The King’s Choice – 10th of April 1940

Alf R. Jacobsen

DISCLAIMER: This is a non-professional translation, done purely for the love of the subject

matter. Some strange wording is to be expected, since sentence structure is not always alike in English or Norwegian. I'm also not a military nut after 1500, so some officer ranks, division names and the like may be different than expected because of my perhaps too-literal translation. Any notes of my own will be marked in red.

This book is more of a political drama and a personal story for the royal family than a military book, but it has its moments of that as well. And it is a treasure trove of personal notes, unpublished stories and reports from those who were in the thick of it. The author has hunted down all the first-hand material he could get, from archives, private collections and family histories of those involved. Many quotes are taken from unpublished diaries and family sagas.

Chapter 1

The Attack

Schleswig Land, Northern Germany

The blackout made the darkness seem deeper when major Erich Walther mustered the two paratrooper companies on the staging ground. Fog swirled over the frozen ground, but a red glare in the horizon announced the coming of morning. The dull roar of tens of BMW engines came from the runway, who coughed and spluttered before starting up. The transport chief, lieutenant colonel Carl Freiherr von Gablenz was the director of Lufthansa in civilian life, and had scraped together several hundred Ju 52’s from all corners of the German Reich. Twenty-nine of them was at Walther’s disposal, and the smell of exhaust fumes, airplane fuel and lubricant oil lingered over the frozen grass like a powerful opiate. Aunt Ju was a rattletrap contraption of rifled metal and thin steel pipes. But the hull had been welded by German mechanics and represented the best of contemporary engineering. The three radial motors could lift a rifle section of 12-15 men in full gear over a distance of 1000 kilometres. That was sufficient to reach their target – and a lot more.

The first battalion faced their baptism of fire, and Walther knew it would be hard going. But the paratroopers were Hermann Göring’s private, hand-picked army, which the corpulent and cynical Luftwaffe officer had placed at the Führer’s disposal. Most of the officers and NCOs were fervent Nazis, and many of them had participated in bloody street fights with communists and other political opponents in Berlin during the emergence of the Nazi party in the early 1930s. Now they faced the unknown, but the unknown was normal for the policemen, brownshirts and daredevils who made up the core of the First battalion of the First paratrooper regiment. Their spirits had perked once premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt saluted the paratroopers in the first company.

“Never before have my morning speech received such a rousing answer: “Heil, Herr premier lieutenant!” he wrote in Die Fallschirmjäger von Dombås, published by the Ministry of Propaganda in 1941. “The enthusiasm of their cry made the closest windowpanes vibrate. Their faces lit up by the dutifulness which encapsulated them all. Before embarking on their planes,

yet another threefold Sieg Heil rent the night – to our dear Führer, to our people and to our fatherland.”

For himself, the thirty-eight-year-old Walther was the prototype of the new class of officer who had made his career in Nazi Germany – not through the traditional staff schools or military academies of Prussia, but through loyalty to Hitler and his party. He had started off as a police cadet in the small town of Oppeln in 1922 and had advanced to senior criminal investigator in the Berlin police force when the Nazis made their power grab that fateful summer of 1933. Hitler's handyman Hermann Göring had been made Prime Minister of Preussen, and had, with his finely-honed instinct for power play at once established a private terror group under the Nazi zealot Walter Wecke. Polizeiabteilung zum besonderes Verfügnung Wecke was on paper to work as life guards for Hitler, Göring and other top Nazis, but in the first year of totalitarian regime, there was a need for people who could do other things than shine shoes and close ranks. Opposition and neutrals in the police ranks were to be weeded out, Jews were persecuted, the remaining communists and social democrats were to be crushed, and Ernst Röhm’s homosexual agitators in the SA were to be brought under control.

Blood had flowed, and cries of pain from the torture chambers of Colombia Haus had reached across the street to the barracks which housed Wecke’s police-soldiers. But the Nazi grip on power had been secured, and Erich Walther had been there from the start in February 1933 until Hermann Göring was made chief of the Luftwaffe two years later and turned the police unit into Regiment General Göring. Inspired by the developments in the Soviet Union and the USA, they had implemented parachute training. By the late 1930s, the tough streetfighters from the back alleys of Berlin had been transformed into Nazi Germany’s first airborne military elites.

The slim and sinewy Walther had been made company chief, and had taken part in the Anschluss, the march into Sudetenland and the conquest of the rest of Czechoslovakia. He was of moderate height, and his brown hair was wild and had to be brushed back often. His eyebrows were dark, his mouth thin and resolute, like in a sparrow hawk. Beneath the officer’s cap, his face radiated authority, an authority born from experience. Walther had seen it all. He was one of Fat Hermann’s chosen men, and that gave him respect. “He was calm and intelligent”, the fallschirmjäger Ernst Mössinger told to the writer Cato Guhnfeldt. “He was not a hard man, though he could become furious and shout orders loudly”.

The first battalion had been on guard duty and had not joined in the victorious campaign in Poland in the autumn of 1939. While others had been praised and decorated, the top-trained paratroopers had seen the blitzkrieg from a teeth-gnashing distance. It made Walther and his men burn with impatience. “The mood was excellent”, Schmidt wrote. “Everyone hungered for the first paratrooper duty.”

The officers had been taken in on the plan the night before: Norway and Denmark were to be brought to their knees. First battalion staff and the first and second companies were to jump out at Fornebu airport in Oslo and secure the airport for the first wave of ordinary infantrymen who would be landing in transport planes soon after. The total force was around 300 men, who would knock out any resistance with light weapons in minutes, clear the runways and stop any

counterattack. The operation had been as cut from a textbook in strategic surprise attacks, but there was a weakness: The theory had never been tested.

As Hitler’s chief of operations general Alfred Jodl had proclaimed to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in a conversation in the Reich Chancellery the same day: “It is the most daring enterprise in the history of war. The stakes and risks are monstrous – with an equal chance of payoff! If we can keep our intentions hidden until dark, victory will be half ours already.”

Walther and his men were experts in crowd control and street fighting, and Jodl and Goebbels had high expectations. “The attack on Norway is the most difficult because it will happen in the immediate vicinity of the British fleet”, Jodl had said. “But we have the paratroopers in reserve!”

The list of small neighbouring countries that had been harassed and cowed by the megalomaniacal gamblers in Berlin was growing. En route, a basic truth had been learned: The main blow had to hit the central government, fast and brutal. Cut the head off your opponent, and the rest would follow. Hitler and his closest advisers did not see the pacifistic cabinet of Nygaardsvold as a problem. They were stuck in the tradition of the broken rifle, and had not even managed to mobilize what was left of the Army after the ravages of the 1930s. “In Oslo, they are slightly alarmed”, an exalted Hitler had told Goebbels while on a walk in the Reich Chancellery garden on the evening of April 8th. “But they still know nothing.”

The aging King Haakon was more of an unknown. He was a navy man, married into the British royal family and an enthusiastic admirer of the Royal Navy. It explained why the detailed instructions crafted by Jodl’s staff included a separate piece on the head of state: “It is of particular importance that the Norwegian king is not permitted to escape abroad during the takeover. It will be necessary to survey his location at once. As an emergency measure, he must be stopped from leaving his palace.”

To Goebbels, Hitler said it with more cynicism: “If the king behaves properly, he can stay. But we will never give back the country.”

They were unmistakeable words: King Haakon was a figurehead of great importance. If he would not bend the knee and surrender to the Nazi regime, then he was to be captured and held hostage in his own home.

At precisely 04.30, the first transports took off from Schleswig Land in an ear-splitting roar. “Blue-yellow tongues of fire burst from the exhaust pipes and created a ghostlike atmosphere on the airfield”, Schmidt wrote. “That historical sight will never be forgotten by those who were present. The first attack on the enemy by the paratroopers was on its way!”

Inside the planes circling the northern German plains, there was little time to reflect on future tasks. The first order of business was to take Fornebu for colonel Helmuth Nickelmann and his soldiers from the 163rd division, who were already climbing aboard some fifty Ju-machines who were to take off at 04.50, just 20 minutes behind the paratroopers. “The element of surprise is key”, Goebbels noted in his diary. “Now, we have to control our nerves and keep an icy cool.”

High in the sky above Schleswig, premier lieutenant Schmidt was more elated than nervous. “It was a great moment to see plane after plane gather in formation”, he wrote in his book. “To the east, a blood-red sun was rising. We set a course northward.”

Lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman was wide awaken when the train from Berlin crossed the border at Kornsjø lake. He travelled on a diplomatic passport, and was ready to shoot his way out if the border guards got too close. The ruddy veteran of the first world war had lived through the humiliation of being an Allied POW, and that had been more than enough. He was the son of a general, but the time of the generals had passed. In his briefcase, he carried the directives from a new generation of leaders. What they lacked in chivalry, they had in brazenness. The briefcase contained the plans for the rape of a peaceful neighbouring nation, but Pohlman had no regrets. He had been infected by Nazi ideology and saw only his own glorious possibilities. As operations officer of Gruppe 21, he would have to toil in the shadows of older veterans. As courier for Hitler’s Foreign Ministry, he could make himself known in different ways. “I slept well in my First-Class carriage until we passed the border at Kornsjø”, he wrote in a script to his own children. “There was no border control. I was the only traveller in Østfold that day that knew that the peaceful winter atmosphere that laid upon the land would be shattered in less than a day.”

What neither Goebbels, Walther or Pohlmann understood, was that the element of surprise had been lost long ago. It was in chief thanks to the bravery and readiness of captain Leif Welding Olsen aboard the sentry boat Pol III, which had spotted the German main force led by the cruiser Blücher leading an armada of 30 vessels in the moonlit Monday night. Just before 23 he had ordered full speed ahead, fired a warning shot and demanded that the intruders lay by. His challenge was met by a storm of fire from the cannons and machine guns aboard the torpedo boat Albatross, and the fearless skipper had fallen, mortally wounded. Welding Olsen was the first to give his life for Norway in the fight against Nazism, but his sacrifice was not in vain. The tracer fire and signal flares had been seen by both the forward observation post at Onsøyknipen at Fredrikstad, Færder lighthouse and the sentry boat Skudd II, who raised the alarm minutes later by an express telegram to the Outer Oslo fjord Sea Defence at Tønsberg.

The signal was logged in the logbook at the general staff at 23.23, and reached Oslo message collection central in the basement of the Astoria Hotel just a stone’s throw from the Storting minutes later: “Several vessels forcing their way past Færder!”

“I was immediately warned from Onsøyknipen about fighting in the Outer Oslo fjord”, wrote the chief of Oslo’s Anti-air command, captain Jakob Bull-Berg in a report dated September the same year. “Every arm of the military was similarly alerted. As well as the civilian anti-air service which operated the air raid sirens in Oslo and Aker.”

