Hitler’s Pre-Emptive War: The Battle for Norway, 1940

to reach the open sea. The isolated ships that did reach open waters had to cross the dangerous North Sea before they could pierce the British blockade. Many German naval officers saw their only hope for useful service during World War II to be contingent on the German Navy acquiring bases in locations that would avoid or complicate British blockades.

Vice Admiral Wolfgang Wegener wrote a book about this subject in 1929 titled Die Seestrategie des Weltkriges. This book was well known in the German Navy and it influenced the strategic thinking of many of its key officers in the late 1930s. Wegener argued that the primary mission of the German Navy in any future conflict was to keep the sea lanes open for German merchant shipping, and that this could not be accomplished from German or Danish harbors. Wegener saw two possible solutions. One was to capture bases on the French coast. The other involved the seizure of bases in Norway. Although he does not directly say so, Wegener appears to view the acquisition of bases in Norway as the easier of the two solutions. This was natural since he was writing based on the experience of World War I, when the German army failed to reach the French coast. With respect to bases in Norway, he wrote, “England would then be unable to sustain a blockade line from the Shetlands to Norway but would be forced to withdraw to approximately a Shetlands-Faeroes-Iceland line. However, this line was a net with very wide meshes.”²

Wegener concluded that, while it would be difficult for the British to defend the new line because of its proximity to German bases in Norway, the only way to eliminate the possibility of a blockade was to seize the Faeroes or the Shetland Islands. This would eliminate the dangers of a blockade and would place the German Navy in a position to interdict British supply routes, an objective that could not be achieved from bases in Norway. Wegener judged the seizure of the Faeroes or the Shetland Islands as beyond German capabilities, and this in turn reduced the value of bases in Norway.

Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the commander-in-chief of the German Navy, did not have a large fleet at his disposal in 1939, but his surface raiders and submarines faced the same obstacles as those Wegener had pointed out ten years earlier. Furthermore, the German Navy had not given up on its plans to play a significant role among the armed services. Hitler approved the navy’s plans for a gigantic fleet rearmament, the so-called Z-plan, in January 1939.³ Hitler not only approved the rearmament program but ordered that it should begin immediately and should take priority over other needs, including the rearmament requirements of the other services. It is therefore not surprising that the German Navy, at an early date, turned its attention to the possibility of extending its operational range. The naval officers did not share the optimism of their army and air force counterparts that the war would be short and that bases would soon be available on the French coast. They were also deeply skeptical about the English government accepting a peace offer after a French defeat.

There was no unanimity of views in the German Navy on either the desirability of establishing bases in a Norway, or the service’s ability to do so. However, new support for Wegener’s ideas surfaced in the late 1930s when some of the officers who favored his approach to naval strategy began to occupy key positions and the question of bases assumed increasing importance in operational planning. There is little doubt that Raeder, too, although not a follower of Wegener, was favorably disposed to his ideas. Gemzell points to convincing similarities between the reasoning contained in a briefing Raeder gave Hitler and others on February 3, 1937 and what Wegener wrote almost a decade earlier.

The similarities in views between Wegener and Raeder have been challenged in a recent article in the Naval War College Review. Commander Hansen describes how Wegener and Raeder, who came into the navy together and were close friends, drifted apart and became bitter enemies.⁴ Hansen maintains that the two saw the importance of Norway in different ways. For Wegener, bases in Norway represented a “gate to the Atlantic,” while Raeder was more concerned with “the absolute necessity to the German war effort of Swedish iron ore.” However, Raeder’s preoccupation with the iron ore issue was closely tied to his desire for a large fleet, which could challenge the British Navy in ways very similar to those put forward by Wegener. When Raeder warned that the loss of Swedish iron ore would quickly destroy the German armament industry, he was also perhaps worried about what such a loss would do to the naval construction program.

The German fleet was divided geographically into the Eastern Group Command in the Baltic under Admiral Rolf Carls and the Western Group Command in the North Sea under Admiral Alfred Saalwächter. Saalwächter sent a report to the Naval High Command (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine, or OKM) on March 2, 1939 in which he openly discussed the acquisition of bases in Norway. He cautioned that the British Navy would close the northern approach with a mine barrier, including mining Norwegian territorial waters. The Norwegian government’s ability to prevent such an action was judged as being limited. Saalwächter’s report stressed both the dangers to Germany of British dominance in Norwegian waters and the favorable change in the geo-strategic position that a German occupation of Norway would bring about.⁵

The OKM was also concerned about the effects of a mine barrier. As a result of the increased range of air power, they considered it likely that the new barrier would be located further north than the one in World War I, and that the only option available to change this strategic fundamental would be through the acquisition of bases in central or northern Norway. The OKM, however, continued to believe that the best solution to the strategic