence budget was cut to a paltry 30 million kroner – he must have known it was the end of the road for him. Oscarsborg was finished in the 1890s and had been one of the most advanced fortresses in Europe. But the decline had accelerated in the 1930s, and Eriksen’s service had been a consistent and frustrating uphill battle against the ill will of the government. The art of war was in rapid development, and he had in many letters warned against the dangers of a new age of warfare, especially against modern airplanes with great speed and range. “Since the foundation of the fortress, there have been built or excavated no shelters at all. Ammunition, the transport of ammunition and the gun crews are as much in the open now as they were thirty years ago, and the conditions must be said to be catastrophic”, he wrote to the Department of Defence in the spring of 1938. “Something has to be done, for no one now cannot dare to guarantee that at very short notice we will not end up in the gravest of all situations.” It had been two years since he had written his recommendation, but little had happened. True, the political situation in Europe had forced a small increase in defence spending, and the establishment of the neutrality watch in the autumn of 1939 had given Eriksen a certain increase of manpower. But the fortress was far from its full operational standard. Shelters were not built, and the Krupp guns of 1893 were still in their uncovered cradles – unprotected against attacks from the air. “When we reported for duty, the cannons were snowed in and iced over”, sergeant Ragnvald Rækken told, when he was summoned to his duty of neutrality watch the leap year’s day 1940, February 29th. The fifty-six-year-old had retired from the army in 1934 and since worked as a farmer, distillery controller and tax secretary in Brandbu. “When I arrived at Oscarsborg, I asked if it was all right to call me up, I who had long ago passed the upper age limit for active duty. I was told that “When there is fear of war” one could be called. I received my arms and was given berth in a darkened barracks in the courtyard. It did not look like there was any “fear of war” at Oscarsborg. The old fortress was placed in reserve many years ago. To make drills possible at all, we had to work several days to clear away snow and ice. The fortress was like a Sleeping Beauty in the winter night, and it was not easy going to bring it back to wakefulness.” Rækken’s immediate superior was another retired veteran, the equally old lieutenant August Bonsak, from Solør. Apart from a few short postings with the Coastal Artillery, the former junior officer had been a clerk and foreman at many public facilities for 25 years – especially power plants and the laying of power lines for the National Telegraph Service. He too had been called up as a neutrality watchman at the end of February, as second in command of the Main Battery under captain Leif Leidits. “The battery had not been used in the winter. Therefore, we had to keep the snow off and apply lots of oil and salt to make the cannons move properly”, Bonsak told. “The Main Battery had 75 crewmen and 70 non-combatant servicemen. We used all three 28-cm cannons, Moses, Aron and Joshva, and 23 men were needed to crew each of them. All the drilling was done by me. The training was intense, and the boys became very good at it.” Four weeks of hard exercise behind the frozen ramparts had made progress, but in Oslo, the leadership of the Naval Defence had no sense of continuity. People were needed everywhere, and against Eriksen’s protests, some of his best men were ordered away from Oscarsborg, with departure by the 1st of April. Captain Leidits was sent to Horten, cannon commander L’Orange and 28 men had been sent to the Kopås battery on the eastern side of the fjord, and a further ten men to the Nes battery on the west side. Half of the partially trained combat-ready crewmembers had been removed by the stroke of a pen, and that could have been a fatal weakening. As Leidits’ relief as battery commander, captain Magnus Sødem told in a later report: “The war strength of the battery was reduced to one – 1 – cannon crew. The main battery was thus destroyed, as I wrote to Leidits on the back of a receipt.”