Oslo message collection central was the nerve centre in the defence of the capital and was shrouded in the utmost secrecy. The cellar rooms beneath the neoclassical brick building in

Akersgata 21 had been turned into a modern communication centre during the winter. It had direct phone connections to around 70 listening- and observation posts across the entire eastern part of Norway, the Fighter Wing at Fornebu and five anti-air batteries, which were to protect Oslo from aerial attack.

“Telephone apparatuses are lined up in rows, and the radios are ready to use”, the Aftenposten newspaper had told in an anonymised report from the cellar, where the phone operators regularly sunned themselves to keep in shape and fit. “On the walls hang large maps with many strange signs. The phones ring, messages are received, and orders are given. There is a lively business down here, but everything is routine in the air raid central in the Norwegian capital.”

Air raids had spread fear among militaries and civilians alike, after the bombings of Guernica, the Winter war in Finland and the blitzkrieg in Poland. The newspaper articles were part of a private campaign to upgrade the air defence through announcements and crowdfunding.

“We should be certain of a 10% accuracy rate with our 20- and 40mm autocannons”, proclaimed colonel Magnus Hagem to the newspaper. “Since these cannons shoot 100-200 shots per minute, the chance of hitting an airplane is very great. The projectiles themselves are so effective that a single hit, wherever it is in the plane, is enough to make it crash or go in for emergency landing. In these cannons we have gained a weapon that we should trust implicitly.”

These were rousing words from the chief of the Air Defence regiment, who was one of the great ideologues of anti-air artillery, and who had graduated second in his class from the War Academy in 1908, only beaten by the top student, Vidkun Quisling. There was only one problem with the interview. Those cannons Hagem referred to, existed only on paper. Kongsberg armament factory had made a deal with Bofors in Sweden, but the first 40mm guns would only come off the factory line that summer. The batteries around Oslo were still armed with twelve manual 7,5cm cannons, which Hagem himself had helped construct in 1932, along with two equivalent batteries from the first world war, and around 35 water-cooled Colt machine guns with limited effect against modern warplanes.

The situation among the anti-air arm was characteristic of the military in general. Additional monetary grants had been made in the autumn of 1939 and winter of 1940 for the purchase of newer war materiel, but the grants were too small and came much too late to right the devastating effects of the 1930s salvo of anti-militarism, which had all but destroyed the will to fight, both mentally and materially. Those who wanted to fight, had to make do with highly insufficient funding. “The corps of officers was basically demilitarized” wrote the Military Investigative Council of 1946. “The attitude of the government towards even the most minute upgrades to the military, had to give the military chiefs the impression that there was no serious will to defend ourselves in the governing bodies. The defeatist atmosphere was most suitable for depriving the military chiefs of any necessary confidence and security.”

There was no idyll beneath the ground at Oslo collection central either. Open conflict had broken out between cavalry officer Nicolay H. Knudtzon and major Sigvald Hanssen, who had taken up the leadership post shortly before. Many had begged leave from being called to neutrality watch,

and the central was chronically short-staffed. On Monday, they had solved an immediate emergency only by recalling five men who had served out their duty back in March. “We were told to be on duty from 20 until 08 the next morning”, wrote the soldiers Olsen and Hegland in a report a few days later. “The evening was calm, with a few calls until around 23.45 when the message came telling of fighting in the Outer Oslo fjord.”

Towards midnight, the political and military leadership had been warned telephonically by prewritten lists jotted down by those on duty in the message central and in the General- and Admiralty staffs. These were Minister of Defence Birger Ljungberg, Oslo’s police chief Kristian Welhaven, commanding admiral Henry Diesen, commanding general Kristian Laake, his chief of staff colonel Rasmus Hatledal and others. Those who could not be reached by phone, heard the wailing howls of the air raid sirens, which were triggered just before midnight.

“When the air alarm went off in Oslo, 8th of April at 23.59, I, like many other officers was on my way home from Oslo Military Society”, colonel Hagem wrote in his report. “When the city was blacked out (shortly after), I was outside the Hotel Continental where I communicated telephonically to Oslo collection central, who informed me of fighting between German warships and our fortresses at Rauøy and Bolærne.”

The situation was almost unreal. Despite the ominous messages of German air- and fleet movements in Storebælt and Skagerrak, which had been coming in all day, the phone call did not trigger any acute feelings of alarm in the fair-haired colonel’s mind. Like the rest of the military elite, he had eaten and drunk well at the Military Society. In the foyer of Hotel Continental, he saw no reason to meet with his subordinates to inspire or cheer. Rather, he went home to his bed.

Chapter 2

Hitler’s ultimatum

Oslo, 9th of April, midnight to 05.00

The time had passed 23 when lieutenant colonel Pohlman asked envoy Curt Bräuer to open the safe in the legation on the Drammensveien road. “The deciding documents are being laid out”, wrote the courier from Berlin. “Rarely have I seen a man be so surprised by my appraisal of the situation as a whole and his own role to play.”

At the fashionable West End of Oslo, Carl Joachim Hambro had gone to bed around 23, at home with his patient and enduring wife, Gudrun. The vital President of the Storting, veteran of the Conservative party (Høyre, more directly translated to the Right party.), the public speaker, the literary critic and newspaper editor was deep in dept and lived a publicly known double life. He

worked hard to keep the creditors off his back, but the sorrows of his familial and economic situation had not deprived him of his clarity. In the interwar period, Hambro had been a consequent critic of the current totalitarian evils, which had made Goebbels froth with rage and hate toward “the Norwegian Jew Hambro-Hamburger". Hambro took the abuse as a badge of honour, and would soon have another chance to show his dedication and anti-fascism again. But the first sirens of the night were not enough to get him out of bed. “We had a fair few air raid alarms and blackout drills as a part of our emergency preparation plans”, he wrote in the book De første måneder. (the first months) “I did not take it very seriously.”

In the Prime Minister’s apartments in St. Olav’s street, Johan Nygaardsvold was woken by a telephone call from Defence Minister Ljungberg at around the same time, who told him that unknown warships were coming in the Oslo fjord. It was the duty of every government to ascertain the safety of their citizens. The news must therefore have created a state of desperation and bewilderment in him, who had avoided preparing the country for war and who had not taken the advice of the General staff to mobilize the same day. The whole life of this cabinet had been based on a hope of preserving Norwegian neutrality between the western democracies and the gangster-regimes of the east and south. Now, that hope was crumbling, and Nygaardsvold faced a political defeat of historical scope, with potentially catastrophic outcomes for the country and people who were relegated to fight back with empty hands – as a result of his own political mistakes. They were grim prospects, but there was no way around it. An emergency meeting of the cabinet had to be called.

While Nygaardsvold fumbled his way through the darkened Palace park towards Victoria Terrace with a cane, Bull-Berg and his operators in Oslo collection central tried in vain to ascertain what had really happened. But the fog had descended on the fjord, and the squadron which had shown itself in a few ghostlike minutes between Rauøy and Bolærne had apparently disappeared without a trace. No one seemed to have enough sense of reality, or fantasy, to link the sighting to the messages of the German armada which had passed the Danish coast some hours earlier. When someone opined that it could be ships seeking shelter from a naval battle between British and German ships in Skagerrak, the relief was palpable. “Everything is calm”, messaged the watchman at Onsøyknipen at 01.30. That was correct, but only partially. In reality, the German cruisers had laid by south of Bastøy island to offload troops which were to attack the coastal forts from the rear, but Oslo was once again in the grip of fair daydreams. Bull-Berg had the sirens call Danger has passed. The emergency measures were cancelled, and the anti-air crews around the city and at the airport could go to bed – except those on ordinary duty.

Victoria Terrasse in Oslo, still the seat of the Foreign Ministry to this day.

In the meantime, even the main architect of that political misery, Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht had turned up at Victoria Terrace. The self-conscious and wily sixty-eight-year-old nursed his ego in the company of beautiful women, and had chosen to spend that fateful night at the home of the beautiful and much younger sculptor Sigri Welhaven Krag.

“He called in the evening and told me he could not make it home to Lysaker in time, because he was needed back at the Ministry”, Krag told the journalist and writer Per Egil Hegge in 1982. “Do you have any steak, he said. I mean, we were at war, and he could have made do with a couple of bread rolls, but professor Koht always wanted steak.”

While the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry frantically searched for the Minister by phone, Krag woke her cook. Koht got his steak and was probably still at the table when the air raid sirens blared. He seemingly borrowed Sigri Krag’s telephone and called the Ministry, then the Royal Palace. According to major Bjart Ording, who was the King’s aide, the Foreign Minister communicated in few words: “Foreign warships are coming up the Oslo fjord, and Rauøy and Bolærne are fighting. You can relay this to the king if it suits you.”

King Haakon was still awake, and received the message seemingly calm. He answered curtly: “You can wake me if it becomes necessary. Now I will retire.”

The relative peace lasted less than an hour. Between 02 and 03 in the morning, messages came streaming in about German attacks – against Kristiansand, Egersund, Bergen, Trondheim and

Narvik. The squadron in the Oslo fjord, who no one had seen since midnight, was again spotted half an hour later at Filtvet – only 25 nautical miles to the south.

“The Cabinet members gathered in my office, and there we received message after message about enemy attacks from every corner of the country”, Koht wrote. “It was the most ghastly thing I ever experienced.”

The situation was critical. The German cruisers were only an hours’ sailing from Hønnørbrygga pier in front of Oslo’s City Hall if Oscarsborg let them pass. In reality, they only had minutes left, and the cabinet was forced to act. Nygaardsvold and his men, who had refused to call on the armed forces for the last several days, finally decided to mobilize – more as a last desperate gesture against a brutal oppressor than as a well thought out decision.

Panic shone through in their second action of the night as well, which consisted of a telephone call to the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Dormer. The Cabinet had refused several earlier offers of aid from the western powers, and Koht had censured the British minelaying in the Vestfjord with hard words hours before. “I could not just go and ask for help”, Koht wrote. “Because we had not answered Dormer when he offered to equalize an attack on Norway as an attack on England at the outbreak of the war. And we had declined the Allied offer of “safeguarding” some of our cities against the Germans.”

The government had put itself in a position where it was too humiliating to ask for direct aid. The telephonic orientation about the German attack was a cry for help, and Koht hoped that the embassy would use their illegal transmitter to call on the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.

Envoy Bräuer had only had five hours to cram Hitler’s directive, but he was a professional diplomat, and announced himself at Victoria Terrace at 04.30 with a message from Berlin. “He was correct and polite, but there was a cold tone of command in his words”, Koht noted. “He brought an ultimatum of 19 machine-typed pages, which he gave to me.”

