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 choice (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 Filtvet signal station: «Warships passing the station with lanterns extinguished.» It was just six nautical miles from Filtvet to the gun emplacements on Søndre Kaholmen. Even if the vessels moved slowly through the thick fog, their contours would soon appear in his binoculars. 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 Filtvet 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 place 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 generals 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 there 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 formulations 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 searchlights 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.” When the embarkation was finished around 04 hours, 1855 officers and enlisted men stowed aboard the five ships, including a band, propaganda staff and a contingent from the Luftwaffe under the command of paratrooper general Wilhelm Süssmann. Blücher had taken on 945 men, Emden 600, Möwe 114, Kondor 100 and Albatross 96 men. “Aboard the flagship people scurried about like someone kicked an anthill” Daub wrote. “It was a tight squeeze, whether you were on the lower crew decks or in the officers’ mess.” One hour later Woldag gave the order to depart. At 05.15 Sunday the 7th of April, Blücher and her squadron steamed past the pier and into the shimmering morning mist.

Seven hundred kilometres further north, people woke up to another fine spring morning in eastern Norway. The high pressure system was waning, and a damp airstream forced itself into Scandinavia from the Atlantic, with increasing winds and clouds. Snow fell in the mountains, and the meteorologists spoke of rain and sleet at lower altitudes. Some places the temperature was still at around minus 8-10 degrees Celsius in the night, but it went up quickly as soon as the sun rose. The roadside snowbanks collapsed. The ice melted and turned gravel roads into rivers of mud. There was no doubt that winter was waning, but for many, the sense of new life mixed with fear and growing uncertainty. The newspapers were full of unsettling messages, and Halvdan Koht had received further messages Friday night that the war was moving ever closer. But his mind was shut, and he could not turn the warnings he received into adequate action. The ambassadors from England and France had surprisingly trooped into his office and in a warning tone, had made it clear that the Western powers were losing their patience with the Norwegian (and Swedish) policy of neutrality. They would no longer stand by while the iron ore from Lappland flowed into Hitler’s foundries, and argued that they had the right to stop the transport “by any means necessary”. An Allied attack on the ore ships from Narvik in Norwegian waters would at once trigger an immediate German counterattack and bring the war to Norway. The entire reason for the administration’s passive politics would break down. That was a frightening outlook, and the Foreign Minister was still shaken when he arrived at a dinner hosted by the American ambassador, Florence Harriman. “He excused himself by stating that he had been given the biggest nervous shock of his life”, Mrs. Harriman wrote in her recollection, Mission to the North. “He looked drawn, and I really understood that the day had been far more strenuous than normal.” In an open meeting in the Storting the next morning, Koht still had the opportunity to rise up as a new kind of leader, of great format. He did not take it, and did not even mention his notes and messages from Berlin – neither to the Storting or to his own administration. Norway was on the brink of the most destructive catastrophe in the country’s history, but Koht did not try to gather the people under one banner, and rally to fight. His long and detailed statement rather felt like a defence speech, of his neutrality policy and his understanding of international law. “We hope the great powers will respect this, our right, in the war itself, and that they will reaffirm it after the war”, he said in his closing appeal, obviously meant for the cynical political operators in London, Paris and Berlin. “We believe that lasting peace in this world is not possible any other way. And we will put forth all our might to protect our national independence. It is a duty to our country, and a duty to the future.” These were pious words, but all might was not put forth. When the General Chief of Staff Rasmus Hatledal anxiously asked the government for permission to mobilize the army, he was quickly put down. Hours later, Koht was again given the chance to reverse his course. The President of the Storting, Carl Joachim Hambro had received a telephone call from Prime Minister Nygaardsvold, who was worried about the Foreign Minister’s silence and aloofness. “He doesn’t speak to us, but he sometimes tells you things”, the Prime Minister had said. “CJH called Koht Saturday afternoon and asked if there was any news that should be submitted to the Foreign Committee at once”, wrote his nephew Johan Hambro in C.J. Hambro, life and dreams. The Right Party leader sensed danger, and had asked that the committee members be ready for an emergency session Sunday. But not even the President of the Storting could reach through to him. “Koht denied there was anything” his biography told.

The best testimony to Kohts’ state of mind and escalating lack of a sense of reality came from one of the young secretaries in the Foreign Office. Gudrun Ræder, who had called his home on Sunday afternoon, agitated and disturbed with yet another message from the legation in Berlin. The Danish attaché Kjølsen had come into new and alarming intelligence about the ships leaving Stettin and Swinemünde - this time from the US Naval attaché - and who once again tried to wake a sense of urgency in envoy Scheel. “Information from a reliable source about troop transports, mentioned in my report 611, that 18 to 20 ships with a total tonnage of 150 000 tons left Stettin on a westerly course”, read the telegraph deciphered by Ræder and presented to Koht. “We are further informed that the destination is unknown, but is to be reached by April 11th.” This message represented yet another piece of circumstantial evidence that something dramatic was about to happen. But the Foreign Minister had “drawn his blinds”. (Unwilling to listen). “He recieved the message so calmly that I was given the impression that this was not news to him. I offered to send the telegram by express courier to Lysaker (where Koht lived), but Koht told me that it would not be necessary”, Gudrun Ræder wrote in her book The indispensably clever ones. “Where do you believe the ships are headed?” Koht had asked. “I believe they are coming to Norway”, she had replied. “I believe they are headed out into the Atlantic.” “Those are transport ships they mentioned, and it is improbable that they are heading out to sea. What do you want me to do with the message?” Koht’s last defeatist reply laid it all bare – the way it was written in Mrs. Ræders’ minutes of the conversation: “There is nothing to do. If the message is incorrect, it will be best not to pass it on. If it is correct, we can do nothing to stop the German fleet anyway.”

Aboard Blücher that same Sunday, the mood was like on one of the interwar period’s Kraft durch Freude-cruises. The warm front had laid itself across the Baltic sea, and the sea streamed across the vessels, who had turned westward, and hastily approached Kiel. “The weather was mostly lovely, and a cruise trip in peacetime could hardly have been more relaxing,” wrote Rittmeister Paul Goerz, who examined the cruiser from top to bottom in borrowed clothes. Appearing on deck in the feldgrau uniform of the Wehrmacht was prohibited, but the crew had dug out every scrap they had of spare clothes. “Then, a comical sight appeared – that every man, from officer to enlisted – somehow appeared in blue clothes. A wonderful traveling comradeship among the men of the sea!” As afternoon came on, Woldag called the crew for a short appeal on the aft deck: “The Führer will no longer accept they Western powers’ continuing abuses upon Norwegian neutrality. He has therefore decided to put Norway under the protection of the Wehrmacht!” The Flag Captain kept to the propaganda line, and underscored that the invasion, as far as possible, should happen peacefully and respectfully. Norwegians were not the enemy. It was the British, who had perfidiously forced Germany into battle. “Our mission is to take Oslo and land the troops we have on board. I know I can trust you. Victory will be ours! Forward Blücher!” With those words, the destination was made known. Cheering broke out on the aft deck, and the sailors’ caps flew skywards. “The joy was great among the soldiers and sailors,” noted Sondenfuhrer Willi Behrens, who spoke Norwegian and was to take part in an action against NRK (Norwegian State Broadcasting Service) at Marienlyst. Communications drills were done with flags and shortwave radios, and two of the ship’s Arado 196 seaplanes were shot out of their catapults. Blücher laid to at the holiday island of Rügen. The twin towers were swung out, and each 20,3cm cannon fired one shot each. “They shook the hull something fierce, and every lamp, picture frame and loose object were tied down and secured beforehand”, reminisced Lieutenant Jürgen Bieler. It was the first time they tested the main guns, something that worried some of the more aware people on board. As Richard Daub wrote: “It only took a few simple steps before the cannons once again were ready to fire. But would it all run so smoothly if the Norwegians were not satisfied with being put under our protection?”

Later that night, the torpedo boat Möwe laid anchor west of Fehmarn, while the rest of the squadron continued into the Kieler fjord. Albatross docked at Kieler Werft to repair a freshwater pump, while Blücher, Emden and Kondor again anchored in Strander Bucht to resupply – and welcome the latest addition to their group, the heavy cruiser Lützow. Grand Admiral Rader had decided the day before to transfer the vessel from Gruppe 2 (Trondheim) to Gruppe 5 after a crack was discovered in the base of one of its auxiliary engines. “A temporary repair was possible, but the shipyard could not guarantee that the weld seam would hold up for more than fourteen days”, noted the ship’s chief, Commander August Thiele. The former commandant aboard the school ships Gorst Foch and Horst Wessel had been intended for the posting as naval attaché to Tokyo, but Thiele was a gung-ho Nazi adventurer who hungered for active duty. He had long had his eye on another far-off resource: the Norwegian whale cookeries in the Antarctic, who were finishing their catch and had nearly half a million drums of whale oil on board. That would keep the German fat industry afloat for months, and Thiele wanted to strike the moment the tank ships met the whaling fleet to refuel. “So as to strike two birds with one stone”, he noted giddily. Weserübung had got in the way, and the engine damage made passage to the South Atlantic impossible. “I had been critical of using Lützow in the operation on Trondheim from the start. It was with a heavy heart I went to fleet command to report on the new complications.” The Navy Chief had cut through and placed the diesel-powered pocket battleship under Kummetz’ command. Lützow already had aboard 40 men from the 3rd mountain division under Major Hans von Poncet, and 50 men from the Luftwaffe, who had been earmarked for the operations in Trøndelag (the 2 counties surrounding Trondheim). There was no more time to rearrange and debark, and the invasion force followed the vessel through the Kieler canal to Strander Bucht. Kummetz had given Thiele and Poncet an extra briefing, and darkly accepted a request from Commander Lange aboard the Emden. Errors had been made during the embarkation at Swinemünde, and an anti-air troop with two light guns and ammunition had to be transferred to Kondor - if the displacement of troops and equipment were to match their tasks. It took three hours to reload and move everything, and at 1.30 the signal was sent from Blücher: “Stand ready by 03.00. Hoist anchor on radio orders.” Precisely 03.10 Monday night the 8th of April, Blücher steamed out of the Kieler fjord, with Emden, Lützow and the three torpedo boats following in its wake. The attack on Oslo had begun.

Part II

Chapter 4

The heroic sacrifice of Pol III

Kiel, Storebælt and the outer Oslo fjord, Monday 8th April 1940 03.00 - Tuesday 9th April 01.00

The dark-haired captain Leif Welding Olsen had had bad news some days before. He had not passed the new eyesight test introduced by the commanding admiral for Naval officers, and would have to give up his command. It was a hard blow for the 44-year-old seaman from Sandar in Vestfold, who tried to grab a couple of hours of sleep in the captain’s cabin aboard the Melsom company’s whaler Pol III. The tough little vessel had been commandeered by the Navy as a neutrality watch ship, and had patrolled the outer defence line of the Oslo fjord between the Færder and Torbjørnskjær islands since December 1939. It was a monotonous duty, but Welding Olsen had thrived, and the crew of 17 had become a tight- knit gang. It would be a heavy blow to leave the whaler, but it would not be the worst. He would be forced off the sea for good after more than twenty years aboard – first in the Navy, then as First Mate for the Bergen Steamship Company and the whaling company Kosmos. When the results were in, he had gone straight to the chief in the First Sea Defence District in Horten, Lieutenant Commander Gunnar Hovdenak, for advice. “Welding Olsen had been scrapped after a strident eye test and put forth that he now too was bereft of his civilian work as a seaman, and would have to try to make ends meet on land”, noted the stout Ålesund man who laid out the case for the district chief, Rear Admiral Johannes Smith-Johannsen. “Welding is an extraordinarily skilled and reliable seaman, and of whom I have the best impression. I request that you give him the strongest possible recommendation”, Smith- Johannsen had answered. The letter of recommendation had not yet arrived, but there was no haste. After the brutal cuts of the 1930s, the lack of experienced officers for the neutrality watch was felt acutely. Welding Olsen would stay aboard the Pol III until his eyes failed, and as long as the Navy had use for him. It had been a thrilling day, but the April night was dark and cool. A thin sliver of moon hanging over the mainland made the sea glitter. In the wheelhouse, Lead gunner Hans Bergan had just turned the whaler around beneath the blinding light cone of Færder lighthouse and turned its bow southeast. It was ten nautical miles across the mouth of the fjord, and he wanted a last lap before watch change at midnight. The time closed on 23, and the traffic had all but stopped, when the night was disturbed by a sudden shout: Unknown ships ahead! “I had turned over toward Torbjørnskjær, when I saw the outline of two large vessels running with no lights at about 300-400 meters away”, Bergan wrote in his combat report. “The boss was roused and came up at once.” Welding Olsen was a man of action. He had been scrapped as skipper, but his sense of duty was still intact. The order came at once: “Full steam ahead. Prepare a warning shot!”

Blücher’s squadron had reached the minefields of the Storebælt inlet at six Monday morning, and saluted the Danish guard boats with whistle signals. The beacon-ship at Halskov reef outside Korsør was passed two hours later, and at 11.15 the fleet rounded Schultz Grund outside Århus, midway between Zealand and Jutland. Kattegat was straight ahead, and the speed was increased to 18 knots. The mood aboard the six vessels was still buoyant and vacation-like. “The sea was calm, and above the small waves, spanned a cloud-free azure sky”, Richard Daub wrote aboard the flagship. Danish fishing vessels teemed to and fro, and the prohibition against being on deck was tightened. “The fishermen could not have the possibility of seeing people in field grey uniforms from the Army aboard. Only those who could borrow a blue sailor’s robe and cap could move freely.” During the passage, Blücher was made ready for its coming mission, but the possibility of practical drills was diminished as long as the fleet was in sight of land. “In the morning, the preparations for combat readiness were finished and controlled by me as per regulations”, claimed First Officer Erich Heymann, who was driven relentlessly. He was both Woldag’s second in command as well as the one responsible for the day to day running of the ship. With close to 1400 crewmen and an invasion force of 950 men aboard, space was at a premium. People sat and stood tightly in corridors, ladders and break rooms, and messengers had a hard time elbowing their way through. There had been no time to unload the practice shells stowed away alongside the war ammunition in the armoured chambers beneath the deck. Crates of anti-air shells, rifle ammunition, hand grenades and other gear belonging to the Army – all together over 30 tons – had been stacked wherever there was space in the upper deck rooms. In the haste, something had to go. Only the day before departure had the cruiser’s lifesaving equipment been delivered from the producer. About 10 rubber boats of differing size with space for 15-40 men, 700 rubber life vests and the same number made from kapok. “The rubber vests were given to the part of the crew who had battle stations below deck. The kapok ones were tied to the gunwales for the use of those outside.” There remained an ominous problem that no one had thought of: There were no life vests for the soldiers from the Army and Luftwaffe. In case of shipwreck, they were relegated to their own skill in swimming. “I did not hear one word about the existence of life rafts and life vests for the invasion force, and there were no guidelines for what we were to do in an emergency”, wrote Lieutenant Jürgen Bieler of Gruppe 21 staff, who was alarmed about the lack of equipment and the absence of any safety drills. “There can be no doubt that a dearth of time forced the Navy to do without the necessary measures.” Captain Heil, company commander of the 163rd division, had a more laconic comment: “In such lovely weather, the general mood aboard was wonderful. The bright sun removed any thought of the possibility of danger.” Among the translators who spoke Danish and listened to Danmarks Radio, the mood was not quite as relaxed. Their daylight passage had been observed by light-ships, guard boats and observers on land. Radio Kalundborg some kilometers away made sure to spread the dramatic news across the country: “Strong German fleet elements passing northward through Storebælt today!” Six warships, followed by minesweepers and cargo ships could not be camouflaged, but aboard Blücher, dark thoughts were pushed away. “We knew nothing of the deadly drama about to happen”, wrote Richard Daub. “Unconsciously we refused to acknowledge the reality of the situation, even when we had talked to sea officers and understood that things could get serious.”

The Danish Naval staff passed on the observations in Storebælt to the Admiralty staff in the Department of Defence in Oslo at 10.40, when the squadron was making its way through Samsø Bælt northwest of Zealand. “Gneisenau, Leipzig and Emden have passed Langeland going northward between 0600 and 0700 today, followed by three torpedo boats and six armed trawlers.” Despite the fleet sailing in majestic calm for several hours close to shore, two of the ships were misidentified. The Danish onlookers had failed to see that they were packed with soldiers. One and a half hours later, at 12.15, the Swedish Defence staff sent a hasty message from Stockholm: “Strong German Naval forces passing through Storebælt and parts have reached Kattegat. Some merchant shipping passed by Læsø island tonight. Other vessels have passed Møen and seem to be steering toward Flintrennen. In the area around Rendsburg there have been observations of infantry and artillery heading north, but they have seen nothing at the Danish border.” A large number of minesweepers and armed trawlers closed on Skagen, and the air traffic was significant. For those connecting the earlier warnings from Berlin to these new observations, the picture was clear: A powerful German attack force was heading north through Kattegat, supported by tens of support vessels and merchant ships. In the hopeful world of fantasy, it was still possible to believe that the cruisers, minesweepers and merchant ships, in suicidal of Hitler sailed to their doom near Scotland or Iceland. For those of a rational mind, the far more likely target was Norway. From Skagen to the Oslo fjord it was around 120 nautical miles. In the worst case, the battlefleet could reach the Fortress pier below Akershus Fortress in less than 8-10 hours. The urgency was now greater than at any time in the history of the nation, but the leaders were distracted, and had been given a new excuse not to act. Just before 06 in the morning, the ambassadors from England and France had again come to the Foreign Office, and explained that the shipping lanes south of Narvik had been sowed with mines to stop the shipment of ore. “The rockslide came over us with full force”, noted Halvdan Koht in his defensive script For peace and freedom in wartime. An immediate crisis had happened, and the Foreign Committe gathered at 10 to discuss measures that could be taken against this breach of neutrality - and against the German reprisals that were sure to come. The war between the great powers had reached Norwegian waters under far more dramatic circumstances than the Altmark affair, and the logical thing to do would be to mobilize the armed forces. But when Koht was shown the message from the Danish naval staff, he did not react. In the Admiralty and General staffs a few blocks away, few were unaware of what was about to happen. “The situation changed dramatically the morning of April 8th, when we simultaneously were made aware of the British minelaying and the German ships moving north through Danish waters”, wrote Harald Wrede-Holm, chief of the general staff’s intelligence office in a note. “That these operations were aimed at Norway, there could be no doubt about.” Messages were given that the order of mobilization was expected, and the staff officers brought out plans and name rolls for enlisted men. “We waited for the mobilization order for the entirety of the 8th of April”, Wrede-Holm wrote. “We were sat ready with our plans for mobilization and arrangement and were ready to send out the necessary orders as soon as we had a notion of what they would contain.”

The alarm spread to the coastal forts by midmorning, and the experienced, but aging Rear Admiral Johannes Smith-Johanssen gave orders for heightened attention throughout the entire First Sea Defense District, responsible for the stretch of coastline from Egersund to the Swedish border. The chief of Rauøy fort, Major Hersleb Adler Enger, noticed the fuss when he arrived at a meeting at the General Inspector for the Coastal Artillery that same morning. “The General Inspector supplied that the situation was very grave, and that I should go back to Rauøy at once”, Adler Enger wrote in his report. “I was back at the fort just after dinnertime.” Rauøy anchored the eastern part of the Outer Oslo fjord Defense section, who was comprised of a series of new forts about 30 nautical miles south of Oscarsborg: Rauøy, Bolærne, Mågerøy island and Håøya island at the inlet of the Tønsberg fjord. The building had started in 1932 and reflected a radical, but disputed change in how one thought about defending the capital and other gateway areas, a school of thought that especially gained ground when the honoured Fortress Artillery branch was transferred from the Army to the Navy in 1934. As the writer Roy Andersen laid it out: “The Navy’s view was that mines, torpedoes and submarines had taken over the strategic role of the coastal fortresses as defenders of strategic inlets, and that they needed new forward bases for the coastal artillery as support weapons to do their jobs, won through.” The change reduced Oscarsborg’s status and stature, for the benefit of the forward forts, who were gradually built up between 1936 and 1940. The two most important ones were Rauøy and Bolærne, who covered the main shipping lanes and acted as the frontal barrier for the Oslo fjord. In wartime, the seven kilometer wide stretch between the two islands was to be covered by a minefield, and could be targeted by 15-cm Bofors guns. Operatively, Bolærne lay under the command of Rauøy, so that the two forts could split their fire if several warships tried to force entry at the same time. In theory, the plan was sound, and Major Hersleb Enger commanded a force of 280 men. Most had been there since February/March, and each gun battery had fired 50 practice shells against moving targets. The fort had two 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns and six Colt machine guns to ward off airborne attacks and three searchlights with a range of several thousand meters. Two of the searchlights and a rangefinder were placed in a forward position on the small islet of Misingen, four nautical miles southwards – with an undersea phone line to warn the command central. “The 1st of March 1940 at 10 in the morning, 2-300 men had met at the Toll booth quay in Tønsberg for transport to Rauøy” wrote Nr. 4530 (this is an enlistment number, so a soldier) in the local newspaper Tønsberg Blad. “Most of the guys had completed their recruit school or garrison duty 17-23 years ago, but we had no difficulty reverting to military discipline once again, a discipline much weakened since last we were out there. Antimilitaristic agitation was especially marked among the younger men.” The new Swedish Bofors guns were highly accurate, but the sidearms were old Krag- Jørgensen rifles from 1894. “The equipment was generally in poor maintenance. The uniforms were old and worn. Only a few had uniforms that were fit to be seen about town in, and these went on loan to whoever was given leave and could go on a trip home.” The island had no electrical power, and 30-35 men had to share the few washbasins available. “We had to queue to get washed. If you weren’t fast enough, you might not get your morning ablutions done before the roll call.” The newspapers Dagbladet and Aftenposten came out with front pages filled with the minelaying and NRK followed the dramatic developments with constant news bulletins. “On our battery radios we heard messages about the great German fleet passing Øresund”, wrote the anonymous soldier. “But no one imagined the possibility that we in a few hours would use our cannons and rifles with full magazines and with all seriousness.” The fort at Bolærne, on the west side of the fjord had been in use since 1938, but only three 15-cm guns were manned, not the four 21-cm ones belonging to the so-called Tunnel Battery. The fort commander, Major Fredrik Færden, had sought discharge from the Fortress Artillery in 1929 and worked as an actuary in the life insurance company Glitne. The fifty- eight-year-old had set his legs on the small summery island for the first time on Monday the 1st of April, and soon discovered that the works on the docks and barracks were not complete. “One of the most important precautions met by the afternoon of April 8th was to fill a deep ditch in the road to the ammunition dump”, Færden wrote in a report from 1942. “A wooden bridge was constructed and solid wooden stretchers. By evening and night, the ammunition transport went back and forth to the battery.” Bolærne played an important role in the communications network between the guard boats patrolling further south and the chief of the YOSA, the Outer Oslofjord defense section, Commander Einar Tandberg- Hansen, who was stationed at the Naval recruit school at Tønsberg. “The communications service was cumbersome and primitive”, Soldier nr. 6213 wrote in Tønsberg Blad. “Messages from the outlying boats out in the fjord, came to a small stone shack south on Bolærne, via Fuglehuk, by light signals. The guys in this hut warned us via telephone. In the collection centre we sent the message on to the staff quarters for the Oslo fjord at the Naval recruit school. To me it seemed idiotic. The whole of Norway could be occupied before the message came through.”

