Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "How Norway's Army Fought Back - Norway 1940 Documentary" video.

  1. The doomed Blucher was in service for less than six months when she was sunk. The Oscarsborg fortress had guns manufactured by Krupp in 1893 and torpedoes that were nearly 40 years old. The commander of the fortress was Coronel Birger Eriksen. an officer just six months from retirement. Most of the fortress gunners were reservists activated just days before the attack. He had been the fort commander since 1933 and knew the 28 cm guns and torpedoes intimately. The torpedo tubes failed about 50% of the time when they were used infrequently in practice engagements. The 28 cm ammunition was almost 40 years old, and the only practice gunners got was firing very low power blank rounds. They had never fired a full power armor piercing round before that fateful morning of April 9, 1940. To make the battle even more improbable, Eriksen was unable to reach defense headquarters in Oslo and had no orders to open fire. His standing orders were to only fire warning shots. Rather than let the Germans sail past after a few warning shots, Eriksen and his soldiers were determined to stop them, orders or not. The guns worked perfectly that day, as did the torpedo tubes, with the combination of gunfire and torpedoes sending the German Navy's newest cruiser to the bottom in the space of fifteen minutes. The secondary battery of 15 cm and 57 mm guns raked the escorting German destroyers, damaging them and causing the full scale retreat of the rest of the invasion fleet. When the Germans returned in full force four days later, their main target was the fortress. After two hours of heavy shelling, German paratroopers were landed behind the fort. After a brief period of skirmishing that sometimes included hand to hand fighting, Eriksen could see that the 80 soldiers manning the fort were no match for the might of the German army and navy combined and ordered the fort's surrender. To show that no good deeds go unpunished, Eriksen was actually court martialed in 1945 for surrendering the fort too easily! Two military commissions, one in 1945 and the other in 1946, cleared Eriksen of all charges and ruled he had acted according to orders.As you might imagine, this left Eriksen a broken man, and he died in 1958 as a hero that always had a black mark next to his name.
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  2. Neil Wilson  You're welcome. Eriksen has always been a personal hero of mine. A man who was looking forward to nothing more than a quiet retirement who stepped up and did his duty to the country when it was in peril. The way he was treated immediately after the war was despicable.
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  3. Tore Østgård  Thanks for the correction. Indeed, it should have been HE rather than AP. I was temporarily think HC shells instead. My understanding was the secondary batteries inflicted damage on the destroyers, and that damage, along with the sinking of the Blucher, is what led to the retreat. I imagine the fear of sailing into a minefield also played a part.
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  4. Crankwerk  Nygardsvold certainly did nothing to put the country on a war footing, but he was hoping strict neutrality would keep Norway out of the war. France had not yet been invaded, and he was hoping the Germany would be fought into the same kind of stalemate the was seen from 1915 to 1917. leaving both Britain and Germany too preoccupied to bother with Norway. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how wrongheaded some his decisions were, but things looked different in the beginning of 1940.
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  5. Oh, okay, i get it now, Crankwerk. Neither one of these men was anxious to support the resistance or British and Norwegian commando raids. I think part of what motivated them was to stop German reprisals on Norwegian citizens but they came anyway. I'm sure they thought they were doing the best they could for the people of Norway, but both became more and more out of touch with the people's attitude toward resistance. They are good examples why politicians shouldn't be in charge of military campaigns.
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  6. I'm glad to hear that. Norway has too few modern heroes to allow any to be forgotten.
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