The German Invasion of Norway. Geirr H. Haarr
Commanding general, Generalmajor Kristian Laake (from 1933), and commanding admiral, Kontreadmiral Henry Diesen (from April 1938), both of whom reported directly to the defence minister, were largely political appointments having been given their offices because the government knew it could trust their loyalty and subordination to political decisions.60 Before becoming commanding general, Laake had led the preparatory work for the Defence Act of 1933, and there would be no better man to carry it through, cutting the Norwegian defence forces to the bone. Laake and Diesen must take responsibility for the failure of the armed forces to optimise the use of the resources made available to them and for not taking a more active role towards the politicians when it became clear that not even the minimum obligations of the Defence Act would be followed. Both accepted that the government had to take ‘economic considerations’ and expressed their opinions through budget proposals and occasional reports, but neither man was prepared to take individual initiatives on a scale required to rock the boat. They believed the ‘prescient Foreign Office’ would initiate necessary precautions in due time, if needed. Neither man ascertained whether the time it would take and the resources needed to increase the strength of the Norwegian defences were appreciated by the government. In 1945, Laake told the Investigating Committee that he believed the ‘initiatives taken during the autumn of 1939 were adequate [as] the government counted on England and assumed it would never come to actions of war on Norwegian soil. Should a German attack occur, England would help reject it – and versus the British, one should not fight.’
Birger Ljungberg, Norwegian defence minister from 1940. (NTB/Scanpix)
Commanding General Laake was nearing retirement. His health had started to fail and the 55-year-old Oberst Hatledal, Chief of the General Staff, troubled by the situation, took on more and more of the tasks and responsibilities of the general. It appears that Ljungberg did not appreciate this and a fatal gap in communication opened up between the General Staff and the minister.
Between the army and the navy, there was a fundamental disagreement on the assessment of threats and tactics to be applied. Hatledal as well as Oberst Otto Ruge, inspector general of the army, assumed a potential attacker would have clear military objectives – naval and air bases or iron ore. Contrary to Koht and the Foreign Office, Hatledal and Ruge believed that the main threat to Norway would come from Germany (and Russia in the north). Britain would, in all likelihood, respect Norwegian neutrality, but attempt to tie the country as close as possible to their economic warfare and not accept any of the other powers utilising the neutrality for its own purposes. A full-scale occupation of the country was not envisaged, as Ruge later openly admitted. When the grants for the military did start to rise, large-scale combined field exercises were organised in south-west Norway in 1937, 1938 and 1939. The exercises were intended to test the defence against an expeditionary corps that had landed between Kristiansand and Stavanger, moving towards Sola airfield. Naturally, numerous flaws and inadequacies emerged and it was clear that it would take years before the Norwegian defences could adequately meet a real threat. Above all, tactics and mobility needed to be improved and new weapon systems against aircraft and armoured vehicles were desperately needed. Demonstrating such shortcomings had undoubtedly been part of the exercises, but there is no record of this being explicitly presented to and understood by the government.
The navy was involved in the exercises, scouting, protecting convoys and acting as opponents. Chief of the Admiral Staff Kommandør Elias Corneliussen argued, with support from fellow naval officers, that the scenario for the exercises was unrealistic as long as the Royal Navy dominated the North Sea. In a newspaper interview in January 1939, Commanding Admiral Diesen held that he considered a war between Britain and Norway improbable, and hence a German intervention in Norway unlikely. ‘To attack Norway one needs supremacy in the North Sea – but if one has, there is no need to,’ he argued – tacitly implying that the threat to Norway indeed was from Germany, but held in check by Britain’s naval strength.
Ruge, on the other hand, predicted that under certain conditions Britain could become engaged elsewhere, creating a situation where Germany might seek to improve its position. The modernised Luftwaffe was a far greater threat to British naval power than before and might achieve at least temporary supremacy, covering the transport and landing of German troops on the Norwegian south coast. This would eventually provoke a British response, he wrote, but ‘. . . British intelligence may fail, or British hesitation may miss the moment of opportunity. In any case, we must be aware that the powers at war will not assist us out of mere sympathy, bur consider their own interests. We shall have to bear the brunt of the first attack alone.’61
The commanders expected the government to keep them informed of the development of the international situation. The government, however, expected the commanders to keep them informed of the military situation and of any shortcomings in the ability of the armed forces to sustain the neutrality. Neither happened. Diesen and Laake never had adequate insight into the government’s thinking regarding the international situation and the threats to Norwegian neutrality. The politicians never understood the mobilisation apparatus, its terminology or inevitable disruption of everyday life. Important intelligence and assessments were not disseminated, far less discussed between the military and civilian authorities. After 1 September 1939, the commanders were not called to the government on a single occasion to discuss the political and military situation – before 8 April – and there is no evidence to suggest the Ministry of Defence sought to improve the situation. The threat analysis from the General Staff, later shown to be very accurate, was ignored.
Nygaardsvold and Koht most probably believed that the already mobilised forces were adequate to handle the neutrality and that the defence minister was taking care of military matters in a satisfactory manner. Koht later admitted his poor knowledge of the armed forces, but claimed that it did not matter much as he left this to the defence minister. His actions do not always support this claim, though, and on several occasions there was direct contact between Commanding Admiral Diesen and him, sidelining Ljungberg. Koht believed that his communication with the ministry of defence was good, as ‘all kinds of information’ was forwarded and ‘the members of the government met at least three times a week,’ but there is no record of interaction, joint analysis or assessment of the information; far less of ascertaining that the actual state of the defences matched the situation. ‘Neither of the powers have any unsettled business with Norway’, said Defence Minister Monsen in the Parliament in March 1939. At the same time, Koht argued that the purpose of the army and navy was ‘not to wage war, but through all possible means keep us out of it’. Neither position was revised until it was too late.62
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Winston is Back 63
In September 1939, Norway was given little consideration in the British War Cabinet for the conduct of the coming war. The sympathies of that country’s government and people would, according to Minister Dormer in Oslo, ‘favour the British cause, to a greater extent perhaps than in any other neutral country’. The only real concern was that the Scandinavian states might not actively join the blockade of Germany.64 For First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the ‘thousand-mile-long peninsula stretching from the mouth of the Baltic to the Arctic Circle had an immense strategic significance’, and severing the import of iron ore to Germany from Scandinavia, particularly the portion that went through Narvik, became a focus soon after his arrival at the Admiralty. Some of the senior staff there advocated ‘a division of destroyers in Vestfjorden’ as a convenient tool, even if this would challenge Norwegian authorities and naval forces. Others, like C-in-C Nore Admiral Drax, argued repeatedly for minefields. Churchill was at first against ‘any drastic operations like landing forces or stationing ships in Norwegian waters’, and instructed his staff to assess the option of severing the Leads by laying minefields ‘at some lonely spots on the coast, as far north as convenient’.
On 19 September, Churchill for the first time drew the attention of the War Cabinet to the issue of Swedish iron ore to Germany. He fully supported the recently initiated negotiations for chartering the Norwegian merchant fleet, but urged diplomatic pressure be applied to halt German ore