Chapter 2

Blücher sets out to sea

Swinemünde and Oslo. 5th-8th April, 1940 Blücher set out to sea from Strander Bucht in the Kiel fjord as soon as the admiral was aboard. It was Friday afternoon the 5th of April, and Kummetz and his flag captain, Kapitän-zur-See Heinrich Woldag were busy. Hitler had taken his final step the day after the séance in the Reich Chancellery and set Weser- Tag for Tuesday the 9th of April, and Weser-Zeit for 05.15 German summer time (04.15 Norwegian time). Gruppe 5 with Blücher as flagship should at that time have passed Oscarborg and sit outside of the Nesodden headlands, ready for an attack on Oslo’s city centre – before the king and government understood what was going on. “I expect that every group leader and commandant in undefiant faith in our Führer will reach their goals without consideration for any difficulties that may arise”, the fleet commander had proclaimed in a tone that brooked no argument. “I also expect them to crush all opposition that will arise in our target ports with utmost resolution.” Those were exhorting words, and those few informed men that saw the slender grey cruiser steam out the fjord and disappear eastwards, would have thought it most suitable for its purpose. Snow fell in the morning, and the south-easterly wind was bitterly cold. But its cutter’s bow sliced through the waves like a dream, and the slanting smoke hood on its chimney made the noxious gases venting from the boiler rooms wave like a banner of victory across the aft deck. The twin towers armed with eight 20,3cm cannons could strike an enemy 33 kilometers away with deadly 122-kilo shells, and the turbines hidden behind the armoured steel under the waterline gave the vessel a top speed of 32,5 knots. Many thought of Blücher as one of the most stylish ships ever built, and the two veterans of the first world war now occupying the command bridge must have felt pride and humility for having been handed the responsibility of this latest addition to Hitler’s fleet. But looks were not everything, and both of them knew that the ship and her crew of 1380 men were far from being a battle-ready unit. The youthful Woldag had taken over the cruiser from Deutche Werft in Kiel in September 1939, and taken her on her maiden voyage two months later, just after his 47th birthday. With his shaven, child-like countenance and his jovial smile, the commander looked like a boy scout, and his humanity made him a popular skipper among the sailors on the lower deck. But among his friends, the former Naval gunnery school chief was called The Dachshound, which hinted that behind his smile there was both a stubbornness and an iron will. “He was small, lively, blond and blue-eyed", the radio journalist Hans Hermann Schlünz recalled in his book, Schwerer Kreutzer Blücher. “The crew always appreciated his positive and comradely bearing. It made them put in an extra effort.” Woldag had set a up a hectic training programme, but the ice had closed off the Kieler fjord in December and spoiled his plans. Until now the cruiser had only spent 20 days on the sea, and the last nine weeks had been spent lying at dock at the shipyard while the last work was being completed. The boilers had been lit again Monday the 1st of April, but Woldag knew better than anyone that valuable time had been lost. Among sailors, a ship is a living being, and that axiom ran truer in the Navy than among the merchant fleet. Drills, drills and yet more drills had to be conducted before instruments, machinery and rescue equipment could be used in an effective way. In battle, the difference between life and death was measured in seconds. Every man needed to know his place and duties. But aboard Blücher, the paint was barely dried, the equipment untested, and the routines not yet drilled into the sailors’ bones. That explained the message sent to fleet chief Rader, carefully crafted by Woldag: “Blücher is ready, but only for lighter duties. The heavy artillery has not been test fired, and combat readiness drills have not been completed. The machinery has not been tested for combat readiness; shipwreck drills have not taken place.” It was a heavy judgement over the situation aboard, and a responsible ship management would normally bow out of frontline duties before the situation had been rectified. Kummetz and Woldag had however been in the Reich Chancellery and heard Hitler’s harangue about his fated clash. They knew the Führer had a long memory, and did not have the guts to stand up to his will. The need for ships was desperate, and a refusal to carry out orders could easily be seen as cowardice and sabotage. It explained the message’s double-faced and cynical content: On the one hand, they would not deny glory and fame to themselves or their crews through the adventure represented by Weserübung - something depending on the Norwegians not resisting, but on the other hand they wanted to cover their own asses if something went wrong. It was 250 nautical miles from