The Battle of the Fjords. In the running destroyer fight during the withdrawal from Narvik.
Warspite engaging shore batteries during the Second Battle of Narvik.
HMS Eskimo after losing her bow.
It is clear from the orders issued by the Admiralty in the immediate aftermath of the Glowworm’s report, that neither Pound nor Churchill suspected at the time that the Germans were intent on invading Norway, let alone Denmark. By insisting that the four minelaying destroyers and their accompanying destroyer escorts withdraw from Vestfjorden – the tricky entrance to Narvik – to the relative safety provided by Whitworth’s covering force further southward, the Admiralty managed to do both the unfathomable and the unjustifiable. Instead of being mined to try to prevent the German invasion force from landing at Narvik, the perilous navigable waters of the Vestfjorden were not made any more inhospitable than they normally were – an omission that was to bring much relief to the ten German fleet destroyers with their elite consignment of 2,000 mountain troops that were intent on taking the port at its head later that same day. In describing these orders, Eric Grove dolefully remarks: `This was another disastrous piece of back-seat driving by the Admiralty where Churchill’s emotional and mercurial enthusiasm combined with First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound’s centralising professional style to cause much unnecessary trials for the fleet at sea.’
Within three hours of the Glowworm’s fiery demise on the mid-morning of 8 April, the Polish submarine Orzel had sunk the troopship Rio de Janeiro off Kristiansand and in so doing provided positive proof that a major northern invasion by the enemy was definitely underway. A stunned Admiralty alerted Forbes and his commanders of what, they assumed, was afoot. Although the Home Fleet at Forbes’ disposal was quantitatively impressive and its ships and men fought bravely and did their best with what few opportunities came their way, the fact remained that the bulk of the fleet was not deployed in such a way as to prevent the German invasion fleet from putting its troops ashore at any of the various landing areas that had been designated for them along the length of the Norwegian coastline. Whatever opposition that was mounted initially came from the Norwegian defenders, particularly in the Dröbak Narrows in the Oslofjorden, where the coastal artillery rained down shells and sent torpedoes into the newly built, heavy cruiser Blücher, sinking her with a loss of 320 sailors and soldiers, and damaging the pocket battleship Lützow (the former Deutschland). Even this setback didn’t stop the Germans from landing an infantry division in the area around Oslo, or receiving assistance from a squad of paratroopers who had been flown in specially to seize the city’s airport. Elsewhere sporadic and heroic defence proved to be no match for the power of the German destroyers who swiftly dispensed retribution for any defiant gestures on the part of the Norwegians.
By the evening of 9 April, therefore, the Germans had much to celebrate for Weserübung had largely gone according to plan and especially in the swift occupation of Denmark. On the Allied side, defeat loomed. A combination of intelligence failures and the issuing of a series of contradictory and strategically unsound Admiralty orders could be blamed for doing much of the damage to their cause in the early stages of the Norwegian campaign. Thereafter Forbes’ task was to minimise the scale of this damage by sealing off the escape routes of those German ships that had been involved in this operation and by eliminating as many of them as possible. A determined counter-attack was vital and air power would soon prove to be the key ingredient in implementing such a strategy, but Forbes’ regrettable decision to leave port without the fleet carrier Furious left him initially bereft of such a striking force.
Further north Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee in command of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla had reached the conclusion in the late afternoon of 9 April that something needed to be done about the situation in Narvik where the port already appeared to be in German hands. While the Admiralty left the decision about whether or not to attack the German force up to him, the issue was hardly in doubt. A bold, dynamic figure who believed in action and who wished to take some retribution of his own for what had happened in Norway, Warburton-Lee planned a bold surgical strike at the enemy force in Ofotfjorden as dawn broke on 10 April in a bid to catch the unsuspecting Germans by surprise and create as much damage as he could before withdrawing. According to his Norwegian sources of information, which in the end proved to be utterly unreliable, the enemy had six destroyers and a U-boat in the harbour. Undeterred by these reports, or by his own suspicion that the Germans may have mined the entrance channel into the port, the fact was that he was not about to engage a marginally superior force at all but one that was substantially superior to his own since it contained a total of ten destroyers and three U-boats. Unaware of the extent of the problem his five destroyers would be confronting in the morning, Warburton-Lee placed his faith in the element of duplicity and surprise.
