In April 1940, the German Navy lost ten destroyers, half its entire destroyer force, inside one Norwegian fjord. Its own war diaries never explained how.

Five obsolescent British destroyers went up Ofotfjord in a snowstorm against ten larger, newer, better-armed German ships. Their captain won the first Victoria Cross of the Second World War and did not come home. Three days later the Royal Navy came back with a battleship and finished the job.

Germany never replaced those ships. By the summer of 1940 the Kriegsmarine could put four operational destroyers to sea. That fleet list is one of the reasons the invasion of Britain was never a serious proposition.

This is the story of the two Battles of Narvik, 10 and 13 April 1940, and of the one thing the German naval staff could account for but never explain.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

WHAT THIS VIDEO COVERS

▸ Why Swedish iron ore made a small Arctic port a strategic target for both sides
▸ Operation Weserübung and Commodore Friedrich Bonte's run north with ten destroyers
▸ The fuel trap: two tankers sent, one scuttled, ten warships and a single hose
▸ Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, the Norwegian pilots at Tranøy, and the warning he ignored
▸ The Admiralty signal that left the decision to the man at sea
▸ The First Battle of Narvik: three runs into a defended anchorage in a blizzard
▸ The loss of Wilhelm Heidkamp, Anton Schmitt and Diether von Roeder
▸ HMS Hardy's bridge destroyed, and the paymaster who steered her aground
▸ The loss of HMS Hunter and the collision with HMS Hotspur
▸ The destruction of the ammunition ship Rauenfels
▸ Warburton-Lee's final signal and the first Victoria Cross gazetted in the war
▸ The Second Battle of Narvik: HMS Warspite up the fjord with nine destroyers
▸ The Swordfish floatplane that sank U-64, the first U-boat destroyed by aircraft in the war
▸ Georg Thiele's last torpedo and the end in Rombaksfjord
▸ Why German destroyer design, centralised command and absent air cover made the loss unrecoverable
▸ Raeder's warning of 9 March 1940, and how precisely it came true
▸ The effect on Operation Sea Lion and the German fleet list of summer 1940
▸ The honest ledger: two British destroyers lost, Norway lost, and what Narvik actually bought

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

MAJOR RESEARCH SOURCES

▸ Naval Staff History, The Norwegian Campaign, Admiralty Historical Section
▸ Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea 1939 to 1945, Volume One, HMSO official history
▸ The London Gazette, Victoria Cross citation for Captain B A W Warburton-Lee, 7 June 1940
▸ Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939 to 1945, including the conference of 9 March 1940
▸ Geirr H Haarr, The German Invasion of Norway, April 1940
▸ Geirr H Haarr, The Battle for Norway, April to June 1940
▸ Peter Dickens, Narvik: Battles in the Fjords
▸ The Halder War Diary 1939 to 1942
▸ Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler's Headquarters, on the Jodl diary and the Narvik crisis
▸ Admiralty despatches and action reports, ADM 199 series, The National Archives
▸ Imperial War Museum collections and memorial records

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

FURTHER READING

▸ Peter Dickens, Narvik: Battles in the Fjords, the standard tactical account of both actions
▸ Geirr H Haarr, The German Invasion of Norway, April 1940, the best modern research using both national archives
▸ Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea, Volume One, for the campaign in strategic context
▸ Donald Macintyre, Narvik, a readable operational narrative
▸ François Kersaudy, Norway 1940, for the Allied campaign ashore
▸ Erich Raeder, My Life, for the German naval command's own account
▸ Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, for the view from the Admiralty

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Every ship, name, date and figure in this script is drawn from the records above. Where accounts disagree, most often on casualty totals, the video says so rather than choosing the more dramatic number. No dialogue is invented and no quotation is attributed without a document behind it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

ABOUT THE CHANNEL

Forgotten Naval History covers the ships, crews and engagements that fell out of the popular record. Long-form, sourced, and told at the pace the subject deserves.

If a relative of yours served in the Royal Navy, in destroyers, in the Arctic convoys or the Western Approaches, leave their name and their ship in the comments. Names outlast records.

Subscribe for more forgotten ships, forgotten crews and forgotten actions.

#NavalHistory #WW2 #RoyalNavy #Narvik