Norwegian Venture: Battles for the Fjords 1940

524 pages

Prof Tim Benbow

The Norway campaign of April to June 1940 saw Germany accepting considerable risk to seize a country that it deemed essential to protect essential Swedish iron ore shipments.  In the face of general British naval superiority, the German operation exploited surprise, using naval and air power to transport troops which captured key locations in Norway, and then defeated an Allied (mainly British but also French and Polish) intervention. The Allied operation was rushed, poorly planned and badly executed; as it was on the verge of failing in its own right, it was overshadowed by the German invasion of France.  The campaign presented many lessons for the Allies, particularly relating to the effective use of intelligence, to command and control (with the Admiralty attempting to exercise far closer control of in-theatre commanders than was either feasible or wise) and to combined operations (with very poor coordination between the Navy and the Army). Most of all, though, the campaign turned on which side could deploy the more effective air power, and demonstrated that naval forces and amphibious operations needed adequate air cover.  The parlous state of the Fleet Air Arm, only recently emerging from the blind alley of RAF control, meant that it was incapable of defending either the fleet or forces ashore. The RAF, with its single-minded focus on strategic bombing and consequent disdain for cooperation with (or, as its leaders characterised it, subordination to) the other services showed little capability either to support the fleet or to deploy expeditionary air power.  In the longer term, Germany’s occupation of Norway greatly complicated Britain’s war at sea, not least in maintaining convoys to Russia after the Soviet Union had been attacked by its former ally. On the other hand, of course, Germany’s heavy naval losses in the campaign effectively ruled out any prospect of an invasion of Britain, while occupying Norway became a considerable drain on its resources.

This volume is highly recommended as a core source on the campaign. The series of which it forms part, the ‘Britannia Naval Histories of World War II’, is a commendable initiative, making Admiralty Staff Histories available to those without easy access either to the National Archives at Kew or a Staff College library. These works, based on sources such as commander’s reports, ship proceedings and war diaries, were initially written quickly to disseminate key lessons but were often subsequently revised to take account of newly available material, notably captured enemy sources: the original Norway account was first prepared in 1942 then revised in 1950. While they are sometimes incomplete or contain errors, they provide a solid first draft of history and a useful complement to secondary histories that inevitably fillet their source material and contain the occasional error or omission of their own.

Battle Summary No.17, ‘Naval Operations of the Campaign in Norway’, is available elsewhere, so it is useful to spell out just how this edition is different. David Brown published with Cass the 1950 version of this Battle Summary, with a four-and-a-half page introduction, on behalf of the Naval Historical Branch in 2000. The Britannia series followed with a volume in 2012, by the same editors as this one, published by Plymouth University Press.  It included a longer introduction than Brown’s, at seven-and-a-half pages, with a bibliography of further reading. Notably, in addition to the Admiralty Battle Summary it also included a 1948 Admiralty study prepared by a German historian, and erstwhile Vice-Admiral, based on captured German papers. This new edition from Britannia republishes the same material with a still longer introduction (14 pages) and expanded bibliography – which is useful but has some surprising gaps, notably the 2017 book by John Kiszely. The main addition to this volume is a section of photographs; far from the half-dozen or so than often appear in books, this one contains more than 130, which for some readers will alone be worth the price – which, it should be noted, is a reasonable sum that puts academic publishers to shame. You get a lot of book for your money; it comes to 517 pages compared to the 408 of the first edition.

There are some problems with it. The original maps and plans are reproduced but in black and white (the originals showed some ship tracks etc. in colour) and as regular, bound pages rather than fold-out; some have the obscured middle sections repeated alongside, which is helpful if untidy.  As a result they are not as legible as they might be, but it is better to have them in this state than not to have them at all.  The notes are a bit of a mess, suggesting a disappointing lack of attention to detail in transcribing the original sources.  In the Admiralty Battle Summary, the superscript number for note 97 appears between 90 and 91 (p.168), and then number 96 is followed by 98 (p.174).  The result is that most of the notes are out of sequence – it is also a pity that the editors or their publishers opted for end-notes rather than the far more reader-friendly footnotes, which might also have made the errors more apparent to them.  More seriously, while the German-source document has superscript numbers indicating notes, the notes themselves are missing. The contents page entirely omits Part III with the German account.

These quibbles aside, however, the book is well worth acquiring. The writers of the Staff History were entirely willing to criticise the Admiralty where this was warranted.  The combination of the perspectives of the two main adversaries makes for fascinating reading, not least with the account of the First and Second Battles of Narvik, in which Germany lost 10 destroyers; this “was a heavy blow to the small German fleet as it halved the destroyer strength of the Navy” (p.448). There is plenty of detail; stereotypes of Germans will not be challenged by the report noting that supplies transported to Norway included precisely 16,102 horses (p.458). The volume contains too many gems for a short review to do them full justice, so a couple of examples will have to suffice. First, the campaign saw Fleet Air Arm Skua aircraft participate from bases in the Orkneys, achieving the first wartime sinking by air attack of a major warship, the light cruiser Königsberg, as well as hitting targets ashore such as oil tanks (p.207). This experience vindicated dive bombing, oddly spurned by the RAF, as a valuable technique. Second, Part III reveals what Germany believed to be at stake in the campaign; although they doubted that Britain had enough forces to take or, even more, to occupy Norway, their naval staff believed that, “the loss of Norway to England would be synonymous with losing the war” (p.383).

The campaign remains fascinating as “the first large-scale operation in history involving the employment of all three arms – sea, air and land.” As the Battle Summary argued, it demonstrated the need for “a preponderance of power in each form of fighting force”; all three could support each other but each was needed (p.318). This volume is a welcome and useful addition to the literature.