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Plan R 4 was an unrealised British plan to invade Norway and Sweden in April 1940, during the Second World War. As a result of competing plans for Norway and a German invasion of Norway the same month, it was not carried out as designed. Similar plans had been drawn up during the proposed Anglo-French intervention in the Winter War.
Germany did not have a sufficient domestic supply of iron ore, which is used in the production of steel. Before the war, large quantities of iron ore had been imported from mines in the French region of Lorraine. Since September 1939, that supply had no longer been available and so shipments from the other large supplier, Sweden, were essential for the production of tanks, guns, ships, railcars, trucks and other implements of war.
In the northern part of the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Bothnia, lies the Swedish port of Luleå from where in the summer a quantity of ore was shipped. It was frozen in winter and so for several months each year, the Swedes shipped most of their iron ore by rail through the ice-free port of Narvik, in the far north of Norway. In a normal year, 80% of the iron ore was exported through Narvik. The only alternative in winter was a long rail journey to Oxelösund on the Baltic Sea, south of Stockholm, which was not obstructed by ice. However, British intelligence suggested that Oxelösund could ship only a fifth of the weight that Germany required. Travelling inside Norwegian territorial waters for most of the trip the shipping from Narvik was virtually immune to British interception attempts. To Britain, stopping the shipping and thus starving German industry were vitally important.
The Allies devised a plan to use the Soviet Union's 30 November 1939 attack on Finland as a cover for seizing both the Swedish ore fields in the north and the Norwegian harbours through which it was shipped to Germany. The plan was to get Norwegian and Swedish permission to send an expeditionary force to Finland across Sápmi, ostensibly to help the Finns. Once in place, they were to proceed to take control of Swedish harbours and mines, to occupy cities such as Gävle and Luleå and to shut down German access to Swedish ore. That would present Norway and Sweden with a fait accompli.
Because of the danger of Allied or German occupation and of the war being waged on their territory, both the Swedes and the Norwegians refused the transit requests. [1]
Meanwhile, the Germans, having realised the Allied threat, were making plans for a possible pre-emptive invasion of Norway in order to protect their strategic supply lines. The Altmark Incident of 16 February 1940 convinced Hitler that the Allies would not respect Norwegian neutrality, and he ordered the plans for an invasion hastened.
The Scandinavian reluctance to allow Allied troops on their territory halted the original Allied plan for using aid to Finland as a pretext for moving in troops, but on 12 March,[ citation needed ] the Allies decided to try a "semi-peaceful" invasion nevertheless. Troops were to be landed in Norway and were to proceed into Sweden to capture the Swedish mines. However, if serious military resistance was encountered, the Allies were not to press the issue. However, Finland sued for peace on 13 March and so the revised version of the plan had to be abandoned as well.
The Germans were partly aware of the Allied planning. Intercepted radio traffic showed that Allied transport groups had been readied. Later interceptions informed Germany that the Allies had abandoned the plan and redeployed their forces. However, Adolf Hitler feared that the Allies would launch their invasion sooner or later. As a result, 9 April was set as the date of Operation Weserübung, the German attack on both Denmark and Norway.
Britain had two separate but parallel plans: Operation Wilfred and Plan R 4.
Operation Wilfred, set to commence on 5 April (but delayed to 8 April), was a British naval operation intending to place two mine fields inside Norwegian territorial waters. That would force ships carrying ore into international waters and become vulnerable to the Royal Navy, which could subsequently prevent the transport of Swedish iron ore to be used to sustain the German war effort. The Norwegian and the Swedish governments were to be publicly informed some days beforehand and to be accused of inability to uphold their neutrality. [1]
R 4 consisted of
According to Ziemke, it was hoped that Operation Wilfred would provoke a German reaction in the form of troop landings or threats thereof, and R 4 was to be executed "the moment the Germans landed in Norway 'or showed they intended to do so.'" [3] The first battalion transports were to sail within a few hours of the mines having been laid. [1]
Claasen, on the other hand, states the orders as "it is not intended that any Forces shall be landed in Norway until the Germans have violated Norwegian Territory, or there is clear evidence that they intend to do so". [3]
Both authors agree that the plan assumed the Norwegians would not actively resist the British forces.
