Hitler Ahoy: The Third Reich's Surface Fleet
History of Naval Warfare, Part 14
When the Second World War began in September 1939, levels of preparedness varied widely across Europe, both across and within various leadership groups and institutions. War was met by the French and British with a general mood of grim resignation and by the Germans with a curious mixture of aggression and foreboding, while Poland saw its initial mood of punchy defiance and determination to defend itself melt in the face of an overwhelming German maneuver scheme and the Wehrmacht’s deadly new tactical package. Arguably, however, the military institution that was the most unprepared for this new war was neither the Polish, French, or British armies, but Germany’s own forgotten service arm: the navy.
The Kriegsmarine (War Navy) of the Third Reich was a curious institution rife with contradictions, resource wastage, and strategic confusion. Naval leadership nurtured ambitious dreams of a formidable Atlantic surface fleet, with little sense of either how such a grand fleet could fit into the timetables of German foreign policy, or the requisite material base to build it. There are few equivalent examples of such a yawning gap between military ambitions and reality: while the Kriegsmarine touted the famous “Z-plan” to construct a fleet of over 700 ships, capable of defending fortress Europe against the British (or American) navies, the German Navy in fact began the war with only a handful of capital ships, and its most famous operations generally involved only a single vessel, or at most a pair, desperately running for dear life.
In many ways, the German surface fleet became something like the perfect black hole for resources. In the prewar years, it began a nominally ambitious building program which was still in its infancy when the war began. Naval planners were explicitly preparing for a mid-century war, with construction programs targeting fulfillment in 1948. Consequentially, the navy was entirely unprepared for war in 1939, and the surface fleet never threatened to fulfill any meaningful strategic function. Yet the scale of the building program was sufficient for the navy to siphon meaningful financial and industrial resources from the ground forces and the Luftwaffe. This was an impressively titrated level of wastage: naval expenditures were large enough to weaken the other arms of the Wehrmacht, but too late and too little to make the navy into a useful arm in its own right. Furthermore, wasteful investments in surface ships, particularly capital ships, materially weakened the one element of the Kriegsmarine that did have a strategic function: the U-boats. The result was a force expensive enough to cannibalize the rest of the Wehrmacht (and itself) but far too immature and small to do anything useful on a strategic scale. In the one German campaign where the navy did play a pivotal role, the limited fighting destroyed most of the surface fleet.
Little wonder, then, that the German surface fleet features sparsely in popular histories of the war. Perhaps the only strong impression of the force is the 1941 chase of the Bismarck - often somewhat shakily labeled as a German “super battleship”. The infamy of the Bismarck is probably fair, simply in the sense that her short service life was undoubtedly exciting, but her strategic impact was essentially null. In ignoring the Kriegsmarine, however, one ignores other important questions, like the tactical lessons derived from the sea war in Europe, and strategic questions of resource allocation. The fact remains that in 1939, on the eve of war, the Kriegsmarine received a surge of funding so that Germany’s naval expenditures were, temporarily at least, the highest in the world - larger even than self-evidently naval oriented powers like Japan and Great Britain. Years into the war, the navy continued to absorb hundreds of thousands of new personnel, even as it languished strategically. An obvious question emerges: what was it all for?
A Dream, a Plan, and a Folly
Like virtually all aspects of the interwar German state, the Reichsmarine (State Navy) was constrained by the Versailles Treaty, which limited personnel and vessels. The Germans were allowed six pre-dreadnought battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo boats. Submarines were forbidden. On the personnel side, the navy was capped at just 15,000 men - a paltry total which was particularly strained because this sum included not only fleet crews, but also coastal installations, signaling and communications, repair and basing, administration, and the naval academies. When the treaty provisions prohibiting a German air force were taken into account, the result was a technologically primitive force (lacking modern battleships, naval aviation, and submarines) with bare bones staffing, suitable only for low intensity coastal defense.
Enter Adolf Hitler and the German rearmament program, which began in 1934. Like the other armed branches, the Reichsmarine (formally renamed the Kriegsmarine in 1935) moved to take part of the rearmament bonanza from the very beginning, and already in 1934 Hitler and Erich Raeder (head of Navy Command) had agreed that long-term expansion of the fleet would have to take place in defiance of British opposition. Like the broader German rearmament program, however, the fleet buildout took place in a complicating milieu of resource constraints, competing strategic priorities, and efforts by the British to make reasonable accommodations to integrate Hitler’s Germany into a stable European order. In the case of the navy, the latter took the form of the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement, through which London unilaterally (that is, without consulting France) loosened the Versailles limits and allowed Germany to built out a tonnage equivalent to 35% of the Royal Navy.