The note was a perfidious mix of threats and promises: Supreme German forces were ready to march on every important Norwegian city. They came in friendship to protect Norway from a British attack. If the King and Cabinet surrendered peacefully and let their forces enter, the county could keep its political independence. On the opposite side, any resistance would be brutally beaten down by any means necessary.

Koht listened to the envoy’s tirade by the flickering light of two candles in the Foreign Ministry’s library. He did not answer, but he was in inner turmoil. “I cannot deny his words fell heavily on me”, it read in his defense script, Fra skanse til skanse (from sconce to sconce) . “But I caught myself and said: Don’t let yourself be frightened. Remember what you so often say: What you do in fright is a stupid thing.”

When Koht left the library to discuss the matter with the rest of the cabinet, even Bräuer revealed that his nerves were on edge: “He started walking nervously up and down the floor”, wrote bureau chief Christian Reusch in a later note. “Then he spoke: This war, yes, I mean the war

between Germany and England is the most insane war ever to happen. It can only yield one result, that both countries destroy each other.”

The cabinet only needed a few minutes to refuse the ultimatum. They were backed into a corner. To accept the German demands would place the country on the wrong side in the fight between democracy and the tyranny of fascism, and that was in reality no option at all. The decision was almost spontaneous, as it was said by Trygve Lie – and joined by others: “We cannot accept this!”

To refuse impossible demands was not the same as declaring war. It was rather an attempt to buy time, and Koht chose his words with care when he went back to the waiting Bräuer with the refusal.

“We will defend our neutrality”, he said curtly.

“Then there will be battle, and nothing can save you”, Bräuer answered.

“The battle is already under way.”

What Bräuer had not thought of in his calculations, was the fighting spirit of colonel Birger Eriksen – and the quick thinking of Stortings-President Carl Hambro. When the German envoy reached Victoria Terrasse at 04.30, the cruiser Blücher was already a burning wreck, drifting through the Drøbak strait – savaged by cannonfire and torpedoes from Oscarsborg. The rest of the fleet turned and pulled out. The 1500 soldiers remaining on Blücher was to have been marching across the Rådhusplassen square in front of the city hall when Bräuer delivered his ultimatum. Instead, they drowned at Askholmene or dragged themselves soaked and cold onto land – with no weapons or equipment. Fortress commander Eriksen’s heroic decision had saved the cabinet at the last, and saved them to make sure they delivered their refusal.

Meanwhile, Hambro stepped up to the plate and gathered firsthand information from journalists at Morgenbladet and NTB. “There could be no doubt about what was happening”, He wrote in De første måneder. “Without any warning, without an ultimatum, the Germans had surprisingly attacked Norway at every strategically important location. Our army was not mobilized. And if the King, the royal family, the Cabinet and the Storting was taken in a coup, Norway would not just be under the yoke of the Germans, but would cease to exist as a sovereign nation with an independent government.”

He used his authority as President of the Storting and ordered that the Storting members leave town at 04. “(on the phone) he said that the Germans had reached Filtvet, some of them even Drøbak”, wrote the Head of Office at the Storting, Ole Johan Vassbotten in a later note. “I had to gather the personnel, protocols and more for departure to Hamar in a few hours.”

When Hambro reached Victoria Terrace a while later, the mood was depressed. Bräuer had just left the building, and the ministers were grasping at straws. The government had acted, but it had no plan. If the Germans had passed Oscarsborg, then they would hear marching boots in the streets in no time. Without any fighting-ready troops, the war would be over before it began. Koht's brave words to Bräuer would be nothing but words. Hambro arrived as a new saviour, and

his request to move to Hamar was accepted at once in council. There might be a way out before the Germans arrived – if they could arrange an extraordinary train from Østbanen rail station at record speed.

Far to the south, Walther’s paratroopers had taken wing, but in Oslo, the flight was already underway.

Chapter 3

Hambro’s initiative

Oscarsborg and Oslo city centre, one hour later

Ony fifteen minutes after the order to cease fire at 04.30, communications officer Thorleif Unneberg had transmitted the first message to the staff in Oslo: “A large cruiser has passed and is burning by Askholmene. The four further vessels are too far out in the fjord to fire upon.”

It was a couple thousand meters from Nordre Kaholmen to the burning Blücher, and it was difficult to see what was happening underneath the flames and the oily smoke. But the Drøbak sound had been forced, and they had every right to fear that the ship would continue on to Oslo – once they put out the fires. Soldiers moved both on Askholmene and on the eastern side of the fjord, and at 05.10, the watchman at Skiphelle made a new, unsettling observation: “It looks like people are coming ashore from the burning ship near Oscarsborg.”

The situation was chaotic, and no one could be sure what the next move would be. They had to steel themselves against what was to come, and at Oscarsborg they called out the recruits to meet a possible German landing. Rifles and bayonets were brought up, and colonel Birger Eriksen personally phoned to Akershus fortress to ask for infantry support.

“It goes without saying that the battle-worthiness of these recruits is rather low”, wrote troop leader Ivar Lien in a later report. “But many were members of sport shooting clubs, others were experienced hunters, and some had done volunteer drills, which had sprouted from these uncertain times. All my men seemed calm at least, and they were very eager. I started the instructions and kept my eye on the German vessel at the same time.”

While the recruits trained in reloading and firing around the snow-covered rocks on Kaholmen, the man responsible for the defense of Oslo was uncertain. The dark and thoughtful major general Jakob Hvinden Haug had served in the Field Artilery and General staff for forty years, and was in possession on a cool and clear brain. He was the son-in-law of the well-known gunsmith Lars Hansen Hagen, and after the first world war he had tested his skills as a businessman in the family business L. H: Hagen & Co, which was Oslo’s leading sports shop, and sold weapons and skis to customers all over the world – including the arctic expeditions of Scott

and Amundsen. He had not settled into civilian life, and had returned to the Army, where he made a brilliant career in the 1930s – first as General Inspector for the Field Artillery, then as commander of Akershus and chief of the 2nd division, which had depots and muster fields from Hovedøya island to the south up to Lake Mjøsa in the north. He was a prominent Freemason, which only a few years later would take him to the top of the Lodge as ruling master for the entire country. In the service, he had been part of military manouvers in several European countries, but nothing had prepared him for the crisis about to unfold.

“I had no orientation from higher-ups about events from the 5th to the 9th of April”, he wrote in a later report. “As late as the 8th of April, I addressed the Chief of the General staff about this, with a request for when I could expect an order for mobilization, but without results.”

The passivity of the government had sabotaged Hvinden Haug’s ability to stop a German march on the capital. By general mobilization, more than 10.000 men could be called up to the 2nd division district. In the East Country, he now only had at his disposal the 2nd battalion of Infantry Regiment nr. 5 with 878 men, who had been called for neutrality watch at Trandum since March 30th, and the 4th battalion of Artillery Regiment nr. 2 in Fredrikstad with 135 men. I addition came the Royal Guards, the War Academy, and the Officer schools for Cavalry, Army Artillery and Engineers, all together around 800-900 men, but none of these were ready for war.

On short notice, he had only a few hundred men available, and Hvinden Haug had to improvise. When he sent his first order of the night at 05.25, it represented a desperate attempt to shore up any German troop landings with the meagre means at his disposal: “The three companies of Royal Guards are to move down to the harbour area to protect against ship attacks.”

For lieutenant colonel Trygve Frivold Graff-Wang at the Royal Guard’s camp at Majorstua, the order came unexpectedly and totally ill-timed. He had in his disposal the only battle-ready troops in the 2nd division’s central district, but that was only partially correct. Certainly, His Majesty’s Royal Guard was composed of around 600 well-trained young men, but they were not mentally prepared for war – and in no way equipped for field duty. The first company was at Terningmoen military camp for recruit school, and the second company had handed in all their equipment facing discharge the same day. Fourth company was on guard duty at the Royal Palace and Akershus Fortress, and even had 30 men on sick leave due to an outbreak of mumps. In reality, that meant Graff-Wang had one and a half companies ready, without machine guns or heavy weapons.

For himself, the sixty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel had been Guard Commander for ten years, and was about to retire in November due to age limitations. With his carefully tended handlebar mustache and bull neck, he was a man for great events: parades, resounding commands and sabers pointed to the sky. But his warrior spirit had been ground to dust by the long years of anti-military agitation, and the order did not stir him to any particular sense of hurried alarm. Graff-Wang did not think he had to hurry, and went about preparations in a

sense like a country picnic – with a sheen of seriousness. “Every company is being organized. Ammunition is handed out, the men are being fed and are bringing along plenty of provisions.”

In the airspace above Denmark, the mood was quite different. “Below us, we could see the Army divisions plunge northwards on every road,” wrote premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt. “We felt a need to open the windows and wave to our comrades down below. We wanted to shout: This time, we are coming too! This time, we too will swing our swords for the Third Reich!”

The 29 Ju-machines transporting major Erich Walthers paratroopers flew in tight formation – three and three planes together. Around 100 kilometers south of them came the next wave of an additional 53 planes going northwards with colonel Helmuth Nickelmann’s soldiers from the 163rd division. As the crow flies, the distance from Schleswig Land to Fornebu was around 650 kilometers. With a cruising speed of 250 km/h, it meant that the paratroopers would jump out over Oslo sometime after seven o’clock. Their baptism of fire was near, and expectations were nearing the breaking point. They joked and laughed, and the sound of the engines was almost drowned out by their battle song: Rot scheint die Sonne.

“The mood was through the roof,” wrote Herbert Drescher, who was a telegraphist on board the airplane carrying troop commander Wolfgang Graf von Blücher and his men northwards. “For a while, we feared they would tear our machine apart while were still in the air.”

In the meantime, Carl Hambro’s arrival at Victoria Terrace had sparked a frenzy of activity. The Ministers hurriedly rang family members and ministerial staff. Minister of Labour, Olav Hindal roused the general director of the NSB (Norwegian State Railways) and demanded that their emergency evacuation plan was set into action with all haste.

The reaction was not late in coming. “I arrived at the track switch station, and the phone was ringing off the hook,” told switchman Fredrik Gulbrandsen, part of the NSB morning crew, who arrived at work on Østbanen (Eastern railway station) at five in the morning.

“It was one of the night watch men, and he was disturbed, totally wild on the phone. We had to bring a train no matter the type, as long as it had some sort of first class seating.”

“But where is it going to?” Gulbrandsen asked, who wanted to know which track to use.

“No, that’s a secret. You can’t know.” answered the man on the other end, who refused to give him any further information.

The train station was seemingly quiet, but Station Master Hjalmar Larsen came running from St. Hallvard’s street. “You better go up the tunnel, I suppose the lads are up there,” he said. “And right enough, there they were. They were just following orders. They were supposed to hide.”

