Anders Kringstad

On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded Norway. Ten German destroyers raced into Narvik carrying 2,000 mountain troops and took the town in a few hours. Why Narvik? Iron ore. In winter, Swedish ore that fed the German war machine came by rail to this ice-free port and then down the Norwegian coast. Whoever held Narvik held the tap. That same morning, two old Norwegian coastal defense ships tried to fight. Both were torpedoed. Around 280 Norwegian sailors died in minutes. Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, a Welshman commanding the Royal Navy's 2nd Destroyer Flotilla, was ordered to stop any German landing at Narvik. He had 5 destroyers: Hardy, Hunter, Havock, Hotspur and Hostile. He stopped at a small pilot station on the way in to ask the locals what was up ahead. The Norwegians told him six large warships and a submarine, and that he'd need twice as many ships. He radioed London. The Admiralty's answer was basically: you're the only one who can judge this. We'll back whatever you decide. His reply said he intended to attack at dawn, at high water. The Germans actually had 10 destroyers, not 6. He went anyway. Up 30 miles of narrow fjord, at night, in a snowstorm, with no reliable charts of the harbor. What he didn't know was that luck was on his side. The Germans had only one tanker in port, so their destroyers were spread out, taking turns refueling. Some were tucked away in side fjords. The ones in the harbor weren't expecting company. At 4:30 in the morning, Hardy slipped into Narvik harbor and fired torpedoes into the anchored ships. The German flagship Wilhelm Heidkamp blew up. The commodore in charge of the entire German force, Friedrich Bonte, was killed. The destroyer Anton Schmitt was torn in half. Others were badly damaged. Merchant ships all over the harbor were sunk or burning. Warburton-Lee made three passes. Then he turned for home. As his flotilla headed back down the fjord, five more German destroyers came out of the side fjords and caught them in a crossfire. A shell hit Hardy's bridge. Almost everyone on it was killed or wounded. Warburton-Lee was hit in the head and mortally wounded. The ship's paymaster, Lieutenant Geoffrey Stanning, a supply officer with no business steering a warship, staggered to the wheel wounded and kept her moving. With her boilers wrecked and her captain dying, Hardy was run aground on the Norwegian shore so the crew could get off. Warburton-Lee's last signal to his flotilla: "Continue to engage the enemy." Hunter was hit, then rammed by Hotspur, whose steering had been shot away. Hunter went down with most of her crew. The survivors kept fighting their way out. On the way, they met a German supply ship heading up the fjord loaded with ammunition. They opened fire. It exploded so violently it was described as one of the biggest blasts of the campaign. Hardy's crew carried their captain ashore through the snow. He died on the beach. The local Norwegians took in the frozen, wounded British sailors, sheltered them in their homes and fed them, while German troops were only miles away. Three days later, the battleship HMS Warspite came up the same fjord with nine destroyers. Every remaining German destroyer at Narvik was sunk or scuttled. Warspite's little floatplane even sank a U-boat, the first U-boat sunk by an aircraft in the war. Germany started WWII with 22 destroyers. It lost 10 of them at Narvik. Nearly half its destroyer fleet, gone in four days. That shortage would haunt the Kriegsmarine when Hitler later dreamed of invading Britain. Bernard Warburton-Lee received the Victoria Cross. It was the first VC awarded in the Second World War. He never went home. He's buried in Ballangen, Norway, a short distance from where Hardy ran aground, in the country he died trying to defend.