In October 1718 Swedish king Charles XII invaded southern Norway with
35,000 troops, determined to reduce the lynchpin of the enemy’s frontier
defences at Fredrikshald to rubble through a regular siege, led by a hired
professional French artillery officer, Colonel Maigret. The Swedes, commanded
in person by the king, stormed and captured the outer fort of Gyldenlove on 27
November. Three days later the Swedes, facing only 1400 enemy troops holding
the fortress of Fredriksten, dug a parallel trench to the fortress, followed by
an approach trench (to a second parallel), and seemed to be on the verge of a
great – and relatively easy – victory. Once the siege artillery had the
fortress within range it could be forced through bombardment to capitulate, as
Colonel Maigret had assured the king. But on 30 November Charles XII was killed
in the most mysterious of circumstances in the forward trenches, saving the
Norwegians from what would have been a humiliating defeat and eventual
occupation by their neighbours.
Galleys had been used in the Mediterranean Sea during the 16th century
but a lesser-known fact u’as that both Russia and Sweden used them during the
Great Northern War. Here teams of horses and men are pulling one such galley
across greased logs from the North Sea coast overland to the dark waters of the
Iddejjord, near Fredrikshald, in 1718.
Plan of the siege of Fredrikshald (Halden) and its fortress Fredriksten
in 1718. The engraved plan by Johann Baptist Homann shows the military
intervention of King Charles XII of Sweden during the Great Northern War in
1718. The siege ended unsuccessfully because the king was killed by headshots
and the siege was therefore discontinued. With decorative title banner and an
impressive naval battle.
The Great Northern War had been going on for 16 long years
when Sweden’s formidable warrior king, Charles XII, laid plans to invade Norway
in 1716. This country was only a stepping stone in his grandiose plans to
invade Britain, dethrone George I and crown James Stuart, before moving on to
deal with Denmark and Russia.
Charles’ plan in 1716 was for a blitzkrieg-style attack on
Norway with only a small army of 7700 men, in three columns. The Swedes hoped
that by treating the Norwegians with silk gloves they would welcome their
‘liberators’. The Swedes knew that their small invasion army faced a Norwegian
army twice their size. But it consisted of poorly equipped, badly trained
peasant recruits. As the aggressors the Swedes held the initiative, which
ensured that the Norwegian army was strung out along the long frontier not
knowing where or when the Swedes would strike. Norway was similar to Canada,
built like a natural fortress, especially in winter with frozen lakes, rivers,
marshes, wooded hills and endless forests sparsely sprinkled with small peasant
settlements. It was not an easy country for an invader to stage a
European-style campaign.
The Norwegians could also rely on the support of the Danish
Navy. Danish and Norwegian vessels led by Norway’s ‘Nelson’, Admiral Peter
Tordenskjold, disrupted Swedish coastal communications and prevented vital
supplies reaching the invading army. Sweden’s naval weakness was a major
problem for the plans Charles had laid. The Norwegians had also built a
formidable line of six major fortifications along the main river barrier in
eastern Norway, called the Glomma Line. To add further defences to this Glomma
Line the Norwegian commander, General Lützow, constructed field fortifications
at the two main hill passes blocking the entrance to Christiania. These field
forts were held by 1500 cavalry and 5600 infantry.
When Charles, who had crossed the frontier in early March,
reached this line his attack against one of these forts failed and he was
forced to retreat south. He then turned north but was surprised by the speed
with which his enemy erected a barrier of logs and felled trees that his troops
could not force. Like the Canadians, the Norwegians were adept at throwing up
defensive lines. But Charles marched his men across frozen ice on the Oslo
fjord to outflank his enemy, and by 21 March he was outside the empty Norwegian
capital.
Once news arrived of the Lion of the North’s approach the
population fled westwards. Christiania’s garrison of 3000 regulars had
plentiful supplies and was under the command of a tough German officer in
Danish service, Colonel Jörgen von Klenow. The Swedish invasion began to run into
difficulties with the Norwegian fortifications. Charles occupied Christiania on
22 March, but the town was built with its streets perpendicular to the
fortresses’ guns so that the guns could shoot straight down the street and onto
any Swede foolish enough to venture out. The Swedes tore up paving stones,
houses and anything else they could find to erect breastworks or dig trenches
to protect themselves. Assaults on other forts were beaten back with heavy
losses. Charles did not give up hope but his officers were pessimistic and a
defeatism that had marred the Swedish army’s morale since the catastrophic
defeat at Poltava in 1709 now surfaced. The officers feared they would be cut
off and starved into submission due to their long supply lines. Charles marched
south and took the town of Fredrikshald (present-day Halden) in July. However,
he could not take its fortress, Fredriksten, or the city’s inner defence wall,
which was held by an armed force of the town’s inhabitants.
When Charles invaded Norway again in 1718 his approach was
very different. If the Norwegians would not greet the Swedes as liberators then
they would be bludgeoned into submission and crushed by sheer military might.
Bearing in mind his experiences in 1716, he was determined to take Fredriksten
first. It was Norway’s most formidable fortress and it straddled Sweden’s
supply routes and the lines of communication all the way back to Sweden.