The first alarms aboard the Blücher went off just after twelve. One of the watchmen saw something that looked like a submarine periscope, and told the bridge. “Sirens howled. After an indescribable race through the tight corridors and up the narrow ladders, the crew reached battle stations in one to two minutes”, wrote Rittmeister Paul Goerz. Both Blücher and Lützow opened fire with machine guns and the medium artillery. After a short, but intense cannonade, the object was still in our sights: A line pole with a red pennant on top. “It still bobbed peacefully on the waves when the squadron passed, but the excitement lasted all day. We had had a taste of what was to come.” During the afternoon, more messages came in that told them that the British fleet had gone to sea, and east of Skagen, the HMS Triton fired a salvo of ten torpedoes toward the flotilla, who zigzagged northwards with the torpedo boats securing the flanks. “Two bubble lines to starboard!” Albatross messaged just after six, and turned hard toward the supposed position of the submarine. Aboard the cruisers, the rudders were turned hard, and like a miracle, the torpedoes passed close by. Albatross sped on, and got a sonar ping minutes later. But the layers of salt and fresh water of the Kattegat made the returns jump and dance. The six depth charges thrown overboard had no effect.

Sadly I cannot seem to add the pictures from the book here. I will try again later. At least I found a good picture of Birger Eriksen.

In Oslo in the meantime, the political breakdown had become tragic reality. New messages from Copenhagen expanded upon the observations through Storebælt and Kattegat, and surviving German soldiers from the torpedoed German freight ship Rio De Janeiro told that they were headed for Bergen. The British awoke at last, and the Vice Chief of the Admiralty staff had informed the legation council in London at two in the morning that German naval forces and troop transports had been observed in the North Sea. “This morning, their forward elements were observed outside the Norwegian coast going north. We assume with certainty that they their purpose is action against Narvik, and that they could be there before midnight.” There were only hours left, and danger loomed. But for Halvdan Koht, who was hard at work in the Foreign ministry with new remarks about international law ahead of a Storting meeting at 17, this new message was yet another excuse not to act. “It struck me that the message came from London. When those over there had knowledge of a German fleet by the Norwegian coast, then they had to know it from their own fleet, who would be in the same waters. It assured me that the British could halt the Germans, so I could take it easier.” In the Admiralty and General staffs, the officers had waited all day for a governmental decision, but Defense Minister Birger Ljungberg slipped away, and demanded to know the cost of mobilization. “At the end of the ordinary office work hours we were told to not go home”, wrote Lieutenant Colonel Harald Wrede-Holm, who was in constant contact with the control office of the Telegraph house, to assure that there would be people working who could handle the telegrams for the military districts across the country. “Shortly after we were told that we could go home, but that we had to be back by 17. We spent the afternoon and evening waiting for the order to mobilize. The commanding general and chief of the general staff had gone to the Storting for orders. Sometime in the evening the chief of staff called and told us to go home. There was no mobilization tonight. We were to wait until the next day. I opined that we would win half a day if we mobilized now. I was answered that Ljungberg had said that tomorrow would do. So there was nothing more to do about it.”

Gruppe 5 crossed the open water between Skagen and the inlet of the Oslo fjord in four hours without further delays. When darkness descended a quarter to eight, the war flags were lowered, and the squadron lined up at 600 meters distance between the ships. In the officers’ mess aboard Blücher the mood soared, and bottles of schnapps were passed around. Many used the opportunity to restock from the slop-chest, where cigarette packs cost 60 pfennig a piece. “In the evening there was held a series of conferences with Kummetz, Commander Woldag and General Engelbrecht about placement of shock troops and the calculations of arrival times for the different debarkation spots”, wrote Lieutenant Bieler. “Group staff were admitted, and Engelbrecht accepted our argument that we should land in the first wave.” The eager Commander Thiele aboard the Lützow had by early afternoon already suggested that the regulations for weapon use be tightened by the following formulation: “1. Permission to fire only by order of the commandant, 2. On the condition that the Norwegians beyond any doubt are firing upon us. Warning shots are not to be answered, 3. Use of searchlights from land shall be answered by counterlights, 4. Permission to use searchlights are not a permission to open fire.” Kummetz had accepted the proposal without argument and signaled it by Morse lamp to every vessel. The Commandery at Kiel had conveyed an additional proposal by yet another Nazi plotter, naval attaché Richard Schreiber in Oslo: “The Attaché suggests that the following Morse signal is sent in Norwegian if the Norwegians seek to hinder the fleet: Arriving by consent of the Norwegian government, escort officer on board.” Kummetz had added: “The suggestion seems reasonable. A fitting Morse signal will be prepared.” In the evening, the squadron passed the ten small vessels of the First Minesweeper Flotilla, who had spent the earlier part of the day sheltering on the Danish coast, and now closed on the Oslo fjord from the west. Only two vessels were missing from the formation, who had left Kiel half a day before the cruisers. Sperrbrecher 10 and 11, who had received orders to turn around. “Following earlier messages from our agents, we feared that the Oslo fjord had been mined. In the original plans, the barrier breakers were to enter the fjord ahead of the squadron”, wrote the nobleman Baron Freiherr Walther von Freyberg-Eisenberg-Allmendingen, who was a Naval Lieutenant, and served as Kummetz’ aide. The twenty-four year old was son of an admiral and heir to the castle Allmendingen and other rich properties in Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany. “Captain Richard von Stosch aboard one of the barrier breakers was well appointed to the task, since he knew the Oslo fjord from his time in the merchant navy, and could navigate even if the lights were out.” An updated message from the agents had made clear that the mines in the Drøbak strait were electrical, and were fired from land. “The Norwegians would probably wait to detonate the mines until the unimportant ships had passed, and the squadron was close by. The plan to send in the barrier breakers first was therefore dismissed.” There came a new observation to Kiel from a German agent who had visited Drøbak: “The Naval leadership reports that are no mines in the surrounding water. Regular ship traffic passes unhindered through the straits.” The radio message solved one problem for Kummetz: He need have no fear of mines. If the forts and naval vessels would open fire remained to be seen.

In Oslo, the resignation and escapism had reached further. Neither in the meeting at the Storting, ending close to 21, or in the half hour long cabinet conference that followed, were there reached any decision to mobilize. Chief of the general staff, Rasmus Hatledal, ran after Minister Ljungberg in the corridors hoping for a decision. He was brushed off and told that he would be told the next morning. In frustration, Hatledal had sent his staff away and gone home to sleep. Large parts of the rest of the officers’ corps gathered to hear a lecture about the delights of the table at the Oslo Military Society, where King Haakon VII would be present. Prime Minister Nygaardsvold was exhausted and had lost the will to lead, while Koht rang one of his mistresses, the beautiful sculptor Sigri Welhaven Krag. “He called in the evening and told me he could not make it home to Lysaker in time, because he was needed back at the Ministry, and do you have any steak, he said. I mean, we were at war, and he could have made do with a couple of bread rolls, but professor Koht always wanted steak”, Krag told, who probably received her aging lover sometime around 22 and 23. Koht was hard on himself in For freedom and peace in wartime: “Something must have clicked in my brain that evening. My capabilities failed me.” His attempt to explain away his decisions came from the world of medicine. It was probably impossible for a man of his caliber to admit that his policies and that of the government had been wrong, and that they now faced total disaster. The consequences became terrible. Norway was drifting into a catastrophe of historical format without someone at the helm.

Just after 22, the translator Willi Behrens listened in on a message from the Oslo broadcast station that all lights on the southern coast were to be extinguished. But when Blücher and the rest of the squadron passed Oslo War harbour (The entirety of the Oslo fjord from Færder to Oslo city proper – an especially guarded zone in wartime.) at 18 knots speed half an hour later, the lights still blazed from the beacons at Færder and Torbjørnskjær. Commander Thiele aboard Lützow at once suggested that they speed up, hoping to pass by Drøbak and Oscarborg before the lights went out. “The extinguishing of the lighthouses must be understood as a clear defensive measure”, Thiele noted in his war diary. “A surprise intrusion into the fjord now hardly seems possible.” Aboard Blücher, the mood had become intense. The festivities in the officers’ mess was shut down at nine thirty sharp. The blackout measures were controlled, and the crew made the last pre-combat preparations. “The closer the ship came to the Norwegian coast, the more the suspense grew”, reported Richard Daub. “An eerie calm was laid over the cruiser, who cut through the fjord under cover of darkness. Even the heavy machinery seemed to work at a lower pulse.” Some tried to sleep in the break rooms below deck. Others sought hiding places on deck to watch what was happening. “During the preparations, I studied the defenses of the fjord closely, something that made me prefer to be outside at night”, wrote Captain Heil. “I had found an observation spot behind the armoured cupola of one of the fire control centers. It gave me cover if something should happen.” Kummetz’ never bothered to give an answer to Thiele’s appeal. The plans were laid, and he meant to follow them. The passing of the 59th latitude was registered around ten minutes to eleven. A few minutes later, a searchlight blazed. It was Pol III closing in, demanding a search by Morse code. Blücher carried on like nothing happened, and radioed to Albatross: “The sentry boat is to be stopped and brought up!” Aboard Pol III, the fearless captain Welding Olsen had commanded full speed towards the intruders. The oil beneath the boiler was adjusted, and the old whaler lurched forward with a burst of speed. When the Morse signals got no reply, he at once ordered a warning shot from the 76mm cannon which had replaced the old whale cannon at the bow. “The shot passed in front of us into the sea,” noted Lieutenant-Captain Siegfried Strelow in the war diary at precisely 23.02. The goateed twenty-eight year old was a torpedo specialist and was later to receive the Knight's Cross for his duties as a submarine skipper against the convoys passing through the Barents sea. Now, his performance was far weaker, and probably bordering on a court-martial – despite that Albatross at 1300 tons, a top speed of 34 knots and with powerful guns was far superior to Pol III. “The coastal vessel using the radio (on wavelength 600 meters) and is trying to escape to the northeast”, he wrote a few minutes later. The two vessels closed at high speed, and soon crashed together in a terrible collision which smashed the gunwales of the whaler on the starboard side. “When I tried to draw alongside to board, the vessel turned hard to starboard in an attempt to ram us”, Strelow claimed. Pol III almost capsized in the crash, and two men threw themselves aboard the Albatross, fearing the whaler was about to sink. But Welding Olsen had nerves of steel. When the ships slipped apart, he demanded through the megaphone that the six times larger warship surrender – or he would open fire. “I put the searchlight on the vessel and saw the gun being manned”, wrote the German Lieutenant-Captain, who probably did not believe his own eyes. Pol III had suffered major damage, the radio antenna was torn off, and the vessel had tree 10,5cm guns pointed at it. And yet, the skipper coldly demanded that he strike his flags while men climbed up to repair the antenna. Despite Kummetz’ explicit orders, Strelow only found one answer: He opened fire. “The frontal gun was knocked out with a direct hit, and the attempt to repair the antenna was stopped with machine gun fire”, he noted in the war diary. Aboard Pol III the close-ranged salvoes had a terrible effect. The windows in the wheelhouse where smashed, while metal splinters and wooden slivers flew across the deck. Worst of all: A machine gun bullet went through Welding Olsen’s thigh. He fell over in a pool of blood in the wheelhouse, grievously wounded. “Two men looked after him, while the crew tried to launch the port side life raft”, reported Lead Gunner Bergan. “We had to throw ourselves behind the engine casing several times to avoid being shot.” The life raft’s tackle block had been destroyed, and the remaining crew of 13 tried to get aboard the starboard raft. “We put the boss in the bottom, but when everyone was aboard, the raft went round in the rough sea.” Ten men climbed back aboard Pol III, while Bergan, a sailor and Welding Olsen clung to the wreck. The skipper was exhausted from blood loss, and did not survive his meeting with the ice-cold sea. “The boss went under after hanging by the gunwale for a few seconds, the sailor hung on by a line, and I got on top of the wreck of the raft”, Bergan wrote.

Aboard the Albatross, Captain-Lieutenant Strelow gave the order to halt fire. He pulled up next to the other ship, took aboard the crew and later picked up the two drifting away on the raft. “After the collision and the shooting, I thought the vessel no longer seaworthy”, he wrote in the war diary. “There was no use in sending over a prize crew. I therefore sank her with artillery.” (Actually, Pol III made it to port later and still runs today, as a live haul transport for fish in Finnmark.) It was a tragic moment in the nation’s history. Leif Welding Olsen had been scrapped as an officer, but had stood up to greater forces without dithering – in accord with the heroic traditions of his profession. The time was almost half past eleven, Monday the 8th of April. He was the first Norwegian to fall in the battle for freedom and independence – and against the totalitarian evil of Nazism.

The heavy fire, rockets and searchlight flashes, were observed both by Rauøy fort and other nearby sentry boats, but none of those other officers showed the same resolve Welding Olsen had done. On the west side of the fjord, a few nautical miles from Pol III, Lieutenant Reidar Schau- Johansen observed a searchlight near Torbjørnskjær from his own chartered whaler, Skudd II. “The searchlight lit up a ship, grey-looking in the glare of the lamp”, Schau-Johansen noted at 22.55. Ten minutes later he heard the warning shot, before Skudd II registered one white and two red signal flares at 23.10. “Just after, there was a salvo from the other one with cannons and machine guns. The distance was short, judging by the angle of the glowing projectiles. There was silence, and the other shone their lamp on the grey boat, which was probably on fire.” The deadly struggle between Albatross and Pol III was also seen by the old sentry boat Farm, commanded by Captain Gustav Sahlqvist Amundsen, and who patrolled the waters between the smaller and greater Færder isles. “My impression was that there was a smaller boat that was bombarded by a bigger one”, Amundsen reported when docking at Tønsberg the next day. “The larger vessel had the outside position, and I saw the flash of its cannons twice every time it fired. The innermost vessel drifted slowly away in the glare of the lights while it was under fire.” Amundsen roused the telegraph, and just after 23, he sent the following radio message to YOSA headquarters at Tønsberg naval school: “Several vessels forcing themselves forward” Sarpsborg message collection central on the east side of the fjord reported the thundering of guns at the same time, while Færder lighthouse reported seeing searchlights and rockets. The alarm went up at Rauøy fort at 23.20. “The bugler’s alarm signal rent the silent night, and the alarm bells whined”, wrote Soldier Nr. 4530 who kept watch in the range finder on the Northern battery, which consisted of two 15cm Bofors cannons. Despite the indetermination in Oslo, Commander Tandberg-Hanssen had given orders for heightened readiness several times that day already. Half the men were at their posts, while the other half rested in uniform. A signal flare had been seen to the south, and Amundsen’s message of unknown vessels had been passed on by Tønsberg. “Everyone looked southward in the dark, and our Captain Sørlie kept silent, standing there with his binoculars to his eyes.” The guns were ready to fire at 23.28, and the searchlights were turned on. Two minutes later, the vague contours of two warships were seen 5600 meters out, passing the frontal barrier, which still had not been mined. “I had a moment’s doubt about what I should do”, wrote Major Hersleb Adler Enger. The earlier Mayor of Drøbak came from a family of officers and was a proud man. Funnily enough, he had the notion that the ships could be some of their old armoured gunboats coming towards Oslo to render aid, but why should they be running with no lights – and without making themselves known? He brushed the thought away and ordered a warning shot, who hit the water 200 meters short of the first vessel. The fire was not returned, but the unknown vessels turned powerful floodlights towards them in an attempt to blind and confuse the gun crews. For the next six minutes, the battery managed to fire four shells, who splashed harmlessly around the passing ships. “Only four shots were fired, as the fog suddenly descended and was so thick that one could not even see the beach in front of the battery.” At Bolærne on the other side of the barrier, Major Fredrik Færden had no better luck. The watchmen had not seen the firefight between Albatross and Pol III, but observed the two red signal flares at half past eleven. When the intruders appeared in their lights just afterwards, the order was given for warning shots. But the training and decisiveness was lacking, and they managed to fire at 23.40. Chaos reigned in the command post, which was bathed in light from the enemy vessels, and one of the gunnery officers fainted with nervousness and had to be carried away. Before the 15cm guns were loaded and ready close to midnight, the enemy squadron was gone. “The episode lasted fifteen minutes”, wrote battery chief Knut Telle. “The ships passed our command post heading northeast at a range of 4200 meters, and then passed out of sight.” These were nerve-wracking minutes aboard Blücher and the other members of the squadron, but audacity had won the day. The squadron has passed beneath the muzzles of seven large- calibre Bofors cannons at 18 knots, but only four shots had been fired. The vessels had been in range of the batteries for half an hour during their passage through the seven kilometer wide gap, but no damage had been done. As Commander Werner Lange aboard the Emden drily noted: “The impacts hit our wake, 75-300 meters away.” By the Admiralty’s new school of thought, the defense line of the outer Oslofjord should stop enemy breakthroughs. The first test had ended in total fiasco as a result of a lack of determination, poor firing skills and inferior training. The road to the capital lay open. Everything now depended upon one man, Colonel Birger Eriksen, in the now demoted Oscarsborg fortress, a couple hours’ sailing to the north.

Chapter 5

Where are the intruders?

The Oslofjord, 9th of April 1940, midnight to 03.30

It took twenty-five minutes from Captain Gustav Sahlqvist Amundsen aboard Farm sent off his first radio message until the alarms blared at Oscarsborg. Precisely at 23.30, Captain Thorleif Unneberg noted in the communications logbook: “B 26 reporting that several vessels are making their way forward.” The messages came from YOSA (Outer Oslofjord Sea Defense section) in Tønsberg and triggered immediate action. Unneberg called Colonel Birger Eriksen, who stayed at the old and beautiful Commander’s villa on Nordre Kaholmen with his daughter Borghild and their maid Ellen. A few minutes later, the phone rang in the barracks, where Lieutenant August Bonsak had just gone to bed. “The colonel called,” Bonsak later told. “They are manning the main battery, Bonsak, he said. Do not let he trumpeter sound the alarm. It might spook the recruits. I will be up shortly.” The old lieutenant threw on his underpants and slippers and ran down to the first floor. “There I found Ensign Høie, and the sergeants Rækken and Strøm. They were told to fetch the boys and make ready the first cannon. Høie was on the range finder, Rækken on the cannon.” A few minutes later, the first artilleryman showed up on the cold gravel behind the ramparts. “He had his pants on, and carried the rest of his clothes under his arm,” Rækken reminisced. “The crew were, as they arrived, set to making ready all three 28cm cannons. Afterward I lined them up for control. There were enough men for one cannon. That was the force we commanded.” It had been a long and tiring day, and Eriksen and the other officers had listened to NRK Radio with mounting unease. At 19 the radio told that “50-100 German ships” were going north, through Kattegat. Especially haunting was a long and colourful commentary at 22 of the torpedoing of the freight ship Rio de Janeiro off the southern coast earlier the same day: “The whole of Kristiansand were gathered on the docks at four o’clock when the naval vessel came in. Whatever could be gathered of medical materials and ambulances were collected on the docks, and the crowd was in the thousands. One by one, wounded Germans were brought to the local hospital. The dead were put in coffins. The bleak affair made an enormous impression on the crowd.”

There was no doubt a troop transport had been sunk, and the Admiralty staff had finally passed on the detailed warnings from London and Copenhagen to the fortresses in the Oslo fjord after forty-five minutes. But the messages came in untreated – with no supplementary comments, no exhortations for the commanders, and no orders to mobilize. The government and Naval leadership were struck dumb and committed a mortal sin: They ran away from their responsibilities and left the frontline soldiers to fend for themselves. “The condition of the fortress at the outbreak of war on the 9th of April was thus: The fortress was not mobilized”, Eriksen wrote in a short, but stinging commentary a few weeks later. “The minefield had not been deployed. The earlier order of the 8th of April concerning the mines was that they would be deployed at a later order. Håkøya battery was not manned, and the main battery was undermanned. The covering sections consisted of around 30 men on each side of the fjord. The commander had no second-in-command and no aide, and against aerial attack the fortress was in the same shape it was fifty years ago.” Some days earlier, Eriksen had sent his wife, Kristiane, to the family farm Sæhlie in Hedmark county. He asked his daughter and maid to sleep in their clothes and made vain attempts to get a hold of the new chief of the main battery, Magnus Sødem. But the captain had gone on an errand to Drøbak and did not pick up the phone. If Eriksen was nervous, he hid it well when he reached the ramparts close to a quarter to twelve. He displayed no irritation at the absence of the battery chief. “Attention!” second-in-command Bonsak had commanded in front of the arrayed men. “First cannon in order. The orograph (range finder) is manned.” “Can you not crew two cannons?” “Yes, but then I have to send for the non-combatants.” “Yes, do that”, Eriksen replied, and hurried back to the communications centre, which laid inside the Envelope, a couple of minutes’ quick march away.

