World War 2
The Triumph of Blitzkrieg
Norway was of great strategic importance to Hitler as a springboard for Luftwaffe aerial attacks against Britain, and against the British navel blockade which threatened the route taken by the ships bringing Germany vital iron-ore from Sweden through the port of Narvik in northern Norway.
On the 4th of April 1940, Neville Chamberlain confidently announced that ‘Hitler has missed the bus’. Only four days later, British War ships encounter German vessels escorting troop transports towards the Norwegian ports of Kristiansand, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim And Narvik. So, far from missing the bus, Hitler was invading Norway.
Only at Oslo, the Norwegian capital, did the Germans encounter serious resistance. The cruiser ‘Blucher’ was sunk and the battleship ‘Lutzow’ damaged before airborne troops captured the city. Denmark was overrun on the 9th of April.
Between the 10th and 13th of April the Royal Navy inflicted heavy damage on the German navel force ferrying troops to Narvik. Over the next three days, they also landed both north and south of Trondheim, but these footholds were eliminated by the Germans as they swept inland, and evacuations swiftly followed at the beginning of May. An allied force captured Narvik on the 28th of May, but then, was forced to evacuate on the 8th and 9th of June, due to the unfolding events taking place in France. In the withdrawal the carrier ‘Glorious’ was sunk and the German battlecruisers ‘Scharnhorst’ And ‘Gneisenau’ were both badly damaged. A shortage of destroyers was to play a significant part in forestalling the German invasion of southern England in the summer of 1940.