The 1935 Naval Agreement is frequently maligned in the historiography as an archetypical case of appeasement, with the gullible British accommodating Hitler’s rearmament by greenlighting Germany’s fleet expansion. This is deeply unfair, and ignores a broader effort by the British to use naval diplomacy to secure the Royal Navy’s supremacy. The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty and its addendums had already codified capital ship ratios with the Japanese, and analysis provided for the Admiralty projected that allowing Germany to build out 35% of British tonnage would preserve a narrow superiority for the Royal Navy over the combined German and Japanese fleets: that is to say, it would protect a British advantage in both European and Asian waters and preserve the two-power standard.
More broadly, the British were attempting to safely navigate a period of strategic vulnerability - a fact that accusations of “appeasement” frequently fail to appreciate. Economic depression had wrecked much of Britain’s shipbuilding industry and created a strong impetus to control costs. Combined with the naval treaties of Washington (1922) and London (1930) this had pushed out plans to replace extant British battleships until 1936 at the latest. The delay in the construction of new generation battleships was particularly important, because it prevented Britain from continuing the policies of the late Jackie Fisher (died 1920), who had pursued British naval supremacy at the turn of the century through a program of technological superiority. Fisher’s policy had been to secure British advantage by leading the world in the construction of the newest and most powerful ships (beginning with the Dreadnought), but this approach was obviously impossible in the early 1930’s because economic conditions made it impossible to push up the construction of a new battleship class. Therefore, the British were obliged to pursue a strategy of quantitative balancing (carefully titrating the number of equivalent battleships), rather than the more costly policy of qualitative superiority.
The overarching British goal continued to be the preservation of superiority over the combination of Japan and whichever European navy happened to be the largest, and naval diplomacy seemed to offer the cheapest way to do this. When Hitler demanded tonnage equivalent to 35% of the Royal Navy’s, ostensibly under the pretense of near parity with France, this seemed like a convenient opportunity to co-opt Germany into Britain’s larger policy of titrated supremacy, as it did not fundamentally alter British fleet requirements. In short, the 35% ratio promised to satiate German rearmament goals by allowing them parity with the French without forcing the British to embark on an accelerated (and costly) building program of their own. This is why the strongest advocates of the 1935 naval agreement were not the politicians and diplomats (the traditional villains of “appeasement”) but the Admirals.
Even allowing for a modest German buildout, the gap between the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy was bound to be colossal, and raised questions about what, exactly, the Germany Navy was for. A 1936 study from the Reich fleet department concluded that a naval war against Britain was “hopeless”, and a more formal assessment from Naval High Command the following year concluded that the German Navy might, at some unspecified later date, be able to win a war against France and the Soviet Union (particularly with Italian help). The study argued, unhelpfully, that war with Britain was unlikely and therefore did not need to be planned for. This was a clear case of simply wishing away an unpleasant scenario, which Hitler doused in cold water when he informed Admiral Raeder that France and Britain were the most likely enemies in any future war. This warning prompted the fleet department to conduct a new study to determine the requirements for a war with Britain (the very thing that they had just concluded was impossible and unwinnable), the results of which eventually became the basis for the phantasmagorical Z-plan.
One important conclusion of the Kriegsmarine studies was the idea that a fleet slanted towards cruisier warfare would be crucial in any future conflict against the British. This would require faster, longer ranged ships which would, if at all possible, be pre-stationed in the Atlantic at the outbreak of war to threaten the sea lines of communication and supply to Britain. In theory, this would both strategically compromise Britain and force them to loosen their blockade (redeploying ships to the Atlantic to hunt down the cruisers).
The provisional final goals (and the basis of what would eventually be known as the Z-plan) implied a considerable naval construction project. Raeder’s initial design called for 10 battleships, 15 “pocket battleships” (essentially a heavily armed cruiser, or battlecruiser), 5 heavy cruisers, 24 light cruisers, 36 ultralight cruisers, 8 aircraft carriers, 249 U-boats, 70 destroyers, and 78 torpedo boats. As formally adopted in the Z-plan, the surface fleet was to comprise at least 230 surface vessels plus many hundreds of submarines. While this is sometimes cast as some sort of German master plan for naval domination, it in fact reflected strategic confusion of the highest order.
