by Ross Kemp
Burrough checked the time again and announced: ‘Hoist the battle Ensign!’ Splitting off from the rest of the force, HMS Chiddingfold escorted the two troopships to the bay south of South Vaagso, out of sight of the main gun emplacement on Maaloy Island, half a mile or so around the corner. Kenya and the other destroyers crept forward to take up position.
The Commandos climbed into the Higgins landing craft suspended over the sides of the Prince Leopold and Prince Charles and the crews quickly loaded on the heavier equipment including ammunition magazines, Bren guns, mortars – and 250 kitbags full of Christmas stockings for the children of Vaagso. Embarkation was completed on time by 0835. For four minutes the men sat silently in the swaying craft, fidgeting with their weapons, focusing on the tasks ahead, praying for a safe return to the ship. At 0839 the landing craft began to descend. Chains clanked and jangled, pulleys whined and screeched, the boats splashed into the icy water as one and the formation moved off into the gently rolling water of the fjord’s mouth. Within five minutes, as planned, No. 1 Group was ashore at Halnoesvik, the southernmost tip of the island, scrambling over the rocks towards the gun battery. Groups 2 and 3, the largest of the assault units, continued towards the main targets of South Vaagso and Maaloy. The gap between the two islands was now clearly visible in the moonlight as they rounded the headland. The gunners aboard Kenya and the destroyers Offa, Oribi and Onslow braced themselves for the first salvos of the bombardment.
The first dim stirrings of dawn had lightened the sky above the Norwegian mainland only a little when the unflappable Burrough calmly gave the order: ‘Open the line of fire!’ It was 0848. The bridge-talker immediately passed on the command to the fire control department. Seconds later, a barrage of star shells burst over Maaloy, lighting up the snow-covered outcrop like a giant overhead lamp. Battle had commenced. And some battle it was to be.
Moving slowly between the two islands, Kenya immediately opened up with her two forward turrets, firing six-inch shells, before the captain turned her side-on to the island and opened up with a mighty barrage from all four turrets, fore and aft. Almost instantaneously, twelve shells, each weighing roughly half a ton, slammed into the German batteries. A cloud of flame and smoke burst into the sky. Offa and Onslow joined in the bombardment with their own broadsides. There was no return fire. They had caught the Germans by surprise, just as they had hoped. The gun crews were still in barracks when the first wave of the bombardment crashed down on the island. For the next nine minutes, the three warships pounded an area the size of a village green with between 400 and 500 shells. It was saturation shelling, and the mighty concussion of the guns reverberated along the coastline. When his landing craft were within 100 yards of the shoreline, Durnford-Slater took out his Verey pistol and fired 10 red flares in rapid succession, the ‘cease bombardment’ signal. As he and the men of Group 2 prepared to beach at South Vaagso, behind him plumes of smoke hung over Maaloy and the stench of cordite drifted across the short stretch of water.
The roar of the guns was immediately replaced by the reassuring roar of aircraft overhead. Having attacked the Rugsundo battery to the east, diverting the attention of the AA batteries away from the approaching ships, the Hampdens dropped low and turned back to assist the landing parties on South Vaagso and Maaloy. Unfortunately, the best-fortified of the Rugsundo guns had survived the aerial bombardment and, moments after the last British aircraft had banked away, it opened up on HMS Kenya. The firing was erratic, but it was a nuisance that couldn’t be ignored. A lucky shot could have had catastrophic consequences. Kenya swivelled its guns eastward and opened up. Royal Navy gunnery skills soon persuaded the enemy guns that silence was the more sensible option.
The turnaround in the weather had come as a huge relief to the RAF. Twenty-four hours earlier their airfields had been buried in snow, visibility was poor and winds battered the coastline. Now it was bright, clear, the wind was negligible and they had had time to clear the runways and scrape the snow and ice off the aircraft. Thirty seconds after the naval bombardment, right on schedule, seven Hampden aircraft, ‘showing great skill and dash’, according to the official report of the operation, swooped low over the water and dropped their smoke bombs over Maaloy Island on a 250-yard front at the landing site. Drifting down on their mini-parachutes, the phosphorus bombs fizzed and billowed in the windless atmosphere, creating a thick wall of white smoke.