Although Plan R 4 could not be executed as planned, as major elements of the German navy were reported to be present in Norwegian waters, Allied troops were swiftly sent to Norway to fight alongside the Norwegians. Real success was achieved only against the Germans in the Narvik area and brought them close to surrender. The Allied troops consisted of 24,500 British, Norwegian, French and Polish troops, in particular marine infantry, French Foreign Legionnaires, and Polish mountain troops. The German troops were composed of 2,000 mountain troops and 2,600 seamen from the sunken German invasion flotilla. On 17 April 1940, Hitler ordered the German troops to evacuate to Sweden to be interned (see the Allied campaign in Norway). However, the successful German campaign against France and the Low Countries led to an Allied troop redeployment. Allied troops were evacuated from Narvik by 8 June 1940.
Narvik is the third-largest municipality in Nordland county, Norway, by population. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Narvik. Some of the notable villages in the municipality include Ankenesstranda, Ballangen, Beisfjord, Bjerkvik, Bjørnfjell, Elvegård, Kjøpsvik, Skjomen, Håkvik, Hergot, Straumsnes, and Vidrek. The Elvegårdsmoen army camp is located near Bjerkvik.
The Phoney War was an eight-month period at the start of World War II during which there was only one limited military land operation on the Western Front, when French troops invaded Germany's Saar district. Nazi Germany carried out the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The Phoney period began with the declaration of war by the United Kingdom and France against Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, after which little actual warfare occurred, and ended with the German invasion of France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940. Although there was no large-scale military action by Britain and France, they did begin some economic warfare, especially with the naval blockade and shut down German surface raiders. They created elaborate plans for numerous large-scale operations designed to cripple the German war effort. These included opening an Anglo-French front in the Balkans, invading Norway to seize control of Germany's main source of iron ore, and an embargo against the Soviet Union, which supplied Germany's main source of oil. By April 1940, the lone execution of the Norway plan was considered inadequate to stop the German offensive.
The Battles of Narvik were fought from 9 April to 8 June 1940, as a naval battle in the Ofotfjord and as a land battle in the mountains surrounding the north Norwegian town of Narvik, as part of the Norwegian Campaign of the Second World War.
Sweden maintained its policy of neutrality during World War II. When the war began on 1 September 1939, the fate of Sweden was unclear. But by a combination of its geopolitical location in the Scandinavian Peninsula, realpolitik maneuvering during an unpredictable course of events, and a dedicated military build-up after 1942, Sweden kept its official neutrality status throughout the war. At the outbreak of hostilities, Sweden had held a neutral stance in international relations for more than a century, since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 and the invasion of Norway.
Swedish iron ore was an important economic and military factor in the European theatre of World War II, as Sweden was the main contributor of iron ore to Nazi Germany. The average percentages by source of Nazi Germany’s iron ore procurement through 1933–43 by source where: Sweden: 43.0 Domestic production (Germany): 28.2 France: 12.9. Within the German military the Navy was most dependent on Swedish steel as an absolute necessity to the German war effort, according to their grand admiral. It has also been argued that the Swedish export helped prolong the war.
The Norwegian campaign involved the attempt by Allied forces to defend northern Norway coupled with the resistance of the Norwegian military to the country's invasion by Nazi Germany in World War II.
The Namsos campaign, in Namsos, Norway, and its surrounding area involved heavy fighting between Anglo-French and Norwegian naval and military forces on the one hand, and German military, naval and air forces on the other in April and early May 1940. It was one of the first significant occasions during the Second World War when British and French land forces fought the German Army.
The Norwegian Campaign, lasting from 9 April to 10 June 1940, led to the first direct land confrontation between the military forces of the Allies—the United Kingdom and France— against Nazi Germany in World War II.
Operation Wilfred was a British naval operation during the Second World War that involved the mining of the channel between Norway and its offshore islands to prevent the transport of Swedish iron ore through neutral Norwegian waters to be used to sustain the German war effort. The Allies assumed that Wilfred would provoke a German response in Norway and prepared a separate operation known as Plan R 4 to occupy Narvik and other important locations.
The occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany during the Second World War began on 9 April 1940 after Operation Weserübung. Conventional armed resistance to the German invasion ended on 10 June 1940, and Nazi Germany controlled Norway until the capitulation of German forces in Europe on 8 May 1945. Throughout this period, a pro-German government named Den nasjonale regjering ruled Norway, while the Norwegian king Haakon VII and the prewar government escaped to London, where they formed a government in exile. Civil rule was effectively assumed by the Reichskommissariat Norwegen, which acted in collaboration with the pro-German puppet government. This period of military occupation is, in Norway, referred to as the "war years", "occupation period" or simply "the war".
Operation Ikarus was a World War II German plan to invade Iceland, which had been occupied by British forces during Operation Fork in 1940. The plan was never realized.
HMS Hardy was the flotilla leader for the H-class destroyers, built for the Royal Navy in the mid-1930s. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 the ship spent considerable time in Spanish waters, enforcing the arms blockade imposed by Britain and France on both sides of the conflict. Hardy was transferred to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in October 1939 to hunt for German commerce raiders in the South Atlantic with Force K. After returning to the United Kingdom in early 1940, the ship became flagship of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla assigned to the Home Fleet. During the Norwegian campaign of 1940, Hardy participated in the First Battle of Narvik where she sank one German destroyer. As the British ships were withdrawing, they were discovered by two other German destroyers that so badly damaged Hardy that she had to be run aground to stop her from sinking. The ship was lifted by a rising tide and eventually capsized.
HMS Esk was an E-class destroyer built for the Royal Navy in the early 1930s. She was designed to be easily converted into a fast minelayer by removing some guns and her torpedo tubes. Although assigned to the Home Fleet upon completion, the ship was attached to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1935–36, during the Abyssinia Crisis. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, she spent considerable time in Spanish waters, enforcing the arms blockade imposed by Britain and France on both sides of the conflict. Esk was converted to a minelayer when World War II began in September 1939, and spent most of her time laying mines. During the Norwegian Campaign of April–June 1940, the ship laid mines in Norwegian territorial waters before the Germans invaded, but was recalled to home waters to resume her minelaying duties in early May. During one such sortie, Esk was sunk during the Texel Disaster on the night of 31 August 1940, when she ran into a newly laid German minefield.
The Reichskommissariat Norwegen was the civilian occupation regime set up by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Norway during World War II. Its full title in German was the Reichskommissariat für die besetzten norwegischen Gebiete. It was governed by Reichskommissar Josef Terboven until his deposition on 7 May 1945. The German military forces in Norway, then under the command of general Franz Böhme, surrendered to the Allies on 9 May and the legal government was restored.
The Anglo-French Supreme War Council (SWC) was established to oversee joint military strategy at the start of the Second World War. Most of its deliberations took place during the period of the Phoney War, with its first meeting at Abbeville on 12 September 1939. The final three sessions were held in France during the German blitzkrieg of May and June 1940.
This page is about the effects on Sweden, during and following Operation Weserübung.
For articles about the operation itself, see also Operation Weserübung and Norwegian Campaign.
During the early stages of World War II, the United Kingdom and France made a series of proposals to send troops to assist Finland against the Soviet Union during the Winter War, which started on 30 November 1939. The plans involved the transit of British and French troops and equipment through neutral Norway and Sweden. The initial plans were abandoned because Norway and Sweden declined transit through their land for fear that their countries would be drawn into the war. The Moscow Peace Treaty ended the Winter War in March 1940, which precluded the possibility of intervention.
Operation Weserübung was Germany's assault on Denmark and Norway during the Second World War and the opening operation of the Norwegian Campaign.
Narvik is a town and the administrative centre of Narvik Municipality in Nordland county, Norway. The town is located along the Ofotfjorden in the Ofoten region. The town lies on a peninsula located between the Rombaken fjord and the Beisfjorden. The European route E06 highway runs through the Beisfjord Bridge and Hålogaland Bridge crossing the two small fjords surrounding the town.
Narvik: The Campaign in Norway, 1940 is a board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1974 that simulates Operation Weserübung, the German invasion of Denmark and Norway during World War II. The game was one of the first in the Europa series of twenty interlocking games envisioned by GDW that would cover the entire European and North African theatres from the start to the end of World War II, using identical map scales and similar rules.