The emerging naval plan was disordered and confused in virtually every dimension: strategic, operational, temporal, industrial, technical, and diplomatic. To begin with, the Z-plan is often expressed as Germany’s plan to “compete” with the Royal Navy, as a sort of revival of Tirpitz’s dream from bygone decades. In fact, Raeder pointed out to Hitler on multiple occasions that even the full expansion plan would still not provide a fleet capable of winning a naval war against Britain, and he belatedly and half-heartedly suggested pivoting more heavily into submarines. Hitler, however, insisted that any military confrontation with Britain would be far off. He even explicitly told Raeder that there was no risk of war with Britain in a meeting on August 22, 1939, scarcely a week before the invasion of Poland. The completion objective for the Z-plan was all the way out in 1948 - far too late not just for the start of the world war, but the ending as well.
The picture that emerges is one of absolute strategic schizophrenia, and nearly total disconnect between the naval authorities and Hitler’s foreign policy and war aims. Raeder was thinking of a fleet buildout over the course of nearly a full decade, with a construction program that was mired in delays. When war began in 1939, there were just five capital ships, 7 cruisers, 21 destroyers, and 57 U-boats in service. Fleet command had begun with the assumption that a proper naval war against Britain was unwinnable, only to be told that they had to plan for one anyway. In response, they spit out the monstrous Z-plan, which required hundreds of vessels built over the course of a full decade. This plan could only even be discussed because Raeder, somewhat shockingly, believed Hitler’s assurances that there was no immediate risk of war with Britain. When the war was sprung in September 1939, the Kriegsmarine was left holding the bag: ambitious plans, expensive orders, strategic confusion, and only a handful of ships.
Above and beyond the problem of paltry force generation, however, the Kriegsmarine had also run into major technical difficulties. The plans for cruiser warfare against the British required ships with both speed and exceptional endurance, which the Germans hoped to achieve through the use of diesel engines. Diesel powerplants with the performance required for heavy cruisers and destroyers, however, were not yet available, nor was it clear how the enormous fuel demands of the navy could be met. Naval studies calculated that, after the completion of the full construction program in 1948, the fleet would require 2 million tons of diesel and 6 million tons of fuel oil annually. This was a whopping 1300% of the Reich’s total production of diesel in 1938, and 1600% of its fuel oil output. Even if the Reich’s economic plans achieved their goals and exponentially increased output, the navy was planning to consume the Reich’s entire output of fossil fuels twice over every year.
The result was a nesting doll of planning failures. The Z-plan, while monstrously ambitious, would still yield a fleet that was too small to wage a successful war against the Royal Navy, as Raeder admitted to Hitler on multiple occasions. These inadequacies turned out to be irrelevant, because war came almost a full decade before the navy expected it. Plans for cruiser warfare required diesel engines that were not available and could not be fueled, powering ships that could not be built.
The real kicker, however, was that in 1939 Hitler - reacting to Raeder’s complaints about shipyard delays - promoted the Z-plan to the highest industrial priority. This made an immediate and material impact on the readiness of the German ground forces for the war that was about to start. Steel rations to army production were cut dramatically, precisely as the ground force was expanding and preparing for action. In 1939, after Hitler pushed the navy to top priority, the German Army was forced to scale down production of the MG34 machine gun (cut by 80%), the 10.5cm field howitzer (by 45%), and the Panzer III and IV tanks (by 50%).
The abrupt priority shift towards naval construction occurred at the worst possible moment on the German strategic timeline. Shipbuilding, with its long timeframes and technological bottlenecks, could yield nothing in the short term - the lone exception being submarines, which could be built faster, but of course Raeder was not focused on U-boats at this time. Thus, despite accelerating the naval program, all the active ships at the start of the war had been laid down in 1935 or earlier. However, the naval program did succeed in cannibalizing the ground forces, siphoning off critical industrial resources. 1939 was the worst time for such a reordering of industrial priority, and it ensured that Germany began the war with hundreds fewer tanks and howitzers, and not a single extra ship to show for it.