At the same time, the landing craft of Group 3 advanced into the shallows with the men crouched out of sight. The group, led by Major John ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, had been given the vital task of seizing the four coastal gun positions. Failure to put the guns out of action would doom the raid and present a grave threat to the warships. Even after the huge naval bombardment, the heavily fortified positions still needed to be silenced by men on the ground. A large garrison was known to be stationed on the island and a fierce engagement was predicted. Churchill (no relation to the PM), an eccentric, fearless character, was the obvious choice to lead the assault. Also known as ‘Fighting Jack’, Churchill liked to go into battle wearing a kilt and brandishing a claymore sword and, sometimes, a longbow. ‘Any officer who goes into battle without his sword is improperly dressed,’ he was fond of saying. He had won a Military Cross in France two years earlier and was said to have taken down a German with his bow and arrow.
On this occasion, he was no less flamboyant as his party burst ashore on Maaloy. Standing at the front of the landing craft, he played ‘March of the Cameron Men’ on the bagpipes as the boats ground onto the shingle before streaking into the smoke, waving his sword and bellowing at the top of his voice. In the event, there was little cause for his stirring actions. Resistance was minimal. Those Germans who did put up a fight were quickly cut down. The rest had been so stunned – quite literally – by the naval bombardment that they surrendered without complaint. The sappers set about demolishing the gun batteries, ammo dumps, barracks and the two oil factories. Barely twenty minutes after landing, Maaloy was engulfed in flames, all targets had been destroyed and the enemy had either been eliminated or captured. At 0924 Churchill signalled to the bridge on Kenya that the whole island was under British control. Safe from the Maaloy guns, the destroyers Oribi, carrying Group 5, and Onslow slipped through the thinning smoke into Ulvesund. At the same time, the Rugsundo battery, eight miles to the east, dared once again to try its luck against Kenya, firing blindly into the smokescreen laid down by Chiddingfold. This time it received both barrels from the British cruiser, or at least two turrets’ worth of sustained pounding.
If the assault on Maaloy had been a walkover for Churchill’s group, South Vaagso was a different matter altogether. The problems began as the men prepared to disembark from the landing craft. One of the Hampdens was hit by AA flak or by fire from the German patrol boat Fohn, which had appeared from around the point along the coastline. The pilot had lost control but still tried to get away his smoke bomb before plummeting into the fjord, killing three of the four crew. Unfortunately, the smoke bomb fell right on top of the landing craft carrying a troop section. The commander, Lieutenant Komrower, saw the bomb at the last moment and shouted to his men as he jumped clear, but it was too late. It exploded in their midst and caused injuries, mostly from burns, to all twenty men on board. Two died outright, several others later of their hideous wounds. The craft caught fire, setting off ammo and flares in all directions. Engulfed in flames, it beached itself, crushing Komrower’s legs beneath it. Prompt action from the Norwegian commander Linge saved Komrower from a painful end. Ignoring the flames and exploding ammo, he rocked the boat until Komrower was able to free himself and crawl ashore. The rest of the section scrambled to get clear of the inferno, dragging injured comrades as best they could.
Despite the accident, the smoke bombs enabled the rest of Group 3 troops to get ashore with light casualties from the sporadic fire of automatic weapons that greeted their arrival. Durnford-Slater’s uniform caught light from sparks from another smoke bomb, but he w
as able to beat out the flames and set about establishing his HQ, close to the landing place, once the area below the southern end of the town had been secured. A temporary ammunition store was established nearby for a small mountain of demolition materials, which included 300 lb of plastic explosives, 150 incendiary bombs, half a ton of gun cotton and 500 yards of fuse. Group 2 headed straight into town, scrambling over the crags, under cover of the smokescreen, onto the road leading north into Vaagso. To the left the hills rose steeply above them, to their right lay the warships and Maaloy, smouldering from its naval shelling. Led by Captain John Giles, 3rd Troop raced to its first target, a German bunker and AA position. A short, brutal engagement ended with the British killing two officers and several others to take the position.
As the Commandos advanced into the town, nervous and bemused locals, appearing at doorways and windows, were ordered to stay indoors and keep their heads down. It wasn’t long before the Germans had overcome the initial shock of the assault and organised their defences. Within minutes a bitter street-fight had erupted among the snow-covered streets, with isolated engagements flaring up across town, each of them fought with incredible ferocity by both sides. The Commandos were forced to work their way up the town, building by building, on two main fronts: up the main street and side roads and along the waterfront. The demolition teams of the Royal Engineers were forced to wait at the rear until the buildings were cleared and the line of confrontation moved northwards. Time and time again, a shot rang out and a Commando fell to the ground. In the frenzied confusion of the scene – clouds of smoke drifting through the gloom, the boom of explosions and crackle of small-arms fire filling the air – it was difficult to tell where the fire was coming from. The hills? Windows? Rooftops?