Chief Conductor Ivar Iversen, who was actually scheduled to go to Lillestrøm on the newspaper train, was commanded to act as train driver with no further explanation. At Track 8, he saw two

steam locomotives with seven bogie wagons and the Royal Carriage set up at the back – with the possibility to change both to the Gjøvik track, Østfold track and Hovedbanen. (the Main Rail line from Oslo to Lillehammer, passing Hamar and Eidsvoll.) “There is to be an extraordinary train to Hamar,” explained station master Larsen. “Yes, but I am in reserve and is set to change for a chief conductor at Lillestrøm,” Iversen objected.

“There will be no normal traffic today,” the station master answered brusquely. “So you better get ready.”

Østbanestasjonen, the Eastern railway station

The Royal Palace, surrounded by the palace park.

Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold had personally taken it upon himself to explain to the King why it was necessary to leave, and the monarch grasped the gravity of the situation at once. Adjutant Ording and the servant staff were turned to packing the necessities, while the king called Skaugum (residence of the Crown Prince and his family in Bærum outside Oslo) to orient the crown prince who had already been appraised of the situation by his own adjutant, friend and sports teacher, Nikolai Ramm Østgård.

“It was not the time or place to discuss,” he told Jo Benkow in the book Olav – menneske og monark. (Olav – man and monarch) “My father took the time to review the situation, but after thinking about it, he decided quickly.”

He added: “Father always took the time to think things through. It is a contributing factor to that he always did what turned out to be right in every important situation. taking the time to use your head is not the same as wasting time.”

The crown prince’s three children were woken up, and at once understood that something extraordinary was happening. “They had bought blackout curtains at Skaugum, and they had been installed,” told Princess Ragnhild. “We were woken in the middle of the night and told to dress for a mountain trip. The most obvious sign something was not right, was that it was our parents who woke us. We had a sort of breakfast behind drawn curtains.”

The thirty-seven-year-old crown prince had grown up in the protective atmosphere of the Royal Palace, and had mostly kept the company of palace staff. It had made him shy and introvert, something only partially cured by his friendship with the sportsman Ramm Østgård. But at the same time, he had become a hardened and determined man, and those abilities would be tested to the full in the dramatic weeks to follow. While others buckled and doubted, the crown prince was ready for war from the moment he placed himself behind the wheel of his black Buick with crown princess Märtha in the passenger seat and their three children in the back. There was no way he would bow to a brutal and criminal Nazi regime.

“I do not think I have ever driven as quickly from Skaugum to the Palace as on this special morning,” he told Benkow. “I was totally prepared for the fact that someone might try to block the road and stop me. That's why I drove myself. I had decided to run over anyone who might hinder me or try to stop the car.”

The independence of a free country was on the line, and the crown prince was ready to defend it to the last. “I did not want to be surrounded or locked up. It was unreasonable to think that my chauffeur would think in the same way as me.”

When he passed the Royal Guards at the gate, he stopped the car and rolled down the window. His words blazed with fighting spirit: “Remember to change to live ammunition, boys!”

In Oslo collection central in the basement below Hotel Astoria, the alarm was raised again around four o’clock. The April night was cold, and the fog banks hindered the observation posts in their work. But sound carried far, and the listening devices on both sides of the fjord caught the unmistakable sound of airplane engines far away. Nothing was seen still, but captain Jakob Bull-Berg took no chances, and sounded the air raid sirens once again at 04.24, and sent out the order for blackout once more. “In the time leading up to seven o’clock we received several messages of airplanes, though none came within firing range,” he wrote in his report.

At the Department of Defence close to Akershus, Chief of the General staff, Rasmus Hatledal worked with grim determinism. The fifty-five-year-old farmer’s son from Stryn was the gentleman of the General staff: soft-spoken, loyal and modest. He had dedicated his life to the Army. But he was not a stiff-legged militarist, and had never dallied with the fascist ideas which had caught on among so many of his colleagues in the 1930s. Hatledal was most of all a professional soldier, and that was why he was embittered and despairing. He knew better than anyone what the disarmament policies of the interwar period had led to. He had seen Norway sliding towards a great war, and for months he had fought to save what was left of material and military options.

“I have laid awake all night,” Johan Nygaardsvold said the last time Hatledal had tried to wake the politicians from their stupor. “I never knew things were so bad. I want a royal decree of 75 million kroner.”

But the money had never arrived, and all his requests to mobilize had been denied – even when he on Monday night had desperately dogged the heels of Defense Minister Birger Ljungberg through the corridors of the Storting and begged him to get going. Ljungberg was a colonel and had been senior commander in Fredrikstad when he surprisingly had been named as the new Defense Minister. Even though many of his contemporaries saw him as a lightweight, he was assumed as a member of the Conservative party to become an ally in the continuous conflict with Nygaardsvold and his pacifistically-minded men. But power was a strong elixir, and Ljungberg had chosen his side with pomp and stubbornness – with the party cadre and against his former superiors in the military.

When Ljungberg arrived at Myntgata 1(address of the Ministry of Defense, part of Akershus Fortress – directly named Coin street) with Supply Minister Trygve Lie as cicerone in a staff car from Victoria Terrace to proclaim their decision to mobilize, the cup was full to overflowing.

“Have you gone mad?” Hatledal screamed when he understood what the Cabinet was planning. There was to be no declaration of war with an open mobilization of all men ready to bear arms, but a silent variety – which meant that the order to mobilize would be sent out by post. It would take three days for the order to go out, and Hatledal had lost his temper for once. The Germans were past Oscarsborg, and it could be minutes before they were mustering on the Rådhusplassen square.

But the power-drunk Lie, who had been engrossed in private telephone calls, had put down he receiver and declared: “There will be no discussion! The gentlemen have their orders. We cannot wait for you, Minister Ljungberg. We must go!”

Hatledal bit back his anger. The procedure had been started – with all the modifications he could manage. But the reality was the same: The army could not be mustered in front of their depots before the 11th of April at the earliest, and that was far too late.

Many of his younger colleagues had been present at the premiere of the German propaganda film Feuertaufe at the German legation the 4th of April and seen how Stuka bombers levelled Warsaw block by block. The showing was a poorly camouflaged attempt to soften up the Norwegian officer corps in front of the coming invasion, and it had its effects: “The film in itself was rather tasteless,” noted lieutenant colonel Harald Wrede-Holm, who was the intelligence chief of the General staff. “My reflection was: This is how it turns out for those who are not good boys and do what Hitler want.”

Hitler’s will had been made known, and the screaming sirens made it clear that the next target for the Nazi bombers would be Oslo. Hotels and schools in the periphery of the city had long ago been designated as reserve command posts, and there was no time to lose. While Hatledal and his staff sent out the amputated mobilization orders at blistering speed to district commands all across the country, all hands were called to pack archive materials and office equipment. “We expected an air bombardment of the Akershus area as soon as it was light,” Hatledal wrote in his war report. “The order was given that the Army Supreme Command would gather at Slemdal. The move started at five in the morning.”

In the next hours, a steady stream of lorries moved between Akershus and the improvised field headquarters some kilometers outside the city centre. It was an exodus that brought the entire military command apparatus to safety from any eventual German airplanes.

“I left the general staff building at 06.30 as the last of the staff personnel,” Hatledal noted, who arrived at Slemdal Hotel an hour later after stopping by at his home to fetch his toiletries and other personal items. He found no comfort in the reports that had arrived in the meantime. “I was by then fully aware that enemy forces were en route to or had taken Horten, Kristiansand, Bergen and Trondheim. I knew that Oscarsborg was fighting too.”

In the Reich Chancellery in Berlin that same night, Hitler had paced restlessly across the marble floors for hour upon hour. Weserübung was his operation, and he knew better than anyone what was at stake.

“How will America react?” Propaganda Minister Joesph Goebbels had asked him earlier that evening, while on their walk in the park behind Brandenburger Tor.

“I am not interested in that for the moment,” the despot had answered. “Materially, they can send aid in eight months, with troops, it will take one and a half years.”

The essence was in the next sentence that Goebbels had consciously added in his diary: “We must win within this year. Otherwise, the opposing material superiority will be too great.”

The Führer had spent his seven years in power at strengthening their self-sufficiency. It had been an uphill struggle that had demonstrated the great basic weakness of the country: Germany had enormous amounts of coal, and a huge industrial capacity, but lacked in nearly everything else: oil, iron, copper, manganese, nickel, aluminium, rubber and most other metals and products that modern warfare consumed in enormous quantities. Hitler's war was therefore a war of conquest to secure the resources he needed to build the Thousand-Year-Reich. The attack on Norway was no different. By controlling Narvik and the Norwegian coast, he could protect the ore veins in Northern Sweden. It was about yearly supplies of more than ten million tons of the richest iron ore in the world, turned into shells and armour plating in the forges of Ruhr. The additions were a deciding factor if he was to reach his political goals: Mastery of Continental Europe and Lebensraum for the master race on the eastern steppes.

He had personally intervened and demanded that the armaments industry increase their production dramatically – with a quintupled increase in ammunition production and thousands more of tanks and planes. To reach his goal, he had to secure the iron ore from Luleå in the summer and Narvik in winter.

The highly respected Armaments Minister, general Karl Becker, who was a professor of military science at Humboldt University in Berlin, had protested against the Führer’s impossible demands. But Hitler had brushed aside his warnings and given full authority to the loyal Nazi technocrat Fritz Todt to take steps – sidelining Becker. The aging professor had succumbed to a whisper campaign accusing him of ineptness started by the Nazi top brass. He buckled under the pressure – On Monday the 8th of April – the same day that Weserübung neared its climax – he had taken out his service pistol and shot himself in his office. The shot was a warning to the hazardous adventure politics of the Nazi elite. It had resounded among the intelligentsia in Berlin. Hitler had been furious and would rather Becker had been passed over and forgotten. But the generals had been shaken. To soothe tempers and to smooth things over, he therefore ordered that Becker be given a state funeral with full political and military honours. It was a cynical gambit, but it did not allay the mood of nervous desperation that spread across the Reich Chancellery throughout the evening and night. “The afternoon passes in breathless excitement,” Goebbels wrote. “The opposing side seems to gain a glimmer of understanding

that something is about to happen. If only night would come! The news are more and more alarming. Hurry, we have no time to lose. Schneller, schneller!”