That surprise didn’t last long. Once a volley of torpedoes and shells had struck home against both enemy merchant vessels and five German 1936-type destroyers riding at anchor in these confined waters, Narvik was quickly transformed into a scene of utter chaos and confusion. Apart from the merchant ships that succumbed in this action, Anton Schmitt blew up, Wilhelm Heidkamp lost her stern, Hans Lüdemann wrecked her steering gear, Hermann Künne was damaged by the explosive demise of her compatriot, and Diether von Roeder was basically immobilised. While the Germans did what they could to get at the British destroyers, their torpedoes malfunctioned and the smoke screen laid down by Havock hindered their efforts to hit back at the impertinent enemy as they were retreating from the scene of devastation within the harbour. At this point with visibility extremely poor, Warburton-Lee called off his destroyers and, regrouping outside the harbour, discussed what to do with his staff.
As the British were discussing what further action to take, the Flotilla Adjutant on Hans Ludemann issued an alarm call to the other five German destroyers in the vicinity: Georg Thiele which was located with Bernd von Arnim off Ballangen to the west of Narvik and Wolfgang Zenker, Erich Giese and Erich Koellner which were off to the northeast in Herjangsfjorden. They responded immediately and set off to repel the danger. Before they could reach the harbour, however, the British had resumed their re-entry run to the same arena in line-ahead formation at 20 knots. It was 0544 hours. Visibility was still murky but Hostile, at the end of the line, went closer inshore to see whether she could penetrate the gloom. She was soon to receive a 127mm shell on her forecastle to suggest that the defenders might have the best of the conditions. As the British ships drew away from the melée, they discovered a trio of German reinforcements coming down Herjangsfjorden some 7,000 yards (6.4km) away. Warburton-Lee, believing he was confronting at least one cruiser, decided to withdraw his warships at high speed, laying down a dense smokescreen as they did so. He reported the sighting to the Admiralty at 0551 hours. As the British force sped off westwards at 30 knots, they were suddenly confronted by two more destroyers coming from the opposite direction in squally weather and poor visibility.
It didn’t take long for Warburton-Lee to discover that the two ships belonged to the enemy. Before he could manoeuvre his ship to port to enable all his guns to bear on Georg Thiele and Bernd von Arnim, the enemy ships had a priceless opportunity to take advantage of the situation at a distance of 4,000 yards (3.7km). They did so. Thiele’s accuracy was such that after straddling Hardy, she began hitting her at will. At 0555 hours Warburton-Lee issued a final signal to the rest of his captains that they should keep on engaging the enemy, but shortly afterwards he and many others on his ship perished as two shells burst on the bridge and in the wheelhouse, destroyed the forward guns, but otherwise left the destroyer’s engines and hydraulic systems untouched. Another hit – this time wrecking the boiler – finished off the engines and left the surviving officers and crew with little alternative than to beach the Hardy.
Over the course of the next ten minutes of hectic short range shelling, Hunter, Hotspur and Thiele were all hit, the former probably by a torpedo which stopped her dead in the water and turned her into a blazing wreck. Though not in the same condition as her unfortunate sister ship, Hotspur was far from sound. Two shells had caused such severe damage to her own hydraulic and telegraph system that she was incapable of avoiding ploughing into the stalled Hunter at a sickening 30 knots. Involuntarily locked together as they were, both British destroyers looked to be destined for the bottom of the fjord as their enemies would be expected to close in for the kill. In a crisis such as this with little real prospect of escape, Commander Layman and the crew of the Hotspur came to the fore. Using a combination of courage, skill and initiative, they performed their various tasks with great aplomb. Once the order to put Hotspur’s engines to full astern got through to Engineer Officer Osborne and his men, the destroyer was able to drive herself free from the doomed Hunter. It now needed a feat of engineering class to secure her safety. Using processes that Osborne had developed earlier to allow salt water to be used in the ship’s boilers without ill effect, Hotspur made sufficient progress to keep her 5,000 yards (4.6km) from the three enemy destroyers (Zenker, Giese and Koellner) coming belatedly from the direction of Narvik. Once she had been spotted by Hostile and Havock some 2nm (3.7km) behind them, Hotspur was swiftly re-united with the two surviving members of the flotilla and they escorted her down Vestfjorden to safety at Skjeldfjorden in the Lofoten Islands later that afternoon.