En route from the commander’s villa, he had made sure to alert two of the fortress’ key officers, the sixty-year old Commander Andreas Anderssen, chief of the torpedo battery on Nordre Kaholmen, and Captain Vagn Jul Enger, who had been intended to command the defences on the east side of the fjord. “There had been a lot of boats and letters for the pilots’ office, whereby I was busy controlling the paperwork until I went to bed ten past eleven”, wrote Anderssen, who had left the navy after the First World War, and worked as a timber merchant and pilot boat alderman in Drøbak. But the chief of Oscarsborg’s torpedo battery had been taken ill, and the retired priest’s son had been persuaded to act as a substitute back in February. “There was a lot of new stuff to learn, so I had enough to do. Just the administrative part demanded so much time that there was little left for the practical. There were few men up at the fortress, but luckily my battery was fully staffed, four sappers and eight soldiers.” Anderssen had driven to Fredrikstad the same day to inspect a steamer that would be procured for the ferry service between Oscarsborg and Drøbak. He was tired after a long day behind the wheel, and needed sleep. “Before I went to bed, I heard on the radio that the lighthouses were to be extinguished from the Swedish border to Marsteinen (an island just south of Bergen). Moments later, the phone rang. It was the commander, who told me to get over there at once, as the guards around Færder were fighting. He told me I had to find a boat myself.” The torpedo battery was Eriksen’s ace in the hole, and was well hidden in a secretive cave blasted into Nedre Kaholmen – with an undersea opening into the Drøbak sound. By way of a clever lift, the slim steel fish could be lowered from the torpedo hall down to the cave floor, three meters below the waterline. Like the cannons of the main battery, the torpedoes had once been among the finest of their kind. But it had been forty years since they had arrived from Robert Whitehead’s factory in Fiume by the Adriatic, and the cold technology was antiquated. Modern torpedoes were propelled by a mix of oxygen and paraffin - not purely by compressed air, like those who rested in their steel racks below Oscarsborg. In the absence of money for new torpedoes, they had gone all in on maintaining those they had, and the steel glinted in the light of the work lamps like polished bronze. In the narrow strait, every ship had to pass the undersea opening at 400 meters. It was almost impossible to miss, and the explosive power of 110 kilos TNT, still gave the warheads a devastating effect. “We heard the news in the evening, and felt the net tighten around Norway”, wrote sapper Sigurd Bexrud, who had gone to bed before midnight. “I went to bed, but could not sleep. The situation was too precarious.” Half an hour later, his phone rang. “It was Commander Anderssen, and the words still ring in my ears to this day: You have to come at once, sapper Bexrud. We are at war. The outer Oslofjord is in combat.” In the torpedo hall, the preparations were already done. Nine torpedoes were ready, under full pressure, 70-80 atmospheres, like they had done since September 1939. “We went ahead at once, placing the warheads onto the torpedoes and placing them firmly in their frames. The depth measurement was set at 2,5 meters and the distance apparatus to 425 meters. When it was done, the torpedoes could be fired at a couple of minutes’ warning.” The situation was not as clear in Drøbak, where the defences spanned six different elements: The main battery at Kopås in the hillside straight across from Oscarsborg with three 15cm cannons, the sub-battery at Husvik near the water’s edge with two 57mm guns for covering fire of the undeployed minefield, the anti-air battery at Veisvingen on Seiersten island with two 40mm Bofors cannons and Colt machine guns, a searchlight section in Drøbak port, an infantry troop of 31 men at Skiphelle and the range finder at Stjernås hill twenty kilometres south for advance warning of intruding vessels. “I arrived at the battery at 23.45”, wrote Jul Enger, who had been awakened by a telephone call from communications officer Unneberg. The forty-four year old captain was one of the younger brothers of the commander at Rauøy fort, Hersleb Adler Enger, but he had left the Coastal Artillery in 1931 to become a dentist. He had his own dental practice in Drøbak and had been mobilized under the neutrality watch as defence commander of the small town. The experienced artillerymen were few and far between, and Unneberg had relayed a hasty decision from Colonel Eriksen. “He told me the commandant’s orders: To go at once to the battery at Kopås and take command there.” Even though 29 men had been transferred from the main battery at Oscarsborg the week before, they were dangerously understaffed and untested. The decision was made to wake the recruits from the Coastal Artillery Officer school, who had been put up in some nearby barracks. “I was awoken just before midnight by Unneberg, who in a quavering voice told me to gather the officers’ school students for Captain Enger”, wrote the school manager, Captain Klaus Nesse, when he was interned at Grini (POW camp and used to hold political prisoners, formerly a women’s prison. Some of my own family and my wife’s great grandfather were interned here. Today it is once again a prison.) a few weeks later. “Enger gave orders to occupy the Husvik battery and cannon nr.1 at Kopås.” The fifty students were a valuable addition, and got to work at once to ready the seaward positions and establish a phone line to the command post a couple of hundred meters up the hill. “The night was pretty dark. Fog gathered out on the fjord. When the crew were in position, I made sure the ammunition was brought up, and that the night sights were attached”, Nesse wrote. “At Kopås they had already got out ten shells with high explosive warheads for each cannon. I remarked to Captain Enger that I though ten shells was too little, and suggested that more ammunition was brought up. Enger replied that he thought it was enough.”

In Oslo, the realization dawned on the military and political leadership that they were teetering on the edge of a cliff. Messages of the battles in the Oslofjord had reached the Department of Defense by 23.30, and the cabinet was summoned to an emergency meeting at the Foreign Ministry at Victoria Terrace. The air raid sirens blared for some time after midnight. Shortly after, the power was decoupled. Oslo was in a blackout. “I was aware that something was going to happen in the night”, wrote intelligence chief Wrede-Holm. “I therefore opened – for the first time since I was made division chief of the general staff – the door between my bedroom and the room where I had my telephone.” He heard the air raid sirens still half asleep, and was shortly after ordered by telephone to meet at the general staff headquarters. While he dressed, the power went out. “I lived at Ljan and feared that the power had gone out for the electrical train as well. I therefore ordered a car and drove into town.” Nobody knew where the Foreign Minister was, but Koht had heard the air raid sirens and understood that something was wrong. He went on foot to Victoria Terrace and arrived last at a quarter past one. “Then we sat there and received those unhappy messages as they came in – about the German warships coming in from every which way, through the Oslo fjord, towards Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik”, he wrote in For peace and freedom in wartime. It was a collection of doomed and defeated men who sat by the flickering candlelight in a moment of pathetic discomfort, without parallel in Norwegian history. “To sit there and receive all these messages was the most discomforting, the most dejected thing any of us had ever experienced. It could sap the courage from any man. Everyone in the cabinet felt it the way I described it to my wife later in the morning: All has failed!”

At Oscarsborg, Birger Eriksen marched impatiently back and forth to the communications centre. The suspense had reached the breaking point, but the phone had fallen silent. He had himself set up a direct line to Bolærne, but fort commander Færden had no news to give at ten minutes to midnight. The fog had suddenly rolled into the fjord, and reduced the sight to a few hundred meters. The unknown vessels had passed, and could no longer be seen. From Horten, they made several attempts to call Pol III on the radio. The signals went unanswered. Ship and crew had seemingly ceased to exist. When Rear Admiral Smith- Johannsen personally called from Karljohansvern naval base at midnight, the situation remained unchanged. “Battle is raging in the Oslofjord by vessels forcing their way past Fuglehuk,” Unneberg noted in the logbook. Orders had finally arrived to block the gap between Rauøy and Bolærne, but the mines were stored on land, and would not be in place until the morning. Of the electronically operated barrier in front of Oscarsborg there was no news, and there were no orders to mobilize. It was very strange – and frustrating. “We waited in ignorant anxiety throughout the night”, Sergeant Rækken told. “It was dark and foggy, so one could not see across the fjord.” Captain Sødem had arrived from Drøbak and assumed command of the battery, while Bonsak organized the addition of extra ammunition. “The light was not electrical. We used paraffin lamps and stearin candles. I brought the non-combatants down into the depot and hauled up six projectiles for every cannon. The powder bags came up too, four for each projectile.” Each shell weighed 345 kilos. With a propellant of an additional 60 kilos of gunpowder for every shot, it was a considerable weight to move around. When Eriksen made an inspection round at around 01, the process had been completed. Nine deadly projectiles rested in their cradles in front of the cannons, along with one and a half tons of ballistite powder in 15-kilo canvas bags. “Rauøy and Bolærne have joined in battle, the colonel said. But don’t tell the boys”, continued Bonsak. “Then we can expect them by morning?” “Yes, I fear so.” In the open gun emplacements, the minutes slowly dragged on. The dark was heavy, and there was an icy wind coming in from the sea. The fluttering paraffin lamps threw a ghoulish pallor across the lumpen monsters of Krupp steel. But no matter how hard the watchers strained their eyes, nothing could be seen, and the phone had stopped ringing. The ships who had appeared ghostlike between Rauøy and Bolærne had apparently vanished without a trace.

Aboard the Blücher, around 25 nautical miles further south, navigation officer Hugo Förster was in trouble again. Visibility had dropped dramatically once they passed the frontal barrier. Fog rolled in from the east. When the lighthouses were extinguished shortly afterward, the darkness closed in like they were caught in a bag. Even his closest subordinate, the experienced first mate Rüdiger Perleberg, thought the situation delicate, and brought out his stopwatch. “From thereon, we had to calculate course and speed, and adjust for the expected effects of the wind and currents”, Perleberg wrote in a later report. “Only rarely could we measure by a few weak lights that could be seen on land.” Blücher and Lützow had both been fitted with brand new FuMo 22 radars, but the echo dissolved into a myriad of reflexes once they entered the fjord. “The equipment worked excellently when approaching the coast”, reported Lieutenant-Captain Karl Knappe, who was responsible for the radar and range finders aboard the flagship. “The steamers at the mouth of the fjord could be seen easily, but close to shore there was too much disturbance.” The squadron was stretched out across two to three nautical miles, and Kummetz had given the order to reduce speed as soon as they passed Rauøy. Halfway between the frontal barrier and the prison island of Bastøy, the fleet had laid by and made ready to debark the shock troops who would take the coastal forts, Jeløya island radio station and Karljohansvern base from behind. “Cruisers and torpedo boats sighted to port”, noted flotilla chief Gustav Forstmann in his war diary aboard the minesweeper R-18 at a quarter past eleven. The navigation of the eight small vessels belonging to the 1st Räumbootflotille had been just about perfect, and Forstmann ordered full speed ahead into the fjord. While the searchlights pierced the sky, the minesweepers and whalers passed unseen beneath the gun muzzles of Rauøy. The fort reported having seen only two ships. In reality, it was 16 ships that in a matter of minutes crossed the outer defence line of the Oslo fjord.

Half an hour after midnight, two of the minesweepers had moored alongside Blücher, and six more alongside Emden. In the darkness amid rough seas, the operation was very risky, and R-20 had at once crashed its bow into the aft of R-21. The minesweeper had started to take on water, and for a while it looked dangerous. “The boat is leaking, but is still seaworthy,” noted the twenty-two year old skipper, Lieutenant Gerd von Pommer Esche through gritted teeth.

For the next two hours, the squadron had lain stationary in the middle of the fjord, a tempting prey for any submarine captain. But the passivity of the government had infected the Admiralty, who had wrapped themselves in the false hope that the Royal Navy was on its way. The three operative submarines stationed in Horten were first ordered to go out at 04, and that was far too late.

When the last minesweeper cast off from Emden just after half past one, they had received 350 infantrymen of the 163rd division with equipment and supplies for three days without accident. “The transfer to six smaller vessels in complete darkness went painlessly and surprisingly quick, thanks to excellent preparations by the First Officer”, noted the ship’s captain, Wilhelm Lange in his war diary. It was still over two hours until Weser-Zeit, when the coordinated attack was set to happen. R-20 and R-24 therefore turned back and went slowly back toward Rauøy, while R-22 and R- 23 crossed the fjord towards Bolærne. Aboard Blücher, the navigators Förster and Perleberg had begun to sweat once again. The current had taken the ship westwards, and the plumb line reading were showing a worrying trend. “While the ship lay there with powerless engines, the water depth had been reduced from around 300 meters to 150 meters”, noted Förster, who had to walk the long road up to Kummetz and tell him that their position was unsafe. “I recommended we proceed forwards at only seven knots’ speed.” The Oslo fjord was full of islets and treacherous reefs, and the group commander had no other option. When the squadron once again put its steam up, the vessels snuck north with greater watchfulness. It was District Commander Smith-Johannsen who unknowingly gave them a helping hand. The uncertainty of what really had happened out on the fjord tugged at his nerves, and the rear admiral had ordered KNM Otra out to sea in hope of getting a clear picture of the situation. When the minesweeper left Horten with chief of staff Gunnar Hovdenak on board at 02.15, the lights were briefly lit – and that was enough for Perleberg and Förster aboard Blücher, who was closing in on the narrow gap between the old naval city and Moss town to go forward slowly. “We navigated by plumb readings until we suddenly saw Gullholmen lighthouse and the lights of Horten bay. We now had a certain positioning and could up the speed to 15 knots”, wrote Lieutenant-Captain Förster, who could breathe easier once again.

At Oscarsborg, the commander was more confused than ever. At five to one, the air raid command in pitch-black Oslo had called and asked if there were any news. It was a strange, almost provocative question from the capital, and the colonel’s answer must have been curt. No one seemed to know anything for certain, and Eriksen had once again in frustration contacted Major Fredrik Færden at Bolærne. But over the crackling phone line, the aging actuary had nothing to contribute – except by confusing him even more. There had only been seen two vessels who had not been reported by the sentry ships on the guard line. It was possibly two destroyers, who had moved out of sight just before midnight. “We heard cannon fire”, Færden said, and added a dose of wishful thinking. “There probably was a large naval battle outside of Færder. The destroyers are probably seeking shelter from the battle.” It was all very strange, and the supreme commander at Horten had nothing much to add. Chief of the naval airplane station, Captain Gøsta Wendelbo, had called and said that the eight operative sea planes were not to take off from Karljohansvern due to the fog. They were instead to be evacuated to a safe harbour further in behind Oscarsborg. It was an unheroic action which put the fleet air arm out of commission – before the battle had begun. At half past one, another surprising message came from Horten: “Bolærne reports four large cruisers and submarines passing inwards at 24.” It was the soundest observation of the night, and had reached Oscarsborg from the minesweeper Kjæk which patrolled the line between Fuglehuk and Misingen, just south of the frontal barrier. Ensign Knut Kraft had seen a large shadow to the east a couple of hours earlier, and had gone to investigate. When the searchlights of Rauøy opened up, the whole squadron had been revealed to the minesweeper: Three to four cruisers, and several smaller vessels and submarines, according to the observer. The ensign sent up two red signal flares, which were seen from Bolærne. “I was lit up by searchlights by the intruders, and fired upon by one of the cruisers”, reported Kraft, who turned his sentry boat around and zigzagged towards Fuglehuk to report. The weakness in the communications network was now revealed. Kjæk had no radio. The vessel was dependent on visual contact with the forward post which lay in a shed belonging to the Lighthouse Administration on the isolated islet, which again had optical contact with the command central at Bolærne, three thousand meters further north. They had used Morse lamps, and Kjæk had taken more than an hour to transmit the message. Yet another hour went by before the message reached Oscarborg, by way of Tønsberg. In the communications centre, Eriksen lunged for the phone and once again called up Major Færden. But the confusion at Bolærne was total. The fort commander either did not know of Kjæk’s observations, or chose to reject them. “No more than those two smaller vessels have passed, but a destroyer is incoming soon”, Færden claimed at 01.50. What was correct? Had two or four vessels entered the fjord – and which nationality did they belong to? When yet another uneventful hour had passed, Eriksen made his decision. His men had been working all day and night without comfort. Everyone were tired, hungry and worn. “I never received any message from further up the chain of command that we were in a state of war”, Eriksen later wrote. “The fortress waited for several hours for information about the ships. When no one came, I let half the force leave the cannons to rest in shifts at three o’clock.” For himself, Colonel Eriksen walked across the bridge to the commandant’s villa on Nordre Kaholmen. He did not take off his clothes, but sat down in his armchair and closed his eyes.

Chapter 6

“The people on the aft deck spoke German...”

The Oslo fjord, 9th of April 1940, 02.00-04.20 Just off Filtvet at the mouth of the Drøbak strait, the tugboat Furu had been on sentry duty since half past seven, and the waiting was getting to them. The straits were only 1800 meters across, and the things Lieutenant Ole Halvdan Jensen could to do make his posting more interesting were limited. The tugboat was almost forty years old, and belched black smoke from its slim chimney like it was burning tar. “There was fog, and all the lights on both sides of the fjord had gone out”, reported the young skipper. Furu had not had its lanterns lit since the order came down for heightened awareness, and in the wheelhouse, only the lit cigarettes and the binnacle cast a weak light across grave faces. It was almost time to rouse the midwatch, but the order was never carried out. “Suddenly, a shadow appeared in the dusk”, wrote Jensen, who killed the engines and grabbed the handle for the searchlight mounted on the wheelhouse roof. He awakened properly when he saw a grey hull entered the beam of light, only 15-20 meters away. “I saw that it was a warship, and quite large. What nationality they were, I did not know until I heard that the people on the aft deck spoke German.” Jensen turned hard to port to go around behind the intruder, when a new colossus appeared in the wake of the first. “It was only by gunning the engine to full speed reverse that I escaped a collision.” In the following minutes, Furu backed between the east side of the fjord and the squadron, while Jensen, in mounting dread, counted seven darkened warships heading toward Oscarsborg, six nautical miles to the north. “As soon as the last one had passed, I called the signal station on land and reported: Seven foreign warships passing Filtvet towards you right now.” As soon as Toftenholmen islet outside of Hurumlandet peninsula grew in their binoculars, navigations officer Förster and his right hand Perleberg felt safe. “The islet was easy to get a bearing off of, and inside there, the lights were still on”, noted the Chief Mate. “Navigating the narrow passage to Drøbak was an easy task.” The time was almost three thirty, and the darkness was growing lighter. It had been an hour since Albatross, Kondor, R-17 and R-21 detached to attack Horten, and yet another hour until the potentially fatal contraction point between Drøbak and Oscarborg. On the port side, the beacon at Filtvet was suddenly switched off, and Rear Admiral Kummetz turned to Förster with a fateful question: “Is it navigationally safe to pass the Drøbak straits if the beacons are not lit?” “I recommend the speed be set down to seven knots at Filtvet”, the Lieutenant-Captain had answered. “Then, the squadron will enter the inlet by daybreak.” The dogged tactician Kummetz left us no written clue for what happened inside the mind of the group commander in this decisive moment. War watch had been set (6 hours on, 6 hours off crew rotation) and on the stuffed command bridge, the entire elite had gathered: Shipmaster Woldag and his second-in-command Heymann, Major General Engelbrecht, Air General Süssmann, and a gaggle of staff officers, sailors and messengers. The flotilla had illegally stayed within the (on paper) heavily fortified Norwegian archipelago without meeting any serious resistance – either during the forcing of the frontal barrier, or during their transfer south of Bastøy island. The main naval base at Horten had been passed by – without any sign of airplanes, submarines or surface vessels. There had been warning shots, and the lights had gone out. That showed that the Norwegians were on alert, but the message was unclear. As Commander August Thiele aboard Lützow noted in his war diary: “There is no doubt that out opponent has been warned, and that the coastal fortresses are manned. It is not clear, however, if he is firmly decided to show any real resistance. For that, the shooting has been too fickle and unorganized.”

If the last fortress – Oscarsborg – acted as reluctantly, the capital would lie open to the squadron. Kummetz was lagging behind the original timetable. But if the passage could be effectuated within the next hour, the occupying forces could be in Oslo before six o’clock - just in time to strike the nerve center of the country. The barrier breakers had turned back at Storebælt. For the final breakthrough, only Blücher, Lützow, Emden, Möwe and two minesweepers were left. The rest of the vessels had other tasks, and Emden and Möwe were to take the Kaholmene islands and Drøbak as soon as they had passed the straits. He could still send Lützow ahead to shield his flagship. But that went against the spirit of his own order: If the fortresses fire, durchhalten! ”Go on!” As his aide, Lieutenant Freiherr von Freyberg, explained: “When choosing between the two cruisers, the senior officers chose Blücher, because it was the most powerful ship. It was also the fastest, and could still go faster than Lützow even if one engine had dropped out. If Oslo was to be reached in time, the lead ship especially had to move fast. The order was full speed ahead – if they fired on us.” The order for battle stations was given at 03, and the invasion force gathered below the armoured deck – in full combat gear. Some officers tried to sleep, while others gathered in hushed conversation in the darkened officers’ mess. “Time went by achingly slow”, Richard Daub wrote, who was set to go in with the first wave along with the rest of Propagandastaffel Norwegen. “Beneath us, the motors sang their monotonous song, but otherwise, the silence was fearful and almost total. Those few with something to say talked in low whispers.”

The first message from Filtvet reached Oscarsborg at 03.38: “One larger vessels with lanterns lit. After being lit up by the sentry boat, both vessels extinguished all lanterns.” It was the crew of the signal station who had observed Furu’s dodging maneuvers, and who messaged again two minutes later – probably caused by another observation from yet another tugboat, Alpha: “Warships passing the station with extinguished lanterns.” The alarm was raised at once, and Birger Eriksen was torn from his armchair by a phone call from communications officer Unneberg. The uncertainty of the preceding hours had been swept away, and the colonel did not dither when he reached the main battery a few minutes later. Normally, the commander’s position was an emplacement high up on the slope on the neighboring island of Håøya, but the bunker had not been in use, and was covered by a metre of snow. “There was no time to reach the command position at Håkøya,” Eriksen wrote in his report. “I saw it as my duty to personally take responsibility for the firing of the Main Battery and furthermore, to see to it that the first shots from these powerful, but slow- firing guns would be most efficacious.” While Eriksen gazed into the darkness from the hardened earth of the rampart, battery commander Sødem, his second Bonsak and the sergeants Rækken and Strøm made sure the cannons were loaded. “The commander relayed that four large warships were on their way. They had already passed Filtvet”, Bonsak reminisced. “The order was clear: Fire as soon as there is something to fire upon.” Half of the two cannon crews had been given coffee and food and went at the wheels and levers with gusto. “The boys really gave it their all”, Rækken said. “It was clear that they understood what was happening.”

