Norwegian Campaign

On the morning of 9 April 1940, German naval task forces and airborne troops struck Oslo, Kristiansand, Arendal, Egersund, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik simultaneously. Denmark capitulated within hours, and most Norwegian ports fell within a day or two of hard but brief fighting. At the mouth of the Oslofjord, Norwegian shore batteries and the fortress of Oscarsborg sank the German heavy cruiser Blücher and damaged the pocket battleship Lützow, delaying but not stopping the seizure of the capital; German paratroops secured Fornebu airfield and flew in reinforcements, and King Haakon VII, the government and the gold reserves withdrew north. At Narvik, Generalleutnant Eduard Dietl's 3rd Mountain Division landed from ten destroyers on 9 April after the Norwegian coastal defence ships Norge and Eidsvold were sunk in the harbour. The Royal Navy struck back the next day: Captain Warburton-Lee's 2nd Destroyer Flotilla sank two German destroyers in the First Battle of Narvik on 10 April, and on 13 April the battleship Warspite and a larger flotilla destroyed the remaining eight German destroyers in the Second Battle of Narvik, leaving Dietl's mountain troops isolated ashore without naval support.

Through the second half of April, General Otto Ruge, who had replaced the discredited Kristian Laake as Norwegian commander-in-chief on 10 April, tried to organise a defence of southern Norway while Allied troops came ashore. British brigades landed at Namsos and Åndalsnes to pinch off Trondheim, and French Chasseurs Alpins under General Béthouart and the Polish Independent Highland Brigade reinforced the Narvik front from late April and early May. The pincer attack on Trondheim was abandoned, and the British force at Åndalsnes, sent to support Norwegian troops in the Gudbrandsdal valley, was pushed back by the German 196th Infantry Division advancing north from Oslo and was evacuated by 2 May, ending organised resistance in the south. Norwegian forces in the south capitulated in early May, though fighting continued in the north.

Around Narvik the Allies built up a substantial force of British, French, Polish and Norwegian troops under Major-General Claude Auchinleck (replacing Piers Mackesy) and the naval command of Admiral Lord Cork, while Dietl's mountain troops and paratroopers and parachute-trained mountain troops dropped in from mid-May held out in the hills above the town. On 28 May, Allied troops finally stormed Narvik in an amphibious assault, forcing the Germans to withdraw toward the Swedish border; it was the first time German forces were driven from a captured city in the war. The victory proved moot: the German breakthrough in France had already made the Norwegian position untenable, and the Allied command had decided on 24 May to evacuate. Allied troops withdrew from Narvik by 8 June, and during the withdrawal German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau caught and sank the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and two escorting destroyers on 8 June. King Haakon and his government sailed for exile in Britain, and Norwegian forces still in the field capitulated on 10 June 1940, ending the campaign in a comprehensive German victory and the start of five years of occupation.