Envoy Carl Bräuer knew he had failed when he returned to the legation on the Drammensveien road around 05.30, and he was right to fear the consequences. The officers and servicemen that chose to follow Hitler knew that the hunt for scapegoats was the foremost blood sport in Berlin, and Bräuer had seen for himself what the murder of legation secretary Ernst von Rath had done in Paris, triggering a wave of murder and terror. When he reported the Cabinet’s refusal in a coded telegram to Berlin at 05.52, he underscored that the ultimatum had been refused in a “definitive and most insistent way”. The seriousness and haste had been pointed out, but it had not helped: “After a few minutes, the answer came: We will not bend the knee voluntarily, the battle is already under way.”

It would take a few hours before the telegram went out from the cipher office to the Foreign Ministry, and in the Reich Chancellery Hitler was in a deep sleep – no doubt knocked out by a heavy sedative injection from his personal doctor.

If Blücher and Lützow had been laying at the quay with their heavy 20,3cm cannons pointed at Stortinget and Victoria Terrace, then Bräuer’s position would have been very different. One salvo would have been enough to break any resistance. The bullying tactics would have worked.

But the German squadron had been delayed for reasons unknown to Bräuer, and naval attaché Richard Schreiber and the political machinator Hans-Wilhelm Scheidt from the Nazi party’s foreign office had no words of comfort. They had waited for the German warships near Vestbanen (the western railway station, close to Victoria Terrace and the Palace) since early morning and even taken a trip up to the Naval College at Ekeberg up on the hillside to get a good view towards Nesodden. But the fjord was dark and silent, and the first telegram sent by lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman from the legation to colonel general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst at the Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg was downcast: “No ships in Oslo harbour.”

The firebreathing von Falkenhorst was known among his subordinates as Wotan (Odin) and was unlikely to accept their rationalizations, and Hitler himself was merciless. There was therefore only one hope that could bring the situation under control. That hope was tied to major Erich Walther and his paratroopers who were soon to land at Fornebu airport.

Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold.

President of the Storting, C. J. Hambro.

Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht.

Chapter 4

The flight begins

Oslo, the 9th of April 06.30 to 07.30

The fear of an attack by land from the troops aboard Blücher turned out to be groundless. The rescue crews never managed to fight the fires raging on board. When the flames reached the ammunition room, the whole stock of medium shells went up at once. The violent explosion rent the armoured steel. Water flowed in, and the cruiser rolled over. Two hours after the firefight at Oscarsborg, it was all over. The attack group’s flagship went down bow first between the Askholmene islands and the mainland. “The cruiser north of Oscarsborg sank at 06.23 after countless explosions on board,” relayed communications officer Unneberg to the Admiralty staff. A deadly threat from the sea had been neutralized, and the order for the Royal Guards to

secure the harbour was recalled. Instead, captain Axel Petersson and his reduced fourth company was sent by bus in the direction of Drøbak to round up the German solider and sailors who had swam ashore near Søndre Hallangen farm.

Only minutes after the news of Blücher’s demise reached Oslo, a new threat materialized. It was the watchpost at Onsøyknipen in Østfold, who transmitted a message to Oslo collection central from Swedish colleagues who had seen 15 planes flying north earlier that night. Captain Bull-Berg in the cellar beneath Astoria Hotel alarmed the anti-air batteries and the Fighter Wing at Fornebu, who had been ready for action.

“Whatever goal these airplanes had, or whichever nation they were from, one did not know,” noted captain Erling Munthe-Dahl in his later recollection of the events. “After what was presented to us, we really did not think they were coming up to Oslo, but to be sure, the Wing sent out a 5-plane team well in advance of when these planes were calculated to arrive.”

The forty-two-year-old Munthe-Dahl was one of the pioneers of military aviation in Norway, and had joined the Army Flying School as early as 1920. He was a keen radio enthusiast, and had set the Norwegian record for long-distance flight with a 5000km trip from Kjeller to Kirkenes and back again. He had joined the Fighter Wing in the autumn of 1939 from a position as chief of staff in the Army flight wing and was therefore one of the most versatile and seasoned officers in the Air Force – both as a pilot and as an administrator. “Munthe-Dahl was a comfortable boss, with whom we had a trusting relationship,” the pilot Kristian Schye told the writer Cato Guhnfeldt. “He was not strict in the military sense, but he was well respected none the less.”

Second in command of the Fighter Wing and Operations officer, lieutenant Rolf Tradin from Kragerø was only 26 and had just finished his class in the War Academy.

“Tradin was an honest leader too, cool and balanced, but quite strict and exacting,” Schye said.

His classmate Tarald Weisteen from the flying school added: “Munthe-Dahl could get nervy. He was quick to think something had gone wrong. He was a good fit with Tradin, who was calm, solid and steady, and quite quiet at times. When he laughed, he had a deep and comfortable laugh.”

The Fighter Wing, like the Anti-Air Artillery, was a good gauge for the condition of the armed forces in general. It was a small force – only 22 officers and 92 privates – with a huge task: to beat back enemy air forces which attacked the capital. For the job, the Fighter Wing had been given eleven Gloster Gladiator biplanes, of which seven were operative on the morning of April 9th. The Gladiator had a fair speed and good all-round flying capabilities, but with its body of thin aluminium sheets and canvas, it belonged to a type of fighter planes already headed for the scrapheap of history. Out in the wide world, the airplane factories worked non-stop producing a new generation of fighters, with metal bodies, higher top speeds, and strong firepower, which would ground the double-decker planes for good. After intense pressure, the Nygaardsvold government had agreed at the new year 1939/40 to buy 24 modern fighter

planes of the model Curtiss Hawk (75A-4, 19 which had arrived, and later used by the Germans) from the USA, but the order had come in too late. Most of them were still in their packing crates, which meant that the young pilots of the Fighter Wing had to make do with their old canvas aircraft.

“The army’s flying arm was in miserable condition,” wrote the chief of the technical department, lieutenant Gunnar Vardan in a biting report. “The workload after many previous years of sin had been overwhelming, especially when we were to bring up something like a real air force in a minimum of time – despite the hostile and sabotage-like mindset of the government and Storting. Even then, we did not expect to set up a useable air force before the spring of 1941.”

When the air raid sirens blared at midnight, the Fighter Wing’s airplanes had been scattered and partially camouflaged in different places around Fornebu, which was still under construction. Munthe-Dahl was ordered to have three of them on a five-minute standby at dawn and sent pilots and ground crew to bed at Oksenøen Bruk’s drafty greenhouses, which had been rented as temporary barracks.

“When the wing arrived at the airfield (after an alarm at 04.30) it was still dark, but getting lighter,” wrote Munthe-Dahl. “There was a connective cloud cover in differing height over the whole area that we could see, partially down to the hills.”

The cloud cover was breaking up when they again heard airplane engines coming closer. Munthe-Dahl ordered two planes up at once, and another three just after 05.

For the next half hour, two German recon planes were pursued through the skies, and second lieutenant Finn Thorsager fired several salvoes from the Gladiator’s machine guns – without a definitive hit.

“The wing commander was certain that these flights were a continuation of those violations of neutrality that we had seen before, and that there was no real war on yet,” noted Munthe-Dahl when the airplanes were safely back on the runway.

When the message of a further 15 planes arrived at the wing’s intelligence office via a direct phone line from Oslo collection central, he followed his instincts – more out of duty than conviction. All seven fighters were sent up to patrol the area between Nesodden and Fornebu.

“The Wing wanted to call the team back down again as soon as the immediate danger from the 15 planes was over,” wrote the wing commander, who was conscious of his young pilots. “(We meant) that the guys should get an opportunity to eat, as they still had not had any breakfast today.”

Aboard the fleet of German transport planes, the mood had gone through a total change. The first wave had reached the sea of fog above Skagerrak an hour and a half after takeoff, and most felt extremely uncomfortable.

“The weather changed at once, and sight was reduced to fifty metres,” wrote the telegraphist Herbert Drescher. “We flew into steadily thicker cloud banks, and the situation was problematic. Many of the crew were ill-trained for flying blind.”

Aboard premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt’s plane, the song had gone quiet. The pilot chose to climb, and found blue skies at 1200 meters. But under them, the clouds lay like a cotton blanket from horizon to horizon. Schmidt's notes were despairing: “Would we make it after all? We hungered to do out duty, but we could not see the Norwegian coast. Only an impenetrable grey soup!”

Lieutenant colonel Karl Drewes was suddenly in the midst of an unsolvable dilemma. The forty-four-year-old group commander from Wilhelmshaven was responsible for getting the paratroopers safely to Fornebu. He sat next to Erich Walther in the cabin and knew how badly the battalion commander and his men wanted to get stuck in. But the fog surrounding the lead plane seemed impenetrable, and he had no way of knowing what waited over Oslo – if the pilots even found their way. If the planes were forced to circle, their fuel stocks would dwindle to dangerous levels. Aunt Ju had a limited range, and soon it would be impossible to return to their starting point. He knew he would ignite the rage of both Hitler and Göring, but he felt he had no choice. He gave the order to turn back – against Walther’s wild protests.

Crown prince Olav’s black Buick hurtled through the gate and parked in the passageway at the Palace. While Olav himself ran inside to talk to king Haakon, the crown princess and the children sat waiting in the car.

“ I remember us standing around and waiting in the back of the passageway before we got in the cars which were taking us to Østbanen,” wrote Einar Østgaard in the book Reisen hun ikke ønsket. (the trip she did not want) The ten-year-old was the son of Ragni and Nicolai Ramm Østgaard, Märtha’s lady-in-waiting and Olav’s adjutant. He had been the princesses’ playmate, and followed the unfolding drama with wide eyes.

“The two princesses were different in several ways,” Østgaard wrote. “Ragnhild, the oldest, was more introvert and shy, but also more contemplative than Astrid, who was more outgoing and robust – and unafraid. I don’t remember them being anything but good friends, and that they were close with each other and their younger brother Harald.” (Our current king, Harald V)

The three kids were dressed in colourful bunads (folk costumes) and thought they were going on a skiing holiday to the prince’s cabin in Sikkilsdalen valley. But they had only packed small suitcases with a few toys and possessions, and the breakfast had been interrupted by the sound of airplane motors. “Father bade us go outside and see what kind of planes they were,” Princess Astrid told. “That’s when we suspected something strange was going on.”

Meanwhile, in the military headquarters of Operation Weserübung at Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg, a heated discussion was taking place among the flying officers around the weather conditions in Oslo. The seasoned long-distance pilot Carl Freiherr von Gablenz, who in his glory

days had crossed the wild Pamir mountants of Tibet, had little respect for Drewes’ decision to turn the planes around. But general Hans Geisler was commander for the entire 10th flight corps and trusted his group commander’s appraisal of the situation locally. He ordered the entire transport fleet turned around – including the 53 airplanes carrying Nickelmann’s infantrymen.