In the torpedo battery, Andreas Anderssen had just thrown himself down on a bench in his office in the hope of getting some sleep, when Chief Sapper Karlsen came running with the message from Unneberg. “It sounded almost incredible, that a fleet detail of large ships could pass by all the way past Filtvet without us being informed.”, the commander later wrote in a personal account to his family. “Then it was to become serious after all – that which in my innermost self I had never considered a possibility, that the torpedo battery really was to be used in battle!” In the torpedo hall, the warheads were armed before three torpedoes were lowered down the shaft – until they rested in their racks three meters below the surface. “It was with mixed emotions I inspected my men before I climbed the observation tower. They were all calm, as if they were facing a practice run, but probably had every nerve wound tight to do their duty to the utmost.”

At Drøbak, they toiled over the boilers in the furnace delivering power to the searchlights on land. The machinist had been woken up. But when Captain Jul Enger phoned in the night, there was still a goodly while until they could build enough steam. Instead, a 90cm searchlight aboard Kranfartøy nr. 2 (Crane vessel nr. 2, a ship) in Drøbak harbour had been hastily manned. “Are you the boss? You must come at once! We are at war”, an out of breath sailor had told Signalman Bakke, who had been traced to a private address in Drøbak. When the light cone pierced the darkness just after 04, it captured a strange sight: one of the Navy’s sea planes, who had come all the way from Horten on its pontoons, and sought refuge in Vindfangerbukta (Windcatcher bay), just north of Drøbak. Just behind the plane, the observers saw something far more frightening: giant warships, who slowly materialized out of the grey wall of fog. “They came on quietly, with no lights”, Captain Nesse wrote. “Just before they passed the harbour, they turned the spotlight towards the lead vessel. I clearly marked the tall command tower just behind a large cannon tower on the foredeck.” “We cannot start shooting at this!” Captain Enger exclaimed in dread. “My dear man, you must open fire now”, Nesse answered.

In the communications centre at Oscarsborg, the message from Kopås was recieved at 04.17; “Silhouette of larger vessels seen against the cone of light.” The message reached Colonel Eriksen at just the moment he thought he could see the armada moving up from the south from his position on the rampart. “When the ships approached, they looked like tall, dark towers, who drifted towards us dreadfully slowly. They came on without lanterns, used no searchlights, had no patrol boats in front, no planes ahead or above them, and their speed was just six knots. One thought unwillingly that the purpose of the squadron was to give it the look of a friendly fleet visit that was to pass unhindered.” Eriksen was not fooled. Just minutes earlier, he had been challenged by Commander Anderssen, who had categorically demanded a decision on what he should do: To fire or not? (This bugs me a bit. The Norwegian used is “Skyte med skarpt”, basically “sharp” ammunition, or live ammunition. I have no good translation for it, “use live fire” seems too strange, but when talking about opening fire, they always ask for “skarpt”, meaning that they are not to use warning shots first, or dummy ammunition.) It was an egregious demand from a subordinate so near to a decisive battle, and gave the impression that the chief of the torpedo battery did not trust in the fortress commander and wanted his own back covered – in case anything went wrong. The rules of the neutrality watch stated that permission to use live shells had to be granted by the commanding admiral, but there was no time to consult with Oslo. Neither was there time for a written order, and Eriksen must have felt the claws of disappointment digging in. The frontal barrier and Karljohansvern had failed. If he followed the regulations and fired a warning shot, he would have no time to reload before the enemy had passed. Even he would then have failed, and that, he could not abide. He had waited for more than forty years. The moment had come, and the decision was made. His was the responsibility, and he would have no truck with insubordination and defeatist talk. When he turned toward the messenger, his words snapped like the crack of a whip: “By the Devil, we will open fire!”

Aboard the Blücher, the First Artillery Officer, Lieutenant-Captain Kurt-Eduard Engelmann studied the shadow of Kaholmen through the crosshairs of his binocular. Messages had come from the bridge that there were batteries on both sides of the fjord, and both the heavy and medium artillery pieces had been loaded and faced forward. “I had a sketch of where the batteries were drawn in – with our position minute by minute at twelve knots’ speed, but the fog made it impossible to see any clear targets.” Higher up in the command tower, Lieutenant-Captain Hans-Erik Pochhammer and the duty officer, Lieutenant Heinrich-Wilhelm Schürdt had taken command of the cruiser’s rapid-firing 10,5 cm guns, which sat in six twin towers on the upper deck. The sentry boat Furu had been spotted, along with the unlucky freighter Sørland, headed towards Oslo carrying food and dry goods. The range finders followed the vessels with their Zeiss precision lenses, and firing solutions were plotted in the calculation room. But opening fire was strictly forbidden, even though the sailors in the gun turrets itched to pull the trigger. “I interpreted the prohibition in such a way that the senior officers did not expect any organized hostile attack”, noted Engelmann.

Just ahead on the starboard side, the searchlight from Kranfartøy nr. 2 stabbed out across the straits. “I saw a sea plane in the cone of light, and turned around to have a closer look”, Schürdt told. “I wondered what nationality it had.” In the integral command bridge, Shipmaster Woldag had taken over the steering from Förster and Perlemann. “He steered by a special map and took the headings with the aid of a shielded flashlight”, the navigation officer wrote, who together with his Chief Mate double- checked the heading with a copy of the map. The searchlight playing across Drøbak triggered no immediate reaction. “By what happened at Rauøy, I interpreted the searchlight as a Norwegian protest against our intrusion – without any real act of resistance.” According to the officer on duty, Lieutenant-Captain Werner Czygan, who stood a few meters away, Förster’s opinion was shared by many. “Among those gentlemen from the different military arms gathered on the bridge, there was a common conception that there would be no real fighting.” Woldag's First Officer, Commander Erich Heymann had had a hectic day, and felt the weight of responsibility. “The searchlights playing across the narrow inlet created an unbearable suspense on the bridge”, he wrote in the reconstructed war diary. “In front of us, the land grew clearer with the coming of morning, but the fog made it impossible to identify batteries and other particulars. That heightened the suspense even more.” The most senior officer, Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz, said nothing. He had steeled himself and would follow Hitler’s orders to the utmost. The die had been cast. There was no way back. He ordered the speed increased from seven to twelve knots and asked for everyone to stay on guard: “Artillerie Achtung, Scheinwerfer Achtung!”

In the main battery of Oscarsborg, Birger Eriksen was still furious when Ensign Kristian Høie called out the distance to the first vessel from the small concrete cupola which contained the orograph: “2000 meters!” “Balderdash!” the colonel replied, who knew the waters south of Oscarsborg better than his own kitchen garden. The orograph worked on simple geometric principles, but needed a clear line of sight to the waterline to be able to deliver a precise reading. “The readings were unreliable, so I had to measure the distance for myself”, Eriksen wrote, who spied Småskjær in the glint of the searchlight, to the right of the closest intruder. “I was thereby able to judge the distance safely. I gave the order for 1400 meters.” While cannon commander Ragnvald Rækken and August Bonsak controlled the lateral distance by aiming along the gun barrel, six men threw themselves onto the controls. The more than forty ton heavy Moses traversed slowly. The intruders came on in a silent but deadly formation. It was a pivotal moment in Norwegian history, but Eriksen did not mince words: “As soon as the vessels could be clearly seen, I had, as commandant of Oscarsborg fortress no misgivings or second guesses when deciding to strike with lethal force. The lack of a declaration of war had to be overlooked. Any attempt to call on high authority was not done. There was no time for negotiation. Neither was there any time to ascertain their nationality. Warning shots had to be skipped. Any bluff from the side of the attackers could not be accepted. Neither was there any time for regret or critique that the fortress was not fully manned. Violent men were coming. We had to make the best of it.” In the cold snow, Eriksen stood alone on the rampart. He looked at his watch and noted the time: 02.41. Then he gave the order to fire. It is not mentioned in the book, but his actual answer when questioned if they should really open fire was: “Either I will be decorated, or I will be court-martialed. Fire!”

Chapter 7

Downfall

The Oslo fjord, Tuesday 9th of April 1940, 04.21-06.40 In the command post for the light and medium guns high up in Blücher’s foremast, death came without warning. A flash of light sundered the foggy haze. Before the senses could react, the 345-kilo high explosive shell from Moses penetrated the steel decking at a steep angle and exploded in a sea of flame. The open platform turned into a slaughterhouse. The thirty-one year old Lieutenant-Captain Hans-Erik Pochhammer and several of the sailors died momentarily. His assistant, the twenty-five year old Heinrich-Wilhelm Schürdt has turned his binoculars toward the sea plane on the port side. “The man next to me died. But I had turned away, and that saved my life”, Schürdt told, who had fallen bleeding to the deck, seven shell splinters piercing his side. On the command bridge, the explosion felt like a hailstom hitting the armoured roof. “The blastwave was immense, shrapnel went everywhere”, wrote First Officer Erich Heymann. “The shipmaster ordered immediate fire and full power to all engines.”

As the bronze propellers churned up the sea and drove the heavy cruiser faster through the narrow straits, Bonsak, Rækken and Strøm fought to keep discipline in the main battery. Many of the crewmen had never seen a cannon fired before, and were shocked and dazed. “When the shot was fired, an intense red flame shot out 20 meters in diameter from the muzzle of the cannon. It was like a sea of fire in front of us”, told Sergeant Rækken. “Those of us in the battery were totally blinded. We saw absolutely nothing, but heard even more. Screams, shouts and anguish beat upon us, and the battery was in a panicked state.” One of the young men shouted that the gun barrel had exploded, and triggered immediate chaos. “The guys ran from the battery to save themselves. I held back three men and told them to keep calm.” Fifteen seconds went by before discipline was restored at cannon number two, and the battery chief could again give the order to fire. “The result was very surprising,” Colonel Eriksen wrote in his report. “In a moment, the entire middle of the ship up to the front mast went up in flame, which brightened the entire area and expelled a lot of very black smoke. The next shot hit the base of the command tower by the front mast. A substantial part of the tower was thrown overboard in the direction of Drøbak, and the fire moved on. Blücher seemed to have received a deadly blow. The front mast leaned over hard.”

In reality, the second shell penetrated the unarmoured shipside between the waterline and the upper deck, just behind the chimney. The explosion on the gun deck tore up the hull and deck plates, and lit raging fires in the airplane hangar and torpedo workshop. “Every one of the flight crews and mechanics died – with the exception of one pilot”, reported the flying officer, Lieutenant Ballier, who had been on the bridge. An Arado 196 seaplane stood ready on the launch catapult with 40 liters of fuel in its tank, and went up in flame in moments. Fed by the lubricant oils and easily flammable equipment, the fire spread to the ammunition crates that the landing force had stacked by the bulkheads. ”The ammunition caught fire and began to explode. Because of the heat and the thick smoke, it was impossible to remove the four 50- kilo airplane bombs stacked in the hangar.” The front mast had been knocked out as a fire control center, and second artillery officer Pochhammer had been killed. Lieutenant-Captain Kurt-Eduard Engelmann transferred the command to the artillery engineer, Lieutenant Friedrich Markworth, who sat in the undamaged front central. “In the dark it was impossible to see any peculiarities in the landscape”, the twenty-four year old Markworth wrote, who two years later would receive the Knight’s Cross for his duties as a submarine captain in the battle for the Atlantic. “I was just about to ask for orders when Engelmann’s voice crackled in my headphones: No identifiable targets from the front mast!”

The lack of training showed itself with devastating clarity aboard the burning cruiser. The cannons had hardly been fired during its test runs in the Baltic sea, and very few indeed knew how to act in an emergency situation while under enemy fire – which was what the ship was faced with that very moment. Without any clear leadership, the main guns did not fire a single shot. But in return, fire crackled from the 15cm guns, and the 37mm and 22mm guns were fired in every direction in wild and uncoordinated salvoes. The freighter Sørland was sunk, and steel rained over Kaholmen and the area around Drøbak. Two women were killed – one in her kitchen and one in the woods. “The light and medium guns shot wildly about themselves – without any proper military target. Instead, they peppered the beach and houses at will”, Engelmann wrote, who climbed the thirty meters to the destroyed platform, and discovered a bloodbath. “The fire control function had ceased to exist, the officers were dead or knocked out, and the telephone line was broken. I immediately messaged the bridge: The light guns cannot be halted from here.” On the command bridge, Woldag had no time to spare for the artillery. The first hit had destroyed the telegraph post and the steering, and the rudder was locked to port. At full power, the turbines were turning Blücher directly toward Kaholmen. To avoid being run aground just in front of the guns of the main battery, they hastily rigged an emergency control on the aft side. “The commandant decoupled the starboard propeller and rammed full speed reverse on the port turbine”, wrote First Officer Heymann. “We just managed to get clear of the island, but it was close.” On Kaholmen, Colonel Eriksen had grabbed Ivar Lien, a young ensign, who had just arrived at Oscarsborg from Bolærne. “Follow me!” he had commanded, and taken up position on the rampart, between the orograph and cannon number one. He was dressed in a well-worn green windbreaker jacket, and carried a cane. “He always walked a little crooked” the later Commander Lien told. “Now, he stood with his hands in his jacket pockets. The thumbs pointed straight forwards on the outside of the jacket, like they always did when it was cold. We had ringside seats to the events. Blücher kept a low speed, and it burned lively aboard.” The low-caliber fire used tracer rounds, and Lien was reminded of a fountain of lights. “The projectiles, whining about us, was by my reckoning very close indeed, but the colonel stood resolute.” For himself, Eriksen likened the firing to a fireworks display in red, green and yellow. “So many of these rocket projectiles flew through the air that the sky was quite brightened. Most of them went much too high, partly way too high – and did no more damage than making some holes in the gymnasium, the rampart keeper’s lodge and the boatswain’s cottage.” The batteries at Husvik and Kopås had opened fire just after the main battery, and pumped shell after shell towards the squadron – first toward Blücher, then toward Lützow. “The first shot from Kopås went into the main tower”, Captain Enger wrote in his report. “When the second and third shots hit too, there was fired one salvo – and then from each cannon until the cruiser was across from the battery and the line of fire was towards Oscarsborg. Fires raged aboard among constant explosions.”

On the command bridge, Woldag fought to keep control of Blücher, which was headed toward the eastern side of the fjord. After the evasive action, the speed was reduced to six-seven knots, and Chief Mate Perleberg set 344 degrees as a new course to exit the strait. “When the ship threatened to turn too far starboard, we laid the rudder over hard”, wrote navigation officer Förster, who went through the drama on the bridge. “The shipmaster fried to support the course change by using the side engines.” In the well-camouflaged torpedo battery aiming tower on Nordre Kaholmen, Commander Anderssen, his second-in-command Chief Sapper Karlsen and Sapper Bexrud waited with quivering nerves. They could not see the intruders through the small slits in the concrete cupolas, but the noise was deafening. “We almost broke down from the blast and the fury of the main battery’s 28cm's and the 15cm’s on Kopås, which fired almost simultaneously”, the excited Anderssen wrote. “The following minutes were indescribable, they had to be lived in all their dreadfulness. Every second we thought our time was up, it was too incredible that we were still alive.” Just before half past four, he spied the grey hull of Blücher in the middle of the strait. “It came drifting, huge and long, burning in front and amidships, as far as I could see. Keep your cool! You're still alive. Ohh, God, let me live just a minute longer!” Anderssen judged the speed to be seven knots and waited until the cruiser was dead in the crosshairs. “I pushed the button and the first torpedo went out, thank God. Quickly, the aiming arm had to be switched over into its notch for the next frame. You’re still alive! Can you do the next shot?” He heard the swish of the torpedo, but had no time to check the outcome. Instead, he adjusted the speed to five knots. Seconds later, the second torpedo was cutting through the water. “I was too busy with the aiming and generally too excited to see the effect of the first torpedo. But after the second one, the torpedo battery rocked in its foundation, and a huge plume of water and smoke arose from the midship area. The battle was over for now.”

Aboard the Blücher, the officers did not know of the existence of the torpedo battery, and Commander Woldag at first thought that they had run aground. “A violent shaking rocked the ship, and the commandant feared for a moment that we had hit a reef”, his aide, Lieutenant Freiherr von Freyberg , told, who at all times kept close to the flotilla chief and the shipmaster. “When the ship started listing gradually and there came several messages of damage and shipwreck, we understood we had taken underwater hits.” The first thing to go was the main engines – first, the middle turbine, then the two side turbines. Steam pressure disappeared, and the three propeller driveshafts stopped turning. “We still had some speed going forward, when the chief engineer sent word that the ship could no longer maneuver. All engine power was gone”, wrote Erich Heymann, who was responsible for onboard safety and would normally have led the firefighting efforts from the casualty center. The prospect of a quick debarkation on the 800 soldiers who were lined up beneath the deck, had made Woldag keep the officer by his side. The power supply seemed to be failing, and communications were knocked out. The messengers took a long time to get from the engine room to the bridge and back, which caused delays and misunderstandings. Woldag and Heymann therefore thought that the engine damage was temporary, and would soon be repaired. “As answer to our questions, we were told that the side turbines could be running again within an hour.” For a modern cruiser of Blücher’s size and build, the artillery hits alone were not a fatal threat. The ship had been built to take a pounding, and the five heavy hits that chief engineer Karl Thannemann registered – two from Oscarsborg, three from Kopås - would not normally have put the vessel out of commission. “The shells hit amidships in a short timeframe, and at a stretch of around 75 meters”, Thannemann wrote in his final report of the wreck. “They caused serious damage, fires and loss of life, but were not a direct danger to the ship.”

Normally, the two torpedo hits would not be deadly either. Blücher had 14 waterproof bulkheads, and could survive even with thousands of tons of water on board. It was the combined effect of both the shells and torpedoes which did it, but it took a long time before those responsible understood what was happening. “Despite the hits, all of us had faith that the ship would stay floating”, wrote First Officer Heymann. “The listing stabilized at around 8-12 degrees. We slid on through the straits at low speed as soon as the shipmaster had us on the right course.” He was supported by Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz, who thought that the cruiser had successfully forced its way past the final defence of the Oslo fjord and would soon be on its way again. “Neither Woldag nor myself understood that the ship was soon lost.”

The fighting ceased after around eight minutes, just before half past four in the morning. At Oscarsborg, Eriksen had settled for two shots, while the battery at Kopås had moved its fire to Lützow, which backed out of the danger zone at full speed. Aboard the Blücher, the artillery officers finally managed to stop the gun crews, and quiet descended on the Drøbak straits, except for the crackle of the flames and the screams of the wounded. “There was a deathly silence on board”, wrote engineer Thannemann. “The engines were out, the firing had ceased. No movement could be discerned. I was under the impression we had run aground.” In the medical station up front, Doctor Pietch and his medics had no time to contemplate the silence. Ropes had been rigged between the destroyed fire control centre in the foremast and upper deck, and the wounded were lowered down in canvas bags and treated. From other places onboard, there came a steady stream of people with burns and broken bones. “The wounded were seen in an improvised waiting room, where those with the worst wounds were given morphine”, wrote the doctor’s assistant, who stood at the operating table. “Those who died were removed at once.” Those worst hit were the soldiers from the Army and Luftwaffe, who had been shut in below deck in full combat gear, ready to go ashore. While on battle stations, the water supply was closed, but the toilets had been opened after intense pressure from the junior officers. “The dull thuds of steel against steel and the rolling echoes that followed, gave a frightful timbre through the rooms beneath the armoured deck”, wrote Richard Daub, who stood lined up with the rest of Propagandastaffel Norwegen. “We had to force ourselves to keep our cool and wait for it all to be over. Two heavy detonations brought the giant to its knees. Silence came, like there never had been on board. The engines were not running. The only thing we heard were the groans of the wounded and some scattered commands. We received no messages. It was as if those on deck had totally forgotten about us.” Lieutenant Jürgen Bieler, who carried a briefcase full of secret plans and instructions for the taking of Norway, kept together with other officers from Gruppe 21. “There was a heavy generation of smoke in the corridors and stairwells, and all hatches were closed. People and equipment filled the waiting rooms. We felt like mice in a trap.” Someone shouted “gas” and sent a new fear through those waiting. “The gasmasks were put on, and then we stood there, like cattle waiting for the slaughter”, wrote Rittmeister Paul Goerz, who could not stand the waiting. He elbowed his way through the corridors in a panic, and discovered that five deck hatches were closed and bolted from the outside. The sixth could just about be opened, and he managed to squeeze through after much effort. “The feeling that I could not get out of the ship was the greatest nervous strain I had ever felt. I thanked the Maker to be out in the open air.”

Simultaneously in Oslo, the German envoy Curt Bräuer was knocking on Minister Koht’s door. “I received him in the library outside my office. All the electricity was out, so we had only a couple of candles to sit by”, he told in For peace and freedom in wartime. Bräuer read aloud the German note that had been smuggled to Oslo a few days earlier by Gruppe 21 operations officer Hartwig Pohlmann. It contained the usual Hitlerian mix of lies, threats and enticements. “He read to me the 13 demands that the Norwegian government were to fulfill at once. It was a pure submission to German power, from one point to the next.” The government, who had after several days’ dithering just decided to mobilize, declined the demands out of hand. “Dann wird es Kampf geben, und nichts kan euch retten”, (Then there will be battle, and nothing can save you) said Bräuer when he received the answer. “Der Kampf ist schon im Gange” (The battle is already underway), answered Koht.