Fregattenkapitän Erich Bey, in overall command of the German flotilla on Zenker, decided not to give chase or slug it out with the retreating Allied destroyers or any reinforcements that the British might have sent to their aid. Instead he returned to pick up Hunter’s survivors and take them back to Narvik where he rejoined his battered flotilla. His situation, already chronic, would soon be made worse by the spectacular demise of his armament ship Rauenfels at the hands of Havock and Hostile when they met her shortly before 0700 hours coming up the Vestfjorden in the opposite direction.
After hitherto enjoying far better news from the Norwegian campaign than the Admiralty had been used to receiving, the head of Marinegruppenkommando West (Naval Group West) based at Wilhelmshaven, Admiral Alfred Saalwächter, was distinctly unimpressed by the reports he began receiving about the First Battle of Narvik. He was also mystified by Bey’s somewhat fatalistic reluctance to take active steps to extricate his ships from the mess in which they now found themselves. An abortive escape run made by Zenker and Giese during the evening of 10 April, forestalled by the presence of British destroyer patrols in the Vestfjorden, did nothing to inspire Bey or to improve the mood in Wilhelmshaven. This mood soured still further with the news that a second supply ship, Alster, bound for Narvik had been captured by the British and taken to Skjeldfjorden, and it would have darkened even more had Naval Group West known the fate of the third supply ship, the tanker Kattegat, which had already been sunk by the resilient Norwegians. Already desperate, Bey’s plight worsened still further on the evening of 11 April when two of his few remaining fit destroyers managed to run aground as they were seeking to navigate their way to their night anchorages, causing extensive damage to Koellner and a bent port propeller to Zenker. His luck was out and it would not improve.
After extensive units of the Home Fleet had spent a fruitless couple of days vainly searching for the German heavy ships off the west coast of Norway, the Admiralty decided that it could vent its frustration on the enemy naval contingent holed up at Narvik. Whitworth’s force was duly strengthened with the addition of the battleship Warspite and a plan of action was agreed upon for the following day. This secret soon leaked out through B-Dienst’s reading of the Royal Navy’s signals traffic and led Group West to warn Bey at 0838 hours on Saturday 13 April of what lay in store for him and his men later that same afternoon. Rejecting the possibility of scuttling his ships, Bey decided to defend them to the last and to try and inflict as much punishment on the enemy warships as possible.
It would be a vain hope as those imponderable companions in arms – luck, fate and equipment failures – conspired to ensure that the Germans weren’t able to take the chances they were given to inflict a series of crushing blows on Whitworth’s expanded force. By late Saturday afternoon, therefore, what was left of the entire German destroyer flotilla had all succumbed to either enemy firepower or their own scuttling charges. While the Germans had been routed as a result of these two encounters on 10 and 13 April, the British had emerged pretty battle-scarred themselves; losing Hardy and Hunter, while suffering extensive damage to one of their light cruisers, three Tribals, and another H class destroyer in the process.
It could have been a lot worse since Warspite, in particular, had borne something of a charmed life throughout and could have been torpedoed on several occasions. While the British could at least repair their damaged warships and get them back into action, there was nothing that the Germans could do to revive the fortunes of the destroyers that had been wiped out at Narvik. Losing ten out of a grand total of twenty-two fleet destroyers – several of which were non-operational – was a terrific blow to the Kriegsmarine and would, as Eric Grove suggests, help to compromise their operations in the Channel and undermine Hitler’s invasion plan for the United Kingdom (Fall Seelöwe). Judged by the standards set at Narvik, the rest of the mopping up operation was nothing like as successful. Many of the German heavy ships involved in Weserübung, by using the poor weather to their advantage and with W/T intelligence to guide them, managed to evade both the surface units and most of the submarines of the Home Fleet as well as the Fleet Air Arm on their way home.