But it was a long way from Hamburg to the airspace above Skagerrak, and radio conditions were difficult. 26 of the 29 planes in Walther’s group turned around. The last three carrying the battalion staff, two officers and 19 paratroopers on board did not receive the orders and carried on northwards. The closer they came to Oslo, the more the weather improved. “Around 60 kilometers from the city, the clouds are breaking up,” read the log. “We can see the ocean again. Three burning ships coming into view, nationality unknown.”

The paratroopers had reached Oscarsborg, and off the Swedish coast to the south, the planes carrying parts of Nickelmann’s regiment held a steady course through the fog. Group commander Richard Wagner had received Geisler’s orders, but he did not want to turn around. Furthermore, the order had been signed by the 10th flight corps – not Transport chief Land, to which the young captain was subordinate. That was the pretext he needed to continue on. As the later report read: “Since the radio message had not been sent from my own organization, every plane in the group kept its position and continued on its mission.”

High above the clouds, premier lieutenant Werner Hansen and his fighter pilots were unworried about the weather. His 8-plane team of twin engine Messerschmitt Bf 110’s had taken off around 06 that morning from the advance base Westerland on the island of Sylt in the North Sea and risen up to a cruising height of 3000 meters. “After flying for one and a half hours at moderate speed, we closed in on the Oslo fjord,” wrote the flying ace Helmut Lent in his report. “The cloud cover broke up. We could see the beautiful Norwegian landscape below us.”

The heavy fighters were armed with machine guns and machine cannons, and were to provide fire support for the paratroopers before and after their landing. They had to reach Fornebu before the transport planes – and no later than a quarter to eight. “We floored it and raced towards the capital,” Lent wrote.

At Østbanen railway station, the situation was tense. The motorcade from the Palace had arrived at the entrance just before 07, and the royal family had been met by the President of the Storting, Carl Hambro and the general director of the NSB, Waldemar Hoff and had been led to the royal carriage.

“On the station we also met the Lord Chamberlain, Peder Anker Wedel Jarlsberg,” wrote Einar Østgaard. “He was dressed in his old major’s uniform and was to accompany the King as his adjutant.”

Meanwhile, switchman Fredrik Gulbrandsen and the rest of the NSB morning crew had set up the extra train and blocked off Track 8, much to the amazement of the many travelers who had errands in the capital and had arrived on early morning trains from other parts of eastern Norway. When the passengers arrived minutes later, Foreign Minister Koht was hounded by the editor of Norsk Telegrambyrå (NTB, the Norwegian news agency) Sigvard Friid, who wanted a commentary on the night’s events. “This German deed of violence against Norway is quite unheard of,” Koht declared according to the telegram which was distributed by teleprinter to all of NTB’s subscribers across the country. “Germany excuses their actions by saying that if they did not, England and France would have done the same thing. We do not believe that at all.”

Before he boarded the train, Koht added: “We will have to hope this condition will not last too long. The order for general mobilization went out tonight.”

The train slowly filled with cabinet members, ministry workers and around 100 MPs, who had received and had chosen to act on Hambro’s alarm some hours earlier. One of them was the famed Supreme Court lawyer Christian Ludvig Jensen, who had been foreman of the Norwegian tourist association and the Norwegian mountaineers’ club, and had represented Bærum (at the time known as Aker) for the Conservative party on the Storting since 1937.

“At 04.30, I received a call from the Storting office, telling me that Germany had taken possession of Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik in the night, and now laid off Filtvet,” he wrote in his diary. It was hard to take in the seriousness of the situation, but Christian Jensen had backed his rucksack with food and warm clothes, said goodbye to his family and went to Østbanen. It was impossible to know laid ahead, but his diary had a cheerless tone: “There were days filled with excitement and sorrow, hope and disappointment. Our wonderful and peaceful land had without warning become a battlefield.”

Except from the royal carriage the train was spartanly furnished, and the mood carried over to the crown prince’s children. “The compartment was dark, the blinds were drawn, and we were several times told to lay down on the floor,” told Princess Ragnhild to the writer Per Egil Hegge. “It was terribly scary . Father and mother were not in the compartment, and it was Mrs. Ragni Østgaard who watched over us.”

She added: “I can’t remember how Harald reacted. He was no more than three years old, poor dear, and probably didn’t understand anything other than that the adults were frightened too.”

At precisely 07.23 the forty-year-old Ivar Iversen waved the green flag and blew his whistle. The two locomotives spewed out smoke and steam, and the extraordinary train started rolling – from Østbanen to the relative safety further north.

Around the same time, lieutenant Rolf Tradin and his six pilots were at 1800 meters altitude above the Steilene islands at Nesodden, only ten minutes’ flying further south. The twenty-six-year-old had seen his father’s bank crash in the Great Depression of 1929 as a young man. He had fought to rebuilt his life after the failure, but opposition given him strength and a daring mind. “I became aware of a foreign airplane coming in over the Oslo fjord at around 1200

meters’ height,” he wrote in his combat report. “One plane soon turned into eight, and now I could see column after column of them coming inwards. It was impossible to count how many they were.”

Tradin knew that the canvas covering the Gloster Gladiators was a poor thing, and was only marginally able to resist modern 20mm guns. But he and his fellow pilots shared the qualities shown by captain Welding Olsen and colonel Eriksen. They knew that someone had to fight against a massive overpowering force, and they put aside their fear and negative thoughts.

“I radioed the others to attack,” wrote Tradin. “I chose the closest plane and let the others choose their own targets.”

None of the pilots knew, but far below them the Royal train was on its way to Linderud. The German attackers had come too late – once again.

Chapter 5

The battle for Fornebu

Oslo, 9th of April. 07.45 – 10.00

For lieutenant Helmut Lent and the other pilots aboard the Bf 110 fighters, the attack came out of nowhere. “Suddenly I saw my wing grow restless and geared to starboard – into the sun,” he wrote in his report. “Just as suddenly, I saw a Gloster Gladiator tailing a buddy to the left of me. I reacted automatically and fired off a salvo just in front of the Norwegian’s nose to scare him off.” The time was just about 97.45, and the seven pilots threw themselves at a totally superior force with a courage that has secured them front-row seats in Norwegian war history.

The German attackers came in wave after wave in a number that grew to between 50 and 100 airplanes in the next half hour: Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters, Ju 52 transports and Heinkel 111 bombers, which had been sent to mark German air superiority over the Norwegian capital. The fearless Tradin fired short bursts of his machine guns and saw his shot have an effect: “The first plane I attacked cut down steeply to the left, smoke streaming from its right-side engine. I turned to my next opponent and saw the air was swarming with German planes. Of our own I saw two, each battling their own opponent.”

For the Norwegians, this represented the first air combat in history in defense of their own country, but many of the German pilots were young veterans of the Luftwaffe – with experience from Poland and the battles with the Royal Air Force above the North Sea. Lent had already been credited with shooting down four planes, and would increase that number to 110 before he was killed in the autumn of 1944. Now, the man who was to become one of the most highly decorated pilots in Nazi Germany had been ambushed. According to their plans, the

Norwegians were not supposed to resist. Their airplanes were of second-hand quality, but they handled them with finesse and daring.

“We were suddenly involved in a gigantic dogfight,” Lent wrote. He was later decorated for his merits with the Knight’s Cross with oak leaf, sword and diamonds. “I shot and was shot at, glued myself to a Gladiator’s tail, but had a Gladiator on my own tail. I dove, went up and turned the plane around. My attacks missed. Our zerstörers were faster, but the Gladiators were more maneuverable. We broke off the fight and pulled away. The Norwegians did the same.”

The aerial battle was observed with rising uncertainty from the five anti-air batteries surrounding Oslo. The crews had huddled through a merciless winter, and many had been ready for a quick dismissal – not a brutal and surprising war. The Luftwaffe had a fierce reputation, and the batteries were poorly equipped to fight an experienced and brutal opponent. The aged weaponry were sat in open positions, there were no sandbags or shelters, the medical service was all but absent, and most of the men lacked steel helmets.

“The policy taken by our government in the immediate period leading up to the 9th of April seemed to me to be irresponsible and unenlightened. No effective steps were taken to fix the lack of equipment and education in the Defence Force,” wrote second lieutenant Knut Lockwood Meyer in a bitter report.

When Labour Party Mayor Trygve Nilsen of Oslo lined up to gather funds for the anti-air batteries he declared among other things: “Our city means so much to us that all of us will be ready to make any sacrifice to defend it. It is a crime to our loved ones and the coming generations to not strengthen our defences, without considering other things!”

Second lieutenant Meyer commented: “Important representatives on national and municipal levels expressed how very important it was that the capital had an effective anti-air defence. Still, every defence program was destined to go the beggar’s road. Any other consideration was more important to the politicians. The public budgets would not be tarred by expenses that were worth any offer.”

Meyer was the commander of Gressholmen batteri, which covered the flight path to Oslo with two 7,5 cm cannons and nine machine guns. Normally, the crew would be at 15 officers and 80 enlisted men, but the sick bill was long and the absentee list was great. When he gathered his crew early in the morning, Meyer had only six officers and 22 enlisted men present – plus 17 recruits who had had six days of exercise. “(around 07.40) we could see air combat at around 2500 meters’ height over the inner part of Bunnefjorden between our own fighters and a superior number of German planes,” he wrote in the report. “One German and two Norwegians could be seen to be damaged. At least the Norwegian pilot regained control and went downwards at great speed toward Snarøya.”

Over the next minutes, machine guns and anti-air cannons lit up the sky around the city, but the effect was hard to judge. “Fire was ordered at once, but because of the low height, the fire had

sadly little effect,” wrote sergeant Theodor Dyring at Huk battery, which was placed inside the forest near the famous beach spot at Bøgdøy island. The anti-air cannons were effective at ranges between 2000 – 5000 meters, and the shells exploded high above and beyond the German planes. The machine guns hit, but the caliber 7,92 bullets seemed to bounce off the planes.

“For the most part, the planes stayed at a height of 300 – 1000 meters, mainly beyond the range of our guns,” Meyer noted. “It seems clear to me that the Germans knew that the Defence Force lacked machine cannons.”

Many had difficulty with morale, and it showed signs of breaking at Gressholmen when the attackers came closer. “As soon as we ordered them to open fire, it was shown that most of the personnel were totally unfit for combat. Many had no control at all of what they were doing. We could only fire one of our cannons,” Meyer wrote. The battery was in the middle of the approaching air corridor to Oslo, and was soon subjected to diving attacks. “Cover was ordered. Despite the fact that we had drilled for this many times with satisfying results, some now threw their high-explosive projectiles to the rocks and ran off in a panic. Other ran and hid beneath the ammunition storehouse, and further others ran all they could until they could go no farther, to the pier at the north end. These last ones were the most difficult to get back. Some heaved and almost broke down. They were stricken by a panicked fear.”