On the engine deck of Blücher, Commander Thannemann began to realize that the situation was far more critical than he had thought. One of the torpedoes had cut through the 80mm thick side plating and exploded near the weakest point of the ship, the watertight bulkhead that separated boiler room nr. 1 from turbine rooms no. 2 and 3. Water and fuel oil flooded in and did massive damage. The lights went out, and short-circuits started explosive fires. “From the first boiler room, only the duty engineer, one junior officer and two sailors managed to save themselves”, Thannemann wrote. “The engineer had serious burns on his hands and face.” The two central rooms amidships were filled with water in a matter of minutes. Two of the ship’s turbines were knocked out, and the steam pipe leading to the third was broken. Water broke through hatches and gaskets, and threatened the two remaining boiler rooms. Fuse boxes and wires burned, and steam pressure went out of the generators. The three power plants could soon only supply emergency power from one diesel-powered “lysmaskin” (Unsure what this is, what I can find is that it is some sort of light diesel-powered engine, almost line a motorcycle engine. So, not quite powerful enough to run a warship. See below picture for a lysmaskin from around 1919.)

which was in constant danger of overloading. The torpedo hits amidships had triggered a catastrophic chain reaction, and the untrained crew gangs could not coordinate their efforts in the chaos below deck. “We had to restore the steam flow from boiler rooms no. 2 and 3, which were ready to go up front (later only boiler room no. 3) and the so far undamaged middle turbine in the aft”, wrote machinist Ulrich Schüller, who worked tirelessly alongside Thannemann in the engine room command centre. The recoupling of the main pipeline had to happen on the middle deck, but the needed valves were already underwater. “Powerful fires raged nearby, and the smoke generation was heavy”, Thannemann reported, who himself tried to navigate his way to the middle deck. “The hull was blasted open, and a recoupling of the steam pipes were no longer possible. Any hope to get the turbine going was dashed.” The chief engineer sent Schüller to the bridge at once with the news: “There is no way to restart the propellers!”

In the meantime, Blücher had drifted on the currents around one nautical mile north from Oscarsborg, and Woldag had let the anchor drop at 70 meters’ depth near Nordre Askolmen islet to wait for the repairs to the engine. “We had no choice”, Kummetz explained. “The ship had no steering, and we could not let it drift towards the rocks and risk a total shipwreck. No responsible skipper would have done that as long as there was even the smallest possibility that the vessel could survive. Still, neither Woldag nor myself expected that the Blücher could sink.” The shipwreck manager, Captain-Lieutenant Glatzer, had just come aboard, and knew neither the ship nor the seven crew gangs at his disposal. They had no drills before the squadron left Kiel, and that punished them severely in the next fateful hour. “When the communications system dropped out, the crew gangs that worked to save the ship were completely cut off from their leadership”, wrote chief engineer Thannemann, who levelled biting criticisms at Glatzer for lacking determination. “In the confusion, the group leaders forgot to keep the shipwreck manager informed about their efforts. That was no doubt in connection to the fact that they had barely started training.” It would have been a nasty shock to Kummetz and Woldag that Glatzer, when asked, had no overview of the situation at all, either of the spread of the fire or the seriousness of the leakage. “The shipmaster sent me off at once to gather the lacking information,” wrote Heymann, who was Glatzer’s direct superior. It was a terrible sight which met the First Officer when he made his way onto the teak- paneled main deck. On the port side, the hull and deck had been mangled and torn by the artillery strikes, and black smoke poured from the middle and battery deck. The areas surrounding the airplane hangar had turned into an inferno. Hand grenades and ammunition went off continually and sent red-hot ricochets in all directions. Dead and wounded were carried off, ammunition boxes tossed overboard. Some work gangs worked methodically, others veered around aimlessly. “It was most demoralizing that there barely was any water in the firehoses”, Heymann wrote. The power outage had knocked out the pumps, and the feed lines were destroyed. Without a concerted effort, the efforts to save the ship were few and feeble. “It was depressing to see that the flames grew ever more destructive without the crew being able to be more effective. Many places they worked valiantly, but it was not enough.” When Heymann returned to the bridge, Kummetz and Woldag made some fast desicions. All of the gun crews were ordered to fight the fires, and Lieutenant Commander Czygan was sent below deck to find hoses and hydrants that still worked. “The Group Commander acceded to call up the torpedo boat Möwe to aid in firefighting efforts from the windward side”, Heymann noted. Radio contact with the rest of the squadron had been lost just before the battle. Kummetz had half expected that Lützow or Emden would follow Blücher through the straits, but no vessels had appeared. He sent his aide, Freiherr von Freyberg, up the foremast in the hopes of establishing optical contact. “I climbed the Admiral’s bridge and found that the starboard 60cm searchlight was intact”, reported Freyberg, who, with signalman Alfred Walluks repeatedly Morsed into the dawn: Möwe must come to our aid! “The signals seemingly could not pierce the pall of oil smoke hanging around the ship. The emergency signals were not answered.”

Aboard Lützow, Commander August Thiele had long ago lost his nerve to pass the field of fire blocking the narrow opening between Oscarsborg and the mainland. “Hit on the port side around chimney-height. High flames that can soon be put out. About the same time, new hit in the frontal gun tower”, Thiele noted in the war diary at 04.26. “Pulling back with full power to all engines, since passage of the straits seem impossible.” The batteries at Husvik and Kopås had with great effect moved their fire from the burning Blücher, and at 1500 meters’ range let their shells rain over Lützow and Emden. The light cruiser escaped without damage, but Lützow registered five hits from heavy guns and many more of lighter caliber over the course of five minutes. Tower A was knocked out, there was a fire in the infirmary, six men were killed and around 30 wounded. Thiele had had enough, and pushed his cruiser so hard backward it almost ran straight into Emden. From the shortwave radio they learned that the flagship had suffered engine failures, and that Woldag meant to lay anchor. Thiele, understanding that Kummetz had transferred command of the squadron to him, sent an immediate message to the remaining vessels: “Plan to let the troops off at Moss. Assume wake line.” The clock was almost 05. The fire from Kopås had ceased long ago, and the vessels sped out of the fjord. But aboard Emden, the headstrong commander Werner Lange, seven months’ Thiele’s senior, would not let his rival take command. As the oldest shipmaster, the squadron was his, and that was a right he would stand by to the end. While Blücher fought for her life near the Askholmene islets, a duel grew between the two shipmasters, which was brought to embarrassing attention to the rest of the fleet. Lange disregarded Thiele’s order and answered after ten minutes: “Before troops are landed in Moss, we must clarify the situation at Horten.” “It in in my view unnecessary”, Thiele noted pointedly in the war diary. “In the preview briefing, Oslo was clearly underscored as the main target, even if we could not take the fortresses.” He sent a new telegram to Lange: “Relay optical order to Möwe and the minesweepers of moving out, since radio contact is out.” Much to Thiele’s irritation, Lange did not answer. He repeated the order six minutes later: “Möwe and the minesweepers are to debark troops in Son, Emden in Moss.” Yet another six minutes later, the Morse lamps blazed again: “Go at once to Moss!” The time was five minutes to half past five in the morning, and aboard the R-18, Captain- Lieutenant Gustav Forstmann was the only one who had received the emergency signals from Lieutenant Freyberg up in the smoke-hidden foremast of Blücher. “Reading Morse signal from Blücher: Möwe must come to us at once and go along the side” he noted in the war diary and sent the message on via radio. Aboard Emden, Lange gave orders at once to Captain-Lieutenant Helmut Neuss aboard Möwe to turn and go at full speed toward the flagship – stoking Thiele’s rage. Lützow still had no radio contact, and the commander refused to believe there were any new orders from Kummetz. “I find Lange’s message baffling, since Blücher has not sent any messages since 04.50” he claimed in the war diary. “Messaging Emden once again that the command has been transferred to Lützow. The incessant interruptions are creating unrest among the squadron, not that it is impacting the operation in any meaningful way.” Aboard Möwe, Captain-Lieutenant Neuss was an incredulous witness to the heated catfight between the two officers: “Which order stands?” he asked at last “Should I land troops or go to Blücher?” But Thiele had made his decision, and Lange backed off. The order to Möwe was cancelled. The squadron continued south, while Lange and Thiele fought over whether the troops were to be landed at Moss or Son. It was an honourless feud with fatal consequences: All hope of rescue for the stricken Blücher faded.

Aboard the flagship, the situation in the meantime had grown even more desperate. Lieutenant Commander Czygan had managed to drag new firehoses up the ladder in the rear end of the mess in an effort to fight the fires from the port side. “We just had the hoses in place, when a violent explosion struck the airplane hangar”, Czygan wrote. “It was the airplane bombs exploding. The water pressure disappeared, and the hoses were destroyed by shrapnel and burning wreckage.” On the aft deck, the around 800 officers and soldiers who had suffered below deck for hours were finally given permission to come out. “We knew the Oslo fjord was quite narrow, and hoped the skipper had steered the cruiser to shallow water” wrote Richard Daub. “That thought made the evacuation happen without panic. We marched, goose-stepping up the ladders with our packs. Only when we reached the deck, did we realize the gravity of the situation. The water was ice cold, and it was 300-400 meters to shore. We had escaped hell, but how were we going to get off this unlucky ship safely?” The time was almost 06, and Thannemann and his men were forced to leave their command centre in the engine room. All attempts to stop the leaks had been in vain. Blücher had ten bilge pumps, which had a capacity of 600 tons an hour each. But without power, the pumps were worthless, and the water broke through to new areas all the time. There were no tables aboard for calculating buoyancy and stability, but the professionals knew that it was around 6000-7000 tons of water – if the engine rooms and magazines had been filled. “It was a huge amount”, Thannemann wrote. “Still, they alone were not enough to threaten the ship’s existence. It was the amount of water on the battery and middle decks which posed the greatest threat.” Because of the fire hazard, the magazines had been flooded – with one exception: the magazine containing 10,5 cm shells between boiler rooms no. 1 and 2. When the fire reached the evacuated room, the cruiser’s fate was sealed. “The magazine exploded in a violent detonation, and left a cloud of smoke which obscured the foremast”, wrote First Officer Heymann. “A shaking went through the ship, which listed markedly towards port.” The list increased to 20-25 degrees, and Heymann sent Lieutenant Commander Kurt Zoepffel at all haste to the aft deck to deploy the lifeboats. A new catastrophe reared its head: Most of the cruiser’s ten well-equipped longboats had been shot to pieces or burned up in their davits. Those few left on the starboard side could not be deployed, since the electrical winches had no power. “We cut the lines, and hoped the boats would survive the drop”, Freyberg reported. “One of them was destroyed when it crashed into the torpedo tubes. Another floated up, but drifted into the oil fires on the water and was lost.” The surgeon Pietch, who had worked in intense concentration since the shooting began, did not notice what was happening around him. “The last explosion made the ship turn over with such force that my patient almost tipped off the operating table”, he wrote in his report. “Under great duress, we managed to bandage him. From there, I took the patient under my arm and climbed through the smoking gases to the upper deck.” Lieutenant-Captain Karl Mihatsch had managed to take control of the only longboat that had survived the midship inferno. The motorboat was laid to by the port bow, which was almost underwater. Those most severely injured where carefully taken aboard – including Lieutenant Schürdt, who swam in and out of consciousness. “We brought them to the largest of the Askholmene islets, aided by one of the sailors”, Pietsch wrote in a bitter report. “Others stood by watching and not helping.” The bad luck seemingly had no end: On the next trip between the ship and the islet, the longboat crashed into the rocky beach and sprung a leak. It had to be abandoned.

The fires raged wilder than ever before. Communications between the fore and aft of the ship was now broken. When Woldag leaned over the bridge wing with his megaphone and commanded all overboard, the words could hardly be heard among the hundreds clinging to the sloping deck. “We now discovered the final criminal frivolity which had been a hallmark of the preparations for the Norwegian campaign”, wrote Richard Daub. “The cruiser had picked up more than 900 men in Swinemünde, but not a single life vest or a single rubber boat – despite the fact that many of the infantrymen were from the Alps and did not know how to swim.”

The kapok lifevests had been tied to the gunwales and had burned up. Of the more primitive liferafts, only four were serviceable. Discipline was disintegrating, and many of the sailors had long ago jumped over board and swam to shore. Everything that could float had been thrown overboard: deck planks, sofa pillows and mattresses.

“I tore off my boots and jacket and tied my gas mask container around my neck”, wrote Daub. “The water was mercilessly cold. Hands and feet had no feeling after a couple of minutes. Around us, there came heartbreaking cries from soldiers in deadly fear. You could only push your thoughts away and concentrate on a single target: do not become tired and indifferent, but keep arms and legs moving – even if the islet seems to be ever further away.” Rittmeister Paul Goerz clawed his way to land on a mattress along with Major Lehmann- Bärenklau, who had suffered a major nervous breakdown, while Lieutenant Bieler had gotten rid of his suitcase and swam to shore on his back. “To our sorrow, we could not help those poor swimmers who shouted for help and drowned around us. Our hands were too cold and stiff to be of use.” To lighten the load, Woldag had hoped that Blücher would turn with the wind and current, so that the aft would ground itself near Askholmene, but the water was too deep. The ship executed a full turn and was lying with its bow toward the south – toward Oscarsborg in the distance. In the last ten minutes, horrible scenes played out aboard the ship. A fog machine exploded and spewed white steam, which mixed with the oily smoke into an impenetrable mass. Panic spread, and non-swimmers threw themselves overboard and sank. All the way between the burning cruiser and the land, soldiers and sailors fought for their lives in the ice- cold water, alone or in small groups. Woldag was nearing a breakdown, and refused to leave the bridge until the last. Finally, when Kummetz intervened, he joined the rear admiral and his closest officers and went overboard. Some minutes later – at 06.23 - the cruiser capsized. The weight of the seawater had destroyed its stability. Blücher rolled around and went down bow first. Shortly after, the boilers exploded. A plume of fire blasted up and ignited the fuel oil leaking from the ship. Those nearby were killed by the flames.

The death struggle had lasted two hours. Of the 2400 who had left Kiel, more than 2000 were saved as by a miracle. Between 300 and 400 died. Of those, around 160 ships’ crew, while the rest were officers and enlisted men from the Army and Luftwaffe. The attack on Oslo was a total failure. The conquerors sat shivering, tired and freezing on Askholmene and the mainland – without food and without guns. Thanks to one man’s stubbornness, the country had gained some breathing space.

Just a small map to show the main area. Oscarsborg is on the central island of Søndre Kaholmen, while the torpedo battery is on Nordre Kaholmen, just above. The big green island is Håøya, where the command post was supposed to be, if not for the snow. Drøbak can be seen in the right-hand corner. The batteries at Husvik and Kopås are both on the landward side facing Oscarsborg just north of the bridge. The small grey and green islands at the top are Askholmene, where Blücher drifted toward.

One of the 28cm guns at Oscarsborg.

Blücher on fire and sinking near the mainland.

Part III

Chapter 8

Crisis in the Oslo fjord

The Oslo fjord, Tuesday 9th of April 1940, 06.30 - 08.00. In the hours following Blücher’s doom, the intruders were in a desperate situation. Half of the invasion force had been removed, their leaders were barefoot and frozen on the rocks of the Oslo fjord, the communications had broken down, and the remainders of the squadron were caught in a deathtrap between Oscarsborg and the frontal barrier of Rauøy/Bolærne. A resolute and coordinated follow-up attack - in the spirit of Colonel Eriksen – could have damaged the attackers greatly, even with the small means available to the Navy. Further vessels could have been sunk, and the squadron could at best have been destroyed or forced into an ignominious retreat. As the clenched Commander Lange aboard Emden admitted in the war diary at 07.18: “Since neither Drøbak, Horten or Bolærne are in our hands, the situation is critical for the remainder of the squadron. We must expect that the Norwegians have called British submarines, who can be set against our vessels who are forced to remain in the narrow waters between Filtvet and Horten.”

Day brightened across the Oslo fjord, which lay quiet and still like a mirror under a shining blue spring sky – apparently untouched by the bloody drama which had played out at Oscarsborg. A few hours earlier, the torpedo boats Kondor and Albatross, along with the minesweepers R-17 and R-21, and the armed whaler Rau VII (codename Gruppe Hameln) had crossed the fjord on course for Horten. If the attempt to force the Drøbak strait had represented the quintessence of foolhardiness, then the plans for the taking of the old naval city were suicidal. “I discovered that the weapons and equipment were unsuitable to conquer a strongly defended point”, commented Captain-Lieutenant Erich Grundmann acidly when he studied the attack plans aboard the small and unarmoured R-17 alongside the representative from the Army, Nazi zealot Kurt Budäus. Horten, with its fortress of Karljohansvern was the main base for the Navy, and the nerve center in defending the southern coast of Norway. Several naval vessels were in town and nearby areas, with the well-armed 1800-ton minelayer Olav Trygvasson and the new minesweepers Rauma and Otra in the spearhead. Rear Admiral Johannes Smith-Johannsen and the staff of the First Sea Defense District were installed in the Shipyard Gate in the fortress, and around 250-300 men from the army and anti-air defence manned strongpoints around the city.

Counting the recruits aboard the non-combat-ready armoured gunboats Tordenskjold and Harald Haarfagre and free ship crewmembers, more than a thousand men could be called up in an emergency. Nature was on the side of the defenders. The only possible way into the inner harbour was a tight waterway between Østøy island and Vealøs, which could in theory easily be turned into a graveyard for attackers. The problem was, the naval town had been alerted, but only partially mobilized. Parts of the officer corps was infected by the spirit of demoralization, and Horten lacked a war leader of Eriksen’s format. Rear Admiral Smith- Johannsen thought offensively, but was never backed by his commander, commanding admiral Henry Diesen, which too had been infected by the government’s indecisiveness. “I was ordered to rouse the engine as quick as I could, cast off from the dock, and keep my guns ready in the inner harbour if any vessel tried to enter”, reported the captain of the minesweeper Otra, Arne Dæhlie, who met with Smith-Johannsen at around 23. When the flow of information dried up and unsurety spread after midnight, the rear admiral chose a middle path. He sent staff chief Gunnar Hovdenak aboard the Otra and gave the order that the minesweeper was to reconnoiter the fjord. “We had not gone far before we spied a shadow”, reported Dæhlie, who turned on the searchlight and at once identified an incoming destroyer. It was Albatross, steaming in the fjord around half past two with the survivors from Pol III aboard. Dæhlie usually spent his days as a whaling inspector for the Ministry of Trade, and had, as a seaman during the first world war seen both ships being torpedoed and shipwrecked. As a resistance fighter, he would survive the Gestapo death sentence and some of the worst concentration camps in Nazi Germany, but as shipmaster, he never got along with Hovdenak. “The chief of staff ordered a boat on the water!” he wrote in a later report - with and exclamation mark. “This was swung out, but before we could do anything else, we had a searchlight in our faces, and the destroyer disappeared.”

Dæhlie turned Otra around and followed Albatross. Half an hour later, the minesweeper surprised Gruppe Hameln, who cut across the fjord toward Horten. “We chased after, still with our lanterns lit.” The searchlight was turned on again, and the vessels were identified as German. The following messages were sent to Smith-Johanssen at the Shipyard Gate. “Two destroyers and two minesweepers at Tofteholmen” (04.03) and “The observed vessels are German” (04.10). Hovdenak and Dæhlie did not choose the path of Welding Olsen, and did not challenge their opponents with warning shots. They abandoned the chase and turned north – toward Filtvet, where Hovdenak wanted to land to make a phone call. “The sentry boat is following us”, noted Captain-Lieutenant Strelow aboard the Albatross. But shipmaster Hans Wilcke aboard Kondor, who had formal command, chose to ignore their pursuer. The episode still had some effect. As Wilcke wrote in the war diary: “When the element of surprise was lost, we abandoned the original plan. There is now no way we can enter Horten harbour with the torpedo boats in front. The minesweepers with their low profiles are the only ones who can possibly slip unnoticed through the difficult waters.” Aboard the minesweepers, Lieutenant Gerd von Pommer Esche and Chief Mate Artur Godenau received the orders to go first trough the Vealøs gap with stoic calmness. The boats had Voith-Schneider propellers, and could turn on their own axis. But R-21 kept taking on water back aft after the collision with R-20 and requested that R-17 take the lead. “Approaching Horten from the north. A signal lamp blinks to starboard. I do not reply”, reported the thirty-seven year old Chief Mate, Artur Godenau, who belonged to the bedrock of experienced officers that built up the Kriegsmarine, and pressed his speed up to twenty knots.

The two minesweepers were observed by both the watchmen at Østøy island, the guards on Karljohansvern and by the crews aboard the Olav Trygvasson and Rauma, but audacity once again had its reward. Despite the attack coming towards them, Commander Trygve Briseid aboard the Olav Trygvasson chose to only fire a warning shot, and only half of Rauma’s crew were back from shore leave the night before. The first real shot did not fall before Godenau had reached the Koren dock inside the inner harbour and deployed his first land troops – right in front of a machine gun nest belonging to Horten anti-air squad. “The three soldiers seemed paralyzed”, wrote Captain-Lieutenant Grundmann, who stormed up the docks alongside Lieutenant Budäus and disarmed the soldiers, who did not gather their wits in time to open fire. “We ran forwards and captured a house with the rest of our team without meeting any resistance.”

In a few minutes, the 90-100 soldiers of the 163rd division had landed, and Godenau tried backing out. But aboard Olav Trygvasson, Commander Briseid’s 12cm guns had found their range, and two solid hits forced the chief mate to flee the burning R-17, just a stone’s throw from land. Half an hour later, the six depth charges aboard exploded with great effect. Facades and roofs were destroyed in a wide radius. Windows exploded and created panic among civilians and soldiers, who tried to escape the sudden catastrophe. “We let weaponless soldiers go, and cars carrying women and children were allowed to drive on”, wrote Grundmann. “Other vehicles were taken for our own purposes.” In the meantime, Pommer Esche had turned eastward and set R-21's bow on land behind the headland locally known as the Foxtail. Rauma had got her speed up and followed the minesweeper, firing their machine guns and the 76mm cannon on the foredeck. “Light hits everywhere! The freshwater tank is leaking, the radio destroyed, the rubber boat shot to pieces”, wrote the twenty-two year old German skipper in the war diary. He returned fire with two 20mm machine guns, which fired 320 gram projectiles at a rate of 200-300 shots per minute. Rauma’s wheelhouse was smashed. The skipper, Ingolf Winsnes, fell over with deadly wounds, his second-in-command was knocked out, and several others were wounded. A steam leakage reduced the vessel’s speed, but the helmsman managed to bring her back to the pier below Karljohansvern. The wounded were taken to the infirmary, but the lives of Winsnes and sailor Erik Jevanord could not be saved.