Arctic Hinge: The Norway Campaign
The Wehrmacht’s operational agenda in the opening eighteen months of the Second World War was dizzying and unprecedented in its scale, its variety, and its successes. The two “big” campaigns - Poland in 1939, France and the Low Countries in 1940 - conventionally receive most of the attention for obvious reasons, but they were hardly the only combat tasks on Germany’s ambitious early war schedule. Beyond shattering and overrunning the powerful neighbors on the Reich’s eastern and western flanks, the Germans also found time and resources for a Scandinavian campaign, the dispatch of an expeditionary corps to North Africa, the overrun of Yugoslavia and Greece, and an invasion of Crete, which was undertaken exclusively by airborne forces. Little wonder that this early wave of German conquests is frequently depicted in documentaries and books as a sort of amorphous expanding blob: a wave of red that simply rolls outward and blankets Europe. Then and now, it seems as if the Germans were everywhere, practically all at once.
Given the incredible tempo and reach of Germany’s early war successes, the defeat and occupation of Norway and Denmark frequently become little more than footnotes. The occupation of Denmark, in particular, was essentially bloodless and occurred essentially overnight. For our purposes, however, Germany’s Scandinavian campaign in 1940 is particularly interesting for several reasons.
Obviously, an invasion of Norway required the involvement of the Kriegsmarine and was therefore fundamentally different from Germany’s overland campaigns in Poland, France, and Yugoslavia. What is often not understood, or at least unappreciated, is that the campaign in Norway was, rather uniquely, driven by the Navy, with Kriegsmarine leadership - particularly Admiral Raeder - providing much of the strategic rationale for Norway and arguing strongly in favor of the operation. Furthermore, the success of the Norway campaign is somewhat of a paradox. Germany’s ability to launch a successful amphibious invasion of Norway shocked the British, who presumed that their overwhelming naval superiority would make such an operation a nonstarter. Yet Germany, despite this terrible British overmatch, did manage to launch a combined sea and airborne invasion of Norway right in the face of the Royal Navy, including at far flung places like Narvik, more than a thousand miles from Germany’s meager naval bases. This was a remarkable accomplishment for an overmatched Kriegsmarine, and yet the effort nearly killed it: the losses suffered in the invasion of Norway wiped out virtually all of the German surface fleet.
Northern Europe, although a relatively ancillary and forgotten theater of the war today, featured prominently in the minds of both German naval officers and economic planning. To begin with, the Scandinavian countries form a sort of strategic hinge: abutting both the Baltic and the North Seas, they formed a geostrategic intersection between core maritime spaces of Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In the prewar years, relations between the states of Northern Europe and the great powers were generally regulated by treaties and nonaggression pacts, and in fact Hitler expressed a preference for their continued neutrality, but it was obvious that this could be subject to change under wartime conditions. The general point, however, is that there was not some particular German desire to overrun Northern Europe, either out of a mania for conquest or some strong urge to absorb racially-affiliated “Nordic” populations. Rather, German policy was driven by essentially rational calculations, many of them made by the leadership of the Kriegsmarine.
In the closing years of the prewar period, during the acceleration of German rearmament, naval leadership conducted a series of studies assessing the prospects of a war against Britain and the Royal Navy. Some aspects of these studies dealt with the material requirements of the fleet, as has been previously stated, but the navy also tackled more concrete operational questions. One fundamental conclusion of these studies was that Germany had an urgent need to rectify its maritime geography. The 1938 “Study of the Tasks of Conducting a Naval War” concluded: “As long as… the military advantages of the British geographical position cannot be overcome, we must not expect to achieve lasting and decisive success.”
The critical point was Germany’s utter inability to project naval power outward, due to both her lack of overseas bases and Britain’s ability to jam the exits of the North Sea. Raeder gently encouraged Hitler to use diplomacy to acquire bases abroad that could support German cruisers, but he also raised the question of:
What Wehrmacht operations could improve the starting-position for a decisive naval war in the oceans of the world, in view of the fact that political successes in peacetime do not give us the chance to acquire and develop bases beyond the North Sea and the Baltic.
He concluded, in the end, that “The occupation of the French Atlantic coast or of central and northern Norway would solve this problem.”
The Kriegsmarine was therefore already thinking about ways that army operations could improve the fleet’s prospects for escaping the “wet triangle”, as the limited extant German littoral on the North Sea was called, by capturing forward bases in Norway and the French coastline. Navy leaders continued to insist that Germany had no chance of outright victory in a naval war against Britain, but they stressed that, if promising basing could be acquired, the fleet might have the possibility of “tackling certain military tasks with good prospects of success” - in other words, waging interdiction warfare against Britain’s trade and protecting vital internal lines of the German space.