Kiel to Swinemünde, and Blücher reached the picturesque medieval town early on Saturday the 6th of April, the light cruiser Emden following in her wake. The ship navigation officer, 36-year-old Lieutenant Commander Hugo Förster, was a man unsure of himself and full of complexes, and the onlookers on the half-kilometre long pier covering the mouth of the Swine river quickly got a demonstration that all was not well on board. “Despite the fact that we had ordered a pilot boat from Bülk radio lighthouse, the guard boats were totally unready for us” Förster later wrote in a snarling and self-righteous report. “We had to run up a pilot flag, and it took twenty minutes until the pilot was on board.” It was a simple thing to manoeuvre the 14 000-tonner against the current onto the docks at Eichstaden, accompanied by the stirring notes of the ships’ horn orchestra. But when the cruiser was supposed to turn its bow to the sea, most things went wrong. “The pilot was apparently unfamiliar with the difficult currents of the Swine river and was totally incapable of giving meaningful advice to the officer on deck about the complicated manoeuvring necessary. The attempt to turn the ship north of Eichstaden failed because of a strong outgoing current, low engine power and incapability aboard the four tugboats.” Turbines off, the heavy cruiser drifted dangerously close to the transport ships lying at dock, and Blücher almost carried off the Hamburg/South America line passenger steamer Monte Rosa which had been commandeered as a troop transport, and carried a couple thousand fresh recruits. The aft anchor had been deployed, and the officers on the bridge waited with bated breath for it to catch on the mud of the river’s bottom. Dramatic minutes followed, and even the Dachshound would have had trouble keeping an even temper. A breakdown with a following delay would have scuppered the tight timetable that was set for Weserübung. Swinemünde was the central shipping port for the troops sent to capture Oslo, and 1600 men waited to be let aboard Blücher and Emden at the closed-off railway station a few hundred meters away. According to the operational order, the loading should start after dark - “Weser- Tag minus 3”. There were only a few hours left, but the flagship had not yet managed to dock. “First after the anchor caught, south of the ferry terminal Hafenamt/Ostswine, was it possible to turn the ship” the unhappy Förster reported. “The time was almost 13 when we could moor at the pier at Eichstaden with the aid of the tugboats.” Their battle against the insidious current had taken all morning, and could easily have ended in embarrassment. When Rittmeister Paul Goertz and Lieutenant Jürgen Bieler came aboard a couple of hours later as the first of Falkenhorst’s staff officers, the mood was still bad. “We were led to the ship’s aide, Lieutenant Colonet Kurt Zoeppfel, but he had not been briefed on the particulars of the operation, and had not made a detailed space distribution”, wrote the tall and aristocratic Bieler, who was a general’s son, and was clearly less than impressed with the whole thing. “Goerz and I were especially surprised to learn that the transport officer from the 163rd division had not reported aboard, and was still without contact from the ship’s officers.” Darkness fell on Swinemünde, and aboard the packed trains on the station, the soldiers waited for something to happen. Many had travelled for two days – without knowing of either their purpose or destination. The lack of information and detailed planning had one root cause: Hitler’s anxiety that the news of Weserübung should leak before the fleet was under way. As the First Officer aboard Blücher, Erich Heymann wrote in his report: “When we left Kiel, we had aboard supplies for five weeks. But the demand for secrecy of the real target of our travels was absolute. That meant that weapons leaders and detail chiefs were misled, and told that the ship was embarking on a longer exercise tour in the eastern part of the Baltic sea.”

The safety measures were an illusion. In reality, the rumours of an immediate attack on Scandinavia were travelling fast throughout the Allied and neutral capitals, based on a range of sources. The eyewitness reports from the 1st of April from consul Vendel and the naval priest Hultgård from Stettin were detailed and well supported, and triggered an immediate reaction from the Swedish ambassador. He contacted his Norwegian colleague Arne Scheel, who had served in Berlin since 1921 and was the oldest diplomat in the German capital. He also made sure copies were sent to Stockholm and the Swedish legation in Oslo. The next day, two central figures in the German power structure – Ernst von Weizäcker from the Foreign Office and Grand Admiral Raeder’s chief of staff, Commander Erich Schulte-Mönting - were confronted with the information, and were not able to give any reassuring answers. The proper and untalkative Weizäcker “looked darkly” on the situation, while