Aboard the torpedo boats Kondor and Albatross, maneuvering outside the inlet, the mood was damp. There were no messages from R-17 and R-21, but the sudden gunfire made Wilcke and Strelow fear the worst. While Kondor transferred her troop complement to Rau VII to make room, Albatross tried his luck in the Vealøs gap. But it was not Strelow’s day, and he had to beat a hasty retreat after a series of well-placed salvoes from the 12cm guns aboard Olav Trygvasson. “I was convinced I could not break through with only one torpedo boat that could only use its forward guns”, Strelow wrote. After a blind artillery duel across the harbour islands lasting half an hour, Wilcke made his decision. He took back on board his hundred soldiers from Rau VII and turned his course across the fjord towards Son. His radio message to Emden said it all: “Horten will not be conquered without substantial support.” When the badly damaged R-21 limped out from the Løvøysund strait, Albatross followed. The time was after 06, and the battle had lasted for one and a half hours. Barely two hundred lightly armed German soldiers had been landed in two places a couple of kilometers apart. But the groups were unconnected, and the ships who were to provide them with artillery support, had fled across the fjord.

In the stylish old Tårnegården villa in the area of Nedre Keisemark in the inner harbour, the Director of Naval Artillery, Ole Blom had been sleeping for about an hour when he was awoken by gunfire. He went out, and was eyewitness to the doom of R-17 alongside a group of frightened officers and civilians. “Suddenly, the burning vessel was tossed upwards. A huge fountain of fire went skywards. The vessel was split in two, the fore and aft sank a distance from the dock”, he wrote in a report some days later. The damage to the surrounding houses were massive, and Blom ran around, trying to ascertain the damages to Tårnegården. “I started sweeping away glass to make a path across the floor when I was surprised by 8-10 men who turned their guns on me and told me to halt”, Blom told. “An officer approached me. I was in uniform and he asked me who I was.”

The Commander had met one of Hitlerjugend’s ideological standard bearers, Lieutenant Kurt Budäus, who would later go on to found the Adolf Hitler schools, responsible for raising the children of the German elite in the ideals of eugenics, fanatical belief in Der Führer and other crazed Nazi doctrines. “We come as friends to aid you against the English”, Budäus declared piously. “These are strange signs of friendship”, Blom answered, pointing to the trail of destruction all around them. Budäus excused their behaviour, and got to his main message: “He asked if I could be so kind as to call the commandant on the phone and tell him that airplanes were coming to bomb us. If this was to be avoided, we had to surrender within half an hour so that he could radio the planes and stop the attack.” It was a monstrous bluff. Budäus had no radio and was totally cut off both from the squadron out in the fjord and from the airbases in Germany. Of the landing force, nine had been killed and several more wounded, and much of their gear had been destroyed by the fire aboard R-17. “Of effective weaponry, we had only the machine guns of our infantry troop”, wrote Captain-Lieutenant Werner Kimmerling, who led the twelve-man strong Sonderkommando Emden, who was targeting Jeløy island, but at the moment was stranded in Horten. “The rest of the men were mostly unarmed, poorly equipped and soaked to their skin. Most of the ammunition and the radio and medical equipment was lost on the R-17. We had around 30 rifles, pistols and hand grenades for a remaining force of around 70 men.” Blom phoned in vain to Rear Admiral Smith-Johannsen's office. But the Germans registered the panic and lack of resistance, and pursued their targets with one-eyed determination. When the city’s police chief came by unknowingly, his car was shanghaied by the landing troop. R-17's chief engineer, Captain-Lieutenant Erich Grundmann, who was the senior officer present, got in the car with Lieutenant Körner and forced the police chief to drive to the Shipyard Gate – while he himself held a white handkerchief out the window. In the meantime, Captain Kristian Fuglerud had taken up position around Tårnegården with 60 men with rifles and machineguns, while a further 80-100 men had reported for duty at the fortress proper. Faced with the white flag, they did not shoot. “I made it all the way to the armoury door and drove through two roadblocks without being stopped”, Grundmann wrote. “Here, a large group of senior officers was gathered, together with a well-armed force of soldiers. I estimated them at around 200 men, but they had little drive and gave an unwarlike impression. I asked to speak with the admiral.”

One of the decisive moments in Norwegian war history had arrived. The greying Smith- Johannsen with more than 43 years of immaculate service as a shipmaster, chief of the Admiralty staff and aide to the king sat down in the guardroom at Karljohansvern with a machinist from Kiel stoked by the fires of Nazi ideology and who demanded that he give up all he believed in. “I explained that Horten and Norway were taken by German troops. We wished for a peaceful occupation without the spilling of blood. I encouraged him to surrender at once, and gave him fifteen minutes to think it over”, Grunmann wrote. It was high stakes poker, and the thirty-three year old laid it on thick: “As soon as the fifteen minutes were up, we would launch a devastating barrage against the fortress and the vessels in the harbour. Furthermore, I told him that we had summoned a large quantity of bombers, who already were on their way.” The lie made an impression on Smith-Johannsen, who asked at once: “When will the planes arrive?” “They will be here shortly”, Grundmann answered. “That is why I can only give you fifteen minutes to think it over.”

The rear admiral said that he could not answer before he had consulted with his commanding admiral, Henry Diesen in Oslo, and Grundmann grudgingly accepted. “I reminded him that eight minutes had passed, and that the deadline closed in.” It took time to localize the general staff, who had left the Ministry of Defense on Myntgata street in the early morning hours and relocated to Smestad school on the outskirts of town. The torpedo specialist Diesen, who had just celebrated his 58th year, was exhausted from the night’s events and was seated on a wicker chair in the hallway, seemingly apathetic. “There is an overall feeling of defeatism and pessimism in the general staff”, wrote Lieutenant Høyer, who tried to report for duty. “I must say, it is not at all encouraging.” The time was almost half past seven in the morning. While Smith-Johannsen waited for Diesen to answer, Grundmann got – incredibly – a chance to gather some moral support by a phone call to Budäus, who was readying his men in Tårnegården for battle. “I gave him an overview of the situation, and said as loudly as I could – after the admiral had asked me to extend the deadline: Hold your fire, the negotiations are still underway!” The government had decided to mobilize, but Diesen backed away from fighting. He wiggled his way out of responsibility and refused to give Smith-Johannsen any clear advice. “I leave it up to your knowledge of the situation whether to give up the fight or not.” That was an answer that the demoralized rear admiral had no use for. The war had come with all its brutality and fearfulness, and blood had been spilled aboard his vessels – for the first time in the nation’s history. Faced with the threat of a destructive air attack with following civilian losses, Smith-Johannsen chose to accede to the demands of the brazen Captain-Lieutenant. “I could do nothing else, even if it was ever so hard”, he said later. The white flag was hoisted at Karljohansvern and aboard the vessels in the harbour. Soldiers and officers were disarmed and mostly discharged. Heavier weapons and machines were rendered temporarily useless while Budäus’ and Kimmerling’s forces took over all strategic positions. “The Norwegian defence was very weak – despite their superiority of men and equipment”, wrote Grundmann, who had waited through nail-biting minutes and had expected at any moment to be called on his bluff. “The amazement was great among the Norwegians at our paltry and mostly unarmed force. After the surrender, there was no sign of resistance. The officers became more friendly and accommodating, but also more depressed and nervous. The enlisted men brightened considerably once they understood they would be discharged.” Captain-Lieutenant Kimmerling, who later became an admiral in the Bundesmarine, was more reflected: “The main reason Horten, which counting the cadet school and the naval vessels had a garrison of more than a thousand men, surrendered to such a small and poorly equipped force, was of a psychological nature: A lack of self-confidence and indecisiveness among the Norwegians. They did not know the true strength of our forces, which we hid well, and were strongly affected by their losses, although few.” A correspondent from the newspaper Tønsberg Blad portrayed the feeling when he visited Horten a few hours later and saw the stream of humanity leaving the town: “Everything that can roll and carry has been mobilized for this train of despair which trails out of the town, towards Borre church and beyond. Trucks, buses and cars filled with people and their essentials are moving towards safer places. Bicycles and handcarts and children’s prams are brought to safety from the bombs that are falling or will fall. It is a grey army of despair that is moving out of a Norwegian city for the first time, bringing the tragedy of war and terror into our human lives.”

The capitulation of Smith-Johannsen had immediate effects on the defence of the Oslo fjord. At Rauøy fort, Major Hersleb Adler Enger had his crews rest in shifts and had made sure to bring up more ammunition after the squadron passed the frontal barrier earlier in the night. When he was told by telephone that foreign soldiers had landed at Engelsviken bay on the mainland, asking for the way to Rauøy, the alarms went off again. “One had to be prepared for a landing attempt, especially from the east side”, Enger’s report read. “Extra armed guards were posted, with orders to be on the lookout.” It was the minesweepers R-20 and R-24 with a landing force of 90 men under the command of Captain Franz Meng of the 163rd division who had gotten lost in the fog after leaving the Emden a few hours earlier. “It was hard to find the northern end because the beacons were out, fog, strong currents and nasty underwater reefs”, wrote the shipmaster of R-20, Lieutenant Jaeger pleadingly in the war diary. When the minesweepers arrived over an hour late, they were at once targeted by the 15cm guns on the fort. The hits came ever closer, and Jaeger moved away north before R-20 could take cover behind some rocks and could deposit Captain Meng and 44 men onto land. The force from R-24 joined the attackers, but Enger had acted quickly. The Northern battery saturated their landing zone in fire, and 100 men were put forward in a firing line, equipped with rifles and machine guns. “It was a little scary – unreal that we would be shooting at live people, but it went well after we fired the first shot”, wrote the signature 4530 – low in Tønsberg Blad. “Then it was almost like a firing range. The German soldiers crawled forwards between rocks and clefts in the mountain and looked like portrait photos.” (Meaning he could only see the upper halves of their torsos and their heads, like on a portrait) The two minesweepers had pulled out under cover of smoke, and Meng’s soldiers were trapped between the firing line and the beach. In the next hour, they fired 45 explosive shells, 2500 machine gun rounds and a lot of rifle shots toward the landing zone. Two Norwegian soldiers fell, and an unknown number of Germans. However, at the Shipyard Gate in Horten, Smith-Johanssen's subordinates were busy telephoning the news of the capitulation to his underlying districts. The rear admiral only mean that he had given up Karljohansvern, but when Commander Tandberg-Hanssen received the message at 07.35, it read as: “Hostilities ceased, stop firing.” The message was at once taken to mean that the whole district should lay down their arms, and was transmitted to a furious Major Enger at Rauøy. When the order was confirmed soon after by the chief of the outer Oslo fjord fortresses, Lieutenant Colonel Kristian Notland, Enger relented. A white shirt was waved around, and the fort chief climbed up to the roof of his command post and shouted through a megaphone: “Das Schiessen wird von uns eingestellt!” (We will stop shooting) It was all over at 08 hours, and a very surprised Captain Meng took over Rauøy fort. “As fort commander I would like to point out that Rauøy did not willingly surrender. It happened on orders by a higher authority”, an embittered Enger wrote in his report. “The fort could easily have continued the fight against the landed troops. However, we would not have been able to resist an attack by air. There were no bomb shelters for the men.”

A few nautical miles to the west, Chief Mate Rixecker aboard R-23 was in trouble too. The minesweeper was set to land a force of 90 men at Bolærne along with R-22, but they lost their way in the fog belt along the coastline. When Weser-time (04.15) had passed and Rixecker sighted land, he made a quick decision. He landed the force commander and 20 men to scout the area. They quickly found they were in the wrong place: Vallø - three nautical miles north of their wanted collection of rocks and reefs. It was too late to correct their mistake. The watchman aboard R-23 had just spied a submarine who was sneaking through the Torgersøy gap, a few cable lengths to the south. “R-23 firing in front of the bow. The submarine is diving”, the silent chief mate wrote in his war diary. It was rear admiral Smith-Johannsen's offensive vanguard that Rixecker had met, the submarine A-2 under the command of the chief of the First submarine division, Captain Thorvald van Severen Fjeldstad. “I jumped momentarily down into the tower, sounded the alarm to dive, and slammed the hatch over my head”, Fjeldstad wrote. He had been surprised by the two vessels close to the rocks and had made a fatal miscalculation. His mission was to defend the Oslo fjord, but he was mentally unprepared to fight. He wanted to save his five torpedoes, and did not man the 76mm gun on the aft deck. Instead, he tried to escape underwater. “Going downwards, I tried to re-find the boats and caught a glimpse of them before the periscope went under. They were maneuvering at full speed towards our position.” Rixecker had worked his way up the ranks since he had entered into the Weimar Republic’s navy as a sailor in 1925, and was of the hard core of experienced junior officers in the 1st Räumbootflotille - alongside Artur Godenau aboard R-17 and several others. He did not share Fjeldstad’s qualms. He left the landed troops to fend for themselves and sped towards the submarine. “R-23 attacking and throwing three depth charges”, he noted in the war diary.” Aboard A-2, the explosions shook them like the demoralizing blows from a fist. “The shocks in a medium like water are terrible, and cause many violent shakes and blows”, wrote Fjeldstad. “We stood in a terrible plume of water in the tower. The water poured into the switchboard, where it resulted in short-circuits and a fireworks of white flame.”

Chaos reigned on board, and the submarine broke the surface – only to be met with a hail of machine gun bullets. A new depth charge from R-22 ended it all. “Leakages were reported from the torpedo room down aft, where they soon stood with water to their ankles”, wrote the sub chief, who claimed A-2 was headed for disaster. “I decided to give the crew a chance, rather than aimlessly sacrificing the lives of 19 men.” Van Severen Fjeldstad surfaced and surrendered the submarine. “The commander asked for everyone to be put ashore so as not to endanger the lives of the crew”, noted a mildly puzzled Rixecker. “The demand was refused and the prisoners taken below deck.” After a short firefight with the sentry boats Oter 1 and Skudd 1, Rixecker made full speed south. The time was almost half past seven, and the attack on Bolærne was more than two hours delayed. But Major Fredrik Færden had been alerted by the explosions and opened fire with the fort’s guns at two thousand meter’s range. “The fire is precise”, Rixecker wrote in the war diary. “Boats and troops could be lost.” After two failed attempts, the landing was abandoned, and the minesweepers pulled back.

For some incomprehensible reason, Captain van Severen Fjeldstad and the three submarines of the First submarine division had been ordered to take up positions between Hollenderbåen and Fuglehuk, a good distance further south down the fjord. They were far from the German squadron, and it did not help that the skippers aboard the A-3 and A-4 acted without the will to fight and withdrew at the first sign of danger. “These two commanders must, in the opinion of this commission be criticized for passive behavior while operating in the Oslo fjord” read the statements from The Military Investigative Committee of 1946. Sure, the submarines were over 25 years old and unmodern, but they were equipped with five torpedoes each and represented Smith-Johannsen's primary offensive weapon. From around seven in the morning and close to noon, both Lützow and Emden lay quietly between Moss and Son while debarking troops and refueling the smaller vessels. For a daring sub skipper with intimate knowledge of the area, the risk would have been high, nut the chance of a decisive blow would have equaled it. Even the military commander aboard Lutzöw, August Thiele was confused and losing his will to fight. “The situation in the Oslo fjord seems very bad”, he wrote in the war diary sometime in the morning. “We have not had luck in any of our ambushes, and landings have met heavy resistance. If the situation is not clear by the end of the day, I will take Lützow and Emden back out the fjord.” The self-proclaimed squadron leader’s nerves were wearing thin, and a surprise torpedo attack on the two cruiser could easily have tipped the scales in favour of the Norwegians. But A-2 was knocked out, and A-3 and A-4 sought refuge in shallow waters among the reefs of the western side of the Oslo fjord – far away from the battle zone. The offensive weapons were gone, and from Germany, the bombers were coming.

Chapter 9

Oscarsborg lays down its arms

The Oslo fjord, Tuesday 9th of April 1940, from 08.00 till midnight As soon as the battle was over, Birger Eriksen and his men must have had a strong emotional reaction. The shots had been fired to uphold neutrality, and may have triggered something like a massacre – with the fear of the loss of maybe 2000 lives from the cruiser’s long and painful death pangs. The fires and explosions were followed by cries of fear, and from Nordre Kaholmen one could hear shouts for help from the hundreds of soldiers and sailors who fought for their lives in the icy water. The assailants had rightly gotten a taste of what they themselves had been prepared to do. But in a mentally and materially disarmed nation, who never before had experienced a military life and death struggle, one would need nerves of steel to handle the gruesome realities of war. For himself, Colonel Eriksen never described with a single word any eventual feelings he had when he saw Blücher capsize and go down through his binoculars at half past six in the morning, but one can glean much from what is unsaid. “The cruiser sank in a most pitiful and dramatic fashion”, he wrote four months after the shipwreck. “While it was on fire, it sank so deep so that the bow was down to the waterline. Then it slowly slipped over towards the port side, so that the ship’s side laid horizontally – and further around until the bottom was turned upward. Many people had gotten up on the bottom. The foredeck sank deeper, until only the three propellers were above water. There was a gigantic fire on board and in the oil floating around the vessel. The fire continued into a hundred-metre tall column of smoke long after the ship had disappeared.” Later, he added: “Some got ashore onto the Askholmene by swimming after having dived beneath the oil, but many burned themselves to death trying. Many of the dead, who later drifted ashore in their life jackets, were totally burned on their heads and necks.” Eriksen had halted the firing after the second shot and Lützow and Emden were retreating. “I asked myself later if this was the right thing to do, but I clearly remember my reasoning from those few decisive minutes: The fortress has stopped and destroyed those who tried to force past us. When the others turn and retreat, we have done the job of guarding our neutrality. Of course, it is unsure if any considerable result could be had by a few minutes’ further shooting. The vessels were soon lost in the fog. At Blücher’s doom alone, maybe 1500-2000 men fell.” Sergeant Ragnvald Rækken had a more prosaic explanation for the silencing of the main battery. Most of the untrained men had fled and refused to come back. “When we had delivered our first shot, we made ready for the next”, he told in an interview with the newspaper Hadeland in June 1945. “It went slowly since we only had four men to work with, while for a full crew we needed 23. The four had no easy task, but we finally managed to load another projectile into the cannon. To get it so far in as to make room for four powder bags of 15 kilos each, we had to use two men, instead of four. One man brought the one half of the powder charge, while I had to get the other half myself from the depot at the right side of the battery.” A shell exploded suddenly against the rampart, a few meters away. “At the explosion, a granite block laid as a parapet over the wall was thrown down into the battery passage. Sand and pebbles flew about me like a storm. A rock struck my cap, and I was pushed in the back so that I raved against the cannon. What could I do but get my cap back on, get over to the left side and finish loading.” When the 345-kilo shell was in place, it had without doubt taken more time than the 3-4 minutes that a complete and well-trained needed to reload. Blücher had glided out of their aiming traverse, and Lützow and Emden were heading out. The attack had been foiled. It was meaningless to continue the attack without any reasonable chance of an effective result – with weakened and partly traumatized crewmen. Rækken had clearly delineated his own view of the drama: “It was a terrible tragedy, and the fjord was filled with cries from soldiers swimming in the burning oil. But we had not asked the Germans to come here. The responsibility is their own.” In the torpedo battery, three new torpedoes lay ready in the tunnel to meet another eventual attempt to break through. In the meantime, Commander Andreas Anderssen had left his aiming tower and climbed an outcropping on Nordre Kaholmen along with Colonel Eriksen. “It had a gripping effect when the water reached the sea of fire amidships, and the explosions eventually died down”, Anderssen wrote. “We could hear clearly – despite the two thousand metre distance – the sounds of hissing and bubbling, mixed with the countless and terrible death screams when that irresistible fire chief, the Oslo fjord, closed slowly around the ship. It was a shocking tragedy to witness. We were though filled with gratitude that the cruiser was not headed for Oslo. Before the vessel had gone under, it had sent a lot of signals to the outlying ships. Now we waited for vengeance to strike us – and it did!”

