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By Root 1641 0

forced into the harbour of Montevideo, capital of neutral Uruguay, on 15 December by the pounding she had received, Langsdorff magnanimously released the Allied sailors he had captured from the ships he had sunk, who reported that they had been well treated. Trusting to BBC radio broadcasts about the imminent arrival of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battle cruiser HMS Renown, and unable to hire a small plane to see whether this was in fact so, Langsdorff sailed the Graf Spee to the entrance of Montevideo harbour just before dusk on Sunday, 17 December and scuttled her. The explosions were watched by over 20,000 spectators on the shore, and heard on the radio by millions around the world. In fact only the cruiser HMS Cumberland had managed to reach Montevideo; the BBC had patriotically taken part in a giant bluff. Five days later, Langsdorff shot himself.

By the end of 1939, Britain had lost 422,000 tons of shipping (260,000 by mines) against Germany’s 224,000, but as a proportion of their total tonnages Germany at 5 per cent had lost more than Britain at 2 per cent. In the naval war of attrition that this was going to be, the relative proportions were more important than the sheer overall tonnages. Had Hitler given first priority in terms of funding to his U-boat fleet on coming to power in 1933, rather than to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, he might have built a force that would have strangled and starved Britain into surrender. Perhaps realizing this, on 15 February 1940 the Führer issued a directive to all U-boat captains stating that any ship, neutral or otherwise, sailing towards a British-controlled war zone, such as the English Channel, must be sunk without warning. For all the protests this new policy engendered from the neutral ship-owning countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway, it was if anything surprising that such orders had not been issued earlier. Besides, the level of respect that Germany felt for Scandinavian neutrality was to be spectacularly demonstrated only three weeks later.

If Poland and Finland had merely demonstrated the impotence of Britain and France – with many Britons and Frenchmen concluding that the appeasing spirit of the 1930s had not been entirely expunged from their Governments’ souls – the Norway campaign represented a definite defeat for the Western powers. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder urged Hitler as early as 10 October 1939 to consider invading Norway as a way of protecting the transportation of iron ore from the Gällivare mines in northern Sweden to Germany, and establishing U-boat bases along the fjords, especially at Trondheim. Hitler ordered the OKW to start planning for an invasion in late January 1940. At that point Hitler did not want to divert troops from the attack he was planning in the west, and was persuaded to do so only by signs that the Allies were planning to invade Norway themselves, possibly using aid for Finland as a cloak for their actions.

An incident on 16 February, in which the neutral Norwegians seemed to have taken the Royal Navy’s side when HMS Cossack daringly rescued 299 British prisoners from a German vessel, the Altmark, also persuaded the Führer of Norway’s iniquity. Telling General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, the commander of the corps which was to lead the expedition, that a British invasion of Norway ‘would lead them into the Baltic, where we have no troops nor coastal fortifications’ and eventually to Berlin itself, Hitler decided to strike.33 In order to simplify lines of communication, and prevent the Royal Navy operating in the Skagerrak and Kattegat Straits, Denmark would be invaded also.

Although the Allies had lost any Finnish excuse for intervention in mid-March after the Treaty of Moscow was signed between Finland and the USSR, they did indeed plan to invade neutral Norway in order to deny the Gällivare ore fields to Germany, and had actually boarded troops at Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s base in the Orkney Isles, in order to do so, when the German attack began only twenty-four hours beforehand. (The British military historian