Schulte-Möntig was far more open to the German-friendly military attaché Anders Forshell over a couple glasses of wine in his comfortable home. “My impression was that he wanted to reassure us in an honest way about any possible German aggression against Sweden” Forshell wrote in his summary. A German aggression against Norway was however far more likely. “As a summary of what Mr. S.M. said about the developments, I will put forth the following: Preparations are being met to meet, or possibly preempt an English landing, probably in Bergen. I do not exclude a simultaneous German action against Southern Norway with troop transfers, and for example Narvik by parachute forces.” For reasons never made clear, the aging Scheel did not see a reason for immediate alarm, despite the fact that Narvik and the ore transport had gradually risen to the fore in the rumours spilling out. He did nothing to verify Richert’s information. “The Swedish envoy told me that the German political circles are very worried about a possible British foray into hindering the passage of ore from Sweden to Narvik. He mentioned in highest confidence that there is a loading of German troops onto transport ships happening in Stettin”, he wrote in a letter that reached Foreign minister Koht in Oslo the 3rd of April. “That they are heavily preoccupied by the thought of a British operation against the ore transport to Narvik is self-evident to me. The loading of troops in Stettin is probably not in connection with any operations against Norway. It is possible that they are eyeing Sweden, but the probable thing is that they are being sent eastward.” That was a strange rendering of the Swedish observations, and its contents were unlikely to move Koht from his passivity. The foreign minister had had little trust in Scheel’s powers of judgement, and he himself seemed struck by a syndrome that afflict many Norwegian intellectuals that gain a taste for politics: A desire to save the world, coupled with a copious amount of arrogance and a steady belief in their own infallibility. As the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Dormer wrote after a meeting with Koht in the summer of 1939: “The minister declared that Norwegians, on the main, and the press especially, did not know anything of foreign policy. The bottomless ignorance gave him no purpose to tell them anything.” Koht did not inform the rest of the government – either of the letter from Scheel or of any of the unsettling messages coming in from Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen over the next few days. Hitler's opponents in the army had decided to act – in the hope of inciting Danes and Norwegians to fight and resist. They hoped to give the tyrant a loss in battle, which could strengthen the opposition and lay the groundwork for a later coup. As transmitter of this information, they chose one of the great heroes of the anti-Nazi movement, the fearless Colonel Hans Oster, who had a key position inside the Abwehr, and intimate knowledge about what was about to happen. Endangering his own life, he at once sought out one of the few people he could trust, the Dutch military attaché, Gijsbertus J. Sas. “At 17 on Wednesday the 3rd of April, I received the message from Oster concerning invasions of Demark and Norway, along with the information that they would – with all probability – reopen the western offensive” General Major Sas told a Dutch government commission in 1948. He improvised a hasty coded telephone message to his superiors in the Department of Defence in The Hague, and used his evening plotting out how to warn the Norwegians and Danes without giving away his source. The bald attaché was completely aware that Oster was the perfect source, who with an idealistic motive committed high treason – not towards Germany, but to an evil regime. According to Sas, the colonel was “a personality of which I have never met an equal, a daring and brave man, who with his men – surrounded and surveyed by Gestapo – stood up to Hitler.” He also knew that Oster risked a death sentence, and that the path to the executioner’s scaffold would be short if he himself did not tread lightly. Sas had a good contact with his Swedish and Danish colleagues in Berlin, the military attachés Anders Forshell and Fritz Hammer Kjølsen, but the Norwegian legation was a different beast entirely. Among the frenzy of demilitarization, the post of Norwegian military attaché had been revoked, and the civilian replacement – legate councillor Ulrich Stang – was a known Nazi sympathiser of the most blinkered kind. Sas still tried his luck when he met Stang in the bar of Hotel Adlon at lunchtime the next day. The fashionable hotel was the leading rumour mill of the war for agents, diplomats and informants for Gestapo. “Tell me, how do you appraise the situation?” the Dutchman asked quite innocently. He sat at a table with his wife and son, and had waved Stang over. “Not without danger, the English want to land in