Who won the Battle of Narvik?
The Battle of Narvik was a campaign in northern Norway in spring 1940. Germany seized the port of Narvik in April, and Norwegian, British, French and Polish forces fought to retake it. The Polish Independent Highland Brigade under General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko arrived in May and fought on the Ankenes peninsula south of the town. The Allies captured Narvik on 28 May 1940, one of the first Allied land victories of the war, but had to evacuate in early June as the German offensive in France advanced.3
In the spring of 1940, far above the Arctic Circle, Polish mountain troops, cut off from their occupied homeland, fought the Germans among the fjords of northern Norway. At Narvik they shared in one of the first Allied victories on land in World War II.4
The iron ore port
Narvik, in northern Norway, was the ice-free port through which Swedish iron ore reached Germany. In April 1940 German mountain troops under General Eduard Dietl seized it. British naval forces sank the German destroyers in the fjords, and Allied troops landed to retake the town.5
The ore mattered because the Gulf of Bothnia freezes in winter, so for months of the year the Swedish mines could ship only through Narvik. Both sides planned to act. Britain and France agreed to mine Norwegian waters and land troops at Narvik and other ports, and the mines were laid on 8 April. But Hitler had already ordered the invasion of Norway for the next day.6
At about ten past three on the morning of 9 April, ten German destroyers carrying Dietl's mountain troops steamed into the Ofotfjord in a snowstorm. Off Narvik they torpedoed the old Norwegian coastal defense ships Eidsvold and Norge; according to the Norwegian encyclopedia, 276 men died and only 96 survived. The town's commander, Colonel Konrad Sundlo, surrendered without a fight.7
Battles in the fjord
The Royal Navy struck back at once. At dawn on 10 April Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee led five destroyers into Narvik harbor and sank two German destroyers, but the remaining German ships caught the British flotilla as it withdrew. Each side lost two destroyers, and Warburton-Lee was mortally wounded on the bridge of HMS Hardy; he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.8
On 13 April the British returned in strength, with the battleship HMS Warspite and nine destroyers. In about six hours every remaining German destroyer was sunk or scuttled by its own crew, without the loss of a British ship. Germany lost ten destroyers and a U-boat at Narvik, and some 2,400 to 2,700 surviving sailors joined Dietl's troops ashore, armed with captured Norwegian weapons.9
The armies
On land, the Germans held Narvik with about 3,000 mountain troops and the stranded sailors, later reinforced by small groups of paratroopers. Against them, British troops began landing at Harstad and Sjøvegan from 14 April. Norway's 6th Division under General Carl Gustav Fleischer, 8,000 to 10,000 men, pressed the Germans from the north and east, and at the end of April French alpine troops and the 13th Half-Brigade of the Foreign Legion arrived under General Antoine Béthouart.10
In all the Allies built up about 25,000 men, and Britannica notes that Dietl's force held out against five times its number. The advance was slow in mountains still deep in snow. In mid-May the Allies landed at Bjerkvik, north of Narvik, which the Norwegian encyclopedia describes as the first Allied landing of the war against a defended beach.11
The Highland Brigade
Among them was the Polish Independent Highland Brigade, formed in France in early 1940 under General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko and first intended for the war in Finland; most of its rank and file were pre-war Polish economic emigrants. It landed at Harstad in early May. On 4 May the Polish destroyer ORP Grom was sunk by German aircraft in the fjords near Narvik. Two other Polish destroyers, ORP Błyskawica and ORP Burza, patrolled the Norwegian coast and shelled German positions in support of the troops ashore.12 › Battle of Tolvajärvi, 1939
The brigade numbered 4,778 men, 182 of them officers. When Finland made peace with the Soviet Union, its original purpose vanished, and after the German invasion of Norway it was attached to the Allied expeditionary corps instead. Its banner was presented at Malestroit in Brittany on 10 April, in the presence of General Władysław Sikorski. Landing at Harstad on 8 May, the brigade was split up at first, its battalions sent to separate sectors around the fjords.13
Grom was the first great Polish loss of the campaign. Hit by two bombs in the Rombaksfjord on 4 May, she sank with 59 of her crew of 213.14
Fighting by the fjords
The Polish brigade fought on the Ankenes peninsula south of Narvik, in steep mountain terrain still covered with snow, attacking German positions to tie down the defenders while other Allied units attacked from the north.15
Narvik retaken
On 28 May 1940 Norwegian and French troops, with the Poles attacking on the southern side of the fjord, drove the Germans out of Narvik. It was one of the first Allied land victories of the war.16
The assault began shortly before midnight on 27 May with a bombardment from British warships. Legionnaires and Norwegian troops attacked from the north, while on the Ankenes peninsula the Poles attacked German positions guarded by mines, machine guns and mortars. Hill 275 was taken, lost and taken again; the 1st Battalion seized Hills 650 and 773, and the 2nd Battalion pushed on to the outskirts of Nyborg. Threatened from two sides, the Germans pulled back across the Beisfjord by boat, and by the afternoon of 28 May Narvik was in Allied hands.17
The brigade lost 97 men killed, 189 wounded and 28 missing in Norway.18
Victory, then retreat
Within days, the German offensive in France forced the Allies to abandon Norway, and the troops were evacuated in early June. Many of the Polish highlanders went on to fight in Brittany in June 1940, and survivors who reached Britain formed the Podhale Rifle Battalion, which became part of the 1st Armoured Division. Narvik is remembered in Poland and is among the battles commemorated on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.19
The decision to leave had in fact been taken on 24 May, before Narvik fell; the Norwegian government was told only on 1 June. The evacuation began in the first days of June, with the Poles among the last to embark. King Haakon VII and his government sailed for Britain on 7 June, the last Allied troops left on 8 June, and the Germans reoccupied the ruined town that evening. Norway's forces in the north capitulated on 10 June, after 62 days of fighting.20
For the highlanders the reward was cruel. Shipped back to France by way of Britain, and leaving most of their equipment behind in Norway, they were thrown into the doomed defense of Brittany against far stronger German forces. The brigade suffered heavy losses and broke up; some of its men reached Britain, while others stayed behind and joined the French Resistance.21
The campaign had consequences far beyond the fjords. As Britannica recounts, the House of Commons debate on the failures in Norway, on 7 and 8 May, brought down Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May, the day Germany attacked in the West; Hitler went on to keep about 300,000 troops in Norway for the rest of the war. The Norwegian encyclopedia suggests that the loss of ten destroyers at Narvik even weighed on Germany's later decision not to invade Britain.22 › The Dunkirk Evacuation, 1940
Memory
In Poland, Narvik became a symbol: the head of the veterans' office called it the first Polish victory of World War II after the defeats of 1939. On 21 July 1940 General Sikorski awarded the brigade's banner the Virtuti Militari, and on the 80th anniversary in 2020 wreaths were laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw and at the grave of General Bohusz-Szyszko in the Powązki Military Cemetery.23
Narvik remembers the Poles too. The cemetery at Håkvik holds the graves of 66 Polish soldiers, and there is a monument to ORP Grom. For the 80th anniversary in 2020 the Polish ambassador laid wreaths at both, and at the Allied landing site at Skjomnes, in the company of Norwegian ministers and officers and the French and German ambassadors.24 › 28 May in military history: the Allies retake Narvik, 1940