The first step in this plan was to get a galley flotilla
into the Iddefjord in order to reduce Sponviken fort and then bombard Halden
from the fjord as well from the land side. The flotilla would avoid having to
run the gauntlet of Fredrikstad’s fortress batteries and the deadly attentions
of Tordenskjold’s fleet hovering off the coast. Charles ordered 800 troops and
1000 horses to haul his galleys and gunboats across the peninsula between the
North Sea and Iddefjord.
Fredriksten, meaning Frederick’s rock, was built on top of a
massive granite mountain above the city of Fredrikshald on the Norwegian side
of Iddefjord, which connected in the west with the waters of Svinesund. On
three sides this eagle’s nest was protected by water, cliffs or deep valleys
and it was only to the south-east that it was open to attack. Even on that side
the approaches were protected by marshes and three forts.
This time Charles was taking no chances. He created a huge,
well-supplied army of 40,000 troops accompanied by a well-equipped siege train
led by a professional fortification officer with a wide experience of sieges.
The French colonel of fortification, Philippe Maigret, had been trained by
Vauban and now prepared to conduct a siege in this northern wilderness
according to his illustrious teacher’s masterly system. Fredriksten would be
completely encircled and cut off from the outside world. Parallel trenches
would be dug to surround the fortress in concentric circles. Approches would be dug to close in on
the fort and in such a way that they avoided its artillery. Then heavy siege
mortars and guns would be used to make a breach in the walls. Meanwhile,
Maigret told the Swedes, the garrison would become demoralized by their
isolation, the absence of news and the growing lack of supplies. Once this had
been done the Swedes could storm the fortress.
Swedish preparations had been so painstaking that the
invasion of Norway only began in late October. Charles arrived ahead of
schedule with 900 cavalry forcing the Norwegians to sink their transport
flotilla on Iddefjord. Nevertheless it was only by 20 November that the siege
artillery was in place. In total Charles had 35,000 men in southern Norway
while Colonel Landsberg, the Norwegian commandant of Fredriksten, admitted that
the fortress was totally cut off by the siege, and that he had only 1400 troops.
Charles could not resist taking risks and personally commanded a daring attack
on 27 November, which stormed and then took the outlying Gyldenl0ve fort.
The Swedes were now engaged in the tedious and unusual task
of digging trenches to approach Fredriksten. Hard and unpleasant work in the
rocky soil around the fortress, the troops dug in the face of Norwegian fire
from the main fort and the two remaining outer works. On 30 November the first
parallel was completed and a sap had been dug. Charles wanted Maigret to begin
digging the second line as soon as possible. Earlier Maigret had assured the
impatient king that the fortress would fall within eight days and even
Fredriksten’s commander, Colonel Landsberg, admitted that Fredriksten could not
hold out longer than a week.
As the soil was thin the Swedes had to reinforce their
trenches with 600 fascines and 3000 bags every day. Once the second parallel
had been dug and reinforced with breastworks Maigret’s siege artillery of 18
heavy pieces (six 16-kg [36-lb] howitzers and six 34-kg [75-lb] mortars) would
bombard the walls and make a breach. Landsberg knew that the walls had not been
properly embedded in the rock and that they would fall apart at the first
Swedish barrage.
Fortunately for the Norwegians Charles, always in the front
line, was in the sap during the evening of 30 November when, supposedly, a
stray bullet hit him in the head and killed him instantly. The Swedish officers
in command immediately ordered a retreat and all dreams of empire vanished. Today
it is thought that the bullet was probably fired by a hired assassin, paid by
the king’s ruthless and ambitious brother-in-law, Prince Frederick of Hesse,
who later became King Frederick I of Sweden.
PEDER TORDENSKJOLD, (1691-1720)
Danish admiral, was born Peder Wessel, tenth child of a
Bergen alderman, and as a young boy ran away to sea. After several voyages to
the West Indies he was appointed a second lieutenant in the Danish Navy and
within a year was commanding the 4-gun sloop Ormen, in which he operated
successfully off the Swedish coast. Within a year he was promoted to command a
20-gun frigate, in which his fine seamanship and audacity were given full play.
With the Great Northern War in full swing, he found no lack of action among the
fjords of Sweden in operations against Swedish frigates and troop transports,
and his fame as a brave and skillful commander began to spread. With the return
of Charles XII to Sweden in 1715, Wessel did great execution among the Swedish
shipping off the coast of Pomerania, and in the following year was ennobled by
Frederick IV of Denmark under the title of Tordenskjold (Thundershield). He
raised the siege by Charles XII of Fredrikshald in Norway by destroying the
Swedish fleet of transports and supply ships, and was promoted captain. In 1717
he commanded a squadron with the task of bringing to action and destroying the
Swedish Gothenburg squadron, but disloyalty on the part of some of his officers
prevented his achieving a decisive victory. Nevertheless, he was able to return
to Denmark in 1718 with the news of the death of Charles XII, and was made a
rear admiral by Frederick IV in the general rejoicing. His final claim to fame
was the capture of the Swedish fortress of Marstrand and the final elimination
of the Gothenburg squadron, partly by destruction and partly by capture. For
this he was advanced to vice admiral. Shortly after the end of the Great
Northern War he was killed in a duel. He is regarded in Denmark as a great
naval hero, and. after Charles XII perhaps, the most heroic figure of the Great
Northern War.