The latter was particularly important in light of German dependence on Swedish iron ore. Prewar economic assessments noted that Germany imported some 9.1 million tons of iron ore from Sweden, of which 74% was exported through just two ports: Lulea, on the far north of Sweden’s Baltic coastline, and Narvik, in the far north of Norway. Due to the sparse rail connectivity to northern Sweden, where the highest quality (that is, the highest iron content) ore was mined, it was considered impossible to fully replace the seaborne exports with overland transportation. In total, Wehrmacht High Command (working with the economic authorities) estimated that in wartime, Germany might be able to import 3 million tons of lower quality ore mined in southern Sweden, along with perhaps 2.5 million tons of higher quality ore which could be shipped by rail from northern Sweden. This left, at bare minimum, a shortfall of 3.2 million tons, which was deemed “not acceptable for the German war economy in a war lasting significantly longer than six months.”
The only way to make up this shortfall, then, was to ensure that the seaborne exports from Narvik and Lulea remained accessible. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 seemed to safeguard Lulea by establishing non-aggression in the Baltic, and an October memorandum from High Command noted optimistically of the Scandinavians:
Barring completely unforeseen developments, they will probably remain neutral in future. The continuation of German trade with these countries seems possible even in a long war.
The ultimate impetus for the German occupation of Denmark and Norway, however, was to come from neither Hitler nor the Wehrmacht High Command, but from the Kriegsmarine and its commander-in-chief, Admiral Raeder. Motivated by a desire to both carve out a role for the navy in the short term (participating in a Norwegian operation) and acquire bases in Norway to support future operations, Raeder began a full charm offensive on the Fuhrer to persuade him of the necessity - if not of immediately invading Denmark and Norway - of at least preparing for such an operation. Fortuitous events helped Raeder’s cause. Most famously, a February incident in which the Royal Navy’s HMS Cossack boarded the German tanker Altmark in Norwegian waters did much to convince Berlin that Norway was becoming sympathetic to the British. If Oslo was going to allow the Royal Navy to operate in Norwegian territorial waters, could the ore shipments from Narvik ever be truly safe?
Many are aware of the Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling, whose collaborationist government led his surname to became a colloquialism for a collaborator or traitor. Fewer are aware that it was Admiral Raeder, of all people, who introduced him to Hitler on December 12, 1939. It was Raeder who bent Hitler’s ear for months about the economic necessity of guaranteeing the flow of Swedish iron from Narvik, and it was Raeder who convinced Hitler to order the Wehrmacht to begin exploring plans for the occupation of Norway.
The Navy complied with Hitler’s instructions to begin examining Norwegian options, and outwardly they presented this as simply an impassionate compliance with orders. In a show of audacity that beggars belief, Admiral Raeder confided in a memo that moving on Norway in the face of “a vastly superior British Fleet… is in itself contrary to all principles in the theory of naval warfare.” True enough, but had not the whole thing been largely his idea to begin with? This ostentatious caution masked the fact that those orders had come about largely because Raeder had been bending Hitler’s ear for months about the importance of a Norwegian occupation. As the official German history of the war puts it:
Putting aside their military reservations, the naval war staff now took the view that ‘The demands of the political leaders that the Wehrmacht solve this problem using all available forces must be fulfilled’. It was overlooked that the navy leaders, and primarily Raeder himself, had suggested those demands to Hitler. By professing readiness blindly to carry out orders resulting from their own wishes, the navy leaders attempted to escape the political responsibility for their actions.
Finally, as German preparations for what would eventually be called Operation Weserübung began to accelerate, it was the Navy’s suggestions which created the urgency to pull the trigger. The scale of Weserübung was such, they pointed out, that the “complete concentration of the whole navy” was required, which implied a complete halt to all other naval operations: recalling all available submarines, halting minelaying operations and cruiser raids, and denuding the German coast of its defenses. This was only justifiable, they argued, if Weserübung was initiated in a timely manner. Speed was of the essence, not only to improve the odds of success, but also to free up the navy for other tasks afterwards. Raeder expressed this view to Hitler on March 5, 1940. Two days later, Hitler signed the Weserübung directive.
