At 4:21 a.m. on April 9, 1940, a 64-year-old Norwegian colonel six months from retirement had about ninety seconds to decide whether to start a war.
Birger Eriksen, who entered Norwegian military service way back in 1893, commanded Oscarsborg, a sleepy coastal fortress on a rocky island in the Oslofjord, armed with three 28cm (11 inch) Krupp guns dating to the 1890s – – plus a secret weapon the Germans didn’t know about: torpedo tubes from 1901. His garrison was mostly reservists conscripted a week earlier. Out of the pre-dawn dark came six unlit, unidentified warships steaming toward Oslo. Norway had assumed that its diligently neutral stance would avert any foreign attack, and so was lax about maintaining coastal surveillance. The ships could have been British. Firing on the wrong flag meant international catastrophe; not firing, if they were German, meant the capital fell before breakfast.
Colonel Birger Eriksen, the commander of Oscarsborg on 9 April 1940.
Eriksen had no orders from Oslo and no time to ask. He gave the command anyway, reportedly saying: “Either I will be decorated, or I will be court-martialed. Fire!”
The lead ship was the Blücher, a brand-new 16,000-ton heavy cruiser packed with troops, Gestapo officers, and administrators meant to seize the king, the government, and Norway’s gold reserves in one stroke. Two shells from the fort tore into her at point-blank range, followed by torpedoes into her flank. Within ninety minutes she rolled over and sank, taking hundreds of men down with her. The German attack on Oslo was not completely averted, but it was significantly delayed and hampered.
German Heavy Cruiser Blücher (Image by Bundesarchiv)
That single decision to attack the invading fleet bought Norway’s government just enough hours to flee Oslo by train with King Haakon VII — and to load 53 tons of gold bullion onto trucks barely ahead of the advancing German columns. The gold made it out to Britain via a harrowing overland and sea relay; the government reached London and kept functioning as a legitimate exile authority, which gave the Norwegian resistance something to fight for rather than just against. Also, Norway had an enormous (~1000 ships) merchant marine fleet, and the intact, legitimate Norwegian government in exile ordered it into the service of the Allies, right when Britain desperately needed ships and sailors to transport cargo to stay in the war.
The strategic hangover lasted five years. Hitler, rattled by the loss of the king and by ongoing Allied fake Scandinavian invasion plans, garrisoned Norway with somewhere around 300,000–400,000 troops for the rest of the war. This was a staggering commitment, sitting largely idle when they could have made a decisive impact elsewhere. One old colonel, one hunch, one order — which tied down a whole German army guarding a country it barely needed.
This is the sixth in a series of occasional blog posts on individual initiatives that made a strategic (not just tactical) difference in the course of the second world war, an event that gave us the world of the second half of the twentieth century. Here are previous posts:
WW II Key Initiatives 1: FDR Prodded the Navy to Convert Cruisers to Carriers, Just in Time
WW II Key Initiatives 2: “Thatch Weave” Tactic to Counter More-Agile Japanese Fighter Planes
WW II Key Initiatives 3: Kurt Tank Gives Germany a Superior Fighter Plane, the Focke-Wulf 190
WWII Key Initiatives 5: General Zhukov Helped Save USSR By Mastering the Pincers Counterattack
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