Norway.” Stang’s rumbling exclamation gave Sas an opening, and he pressed on, bending forwards: “What? Are the English landing in your country!? Do you not know at all that the Germans are coming to take Demark and Norway this next Tuesday?” “That’s impossible! Insane!” “Impossible, you say. Madness. But we will meet again on Tuesday, and then even you will know for sure.” Stang collected his morning drink, and stopped again by the Dutchman’s table: “You really scared me...” “Mr. Stang, you really have good reason to be scared, believe me. We'll see each other again on Tuesday, and you will know I was right.” As soon as the lunch ended, Sas had driven over to Forshell and Kjølsen and given them the same message. The Swedish attaché, who had been almost directly informed of these plans by Schulte-Möntig, agitatedly sought out his Danish colleague. “He supplied that there would be a German strike against Denmark in the coming week, and that this operation would also include Norway, which Germany meant to occupy”, Kjølsen wrote in a pamphlet, The prelude to the 9th of April. “The information came from the same trustworthy source that earlier had warned Holland, and who was unsatisfied with the current political system.” Detailed messages were quickly written down, and sent to Stockholm in cipher, and to Copenhagen by personal courier. Ulrich Stang was not alarmed to the same degree. He sought out a civilian contact, who denied that Norway was part of any plan, and continued on to the Dutch legation to double check if Sas could be trusted. “You would be wise to bring this information to your government immediately”, legation councillor Boetzelaar van Oosterhuyt had answered him. The later foreign minister added in an explanation after the war: “Stang declared that he did not think it likely that Germany prepared for an invasion, since his German friends had convinced him otherwise.” On his way back, Stang stopped to take a bath at the Danish legation, who was next to his own, and had a similar discussion with Commander Kjølsen. It did not help much. When he later that night drafted a message that was sent to the Foreign Office in Oslo by cipher telegram Friday the 5th of April, all reference to Norway was removed. “The military attaché of one of the neutral states’ legations here has – in stictest confidence – told one of our officials today that he could count on Germany marching on Holland in the near future, perhaps already next week. To this effort, the Germans mean to pursue two targets: To gain bases on the Dutch coast for air raids on England, and secondly to make way for German infantry and artillery through Belgium for further action against France. This legation interprets this foregoing information with all possible reservation, but since the military attaché is well known as a clever and well-informed man, this legation did not want to abstain from furthering this information. The same attaché also implied a German operation into Denmark to gain bases for German airplanes and submarines on the west coast of Jutland.” Kjølsen had become so worried about Stang’s attitude that he personally met with envoy Arne Scheel and laid out all the newest information to him. That prompted the following additional telegram to Oslo a few hours later: “The same information mentioned in my writ 638, has been heard by the Danish legation, who furthermore has heard rumours of an attack on the southern coast of Norway. The meaning behind these thrusts seem to be to hurry the war along and pre-empt the Allies.” In the meantime, the Danish foreign minister had called on the Swedish and Norwegian envoys in Copenhagen, and shown them the far more serious warning he had received in writing from Berlin by courier the afternoon before. But when minister August Esmarch phoned foreign council Jens Bull at the Foreign Office in Oslo, the farce neared its completion. Esmarch was so worried about being wiretapped that Bull barely understood what was being said. “The question of Southern Norway was mentioned”, Bull reported to Foreign minister Koht, who still saw no reason to act. “I was not at all nervous on the 5th of April”, Koht wrote, who did not inform the government, and laid the messages aside.

Aboard Blücher in Swinemünde Saturday night, things were in full swing. At 17, Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz had gathered all the ships’ officers and section leaders in the Admiral’s cabin and given the first briefing about Weserübung and Gruppe 5’s tasks. Woldag was present with his second in command, Commander Erich Heymann; from Emden had come Commander Werner Lange, who previously had been military attaché in Rome, and his First Officer, Wolfgang Loeper. The torpedo boats Möwe, Albatros and Kondor were represented by the ship officers Helmut Neuss, Siegfried Strelow and Hans Wilcke, while Lieutenant Captain Gustav Forstmann of the 1st Räumbootflotille had driven the long way from Kiel to hear what the group commander had to say.