A discussion was had about sending Kranfartøy nr. 2 to the wreck site, but above the clouds, the buzz of airplane engines intensified. It was Luftwaffe’s fleet of transport planes headed for Fornebu airport, and they prepared for readiness once again. “After convincing myself that no one had been killed or wounded from the warships’ firing, I ordered Lieutenant Bonsak to gather the men and fetch rifles with readied bayonets”, Captain Sødem wrote in his report. The recruits were mobilized and given 50 shots each. Some were accustomed hunters and sport shooters and were familiar with guns. Others had only been in uniform for eight days and had to be given a crash course in how to load and fire a rifle. “All my men seemed calm, and were very eager”, noted Ensign Ivar Lien, who was responsible for 2nd troop with orders to foil any attempts to land troops on the west side of the island. While they instructed and placed their forces, Eriksen moved into the communications centre to seek direct contact with his superiors. “Between 07 and 08 I tried in every possible way to get through to higher authority in Oslo, but in vain”, reported the fortress commander, who probably caught the news from NRK Radio, which repeated the news of the German landings and the cabinet’s flight to Hamar every fifteen minutes. While he waited for contact through the rising uncertainty and frustration, there came an unexpected call from the dejected rear admiral Smith-Johannsen, who told him that Karljohansvern had capitulated and that he in essence now was on his own. “I was connected to the Coastal Artillery office at around 08.30, who could offer no help. Attempts to reach the commanding admiral and Defense Ministry did not succeed.” The one who finally picked up the phone, was the chief of 2nd division, Major General Jacob Hvinden Haug, who was in the process of leaving Akershus Fortress and could offer little comfort. “He told me that Fornebu airport was taken, Kjeller destroyed, (another airport) Bergen taken, and that the top brass had left Oslo.” Eriksen explained his situation to Hvinden Haug and asked that sections of the Army at once were sent to gather those shipwrecked in Blücher and secure the eastern side of the fjord against a German advance from the south. The major general accepted the first request, but denied the second. “There are no disposable men to cover the flank.” Eriksen must again have felt the claws of isolation and disheartenment when he hung up. As he himself summarized in his taciturn way: “Status for the morning of April 9th is as follows: The top military authority has left Oslo. The city is taken by Germans who came by other routes than past Drøbak. Horten is overrun, and the fortress master – the admiral – put out of play. The fortress’ flanks were totally open to troops landing in Moss and Son. The anti-air capacity was totally inadequate.” On the Askholmene and on the rocks on the east side of the fjord, the situation was still critical. The swim had sapped the strength from most of them, and many had badly burned faces on account of the burning oil. “All of us had one intense wish: To lie on the finally reached Mother Earth without moving, seeing or hearing anything”, wrote Richard Daub, who had crawled onto the largest of the three islands, frozen and exhausted. “If the sailors hadn’t pulled us up by force and chased us forwards, we would have frozen to death in minutes.” A rude plank hut was found between the rocks that gave some cover to those with the worst wounds. Rittmeister Goerz and engineer Thannemann organized the gathering of driftwood and managed to light a fire so that they could dry clothes in shifts. Everyone who could walk, were commanded to march in a circle around the islet while they clapped and thumped on each other’s backs and chests. “Every step was pain”, wrote Daub. “At best, most of us had only stockings on our feet, and the ground was covered in sharp rocks and stamped snow.” There was no food or drink on the islets, but the collective movements helped. When the sun shone through later in the morning, the will to live returned. The broken longboat was repaired and shuttled across the fjord – first with the wounded, later with those who had the least clothes and handled the cold the worst. On the spit of land called Hallangstangen, Major General Erwin Engelbrecht had assumed command. Commander Woldag had broken down and was being taken care of by Kummetz and his closest officers. Some local fishermen had aided in the rescue work, and the division chief had taken a boat to scout out the land – with Willi Behrens as interpreter. “We discovered some houses, and the general decided to stay”, Behrens reported. “Ovens were lit and a room turned into an infirmary.” First Officer Erich Heymann registered a total of survivors on the mainland as 920 men, 753 were from Blücher’s crew, while 167 were from the Army and Luftwaffe – alongside most of the senior officers, who had jumped into the drink from the foredeck. “Some few died on land”, Heymann wrote. “The rest marched together to the houses Engelbrecht had discovered. Few had shoes. Instead we cut up the life vests to make feet covers.”

The first bombers began circling over Oscarsborg between eight and nine in the morning and quickly demonstrated that the Luftwaffe had total air hegemony. It was Emden who had begged for assistance in desperate radio messages in the crisis time of early dawn: Immediate destruction of the Drøbak area is demanded! The signal was received in the temporary HQ of Nicolaus von Falkenhorst at the Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg at 07.40. A few minutes later the first airplanes were leaving their bases in northern Germany. “The time must have been around eight when there appeared a plane that circled for a while, then disappeared”, Lien wrote. “After a while, an additional three planes appeared. They dropped one bomb each and left.” The introduction was a warning of what was to come, and Eriksen at once ordered civilians and soldiers into cover. “I got hold of an axe and broke the lock to the door that lead down into the tunnel depot” wrote rampart keeper Peder Salomonsen, who like many others lived with his family on Oscarsborg. The two islets (On which Oscarsborg is built, Kaholmene) were perforated by tunnels and storerooms which were quickly used as bomb shelters. Most of them were wet and dark and hewn from the raw mountain around them, but they were deep – and gave sufficient protection against the light airplane bombs used against them. “The explosions came closer and closer”, wrote Captain Sødem. “So as not to lose my entire crew in case of a breach, I ordered them to split up between the tunnels and to bring picks and shovels. A bomb blast could block an entrance and risk people getting buried alive.” It was a massive operation carried out by the Luftwaffe, and Heinkel 111 and Stuka bombers from the 4th and 26th Kampfgeschwader had more than 1700 raids against Norwegian targets. Exactly how many of those were aimed at Oscarsborg is uncertain. But there was probably dropped hundreds of 50- and 250-kilo bombs on and near Kaholmene in the space of ten hours. “It is impossible to say how many bombs that fell, but it is certain that it was at least 500”, wrote Colonel Eriksen, who moved from tunnel to tunnel with encouraging words. “One officer at Håøya island who had started counting the impacts, stopped when he reached 250 – because the bombs fell so fast he could no longer be sure of the count.” Between 50 and 100 persons had gathered at the torpedo battery. They were safe, but the repeated attacks was a test of their endurance. “Even though the roof is 10-15 meters of solid mountain, everything feels like it is ready to crash down at a moment’s notice – when the rain of bombs thundered across us”, wrote Commander Anderssen. “The whole island shook, and many times it seemed critical. Those were fearful hours. Women and children cried in fear, also because most of them understood that their homes were being totally destroyed. Many lost all that they owned.” The fortress itself was in remarkably good shape, and the three Krupp cannons in the main battery survived with barely a dent. The other buildings were razed to the ground. The timber-framed roof of the main fort, the old barracks and several smaller buildings went up in flames. The rampart keeper’s house, the commander’s villa and many other houses were totally or partially destroyed. Windows had blown out all over the island, pieces of stone and masonry were blown off, and the courtyard and parade grounds were pockmarked with huge craters. Everything was covered in a thick layer of grit, sand and ash. Duds made moving about dangerous, but miraculously, no one had suffered any serious injury of the close to one thousand people who sought cover beneath the earth from the rain of bombs. For Birger Eriksen, it became clear that the civilians and untrained crews could soon take no more. “Of course the entire crew had become very shaken in their improvised cover”, he wrote later. “What was most depressing of all, is that none of the rooms had proper doors. A bomb just outside could have killed a large number of people.” They fired at the airplanes with Colt machineguns set up in the howitzer battery on Håøya, and the two 40mm Bofors cannons on the mainland hammered the attackers as long as they worked. But the effect was small, and the gun crews had to hide in the woods later that morning so as not to be mowed down. “The German planes’ height made it impossible to fire on them since the angle was too deep”, reported the battery commander, Lieutenant Hans Sollie. “On the other side, the crew was totally unprotected from machine gun fire.”

South of Filtvet, Commander August Thiele was regaining his confidence after the demoralizing blows he suffered the same morning. Horten, Rauøy, Moss and Son had been taken, and 700 men under the lead of the later Knight’s Cross recipient, Major Hans von Poncet of the 3rd mountain division, had been landed and marched on the Østfoldbanen railway and the main road to Oslo. “It is really outside my remit to guide the debarked men from the Army”, Thiele noted, who was greatly bothered by the fate of Blücher. The flagship had fallen silent, and no one knew what had happened. He had personally stopped Möwe from going to the rescue and risked Hitler’s wrath – if he had made the wrong decision. “Blücher’s situation is still unclear” he wrote in the war diary around 08. He still would not send the squadron’s vessels through the Drøbak strait, but Thiele was a cynic, and made an alternative plan. Earlier that morning, he had captured the aging ferry Oscarsborg I, who he now forced to aid in landing troops at Son. He planned to put his own men aboard the ferry and go past the fortress in the hope of getting some answers. “Regrettably, I must abandon this plan since the steamer does not carry sufficient coal on board”, he noted after another discussion with Emden. A new opportunity arose when the small German freight ship Norden appeared in the battle zone some hours later, headed for Oslo. The skipper accepted the charge to reconnoiter the fjord past Drøbak - assisted by a junir officer and a signalman from Lützow. In the meantime, the air raids had started, and Oscarsborg was on fire. “I mean to fire upon the fortress with my heavy guns to ease the passage of Norden”, Thiele wrote, who brought Lützow in at 8000 meters’ range around 13’o clock. In seven minutes, they fired ten salvoes with the cruiser’s 28cm guns. In all, 27 heavy shells struck Kaholmen, which seemed to disintegrate into smoke and fire. Norden sailed on, and reported back half an hour later: “Blücher sunk by the Askholmene, probably following two torpedo strikes. Crew on the islands and mainland.” It was the first precise information of the flagship’s fate that reached the squadron. The message seemed to steel Thiele, who cast off all defeatist thought. “The air attacks have fundamentally changed the situation”, he wrote in the war diary. “The plans I laid this morning to move Lützow and Emden out of the fjord by cover of darkness are now permanently shelved.” There was still time to regain his honour, and Thiele decided to risk everything on one card. With Lützow and Emden as fire support, the torpedo boats Möwe and Kondor and the minesweepers were to strike Drøbak and take the recalcitrant gun batteries from land. “I mean to clear the situation with all available forces and go to the aid of Blücher’s crew.” After a short detour to Horten, the squadron steamed up the fjord for a second time, around 16. It was sunny and windless, and Lieutenant Gerd von Pommer Esche aboard R-21 once again readied his boat for battle. The little minesweeper had been travelling continually for 48 hours. It had collided and been shot up, but still held on. At 16.55 the order came: Battle stations! The breakwater and the picturesque villas of Drøbak loomed ahead. The landing force of 36 men held close together below deck.

Both on Kaholmen and on Kopås, the unrelenting bombing had gradually reduced both the senses and the morale, and few seemed to understand their acute danger. No one had gotten much rest, and there was little in the way of food service. The telephone lines had been cut at nine in the morning, and Oscarsborg was cut off from the outside world. The radios were on, but NRK remained silent. There were no news after 13. On his walk, Colonel Eriksen, joined by Captain Sødem arrived at the Torpedo battery, where his daughter Borghild and the family dog had been staying, seemingly untouched by the explosions. “The commandant was served a cup of black coffee in the hall”, wrote battery chief Anderssen. “After that, we sat for half an hour in the tunnel. When we noticed the bombing had stopped, we went down to the dock.”

At the Kopås battery on the other side of the strait, the watchman had observed both Lützow and Emden, which laid to at 8000-9000 meters’ distance, and the three smaller vessels, who snuck toward Drøbak close to the eastern side of the fjord. “Everything was made ready to fire in case of a new attempt”, wrote Captain Jul Enger in a later report. “But when the accuracy and effect at long range were unfavourable, I decided to wait until range was 6-7000 meters.” The real danger however, did not come from the two cruisers out in the fjord, but from the minesweeper R-21, approaching the Tollbodkaia docks. It was a threat apparently overlooked by Captain Enger – despite the fact that many had pointed out that he needed to guard against a landward attack. “When we approached the entrance to Husvik/Kopås, we expected to be halted by guards, but nothing happened, wrote the then-cadet at the War Academy, Reidar L. Godø in a story after the war. He and a schoolmate had taken the bus to Drøbak from Oslo the morning of April 9th to report for voluntary duty. But when the two youths arrived at the fort, the cannons were unmanned. The area seemed deserted, and they made their way to the inner part of the fort before they met anyone. “We were surprised to have gotten so far without being hailed, and we had registered that nothing had been done to observe or cover the accessway to the fort by land.” To buildings at Husvik had burned to the ground after the morning’s firefight, and the gun crews and hidden in the woods to take cover from the airplanes. “In short breaks when the bombing was at its worst, we once again manned the guns, since the German vessels were closing in” wrote Captain Klaus Nesse. “But when the bombardment once again was intensified, we drew the men back under cover.”

On the dock outside the Torpedo battery’s tunnel opening, Eriksen, Sødem and Anderssen also saw German ships approaching. The fortress commander never wrote down his version of what happened, but according to Anderssen, the mood had hit rock bottom. “The Kopås battery was probably intact. But the main battery had nearly no crew, and those few we had used in the morning, were spread across the fortress. We had no anti-air measures, had had no food or rest in over a day, were cut off from the world and had been exposed to intense bombing since early morning. The situation on the whole seemed to make any further fighting useless.” The commander probably did not disagree with that statement, but at the moment he was drawn to something else: If Vagn Enger opened fire on the cruisers, he feared terrible retribution – from Lützow’s 28cm guns and the Stuka bombers of the Luftwaffe. The effect of the heavy shells had been terrible on Kaholmen, but the men had been safe in the tunnels. Kopås had no shelters, and that put it at far greater risk. When he called over Sigurd Bexrud and asked the sapper to set up a Morse lamp, the following order was worded in such a way that it is one of the most disputed orders in Norwegian war history: “Do not shoot until further orders.”

On the other side of the strait, Captain Enger received the message with puzzlement and probably relief. “I pondered what it meant”, he later wrote. “If the fortress had been taken and only Kopås was still fighting, or if the commander wanted to wait until the vessels came closer. I signalled many times in reply, but no answer came.” The effect was catastrophic. For reasons it is not easy to see, Enger took the signal as an order to capitulate. He did not just not fire at the cruisers, he didn’t alarm the defense and ordered no resistance when Pommer Esche reversed his boat and laid to at the Tollbodbryggen dock in central Drøbak a few minutes later.

Lieutenant Eberhard Wetjen and Ensign Joachim Knecht were tense when they stormed ashore at the tip of the landing force of 36 men, mostly naval soldiers. But the nervousness was soon replaced by disbelief and amazement. “No shots fell”, wrote engineer Draudt in his report. “The city seems deserted.” The troop advanced northward in three lines and surprised the skipper and the 10-12 sailors sleeping on board Kranfartøy nr. 2. On their way to Kopås, they stopped a car containing the city’s police constable. “To protect ourselves against any shooting, we had the policeman walk in front. On our orders, he shouted into this for us totally unknown terrain that resistance was useless, as strong forces had surrounded the fort.” It was an unnecessary ruse. There were no guards, and neither officer nor enlisted men were keen to fight. Captain Enger and some of his closest subordinates met the Germans and surrendered their personal arms. “We could barely believe our own eyes when the woods awakened”, wrote Draudt. “First came two sections of 70-80 men, who were disarmed, while we posted ten guards nearby. We were even more amazed. More and more officers and soldiers arrived at such a pace that we barely had time to disarm them. Not a shot was fired. In all, we captured 19 officers, 30 cadets and 250 privates. A pile of ammunition, pistols, rifles and machine guns laid in front of us in the courtyard.” Commander August Thiele, who in the meantime had hosted an unwilling read admiral Smith-Johannsen aboard Lützow in an effort to use the district chief as a negotiator, reacted quickly when the news of the surrender reached him at 19. Kondor was at once sent through the Drøbak strait to save Blücher’s remaining crew from Askholmene, while Möwe hoisted a white flag to encourage Colonel Eriksen to follow Enger’s example. “Kopås and the Drøbak-side taken by the Germans. The Germans want a boat”, the battery chief Morsed to Kaholmen by German encouragement. Eriksen turned toward Bexrud: “Is it true?” “Yes”, answered the sapper. “Send back: Boat coming”, ordered the colonel and turned toward Anderssen: “You will go as negotiator.” It was a tough moment for the commander, who had hoped for another result. But with Kopås in German hands, the situation was hopeless. “Taking into consideration that the fortress’ most important fighting battery and the air battery had been taken and could be turned on Kaholmen, I found no purpose in continuing to fight”, he wrote later. “With the incomplete and shaken crew I had, resistance was no longer possible. I also took into consideration that all higher authority had been set out of function, and that Oslo already had been taken.” Anderssen, with Sødem at his side were welcomed aboard the Möwe by Lieutenant-Captain Helmut Neuss, who politely performed the ruthless Hitlerian message: They had come as friends, but the retribution would be terrible unless they ceased all resistance. Oscarsborg was to surrender at once without terms, Eriksen would promise to fire no more guns, and the German swastika was to be hoisted above the fortress. When the negotiators arrived with a five-man delegation of Germans fifteen minutes later, Eriksen proved a shrewd and stubborn negotiator. He gave his word of honour that there would be no more shooting, and confirmed that no mines had been deployed. But he refused to lower the Norwegian flag. “The negotiations on Kaholmen drag on”, Thiele noted in mounting irritation in his war diary. “Sailing into Oslo tonight no longer possible.” In the meantime, Kondor had picked up 267 survivors from Askholmene and thrown an improvised wreath over the shipwreck site. “The cook showed up with hot soup”, wrote Rittmeister Paul Goerz, who was among the last to climb aboard. “A bottle of Hennessy cognac was opened, which cheered us immensely.” They celebrated on board, but when the squadron passed Kaholmen at 09 the next morning, the Norwegian flag still flew, next to the German one – as a tribute to the fortress commander who dared to stand up.

This is a page from the Guard’s logbook at Oscarsborg from the 9th of April. The ink bottle spilled across the page when Moses opened fire.

Part IV

Chapter 10

Aftermath

Norway and Germany, 1940 – 1946 When Karljohansvern and Oscarsborg capitulated, the battle of the Oslo fjord had for all intents and purposes ended. Commanding Admiral Henry Diesen had manned up in Hamar later in the evening of April 9th and sent the following order: “The forts are to resist as long as they are able. Then the guns are to be disabled, and the forts evacuated. The vessels will damage the enemy as much as they can and then seek to get away – eventually westwards.” The order had come at least 24 hours too late, and could not raise the fighting spirit in the isolated forts on the west side of the fjord, who were continually threatened by German air attacks. Bolærne hoisted the white flag in the evening of April 10th, Tønsberg was evacuated April 12th, and Håøy and Måkerøya islands gave up April 14th - those two without having fired a single shot against the German troop transports streaming into the fjord.

Oslo had been under in German control since Colonel Helmuth Nickelmann of the 163rd division appeared at Akershus Fortress at lunchtime the 9th of April at the head of 400-500 men, who had been landed at Fornebu and had marched into the city centre without meeting any resistance. The division chief, Major General Erwin Engelbrecht, took over for Nickelmann when he arrived after midnight, still quite worn out, along with some of the other survivors from Blücher. Hvinden Haug had kept his promise to Colonel Eriksen and sent a company of Royal Guards to Hallangen under the command of Lieutenant Axel Petersson. The Guards captured Engelbrecht, Kummetz, Woldag and around 550 survivors and interned them at Søndre Hallangen farm. But by 18.30 Petersson received new orders from Haug to pull out and leave the Germans to their fate. An escape was at once organized, and Engelbrecht and several top officers were on their way to Oslo at around 23 in a hijacked bus. Others got to Oslo by themselves. “To keep warm, we started jogging along the road”, told Lieutenant Jürgen Bieler, who had wrung the cold water from his clothes and escaped the Guards. “We had not run far before we were passed by an elderly couple in a car going the same way. We stopped them, and to the man, who spoke English, we told of our meeting with Norway and that we had rooms at the KNA Hotel. The couple were very obliging, and drove us all the way to the hotel.” Lützow, Emden and Möwe docked at Vippetangen docks at 10.45, Wednesday the 10th of April. Emden delivered 102 survivors from Blücher with burns, 8 with frostbite and 15 men with broken bones or gunshot wounds to the local hospital. “The rest of us went to Akershus with Engelbrecht, where we dressed in uniforms put together from different storehouses.”, wrote Rittmeister Paul Goerz, who was suffering from massive back pains after his meeting with the armoured hatch that he had pried open in a panic. While Commander Woldag was sent back to Berlin by plane to report directly to Hitler, the rest of the survivors were split into groups and placed in the temporary bridgehead defence – as soon as they reached Oslo in buses and cars. Major Lehmann-Bärenklau was made City Commander, navigation officer Hugo Förster was made Harbour Chief, while Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Bloomfield was made temporary commander of Oscarsborg, at the head of 50 men, later reinforced with a further 100 men under Blücher’s radar officer, Lieutenant Captain Karl Knappe.

Bloomfield had been an engineer officer aboard the cruiser, and would spend the last three years of the war as an assistant to the German naval attaché in Tokyo. He had a diplomatic nature, and always acted correctly. “Bloomfield showed a remarkable sensitivity to our situation and was most gracious”, Eriksen wrote, who had secured maximum rights for his men in the capitulation agreement. “There was no friction, and we tried to work together to make the houses livable again and smooth over the worst of the bomb craters.” Many had been anxious that the Germans would want to take vengeance on the artillerymen that sank the pride of their fleet, but the fears were unfounded. “A swarm of sailors arrived on land the 10th of April”, reported Ensign Lien. “They didn’t care about us, but crawled everywhere, took photographs and talked. They gaped when they saw the Eastern battery and laughed that these museum pieces could have stopped Blücher. The Eastern battery consisted of Palliser guns from 1858, see pic below.) Their laughter stopped dead once they saw the Main Battery. Ach so, came the sound.”

One of the 1858 Palliser guns at the Eastern Battery, the “museum pieces”.

As soon as the guns were readied for an eventual British counterattack, the sailors were put to work removing the corpses from the cruiser. “Many of the dead floated in the water”, wrote Lien. “They were burned and covered in sticky oil. An officer with a protocol noted the data from their dog tags, and the bodies were put in the main watchhouse.” The dead were buried at a formal ceremony at Oslo’s Western Cemetery Tuesday April 16th, attended by Colonel-General Nicolaus von Falkenhorst and the new Admiral Norwegen, Herrmann Boehm, who had flown in from Hamburg some days earlier. The honour guard consisted of members of the Heer and men from the light cruiser Emden. The survivors of Blücher were denied, much to their disappointment. Boehm had in his wisdom found that there were not enough “uniform uniforms and equipment”.