When the attacks started, the extra train with the Royal family, parts of the goverment and Storting was labouring through the Groruddalen valley. “They went up Brynsbakken hill,” told switchman Fredrik Gulbrandsen, who stood at Østbanen, looking at the small train set. “The black, ugly planes followed them up the hill. They shot with machine guns so that it banged on the roof of the Hovedbanen workshop. It banged like damn.”

Aboard the train, Ivar Iversen went on his usual rounds, but the passengers were seemingly calm. “I mostly kept to the back of the train next to the Royal Carriage, where they had a phone set for the conductor,” he later told. “The journey to Lillestrøm was peaceful, and they did not need me much. But I was called for once by one of the compartments. Turns out it was little Harald that had rung the bell. The next time it rang, I just let it ring. The little princesses ran around in the corridor, and we got to know each other a little. Ragnhild told me that they had risen very early. When nanny went to turn on the lamp, there was no light.”

Through the open window at the German legation in Drammensveien road, lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlmann had heard the sound of airplane engines far away. He had waited for hours for any sign of life from Blücher, but the signals from the legation’s secret transmitter were no replied to. The morning coffee had been drunk, the newspaper headlines of war had been read and analyzed. Bergen and Trondheim was taken. They fought in Narvik and Kristiansand, but in Oslo the silence was total. The German squadron had not arrived, and the king and government had fled to Hamar.

“Finally around 08 I heard the drone of our airplane engines, mixed with shots from machine guns and anti-air cannons,” Pohlman wrote in a later script to his family. “I stormed over to another window which had an overview of the forest that concealed Fornebu. I expected to see white parachutes folding out and glide towards the earth. But there was nothing to see. Only air combat, falling planes, flames and plumes of smoke. The others looked at me quizzically: Was everything to go wrong today?”

In Berlin, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had gotten up at 03 after just three hours of sleep. His nerves sat on the outside of his skim, and the master liar had himself set up the strategy for the press campaign which was aimed to silence international opinion. He had woken his staff two hours later for the first briefing on the night’s events and laid guidelines for their further work. The preliminary messages were unclear. “The action in Denmark was completed almost without any combat. In Norway, light resistance,” read his diary. “Something else is hardly expected. Paris and London have not reacted yet. We are already in Copenhagen. The air landing in Oslo has failed because of fog.”

The German press were obedient lapdogs, and the Nazi organ Völkischer Beobachter arrived with grand headlines: “Germany saves Scandinavia!” Börsen Zeitung opined that the Norwegians should thank Germany for the invasion that saved their freedom: “England stamps cold-bloodedly on the corpses of the smaller peoples. Germany protects the weak states against the British highwaymen!”

Primitive words, but Goebbels was satisfied: “The world is as struck by lightning! I personally proclaim our words to the Norwegian and Danish governments on the radio. Our position is well known: Protection for Oslo and Copenhagen. Oslo is still reluctant and has ordered an evacuation of the capital. Paris and London offers aid, but everyone is laughing. Again we have struck a grave blow to the English prestige.” At the German legation in Oslo, the radio was set to the powerful German transmitter in Berlin, but the proclamation did not stir any cheer or jubilation.

“The fanfares resound. Then we can hear Goebbels’ voice making out daring plans known to the world: Oslo is in this moment under secure German control...” wrote Pohlman. “The others again don quizzical looks, while I study my right hand thoughtfully. Suddenly, laughter erupts. But it is a grim laughter, and outside the Norwegian machine guns and anti-air cannons hammer up at German planes racing across the sky.”

The air battle over the sea approach to Oslo lasted for 15-20 minutes. Lieutenant Tradin and his men fought heroic duels and shot down four of the intruders. But the resistance was overpowering, and the Fighter Wing’s Gladiators stood no chance in the battle to save Fornebu. “The number of German planes increased further. There were so many that I had enough targets but still had to maneuver to avoid an opponent on my tail,” wrote the twenty-two-year-old medicine student Kristian Schye from Jar, who had graduated from the Army flying school in

1939. “I was attacked ever closer to Fornebu and attacked or was attacked both above and below the clouds.”

The cockpit glass had iced over, and Schye headed towards Kolsås hill. He pumped fuel over his front and soon had a better view. Half a kilometre away he spotted a light German Dornier Do-17 bomber headed on the opposite course. “I pulled back on the gas, took a half roll and dove onto the plane,” he wrote in his report. “I opened fire at good range and had the plane in my sights until I was about 50 meters away. The plane tipped over sideways and disappeared downwards in a spiral.”

The bomber crashed into a field in Bærum, but Schye had gotten himself into trouble. Three German planes opened fire. One of his wings were torn open, and a shower of splinters penetrated the cockpit. “One of the splinters went into my upper left arm, which paralyzed it so much that I could no longer operate the speed lever.”

The quick-thinking youth mobilized his last strength and managed an emergency landing on a slope filled with small trees, after cutting a power line on his way down. The Gladiator was totaled, but Schye crept out – dazed and bleeding, but without any serious injury.

Fornebu's local defence consisted of three machine gun nests east, west and north of the two runways with seven Colt machine guns and a total crew of 40 men. The guns were placed in open rock pits, the store of ammunition and medical supplies were lacking, and there were few steel helmets to go round.

It was basically primitive and inadequate defences, but sergeant Torleif Tellefsen from Grimstad was equipped with an extraordinary cold-bloodedness. The thirty-seven-year-old was the son of a sea captain, but the crisis years following the first world war had smashed into the shipowners of Norway’s southern coast with a heavy blow. After graduating from the Army flying school in 1926, Tellefsen had tried his luck in the USA and served several years in the American air force. They had been hard, vagabond years, but the experience was about to serve him well.

The young gunners were tempted to start hammering when the air combat dried up between eight and half past eight, and the German airplanes started circling the airport in ever greater numbers. But Tellefsen only had 17 000 bullets, and did not want to waste his ammunition. Helmut Lent and the other fighter pilots dove down and peppered anything that moved at low altitude. You had to keep your cool, and the finger off the trigger. “The wait from when the enemy Bf 110’s started firing until we could open fire, we spent getting our aim in on our machine guns,” wrote the later Resistance hero from Grimstad. “Often, this was difficult because of all the dust and earth that the enemy projectiles dumped on us.”

He added drily: “Some sandbags around the machine guns would have helped prevent this. As well as steel helmets for the machine gunners.”

Aboard one of the Ju 52s circling Oslo, the paratrooper Walther Behn heard how the machine gun bullets cut through the aluminium plates. “We waited for the rest of the section and were

getting antsy,” he wrote in a later report. “So far we were only three machines with the battalion staff aboard. As we were staff we were pretty lightly armed.”

But the rest of the section never arrived. Major Erich Walther had to concede to the transport chief’s demand to turn back. Instead of leading the attack on the Norwegian capital, the planes had temporarily landed at the newly seized airfield in Aalborg, where he and the rest of the paratroopers waited for the all clear from the meteorologist – frothing in impatient rage.

“There was a violent row between Walther and transport chief Drewes at the airfield,” recalled corporal Bruno Melchior, who had hunkered down with the rest of the paratroopers while the planes refueled. “The discussion continued until the officers disappeared into the terminal building.”

But above Oslo the clouds had finally cleared, and the oldest remaining officer, premier lieutenant Wilhelm Götte was forced to make a decision. One paratrooper was already injured and the fuel supply was limited. Götte was Walther’s adjutant, and the time had come to act. “The pilot dove suddenly toward the airport,” wrote Behn. “The first man, a medical sergeant, was already at the door, ready to jump.”

The jump was to be made at Götte’s orders at 80 meters’ height, but the pilot saw another opportunity – probably inspired by two other transports ahead of him. “The plane went lower and lower,” Behn wrote. “Our machine guns emptied drum after drum. Suddenly we experienced a most improbable thing: We landed! We who for the longest time had dreamt of the first jump over enemy territory, we landed and climbed calmly out as soon as the plane was still!”

In the machine gun nest on the eastern side of the airport, Sergeant Tellefsen’s three Colt machine guns had their aim. “People could be seen in the windows of the transport planes,” he wrote in his report. “We concentrated the three machine guns on one plane at a time, and let the stream of bullets pass from the pilot’s cabin and backwards just below the windows to the tail and back, several times. Not one enemy soldier exited the planes in our line of sight. I saw no enemy soldiers at all as long as I stayed at my post.”

It was the lead machine in Transportgruppe Wagner which fared the worst. Captain Wagner, who had defied orders to turn back, was killed instantly along with four of colonel Nickelmann’s soldiers. The bloodbath had a nerve-wracking effect and the pilot took off for Aalborg – in the hope of getting medical aid for the many wounded.

Despite the fire, around ten German planes managed to land around 08.30 with paratroopers and infantrymen, alongside Bf 110 pilots who were running out of fuel. Many of the planes were hit during the landing, but most of the soldiers jumped unhurt onto the asphalt and sought cover on the outskirts of the runway.

“We started unpacking our containers of weapons and equipment,” wrote Walther Behn. “But the salvoes from the Norwegian machine guns brought us back to reality. They forced us to seek immediate cover.”

One of the wrecked German transports.

Just outside Lillestrøm station, the extra train carrying the royal family got caught up in the drama. As an answer to the government’s no to Braüer, Alfred Jodl, chief of Hitler’s personal staff had given approval to the Luftwaffe to bomb defence installations around Oslo. A wing of Heinkel-bombers who had terrorized the city in the early morning hours had chosen Kjeller as their target – including the airplane factory and the air force hangars. “The train stopped as usual at Lillestrøm,” wrote crown princess’ Märtha’s lady-in-waiting Mrs. Ragni Østgaard in her diary. “While we stood there, we suddenly spotted several large black planes, coming in from the south. Suddenly, bombs were falling. They fell slowly onto the airfield, and several houses started to burn. The anti-air batteries replied, and it was a terrible din. One had the impression that the shells passed just above the train.”

Her husband Nicolai pulled down the curtains and had the children sit on the floor. “Astrid (8 years) cried and was confused. Ragnhild (9 years) cried too, but not as much. She asked me all the time if it wasn’t just a drill. I answered that we could not be sure what it was, but that we at least should be careful and stay away from the windows.”

The attack came as a shock to most, who had had a remote view of the morning’s events. Many experienced the brutality of war up close for the first time, and it took several minutes before station master Karoliussen reacted. At close to half past eight, the 150 refugees were led out of the carriages and down into the nearest railway tunnel, which provided a measure of protection from stray bullets and shrapnel. King Haakon seemed unperturbed and carried the three year old price Harald on his shoulders, but Foreign Minister Koht could not handle the dark and crowded tunnel. “I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes,” he wrote in Fra skanse til skanse. “It was a frightful sight. German planes wheeled and dropped bombs on Kjeller, which was close to the station. There, everything was smoke and fire.”