The leading officer from the army was the commander of the newly called up 163rd infantry division, artillery general Erwin Engelbrecht, who met together with one of his regimental chiefs, Colonel Hans Blohmeyer and the aging leader of the 234th Panzerabteilung, Major Ernst Lehmann-Bärenklau, who was an ardent supporter of Hitler, and in civilian life managed one of Nazi Germany’s largest textile factories. One of Blohmeyer’s subordinates was the well-known Nazi (in Norwegian, stornazist, literally great big Nazi, meaning one who goes all in on the Führer juice) Kurt Budaüs from Leipzig, who had been one of the main bureaucrats of the Hitlerjugend, and was later a member of the Reichstag and led the infamous Adolf Hitler schools. He had been called up as a lieutenant, and had been given command of the machine gun troop in the first battalion of the 307th regiment, who were given the toughest tasks on the first day of the invasion. Rittmeister Paul Goerz, who would play a key role after the wrecking of the Blücher, was of a different sort. He was director of Blaupunkt, and belonged to one of the wealthiest and best-known families of the German electronics industry. He was counted as one of the brains behind the mass production of cheap radios and the development of German television, who had its first broadcasts during the 1936 Olympiad. His technological and organizational skills had given the Rittmeister a key role in Weserübung. He was to land in Oslo with the first wave of attack and make sure that the supply of foodstuffs, materiel and ammunition from the next waves were handled properly – and not just piled on the docks. He also brought along a substantial amount of cash in Norwegian kroner for the purchase of food from local vendors if possible. “I was to establish a stockpile of catering and supplies at once, and make sure that necessary supplies reached the landing troops, either from docking ships or Norwegian wholesalers”, he later wrote. “The task was enormous, and every possibility had to be considered and added to the plans.”

Most of the chequered gathering of career officers, technocrats and Nazi adventurers in the Admiral’s cabin had long ago guessed that the target was Oslo, and the brazenness of it all could have come as no big surprise. Hitler had time and again defied the Western powers and run roughshod over all opposition in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The alliance with Stalin had freed his back, and the demilitarized Norway was a tempting prey – 24 hours’ sailing time to the north. The plans, presented by Kummetz, were borne from overconfidence, and could remind one of plans for a spring picnic. The unfinished and untested Blücher would sail into the Oslo fjord with darkened lanterns with the lightly armed training vessel Emden, the three old torpedo boats Möwe, Albatross and Kondor, eight 115-ton minesweepers with wooden hulls, and two armed whaling boats with approximately 2000 infantrymen on board. As soon as they had passed the forts in the outer Oslo fjord under cover of darkness, the flotilla would lay to and send out a few hundred men, who would attack the main Naval station Karljohansvern at Horten along with the coastal forts of Bolærne and Rauøy island from behind. Blücher, Emden and the remaining escort ships would then continue through the narrow Drøbak strait and past Oscarsborg as the innermost fortress – still with darkened lanterns and without opening fire. Calls should not be answered (if they were, with fake English names) and the use of spotlights were to be answered with counterlights. There was a considerable element of improvisation in the attack plan, which rested on an often-used tactic – surprise and bluff. The passage of the inner defences of the fjord would happen in 10-15 minutes in darkness and fog. The primary hope was that the demoralized commanders would not man themselves up enough to open fire on unknown vessels before it was too late, and the breakthrough had been made. Thereafter, the forts were to be taken from the landward side and at once staffed with their own men – defending against a feared British counterattack. Precise guidance could not be given: “In what way the implementation of the plan will happen, will depend on the situation and must be decided by the commanders in each single occurrence.” The quintessence of the rear admiral’s thinking was evidenced by an addition to the plan written a couple of days before. Messages had arrived that an electronically-controlled minefield had been laid just south of Drøbak, and Kummetz had in all haste mobilized a couple of so-called barrier breakers for his squadron, Sperrbrecher 10 (the ex-merchant trader Vigo) and Sperrbrecher 11 (Ex-Petropolis). The barrier breakers were refitted cargo ships filled with empty oil drums, wood and other floating debris. Airplane engines on board produced powerful magnetic fields, and made them well suited for one purpose: They would defy death sailing through minefields and blow their charges, either magnetically or by direct contact. It was a suicide mission, and the two barrier breakers would according to the new order of advance go in front, at ten knots speed and “pilot the battlegroup through the Drøbak strait” - camouflaged as English steamers. “The relationship between our own and Danish and Norwegian forces depend on the fact that Weserübung has the character of a peaceful occupation” the rear admiral wrote. “If the coastal batteries open fire or we hit mines: Go on! If badly damaged, clear the waters and free up the sea lanes. If foggy and the coastal lights are extinguished: Go on!”

