The Naval Battles of Narvik were a series of naval engagements fought between German and Allied (Norwegian and British) forces in April 1940 during the German invasion of Norway as part of World War II. The battles took place in the Narvik and the waters of the surrounding fjords. The battles were initiated by the arrival of a German landing force transported to Narvik aboard 10 destroyers commanded by Commodore Friedrich Bonte, which sank Norwegian vessels and disembarked troops on 9 April. The First Battle of Narvik took place on 10 April 1940 and involved British destroyers under the command of Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, resulting in losses on both sides. The German vessels, subsequently blocked in the fjord, were destroyed during the Second Battle of Narvik on 13 April 1940 by a British force that included the battleship HMS Warspite. These actions granted the Allies control of the waters around Narvik, which facilitated the subsequent capture of the city by Allied land forces in the Battle of Narvik, although they exerted no decisive influence on the overall outcome of the Norwegian campaign.
Preparations
On 1 March 1940, Adolf Hitler decided to carry out the invasion of Norway, codenamed Weserübung. The majority of German warships were allocated to this operation, tasked with transporting the first wave of the seaborne landing force. German forces were divided into six groups intended to seize Norway's main ports. One of the most important was the port of Narvik, which provided the most convenient route for transporting iron ore imported from the Swedish Kiruna mining district during winter, when the Baltic port of Luleå was frozen. It was the northernmost objective of the German landing in Norway. Due to its greatest distance from Germany, to achieve maximum surprise, it was decided to conduct the landing using fast and relatively heavily armed units, namely destroyers. The fact that Narvik lay deep in the Ofotfjord, at a distance of about 100 nautical miles from the open sea (including the Vestfjord), was also significant.
The force to capture Narvik was formed as Group I under the command of Commodore Friedrich Bonte, who held the position of Leader of Destroyers in the German fleet (Führer der Zerstörer). It consisted of 10 destroyers: Georg Thiele, Wolfgang Zenker, Bernd von Arnim, Erich Giese and Erich Koellner of Type 1934/34A, and Diether von Roeder, Hans Lüdemann, Hermann Künne, Wilhelm Heidkamp and Anton Schmitt of Type 1936. These were large and fast destroyers with a displacement exceeding 2,200 tons and a speed over 38 knots, heavily armed with five 128 mm guns (nominally 12.7 cm) and eight torpedo tubes each. The flagship was Wilhelm Heidkamp. The destroyers embarked as landing troops approximately 200 soldiers each from the 139th Mountain Rifle Regiment of the 3rd Mountain Division, along with a flamethrower platoon from the 83rd Mountain Engineer Battalion and an artillery company – a total of 1,854 soldiers under the command of Brigadier Eduard Dietl.Publications generally give a rounded figure of 2,000 soldiers () On 6 April 1940 at 11:00 PM, the group set sail from Wilhelmshaven. As part of Operation Hartmut, the destroyers near Narvik were to screen four submarines.
The destroyers initially sailed with units of Group II, which were to participate in the landing at Trondheim, including the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, and with the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau providing cover for the operation. En route, however, some ships separated. The weather during the passage through the North Sea from the evening of 7 April was stormy, hindering navigation but also detection of the ships. The storm also caused greater fuel consumption by the destroyers.
Already on 7 April at 9:50 AM the ships were sighted by a British reconnaissance aircraft in the German Bight. The British reacted to reconnaissance reports of German ships sailing toward Norway; an air raid by 12 Blenheim bombers at 1:25 PM from No. 107 Squadron RAF was unsuccessful, however. At the same time, substantial fleet forces were sent to sea on the evening of 7 April to intercept the Germans, but these attempts proved ineffective. On 8 April at approximately 9:00 AM the British destroyer Glowworm alone detected in the Trondheim area two destroyers heading for Norway (Hans Lüdemann, and then Bernd von Arnim). After an ineffective exchange of fire the German destroyers broke contact with the enemy, but the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper joined the fight. After a short duel Glowworm sank, but before that managed to damage Hipper by ramming it. A separate British force comprising destroyers and the battlecruiser Renown under Vice Admiral William Whitworth had maintained station off the Vestfjord entrance, where it deployed a minefield, but withdrew during the night of 8–9 April. Consequently, the German destroyers proceeded into the fjords unobserved. Navigation in the fjords was further assisted by the continued illumination of most coastal lighthouses, notwithstanding Norwegian directives issued that night to extinguish lights in southern regions in response to indications of imminent invasion.