The German invasion of Denmark and Norway began on April 9, 1940, and not a moment too soon. Only the day before, British forces had begun mining several channels between the Norwegian coast and Norway’s offshore islands (Operation Wilfred) in an attempt to deny German shipping the use of Norwegian waters. Wilfred was, rather blatantly, a major violation of Norway’s territorial sovereignty, and the mines laid on April 8 would sink several Norwegian ships as well as German vessels.
In any case, the British were the first to move on Norway with Wilfred, but the Germans were much faster and moved more decisively. The British Admiralty believed, fundamentally, that British naval superiority would make it impossible for the Germans to operate on the Norwegian coast. It therefore came as quite a shock when Weserübung successfully landed troops at a variety of widely separated points on Norway’s coast. On the first day of the operation, the Germans had small forces ashore (initially no more than 2,000 men at each landing) at Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik, and German paratroopers had captured airfields at Oslo and Stavanger, where the Luftwaffe almost immediately moved in and set up shop to provide close air support. Meanwhile, a mixed overland, amphibious, and airborne assault on Denmark toppled that country in only a few hours, with fewer than 50 men killed in total.
In terms of its general impression, the Norwegian campaign offers several instructive facets. The first, very obviously, was the enormous advantage that the Germans derived from speed and surprise. In order to accelerate the operation, the decision was made to land ground forces using speedy naval vessels, primarily destroyers, rather than cumbersome troop transports. This was a deliberate tradeoff which provided speed at the expense of very low combat power; for example, the force dispatched to Trondheim - Norway’s third largest city - consisted of just a single heavy cruiser, the Admiral Hipper, and four destroyers carrying 1,700 men. In the context of the Royal Navy’s fighting power, these German assault forces were genuinely tiny, dissipated task forces, but the Wehrmacht had correctly gambled on speed and aggression. Every German objective had been achieved by the end of the first day.
The Norwegian campaign also demonstrated, for the first time and at scale, the decisive role of airpower brought against naval targets. In the 1930’s Japan had experimented with the use of naval aviation against overland targets, waging a strategic air campaign in China using carrier air groups. In Norway, the Luftwaffe attempted something like the reverse, using ground based aviation to chase the Royal Navy away from the Norwegian coast. German air deployments in Norway were considerable, and were active from almost the first moment, with airborne forces seizing airfields in the opening days of the campaign.
In all, the Germans would deploy 290 bombers, 40 Stuka dive bombers, 100 fighters, 70 variegated patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, and 500 transports in Norway. This was a considerable concentration of airpower that the British could not compete with, and the Royal Air Force never managed to accumulate more than 100 total aircraft in the theater. Luftwaffe bombers managed to sink the destroyer HMS Gurka, heavily damage two cruisers (the Southampton and Glasgow) and even damage the battleship Rodney, chasing it away from the coast. In the context of the Royal Navy’s total force, these were not crippling losses, but it inverted preliminary assumptions about area denial. British admirals assumed that the superiority of their surface fleet could prevent the Germans from operating off Norway at all; instead, it was the Royal Navy that found the littoral closed to them.
The British response to the German invasion of Norway was indecisive, dissipated, and clumsy. In fact, the general incompetence displayed by the British in Norway was a proximate cause for the fall of the Chamberlain government, with aged former PM David Lloyd George ranting in the House of Commons about the “half-prepared” and “half-baked” British response. Curiously, the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill escaped most of the scrutiny, despite his personal micromanaging of the operations in Norway.
In any case, the British failed to mount an effective response in Norway, largely because they suffered disorientation from the speed and range of the German landings. It never seemed clear to the British where the main point of emphasis was, with German forces landing at a variety of sites all along the Norwegian coastline, and they failed to react with appropriate decisiveness and violence. A variety of uncharacteristic logistic and command lapses magnified the problem. For example, troops which had boarded in Scotland for conveyance to Norway were offloaded, then reloaded before being sent to Narvik without any winter clothing. The British carrier HMS Furious was dispatched in a hurry - such a hurry in fact that she failed to load her fighter wing, and carried only torpedo bombers. A litany of oversights, delays, and dissipated reactions all conspired to prevent Britain from every seriously contesting the invasion of Norway.
The dynamics of the German operation - centered as it was on extremely small naval groupings - and the correspondingly scattershot British response ensured that direct naval engagements were relatively small and accidental. Rather than a coordinated fleet engagement, there were instead a handful of incidents where small flotillas fought meeting engagements.