His book was a written defense of his own position, and Koht did not admit to any political responsibility for the reason that the battles were faring poorly. Captain Lars Rosmo at Kjeller had just four anti-air cannons and a handful of machine guns to defend himself with. The Fighter Wing was in the process of being wiped out, and the Curtiss-Wright airplanes, who could have played a part, were still being unpacked and assembled in the airplane factory. “It seemed like the Norwegian planes could not get up and defend themselves,” Koht wrote. “The anti-air guns fired like mad, but I could not see them hit a single enemy plane. Soon the battle would be over, and all the Norwegian planes destroyed. it was obvious that the Germans had the upper hand.”

MP Christian Ludvig Jensen was shocked as well, when he saw the bombers in action. “Our land had entered the eye of the hurricane – the centre of battle for the Great Powers,” he wrote in his diary. “The misery of war in all its wrath and gruesomeness was upon us. How would we fare?”

Another train carrying a large group of volunteers on their way home from the Finnish Winter War had been stopped nearby, with Jensen’s stepson Kjell Holst on board – without father and son making contact. “Their train should have turned around – that we can say with hindsight,” noted Jensen. “The boys raged against their transportation to Oslo and Aker. They were of better use elsewhere.”

But the flight had created a power vacuum in the capital. The political signals were unclear, and none of the officers in the military elite were of such a format as to fill the void. Commanding General Kristian Laake had lost contact with the General staff, and his naval counterpart, admiral Henry Diesen, had fallen into apathy. The telephone network was overcrowded, the cab lines long and many officers had left their homes and offices in an untrustworthy way – without contacting the fighting sections.

“In the morning of the 9t of April, our work was made vastly more difficult by the fact that every senior military officer suddenly disappeared without a trace from the city,” wrote cavalry officer Nicolay H. Knudtzon at Oslo collection central – heavily underlining the word vastly. “After much strain, we found that every senior staff member had left the city for predetermined evacuation zones scattered around the surrounding area. It must be characterized as a mistake that Oslo collection central never received any lists of these addresses with their phone numbers beforehand. Our telephonic requests often came through after the staff had left one evacuation point for the next – without informing us of their secondary location. And so we got nowhere.”

It was the Army air corps and the anti-air troops who met the brunt of the German attack. But both the chief of the Anti-air regiment, colonel Magnus Hagem and the General Inspector for the air force, colonel Thomas Gulliksen were marked by a sense of departure. “Colonel Gulliksen seems very nervous and showed himself to be totally without ability to lead his staff and give orders,” wrote lieutenant Odd Bull, who worked in the colonel’s waiting room.

The staff itself had been hastily evacuated to Gulleråsen boarding house, which had been appointed as a reserve command seat for the air force, but the senior officers never made it there. From the hotel windows high up in the Holmenkollåsen hillside, the officers were impotently sidelined to watch the German planes stifle the frontline units deployed at Fornebu.

“At Gulleråsen we did nothing of note,” wrote lieutenant Gunnar Vardan. “In fifteen minutes’ time we were informed that the General staff was moving towards Eidsvoll, and that we were going too. We had many private cars and went in these plus four lorries for the office equipment.”

While naval attaché Richard Schreiber patrolled the docks to welcome Blücher, air attaché Eberhard Spiller had waited since early nightfall for the paratroopers in the villa of the German-born Alfred Kleinmann a few hundred meters from Fornebu.

“Schreiber was to gather locals who could guide the troops to the most important buildings: The Palace, offices of government, the Telegraph office and other places of strategic importance,” wrote lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman, who had taken command at the legation, supported by his warrants from colonel general Falkenhorst. “The air attaché was sent to Fornebu at the same time.”

Spiller was to call the moment the airport had been secured. But the phone was silent, and Pohlman grew ever more impatient. “Finally the call came!” he wrote around 08.30. “It was the attaché reporting that a few Ju 52’s had landed and that shock troops from the infantry had chased away some of the guards. But it was a difficult situation. Some Norwegian fighters had been destroyed, but they were constantly firing machine guns at the landing planes. The airport was in poor condition, and several planes had been wrecked. The worst part was that the troops did not know what they were doing at Fornebu. None of their commanders had landed.”

This was alarming news, and Pohlman had started to form an answer: “Tell the closest officer that...” But the connection was broken mid-sentence, and did not come back – no matter how loudly Pohlman swore. He turned at once to envoy Bräuer: “Do you have a car for me, herr minister?”

As soon as the German planes started landing, Wing commander Munthe-Dahl had called desperately for infantry support. The phone line to the air force’s General Inspector was dead, but cavalry officer Knudtzon at Oslo collection central still had contact with the Royal Guards’ camp at Majorstua.

“Message from the chief of the collection central that enemy planes have landed at Fornebu and destroyed two fighters,” it read in the logbook at 08.26. “A portion of the Guard is requested to come to their aid.”

Guard commander Graff-Wang had just sent his amputated fourth company to Drøbak, and was under heavy pressure from the Foreign Ministry to post a further 60-70 Guards for guard duty at Victoria Terrace. The order to guard the docks had been recalled. In return, he had been told to move one company to Akershus fortress, where conditions were chaotic. Some cleared

their offices, others reported for duty and no one had any sort of overview. Graff-Wang was worried when he called major general Hvinden Haug, but the commander of the 2nd division had no comfort to give. The unoccupied 2nd Guard company was to be sent away at once. As the log read a few minutes later: “Captain Winsnes will go to Fornebu with his second company and make the enemy planes leave or destroy them.”

Captain Christian Hulbert Hielm Winsens was with his 47 years one of the oldest company commanders in the Guard and a fervent member of Nasjonal Samling. He was seemingly unaffected by his political leanings, and had the company up and ready to go in buses and cars by 09.15. But at Akershus, Hvinden Haug was suddenly doubting the wisdom of it all. There had been no declaration of war, and his military and political superiors had left the city. When he called the Guard commander once more, his tone was much less bellicose. “If the enemy has superior numbers, do not risk the company’s destruction.”

Winsnes was faced with a dilemma: On the one hand, he was to destroy the German planes at Fornebu, which was likely to be a difficult and bloody task. On the other hand, he was to do it without risking his force. That can explain why he didn’t direct his buses onto Drammensveien road and the direct route to the airport. Instead he chose the cumbersome detour over Røa to Øvrevoll horseracing track in Bærum, seven kilometers north of the airfield. There he offloaded his 85 officers and privates and gathered them in a wooded copse. The rest of the way was to be taken on foot, but it was not easy. “The advance was hindered by enemy air activity, so we had to seek shelter all the time,” Winsnes wrote in his report. “When we could advance again, we did so at double time.”

When lieutenant colonel Pohlman reached the airfield, the situation was still unclear. “Some planes were on fire, others were turned over on their backs,” he wrote in his story. “But the landings continued, and infantrymen from the 324th regiment gather in an increasing number of small groups.”

Pohlman was met by a very much agitated air attaché Spiller, who explained what had happened: “The planes met bad weather and were split up. Here are parts of companies without officers, officers without companies, and no responsible leaders have yet reached us.”

Shots were fired from positions on the edge of the airfield, and the incoming transport planes suffered further hits. Pohlman therefore organized a shock troop with premier lieutenant Götte in the lead and his 19 paratroopers as a core. “They were strapping lads,” wrote the lieutenant colonel. “When you showed them a machine gun nest, they went off like devils and cleaned out the positions almost without firing a shot.”

In the foxhole south of the unfinished terminal, captain Munthe-Dahl and sergeant Tellefsen had observed the German preparations. But their ammunition was running low, and the Royal Guards were far away.

“I realized that our position would be compromised if we did not receive reinforcements,” wrote Munthe-Dahl. “At a German advance which could be expected at any moment, we would be cut off from our only line of contact with Lysaker and either be captured or destroyed.”

Munthe-Dahl had no choice. The machine guns were disassembled and the men withdrawn towards the highway going to Oslo. The two machine guns belonging to the searchlight troop on the western side of the runway held out for a few minutes longer, but around 09.30 it was all over. The Fighter Wing had fought heroically with totally inadequate means and had been wiped out. Six out of seven planes were lost – one to shooting, two while refueling and rearming, and the rest while landing on ice-covered lakes outside of town. But the pilots and almost all of the crew had survived, and many of them would later play a significant role in the fight against Nazism – both inside and outside of Norway. Luftwaffe had lost five planes in the air, and a large number while landing, both to crashes and shooting. But the overpowering force had been too great, and the planes kept coming – in wave after wave. Fornebu was on German hands before 10 o’ clock.

Lieutenant colonel Pohlman left Fornebu as soon as colonel Helmuth Nickelmann from the 163rd division landed. “I instructed him to block the access road to Oslo and occupy Akershus fortress and other important buildings,” it read in the report. “It had to happen within two hours.” Pohlman rode with Götte and the paratroopers on captured trucks in triumph to the German legation at Drammensveien road, where they hoisted the swastika flag – as a symbolic pre-indication of the occupation of Oslo.

“The envoy and his staff wished me all the best,” wrote Pohlman, who soon gained a telephonic connection to his immediate superior, chief of staff Erich Buschenhagen of Gruppe XXI at the Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg. “I briefed him on the situation and could almost hear the weight fall off his shoulders. He was agreeable to all my precautions and gave me command of the city – even over those of a higher rank than my own.”

The news from Oslo cheered the people in Berlin. “The Führer was in a better mood today,” wrote Goebbels, which probably was a gigantic understatement. In reality, his diary notes seem to recall an overconfident revival meeting – not a rational situation briefing. Hitler's gloomy deputy Rudolf Hess and the SS-leader Heinrich Himmler had shown up at the Reich Chancellery to congratulate, and the Nazi leadership basked in unrestrained delight at Hitler’s bravado. “The whole thing could be brought to a happy conclusion by dinnertime. Hysterical particulars are brought forwards. The action will stand as the most daring and brazen action in history!”

The situation in Oslo was by no means clear, and the royal family and government still eluded them. But Hitler brushed off the naysayers. “The Führer has absolutely no respect for the remaining resistance in Oslo. It will soon cease.”

There were obvious reasons for Hitler’s bravado. He had most likely learned of the next move, which had been planned by lieutenant colonel Pohlman.

Part II

Chapter 6

Oslo falls

Oslo and Hamar, 9th of April 1940, 13.00 - 15.00

There was still a glimmer of hope of capturing king Haakon, and lieutenant colonel Pohlman went to the Royal Palace himself, leading a patrol of paratroopers.