Most of the enlisted men at Oscarsborg were discharged in the first few days, while the officers were interned and released in May and June. Colonel Eriksen stayed at the fortress until the Norwegian flag was taken down on April 21st. He moved the flag and the signed photograph of King Haakon to his new home in Drøbak. Lieutenant Johannes Jønland left the fortress on the 11th of May as the last man. Oscarsborg was in German hands. The summer and fall was a depressing and difficult time, and the thought of what had happened on those April days gnawed on the minds of many. After their victories on the continent, Nazi Germany seemed invincible, and the Luftwaffe bombers dropped their deadly cargo over London every night. Nygaardsvold’s government had reestablished itself in England, while the Administration Council in Oslo sought ever more compromise with Hitler’s man, Josef Terboven. (The Norwegian Reichskommissar, the most hated man in Norway. Probably still is, alongside Quisling and his sadistic friend, the torturer Henry Rinnan.) There had been friction between the central officers at Oscarsborg during the battle, and commander Eriksen had had to straighten up the chief of the Torpedo Battery, Commander Anderssen, who had demanded written orders before he fired, minutes before Blücher arrived. Eriksen had also pushed aside the chief of the Main Battery, Captain Magnus Sødem, to take personal command in the decisive moment. While Sødem moved back to his farm in the Odal valley, Anderssen went back to his job as pilot boat alderman in Drøbak, where he could hardly avoid meeting the retired Eriksen and the third of the key personnel, Captain Vagn Jul Enger, who had resumed his practice as a dentist. We don’t know what passed between them, but on the 12th of September 1940, Anderssen sat down and wrote an agitated letter to Sødem: “You will be surprised to receive a letter from me, with whom you have had nothing to do excepting those few minutes the 9th of April. The thing is, would you please send me an account of what happened on the evening that day from the time that You and the commander came over to the Torpedo battery as elaborately and correctly as you can.” Sødem had drunk coffee together with Eriksen and Anderssen in the battery tunnel and since followed the commander as a negotiator on board the Möwe. Suddenly, it was of “great interest” to piece together a chronological timeline of the events which led to the surrender of the fortress. “And especially what result we came to in our improvised war- council which we held on the hill at the torpedo workshop. This is the most important part, and if You remember the timing of the signals from and to the Kopås battery.” He added in a conspiratorial tone: “I give no times of my own so that they will not confuse you, when it is possible they are wrong. I hope You are well given the circumstances.” It was an extraordinary request, one that expressed that there had been a new crisis of confidence between the fortress commander and his closest subordinate. Anderssen did not explain why Sødem’s aid was important, but in a later letter it came to light that he – and possibly Enger – had clashed with Eriksen in Drøbak about what had happened in the minutes before the capitulation. “The discrepancy is huge!” wrote Anderssen. “Eriksen affirms – even in his report, which neither myself nor Enger has seen or been asked about – that he would have fought on even the next night, if Enger (the Kopås battery) hadn’t surrendered too early.” In his report, which he sent to Rear Admiral Smith-Johannsen in August, Anderssen and Enger’s experience and skill were highly praised, but the events of the evening of the 9th of April had been glossed over. “Husvik was assaulted in the evening by German troops coming from land”, Eriksen had written. “At the same time, a torpedo destroyer came up the Drøbak strait with a negotiation flag. Captain Enger signalled that Drøbak and Kopås had surrendered to the Germans, and that the destroyer wished for a boat. I sent out a boat, and a German Lieutenant-Captain came ashore under a flag of negotiation to treat with me.” Eriksen did not criticize Enger’s actions, but used his surrender as the main argument for why he himself had given up. The Germans could shoot straight into Oscarsborg from Kopås. Therefore he had found it “senseless to continue the battle, which could now only lead to major loss of personnel.” It was this portrayal from the fortress commander that had angered Anderssen and Enger and triggered the letter to Sødem. They meant that the opposite had happened, and that Eriksen had decided to surrender Oscarsborg in a war council outside the torpedo workshop before Kopås surrendered – with Anderssen and Sødem present, and sapper Sigurd Bexrud as witness. “We saw German vessels landing troops at Oljemøllen. After reviewing the situation, we had a war council, You, me and the commander up by the Torpedo battery workshop”, Sødem wrote in his response to Anderssen. “What we said to each other, I cannot say word for word, but the result of our discussion can be summed up in the following points: 1. The fortress has no air cover, and cannot fight against the German airplanes. 2. The batteries cannot be manned since the airplanes will shoot down every man. 3. All connection to the outside world has ceased. 4. Since we have no minefield, we cannot stop the new German vessels. 5. The destruction is great across all of the fortress. The combat worth of the crew is zero. Most of them were in the battery all night. No one had had any food, and the continual violent bombing had made them jumpy and nervous. 6. A continued resistance with no weapons on our side would have led to unnecessary loss of life. 7. The Germans could land troops and drive to Oslo when we had no covering sections on land. We therefore decided to treat with the Germans. At around 18.30(?) the commander signalled to the Kopås battery: Do not fire until further orders. This was received and accepted. Just after, we saw that the Kopås battery was taken by the Germans.” Sødem had messed up the times and didn’t explain why the order had been worded so strangely – if Eriksen had meant that Kopås was to surrender as a result of the decisions of an informal war council. Anderssen paid no heed to the inaccuracies and wrote back: “After those notes I have added to several other officers’, I believe that Your noted time is around one hour too late. Besides, these times do not matter as much as an agreement of what happened up at the workshop. You see how it is, and how important it is that the very inaccurate description of our conclusions at the time are put down hard.” In a meeting between Anderssen, Enger and sapper Bexrud, Sødem’s version was polished and machine-typed and deposited for later use. “We believe the resumé is as accurate as possible”, Anderssen wrote to Sødem in January 1941. “All of us four will have to close ranks when we get the possibility to speak of this later.”

It was not only among the Norwegian officers that sparks flew. At a party, the noble Lieutenant-Colonel Horst Freiherr von Buttlar-Brandenfels, who had become operations officer of Gruppe 21, had let slip strong belittling remarks about Commander Woldag and Blücher’s efforts at Oscarsborg. “By remarks from differing members of Gruppe 21’s staff, I have understood that among some in the Heer there circulates false, and to the Navy, very damaging perceptions of how Blücher and Gruppe 5 was led the 9th of April 1940”, wrote the proud Commander-Captain Kurt Nieden in a letter to admiral Boehm after a visit to Oslo in the summer of 1941. Von Buttlar’s sarcasms had an operational undertone. “In future combined operations, the relations of command must change”, he had said. “The moment a ship loses the capability to maneuver, leadership must at once be passed to the army chief.” The Nazi officers of the different arms of the military spent as much time fighting each other as they did the enemy, and Niedens icy report shook Naval leadership in Berlin to the core. On closer inspection, it was shown that Von Buttlar built his statements on a series of shipwreck stories entered into Gruppe 21’s war diary, and had from there found their way to the Army command at Zossen. The reports had been written by rittmeister Goerz, lieutenant Bieler, captain Heil, Willi Behrens, Kolbjørn Johnsen and several others from the 163rd division and Propagandastaffel Norwegen, and aimed withering criticisms at the disposition and performance by the Navy. It had been a merry madness to send Blücher in front through the narrow strait, and the officers and sailors on board had no idea how to manage an emergency situation. There had been no life-saving materiel for the Army and Luftwaffe soldiers, and the sailors had apparently been preoccupied with saving themselves than with saving the passengers they had on board. “It was conspicuous to register that the sailors apparently had no idea what to do”, reported Bieler, who was Colonel Buschenhagen’s aide and enjoyed great trust among Gruppe 21 staff. “The sea officers acted singly, which again gave the impression that leadership had ceased to exist.” “I did not observe a single effort from the ship’s leaders to save the crew or the passengers after the torpedoing”, added Kolbjørn Johnsen, who was of Norwegian heritage and had been promised a role in press censorship. They were hard and unfriendly words, and brewed a storm of feelings among the naval officers. Hatred was especially pointed at Paul Goerz, who in a highly critical, but fanciful and bragging report had made himself out to be one of the great saviours of the shipwreck. Commander-Captain Nieden had been, together with the Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris, one of the heroes of the cruiser Dresden’s battle with the British in the South Atlantic during the first world war, and had angrily sought the rittmeister at his stylish home in the neighborhood of Grünewald in Berlin. “Goerz is a very calm person, who weighs his words carefully”, Nieden wrote after his visit. The Rittmeister had been discharged because of the back injury he suffered on board the Blücher and had resumed his post as director of Blaupunkt. He had wilted much since those furious days in Oslo in the spring of 1940. “He struggles to remove the sting from the criticism he has levelled against the operation and the ship’s commanders.” Before that, First Officer Heymann and Chief Engineer Thanneman had interviewed between 100 and 150 of the surviving crewmembers for use in the report of the wreck and the reconstructed war diary. They now collected an additional 23 witness statements which were meant specifically to kill any criticism. The conclusion was the same as in Thannemann’s report: It was a conflux of unfortunate events that led to the sinking of the cruiser, especially linked to the power outage and lack of water in hoses and pumps. It was correct that the crew lacked training, but that had not caused the shipwreck. Despite it all, they had worked tirelessly and purposely, with a few exceptions, and many had given their own life vests to soldiers who could not swim. Finally, it was the war leaders that had decided to send an unfinished ship into combat as part of a greater strategic assessment. Implied: The responsibility belonged to Hitler. Any further criticisms therefore had to be addressed to Hitler personally, and that was something the Army was free to do – if the officers still wished to complain.

For himself, Commander Heinrich Woldag was no longer able to answer his critics. He had reported to Hitler and Grand Admiral Rader at the Rech Chancellery and was to travel from Kiel early Tuesday morning, the 16th of April, to attend the funeral for the fallen. But the plane, a Ju 52, which was to bring Woldag to Fornebu airport, had crashed in the Oslo fjord under unknown circumstances – not far from the site of Blücher’s wreck. Everyone on board disappeared. All that was found drifting in the fjord was a collection of private letters written by Mrs. Heymann to her husband and given to Woldag – much to the horror of the First Officer. “I can only repeat what I said earlier: Commander Woldag showed himself to be a fearless and brave leader in the battle, and was a role model for his men to the last.”, wrote Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz, who refused all criticism point blank – including suppositions that Woldag fought with Major General Engelbrecht on the bridge. “His calm and security never wavered.” The shipwreck did not hold back Kummetz’ own career noticeably. He was appointed as Cruiser chief and was senior commander of the most important operative unit of the Kriegsmarine in the last years of the war – the first battlegroup in the Alta fjord, comprised of the battleships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. But Kummetz was unlucky and lost both ships – without them getting any results. He was deemed unfit for service in the Bundesmarine and lived on after the war as a bouncer boss in a gambling casino in Bad Dürkheim. He died in the autumn of 1980, 89 years old. Neither did Freiherr Von Buttlar suffer unduly. When Major General Bernhard von Lossberg was fired in the autumn of 1941 as the operational leader of the OKW by Hitler personally, Buttlar was given the job. Over the next years he became one of the central staff officers of the Wehrmacht. Several of the leading officers from Blücher served on submarine duty. Many of them fell – among others, duty officer Werner Czygan (captain, U-118), first artillery officer Kurt-Eduard Engelmann (captain, U-163), third artillery officer Georg Hagene (captain, U-1208), and adjutant Freiherr von Freyberg (captain, U-610). Navigation officer Hugo Förster, who steered the ship through the fjord, got one of the saddest destinies. When depth charges hit U-501 on his first tour of duty as submarine commander, he threw himself aboard a Canadian corvette in a panic. his own surviving crew smeared him as a coward, and he took his own life when he returned as a freed POW in the winter of 1945. The war correspondent Richard Daub, who praised Hitler’s war of conquest with a series of reports from the Norwegian campaign, turned around and became a vocal opponent of Nazism after the war. “The ship, filled to bursting, was chased against the cannons of the coastal fortress and was destroyed.” he wrote in 1955, in the first critical news article about Blücher’s downfall. “The cannons were well-known among all the professionals of the navy. The helpless cruiser became a victim. The whole business was mad. It was directed by Hitler.”

The peace came in 1945 after five tough years of war – with a bitter settlement with those many who betrayed them. All officers were suspended in August, pending a review of their efforts and attitudes. The suspension did not include Colonel Eriksen and Commander Anderssen, who both had retired and stayed in Drøbak during the war. It was obvious to most that Oscarsborg’s heroic and lonely struggle deserved the highest honours, and Naval High Command had nominated both Eriksen and Anderssen for the War Cross with sword, the highest military honour that could be given. “Under these circumstances, when the general situation otherwise seemed unclear, Colonel Eriksen showed excellent judgement, responsibility and a resolute performance as a leader, as well as personal fearlessness in war” read the nomination from the Defense Ministry. “He personally oversaw the leadership of the fortress’ main battery from one of the traverses on Søndre Kaholmen.” Anderssen was praised for “cold-bloodedness, skilled and well calculated leadership of the torpedo battery.” The royal familiy had stopped to rest at Sæhlie farm while fleeing Oslo the 9th of April, and had been served lunch by Kristiane Eriksen and her sisters. The colonel was granted an audience at the Royal Palace in connection to his medal ceremony, but Anderssen could not join him. He had suffered a stroke and died, the second day of Christmas 1945. Beneath the surface, friction still continued, and as early as the end of April 1940 the rivalry reached the ear of King Haakon VII personally. It was chief of staff Gunnar Hovdenak, who had left Otra at Filtvet the night of April 9th and apparently thought Eriksen a bit too uppity in a phone call later that morning. “I forgot to ask more questions, which undeniably crowd around me in afterthought”, Hovdenak wrote in a personal report to the King. Why only three shots (sic)? And why didn’t Kopås do more damage? It must be admitted that it is mainly by the virtue of the torpedo battery that the attack was beaten back, while the efforts of the artillery must be seen as mediocre at best.” In May and June 1945, Lieutenant August Bonsak and Sergeant Ragnvald Rækken had let themselves be interviewed in the press, and with little thought and low accuracy had almost claimed that it was only thanks to them that Blücher was sunk. Eriksen had gripped his pen in wroth and rebutted their story with formulations seen by many as too crass. It was he, as commander who had taken all the decisions – from judging the range to the order to fire. “In case any serious wrong had been ordered or done, the reproach would naturally have fallen on the commander – by rights”, Eriksen wrote with no understanding of psychological finesse. “But then, must not also the main part of the accolades go to him, if it is found that the leadership and coordination of the war effort led to a fortuitous result?” It is possible that Eriksen prepared for a larger showdown that he expected to come – after the fight with his subordinates in the autumn of 1940. Vagn Jul Enger and Magnus Sødem had been arrested alongside 1100 other officers in August 1943 and had spent the last two years in the POW camp Schildberg in Poland. His main opponent, Anderssen, had passed away. But when Enger and Sødem were called in front of the Military Investigative Committee in the winter of 1946, they brought the unified statement of the supposed war council that had been held outside the torpedo workshop that dramatic afternoon on the 9th of April. When Eriksen and Enger were questioned by the Commission the 8th of April 1946 – six years to the day after the events – the disagreement was total. The colonel denied there had been a war council at all. He held to the explanation that Oscarsborg had to surrender because Kopås had been taken, and that the controversial order about not firing had been sent to save the crew. “That is nonsense”, opined Enger. “After what has been told to me, the surrender of the fortress was not a result of the taking of Kopås. The decision was made at that conference (war council) that was held before the Germans made it to the Kopås battery.” It was a dramatic confrontation. The man who had just been awarded the War Cross with sword, was accused of lying by his own subordinate. The surprising thing is that Enger was believed by the Investigative Committee, who did not make any inquiries of their own. The coordinated statements from the autumn of 1940 were accepted. No other witnesses were called, except for sapper Bexrud, who by all accounts had been present at the meeting in Anderssens home when the differing witness statements were sewn into one combined document, with all present contradictions and all its ambiguity. Why had Eriksen not called on his closest associate, communications chief Unneberg, if he really wanted a war council? At what time did the different conversations take place? Had they talked together at first without making a decision, as some recalled, so that it was really two different conversations at two different times? Had Eriksen been on his way to the main battery to prepare for combat after the message had been sent, as Bexrud claimed? Was his recounting of the events therefore correct – and not that of the four others? And why was the order worded so strangely – if Eriksen really had meant for the fortress to capitulate? There was a long line of unanswered questions that the Military Investigative Committee did not bother to try to find any answers to – despite the fact that the chairman, Erik Solem, was a Supreme Court justice, and would hardly have accepted preapproved witness statements of such a kind that had been laid before the Committee in his normal line of work. The conclusions of the Committee were murderous to Colonel Eriksen: “The Commission is of the decided view that Captain Enger’s, Captain Sødem’s and sapper Bexrud’s statements are correct”, it said in a letter to the Navy dated the 12th of June 1946. “It has to be seen that the commander, before the surrender gave such an order to the Kopås battery, which had performed admirably and still was fit to fight: Do not fire until ordered. The circumstance being that the battery having received this order, led them to being captured by the enemy. The Commission must therefore conclude that the commander had already given up the fight when he sent his order to the battery.” There was no mention of the lack of mobilization of the guard companies Enger commanded in Drøbak or Skiphelle, nor of the total lack of guards in the battery itself, which had been pointed out by many. Instead, the attention was paid to the lack of fire from the main battery towards Lützow and Emden - after Blücher had passed beyond targeting range. “The Commission finds it conspicuous that the German vessels following the Blücher in the first attack were not fired upon by the Main Battery on Kaholmen, but accepts the commander’s explanation that this was impossible due to the age of the cannons and the lack of skilled crew, who were strongly affected by the firing.” The assessment did not include a single word of praise for the singular efforts of Colonel Eriksen – at a time when he, as senior officer was absolutely on his own and held the fate of the country in his hands. On the contrary, the Commission chose to publicize its arguments in a rare press release – with the following conclusion: “About Oscarsborg, the Commission is of the opinion that there is no reason to pursue any legal liability around the fighting at Oscarsborg and the following surrender at the time that it happened.” Not one word about Eriksen’s courage, not one word about his pivotal significance – only discreditation and vilification built on a razor-thin examination. No reason to pursue any legal liability. The Commission had spoken. The first and greatest heroes of the resistance had been publicly executed.

Epilogue Oscarsborg, from the war to our own time

Colonel Birger Eriksen’s effort cannot be overstated – even 70 years after the dramatic battle between Oscarsborg and Blücher. When the shots fell at 04.21, Commander Woldag gave an immediate order to go at full speed forwards. In the engine room, Chief Engineer Thannemann had readied the turbines for 31 knots, which would have taken the cruiser to Akershus Fortress in less than an hour – if Eriksen had declined to fire. Major General Engelbrecht’s troops would have stormed onto land between 05 and 06 in the morning and taken central Oslo by surprise – in the same pattern that repeated itself in Drøbak and Horten. At that time, the President of the Storting, Carl J. Hambro was still busy organizing the evacuation of the political elite by a special train that was set to leave the Eastern Railway Station at 07.15, one and a half hours later. It would have been far too late. The Royal Family, the Cabinet and the members of the Storting would have had no chance to escape, the gold reserves of the Norwegian National Bank would have been lost, and the demoralized officers of the General and Naval staffs would highly probably have been arrested at the same time. In the disarmed and non-mobilized nation, any further resistance would have been useless. The battle would have been over before it had even begun. “The political ramifications of the stopping of the German Oslo Group at Oscarsborg, was that it was possible for the king, the cabinet, the Storting and the higher military command structure to leave Oslo in time and get to safety in other parts of the country”, wrote Lieutenant-Commander Erik Anker Steen in his seminal work Norges sjøkrig 1940 – 1945. (Norway’s maritime war 1940 – 1945) “Because of that, the state apparatus had freedom to act, and meeting those conditions meant that Norway and her allies could take the fight to Germany from the first day.”

The more grotesque and shameless does it appear, the treatment given to Eriksen by the Investigative Committee of 1946. The commission excused much of the passivity and defeatism that was the hallmark of many officers in and around Oslo, but hung the greatest hero out to dry – as a sort of shabby person that should praise the Lord and his circumstances that he escaped law and judgement. The Commission’s behaviour can hardly be seen as anything but a personal and political act of vengeance, staged by persons and milieus no longer identifiable. Many of those who returned from foreign countries would rather forget the weak efforts of April 9th and disliked being overshadowed by the aging colonel in Drøbak. His clear and concise criticism of the lack of mobilization and the government’s failed policies did not gain him any mercy among the ruling circles that wanted to overlook the sins of the Labour party and avoid a reckoning of the Nygaardsvold government. Just in that moment the fortress commander struggled to stand up, the political fallacy was clear to all. While the bombs rained down upon Kaholmen, the government – thanks to Eriksen – reached Hamar in a terribly poor state. According to Hambro, Nygaardsvold was “physically broken”. He had cried and begged the President of the Storting to take control of the government. “It had made a terrible impression on him, that which had happened. It was as if something in his life had collapsed. He had really believed in the will for peace among men, and in words spoken. He did not believe he could go on, for all had been snatched away from beneath him.” The Cabinet had manned up to take the fight forwards, but it could not undo the wrongs it had committed. The lack of will to invest in the military, the basally defeatist attitudes and their unwillingness to mobilize until it was almost too late, made the youths who enacted their new policies in the field faced far worse odds that they had needed to. The indecisiveness, the lack of responsibility and the totally inadequate preparations had shown themselves on the morning of the 9th of April, when the German attackers quailed and commander Thiele wanted to flee the fjord. If the government had mobilized with full power when the messages came in from Storebælt and Kattegat in the previous days, much could have been different. If Read Admiral Smith-Johannsen had chosen battle instead of surrender – even with the meagre forces he commanded – and sent his submarines and torpedo boats to Son, it could have made a difference. Hiter’s nerves were highly strung, and Thiele was deathly afraid of losing the Lützow - ex-Deutchland – with all that would entail of negative propaganda. It would not have taken much before he had stuck his tail between his legs and slunk back to Denmark. As long as the Luftwaffe held aerial superiority, the Norwegian losses would no doubt have been great. But a mobilized and battle-ready army would have had good chances of fighting off the small forces that had been landed, and lacked both food, ammunition and heavy equipment. Bolærne held the German transport fleets at bay until the 11th of April, despite the fort being alone and isolated. The German plan was extremely risky. It opened military opportunities for the defenders, but that presupposes a will to fight at the top level – and that was totally absent when all was decided. A setback in Oslo – in addition to the problems faced by Dietl in Narvik - could have spoiled Hitler’s plans of conquest and changed the outcome of the war. At least it would have given Hitler’s opponents in the Wehrmacht courage to act – as the whistleblower Hans Oster had hoped. With the tyrant gone, the world would have been a different place. It was not to be, but that is no fault of Colonel Eriksen’s. He dared to stand up against overwhelming power in immaculate calmness – in a situation where many others failed. That is what makes him one of the great role models for coming generations, who, faced with his example will be forced to think: Would we have dared to do the same?

Thanks for reading! I exclude the two appendices, because this is quite enough. They are about the development of the cruiser ships 1890-1940 and the history of Oscarsborg. Hope you enjoyed it, and please give me feedback if you feel like it.