Hitler’s Pre-Emptive War: The Battle for Norway, 1940 Henrik Lunde (general ebook reader txt) 📖

in Narvik and there was no indication that their forward progress would slow. The British authorities had finally become alarmed. Churchill writes, “It would be a disgrace if the Germans made themselves masters of the whole of this stretch of the Norwegian coast with practically no opposition from us in the course of the next few weeks or even days.”36 This was written before the Germans captured Mosjøen. Since then, they had captured another 70 kilometers of coastline and the British commander at Mo reported that it was militarily unsound to hold that town. According to Ironside, Churchill’s own feelings about further commitment of significant ground forces in Norway without adequate air support is partially to blame for this situation. He writes on May 2:

We had a peaceable Chiefs of Staff meeting and Cabinet too. So far Winston has not troubled us very much. He delivered a long tirade and then said that we had been right in recommending that we did not put ashore a large army in Norway. He forgets what he felt so passionately a week or so ago.34

Allied operations in Norway were hamstrung by lack of air power from the very beginning. One aircraft carrier was kept on duty in the Narvik area but it proved inadequate for the task. The British began the construction of an airfield at Skånland but it never became usable. There were Norwegian airfields at Bardufoss and at Bodø but the British were slow in making them operational. They had been in the country almost a month before they decided to use Bardufoss. It took some time to clear the snow from the runway and it was not in operation until the end of May. Survey teams were sent around to other airfields such as the ones at Bodø and Mo. Although quick actions were called for, reports were submitted and decided on in a fashion more appropriate to a peacetime environment. This was no way to counter the tempo of German operations.

The Germans captured Værnes on April 10 and employed a large Norwegian work force to clear the snow. The airfield was operational by April 12 and reinforcements began landing the following day. OKW stressed the need to establish landing fields along the route of advance to support operations. An airfield at Hattfjelldal, southeast of Mosjøen, was ready for use by late May as a refueling point for aircraft returning from Narvik and the nearly completed airfield north of Mo was captured when Mo was evacuated.

Colonel Dowler and Brigadier Fraser discussed the problems of reinforcing the Mo area with General Auchinleck and they described the situation there as becoming critical. Auchinleck decided to change Mackesy’s plan to send the 1st Irish Guards to Mo. Instead, Brigadier Fraser was ordered to take the battalion to Bodø. He also announced that he would send South Wales Borderers to the same location. He reasoned that it was not possible to supply the force by the mountain road over Saltfjell since it was still closed by snow. Mo was at the end of a long fjord and Admiral Cork was reluctant to supply the forces there since ships would be exposed to air attacks in confined waters. Auchinleck directed Fraser to hold the Bodø area “permanently” and to try to establish contact with the forces in Mo “if he could.”35 Moulton’s statement that the intent was to send the 1st Irish Guards and 2nd South Wales Borderers by road from Bodø to Mo is therefore somewhat misleading.

In a letter to General Dill on May 13, Auchinleck announced that he intended to give up on the use of the Independent Cos in a guerrilla role. This is an interesting statement since he had never used them in that role. He stated that he intended to coalesce them into a light infantry unit under Gubbins and place the whole force under Brigadier Fraser‘s command. The inevitable outcome of the decision to send Fraser to Bodø was to give up Mo and to surrender another 150 kilometers of excellent defensive terrain to the enemy. The decision left no British combat forces in the Narvik area. Operations in that area became a joint Norwegian-French-Polish effort. Operations in the south became a British-Norwegian effort. There continued to be no unity of command in either area.

Misfortunes continued to plague the British. They decided to send the 1st Irish Guards to Bodø in the Polish transport Chobry. The Norwegians had suggested that the troops be transported in fishing vessels to reduce the exposure to German air attacks and to avoid navigational mishaps in the treacherous approach to Bodø. This advice was rejected according to Kersaudy. The ship was attacked by a German aircraft when it reached the southern tip of the Lofoten Islands at 0015 hours on May 15. The regimental history states that three Heinkel aircraft carried out the attack and Moulton implies that there was more than one aircraft. It has since been established that only one aircraft was involved in the attack and that it dropped its bombs during its second pass over the ship. Auchinleck’s biographer writes, “There was more than a suspicion that there had been a leakage of information before the ship sailed.”39 This is another example of the unfounded accusations that did so much to poison the relations between the British and Norwegians. The Germans would surely have sent more than a single aircraft if they had known about the ship and its cargo.

The bombs hit the transport amidships. The explosion killed the battalion commander and most of the senior officers. The ship was on fire and began to sink. In an outstanding example of the discipline in the British Navy and among the Guards, 694 men were successfully transferred from the sinking ship to the escorting destroyer Wolverine while another escort, the sloop Stork, remained nearby to protect against further air attacks. The transfer was accomplished in 16 minutes. The battalion lost all its equipment along with the only three British tanks