Landing in Narvik On 9 April 1940, early in the morning, the German destroyers of Group I passed through Vestfjord and arrived at the entrance to Ofotfjord around 4:00 AM (times are given in German and Norwegian time; some sources use British time, one hour earlier). The weather was poor, with snowfall. At the entrance to Ofotfjord near Barøy island around 4:10 AM the Germans captured without resistance the Norwegian fishery protection patrol vessel Michael Sars (armed with two 47 mm guns) and the patrol boat Kelt (armed with a 76 mm gun). Kelt, however, transmitted a radio warning about the sighted ships. Hans Lüdemann and Anton Schmitt landed troops at Ramnes on the northern shore and Hamnesholm on the southern shore of the Ofotfjord entrance to neutralise reported coastal batteries, which proved incomplete and unmanned. They subsequently encountered the second fishery protection vessel Senja (47 mm gun), which was ordered to return to Narvik. Wolfgang Zenker, Erich Koellner, and Hermann Künne then proceeded into Herjangsfjord, the northern branch of Ofotfjord, to secure Bjerkvik and military depots at Elvegaardsmoen, disembarking troops there around 6:00 AM. Diether von Roeder remained on patrol at the Ofotfjord entrance near Barøy island. Erich Giese had earlier become separated in the storm due to suspected fuel tank leakage and rejoined the group later in Herjangsfjord.
The three remaining destroyers (Wilhelm Heidkamp, Bernd von Arnim, and Georg Thiele) under Commodore Bonte proceeded toward Narvik harbour. In the absence of coastal artillery, the principal Norwegian defence comprised two old coastal defence ships of the Norge class, constructed at the turn of the century and equipped with heavy armour, two 209 mm guns, and six 149 mm guns each. At 5:10 AM, Bonte's group encountered the anchored Eidsvold (Captain Odd Willoch) outside the port, which fired a warning shot. The Norwegians had received alerts the previous day of possible German action; steam had been raised overnight on both battleships, and Eidsvold lay in the roadstead, though neither vessel was fully combat-ready and each was short approximately 40 crew members. Wilhelm Heidkamp halted and signalled intent to send a boat for parley. The German emissary, Lieutenant Commander Heinrich Gerlach, boarded Eidsvold and demanded surrender, asserting that German forces had come to protect Norway from British and French aggression. The other two destroyers meanwhile entered the harbour, a bay south of the town at the mouth of Beisfjord. After Captain Willoch consulted the Narvik naval commandant Per Askim (commander of Norge) and refused surrender, Gerlach returned to his boat. Upon clearing the battleship, he fired a signal rocket. Wilhelm Heidkamp then closed to 700 metres and launched a salvo of four torpedoes, two of which struck. The resulting detonation of the aft magazine caused Eidsvold to sink immediately at 5:37 AM, with the loss of 175 crew including the commander (only eight survivors were rescued, four by the delayed German boat).
Around 5:45 AM, the German ships began shelling the second Norwegian coastal defence battleship Norge (Captain Per Askim), the sister ship of Eidsvold, which had cast off from the shore and was moving at low speed across the port waters. Norge managed to fire four 209 mm shells and seven or eight 149 mm shells at Bernd von Arnim, which was already alongside the postal quay disembarking troops.According to other publications, five 21 cm shells and seven 15 cm shells (). The first salvo fell short, and the second hit the quay. Bernd von Arnim opened fire with its guns and launched seven torpedoes. The last two hit, and Norge sank with 101 sailors; 90 people were rescued, including the commander. After the loss of Norge, Norwegian resistance ceased. The destroyers then landed troops that occupied the city and five British and four Norwegian ships anchored in the port roadstead. In Narvik, there were also four neutral Swedish ships and one Dutch, as well as ten German ones, of which one – Bockenheim (4,902 GRT) – was grounded and burned by its own crew, who mistook the destroyers for British. All three Norwegian patrol boats were also captured in the port. Thanks to the pro-Nazi stance of the Narvik garrison commander, Colonel Konrad Sundlo, most Norwegian soldiers offered no resistance and were disarmed; only a part withdrew toward the Swedish border. Two old Norwegian submarines, B-1 and B-3, which on 8 April had moved from Narvik to Bogen Bay on the northern shore of Ofotfjord, failed to notice the German ships in poor visibility.
After disembarking the troops, the German destroyers remained in Narvik, as after the voyage from Germany they were running low on fuel supplies. The plan called for refuelling as quickly as possible and returning to Germany the same day. However, the Germans had only one tanker in Narvik, Jan Wellem (a former whaling ship base), which had arrived there for this purpose on 8 April, before the invasion, from the Soviet Murmansk. The second tanker, Kattegat, was delayed and was then intercepted on the evening of 9 April in Glomfjord (60 km south of Bodø) by the Norwegian fishery protection patrol boat Nordkapp, armed only with a 47 mm gun; after being shelled, it was scuttled by its crew. Refuelling was moreover time-consuming – 7–8 hours per destroyer, and only two could be serviced at a time. That day and night, fuel was replenished by Heidkamp, von Arnim, Thiele, Zenker and Koellner, while in the early morning Lüdemann and Künne were refuelling.
First Battle of Narvik
On the morning of 9 April, having no news of the capture of Narvik, the British sent the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla under Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee to the area of the entrance to Vestfjord. The flotilla consisted of five H-class destroyers: Hardy, Hotspur, Havock, Hunter, and Hostile. These were medium-sized destroyers, smaller than the German ships and slightly less heavily armed with four guns (except the larger flotilla leader Hardy which had five guns) and eight torpedo tubes each. The British Admiralty subsequently transmitted to them information that, according to press reports, one German ship had entered Narvik, and ordered its destruction or capture.