On April 6, the destroyer HMS Glowworm encountered a pair of German destroyers after dropping out of her task force to search for a man overboard. In the ensuing skirmish, the German ships were joined by the battlecruiser Admiral Hipper, which catastrophically damaged the Glowworm with a series of direct hits. Crippled and cornered, the Glowworm’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Gerard Broadmead Roope, turned into the Hipper in a last ditch ramming attack, which sheared off the Glowworm’s bow and sank her. The maneuver so impressed the Hipper’s officers that Captain Helmuth Heye wrote to the British admiralty (using the Red Cross as an intermediary) recommending Roope for the Victoria Cross, making Roope one of only a handful of British fighting men to receive the award on a recommendation from the enemy.
On June 8, the British aircraft carrier Glorious and her escort destroyers, Acasta and Ardent, bumped into the twin German battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The two British destroyers put up a vicious fight, but the mathematics of mass were strongly against them, and the Germans sank all three British ships. This encounter was a debacle and an embarrassment to the Royal Navy on a variety of levels. It was not simply that an aircraft carrier was an expensive and valuable asset that was difficult to replace; the near-ambush of a carrier by surface ships was an anomaly, made possible only by British carelessness: on the morning of the battle, the Glorious had no combat air patrols in the sky, nor even a single man in the crow’s nest. Furthermore, the British battlegroup were out of radio contact with the rest of the fleet, which meant the Admiralty (thanks to its own orders for radio silence) did not even know of the sinkings until they learned about it from German radio broadcasts. Therefore, although hundreds of men managed to abandon ship (in the estimate of the survivors), no rescue attempt was made for well over 24 hours, and only forty men were recovered alive, including 38 from the carrier and one man each from the destroyers.
Although the Norwegian campaign on the whole was a disaster and an embarrassment for the British, there were situations where the Royal Navy was able to bring its combat power - which remained laughably superior - to bear at critical points. The seminal example of this were the twin battles of Narvik, which became relatively famous (as far as the Norwegian campaign goes) as a classic in small-ship fighting, particularly given the cinematic setting in the confines of an icy Norwegian fjord.
Structurally, the Narvik battles were very simple. The Germans had committed a disproportionate naval task force to Narvik, which was the critical port for the seaborne export of iron ore to the Reich. The German force, consisting of ten destroyers, had arrived in the fjord at Narvik on April 9, in heavy fog and snow. The following day - April 10, 1940 - the First Battle of Narvik was fought when a British destroyer flotilla arrived at the mouth of the fjord and launched a surprise attack. A spirited duel between the destroyer fleets ensued, with two ships sunk on either side. The critical fact, however, was that the British ended the day in control of the mouth of the fjord, and were thus able to trap the remaining German destroyers inside. On April 13th, the hulking battleship HMS Warspite cruised into the fjord and fought the Second Battle of Narvik, which was really more like a shooting spree. The powerful battleship methodically moved into the Narvik Fjord, mowing through the undergunned and trapped German destroyers. After the first three had been sunk, the remaining five simply evacuated their crews onto the shore and scuttled themselves.
The battles at Narvik are certainly interesting and unique, not least because of the breathtaking background in the fjord. In the long run, of course, the Germans consolidated their occupation of Narvik and the British withdrew, but the naval fights were a much needed lift for a Royal Navy that had not handled the Norwegian campaign well. For our purposes, however, what stands out is that these relatively small fights in the Narvik Fjord wiped out fully half of the German destroyer fleet. More broadly, Narvik was emblematic of the Kriegsmarine’s extreme fragility.
Despite rapidly achieving its objectives and scoring a variety of satisfying blows on the British (the sinking of the Glorious not least among them), the accumulated action in Norway more or less wiped out the German surface fleet. The heavy cruiser Bluecher was sunk by a Norwegian coastal battery; cruiser Karlsruhe was torpedoed by a British submarine; cruiser Koenigsberg was sunk by British dive bombers; Hipper was temporarily put out of action by the Glowworm’s ramming attack, and both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau took damage and needed refitting. In the aftermath of the campaign, the Kriegsmarine had just three cruisers and four destroyers operational. In practical terms, therefore, the effort in Norway - although successful - had expended essentially the entire German surface fleet.
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