At Oscarsborg, the leading officers still lived in a vacuum. The around 430 new recruits had been installed Tuesday the 2nd of April, and Captain Magnus Sødem sought to the best of his skill to distribute his remaining 30-35 artillerymen among the three 28-cm Krupp cannons that were ready to fire. “Of fighting men, I only had enough to cover one of the three cannons – those with thirty days of education”, he later wrote in a dejected report. the skinny and thoughtful farm boy had grown up on a farm in Ytre Sandsvær on the border between Vestfold and Buskerud counties, about midway between Holmestrand and Kongsberg. He had graduated from the War Academy and made lieutenant in 1921, 23 years old. But his career had stalled, and in the paring down of the defence in the interwar years, Sødem struggled to keep the rest intact. “The strong political disruptions of the 1930s soon laid the groundwork for another devastating war. You could not avoid that dreadful thought that there might only be a matter of time before another terrible slaughter of men would happen”, he wrote many years later. He had tried to call people to action through the newspapers and gotten nowhere. “The little man does best by keeping quiet. Many probably smiled or shrugged their shoulders contemptibly (at his futile warnings), but I kept calm. If many now smiled, soon the day could come when they would all cry.” Later in the week, the newspaper messages were getting bleaker. Bitter fighting raged between German and British air and naval forces in the North Sea, and the rumours of an invasion of Norway gained traction. An army of 400 000 men was apparently readying in the German Baltic sea ports, ready to strike southern Norway, and the danger of war for the neutral countries was seen as imminent. “The interest swings from north to south depending on if you think a military invasion is imminent or not”, reported Aftenposten’s correspondent Theo Findal from Berlin. “Today the pendulum swings violently between Norway and Bulgaria, with a tendency to stick by Norway.” As late as the 4th of April, Sødem had asked for a transfer of a sufficient amount of men for the main battery, but his request had been denied. “It was however decided that a part of the reserve company that was camped on the Drøbak side of the fjord should come over for training at the battery. Some of them even came over for a few hours. After that, I saw no more of them.” It was a frustrating situation, and Sødem was resigned. “With what little forces I had left, there could be little time for drills. We mostly cleared away snow and ice, with a little training.” The warm front spreading across Østlandet kept on, with warm, sunny days and cold nights. It was time for spring cleaning, and Sødem commanded his men out of the barracks that Friday. The 5th and 6th of April I used the men to air the linens, wash down the barracks and halls, and have the section properly bathed at Drøbak’s heated bathhouse.” Sergeant Ragnvald Rækken was one of Sødems closest subordinates, and worked the solders as hard as he could. “Those were exciting days. The rumours abounded, and the excitement became more and more hectic as the hours went by”, he later told. “There was a feeling in the air that something was about to happen, and if we were to believe the rumours, war was just around the corner. We knew nothing with certainty, and we did not know either, until we lived the facts. They were unmistakeable.”

Chapter 3

Lützow arrives

Swinemünde, Kiel and Oslo, 6th-8th of April 1940 The loading at Eichstaden happened as soon as the meeting in the Admiral’s cabin ended. The soldiers, who had been patiently waiting in their train cars for many hours, moved in long columns toward the weakly lit ships. “In the dark it was hard to cross the platform and the train tracks”, wrote Carl Tewaag from Falkenhorst’s staff. “Despite these obstacles, the embarkation went on with admirable calm and discipline. People moved quickly to get out of sight.” There was only one ladder leading from the quay to the main deck of Blücher, and every name was ticked off a list and controlled by First Officer Erich Heymann and Lieutenant Commander Werner Czygan, who kept the shipboard rolls. “The mood was uplifted. After months of waiting, both the sailors and us landlubbers were certain that something finally was about to happen”, noted Sondenführer Erdewin Pinckernelle, who was a translator on Gruppe 21’s staff. “The camaraderie aboard was magnificent, and the main topic of conversation was: Where? Those who dared to guess were mostly right.” The train, bringing journalist Richard Daub from Berlin to Swinemünde, reached the station at Erichstaden by midnight. “It was pitch dark. We were met by naval soldiers, who guided us over the railway lines to the docks, where Blücher towered against the night sky.” Daub was given a mattress laid out on the deck in the cabin belonging to the doctor’s assistant, but his host could not satisfy his curiosity. “My first question was about our destination, but the doctor ensured on his honour and conscience that he did not know it. The crew had been told that they were training for troop landings in the east.”