What was perfectly clear to the raiders – most of them seeing action for the first time – was that a hard day’s fighting lay ahead and that a great number of them were unlikely to be still standing when the guns finally fell silent. Led by the fifty-strong unit of veterans sent to Vaagso for Christmas leave, the Germans put up a formidable defence. The post-operation dispatch to the Admiralty, written by Haydon and Burrough, stated: ‘Group 2, from the start, encountered very stiff opposition, both from Germany Infantry who fought to the last man in the buildings in which they were established, and from snipers, armed often with automatic rifles, who took up positions on the hillside west of the town where they were very difficult to locate owing to the excellent natural cover . . . By 1030 hours house-to-house fighting in the centre and northern end of the town had become bitter, resulting in severe casualties, especially in officers and senior N.C.O.s.’
The first wave of RAF fighters arrived over Vaagso at 0928 as the fighting began to intensify into a full-scale confrontation on land, sea and in the air. For the rest of the day, protection over the assault force was provided by the Blenheims and Beaufighters of 404, 254, 235, 236 and 248 RAF squadrons. They were by no means the most sophisticated aircraft in operation, and not a patch on the Spitfire or Hurricane, but they were flown by highly skilled, courageous crews and, with resources stretched to breaking point, the sight of any friendly aircraft was welcomed by the forces below. The German air base at Herdla – 100 miles to the south, or 30 minutes’ flight away – was in a state of high operational readiness, but it was first thing in the morning and the nine Me109s based there still needed to be de-iced. It was almost ninety minutes after the raid had begun that the first enemy aircraft appeared at the scene. Two Me109s swept in and homed in on the slower, less manoeuvrable Blenheims. Communications were proving to be a major problem between the many units involved in the operation – as it was for British forces everywhere in the first half of the war – and the men on the ships could only watch as one of the German fighters, attacking from below, took the Blenheim unawares and sent it plunging into the sea.
Two days before the force had set sail, to the exasperation of ARCHERY’s commanders, Bomber Command cancelled its plans for the Stirling bombers to launch an early morning bombing raid on the airfields at Herdla and Stavanger, where a total of eighteen Me109 fighters were based. (There were a further nine at Trondheim to the north but they would all have to use Herdla as an advanced refuelling base.) The Stirlings were reassigned to what was seen as a more urgent priority, and this left the fighters free to operate all morning until a subsequent bombing run by Blenheims scheduled for noon. For two hours, during the critical early phase of the assault, the force was susceptible to attacks from the air. At the very least, the attentions of the Luftwaffe were a distraction the raiders could have done without.
As activity in the air increased and the battle for Vaagso intensified, fighting erupted at sea. Once the smokescreen for the landing parties had cleared, the destroyers passed through the narrows between the two islands and began seeking out enemy shipping. Small-arms fire from the town peppered the hulls of the ships and three minor casualties were sustained aboard Oribi, but the destroyers arrived at a timely moment. Four German vessels – three commandeered steamers and the armed trawler Fohn – had taken one look at the opposition and turned tail for the northern exit of the Ulvesund. They were no match for the Royal Navy destroyers in speed or firepower. But like their compatriots on land, they made it clear from the outset of the engagement that they weren’t going down without a fight. The Fohn immediately opened fire on the Onslow with her Oerlikon AA 20-mm guns and punched a few holes in her armoured side before the destroyer returned fire and killed half the crew. The other half rushed ashore and continued to fight back with small-arms fire, but a shell from Onslow’s main armament quickly put an end to their brave if futile resistance. At the same time, two Me109s attacked the destroyers with cannon fire but failed to hit their targets. In his official report, Captain Armstrong of Onslow quipped: ‘At one moment we were sinking a merchant vessel with the after 4.7, covering the military with the foremost 4.7, engaging aircraft with a 4" and the close-range weapons were covering the landing party against German snipers. Unfortunately, there was no torpedo target.’
Two of the steamers, SS Reimar Edzard Fritzen and SS Normar, followed the Fohn’s example and beached themselves in a small bay to the north of the town. Shots were fired across their bows and their upper decks swept with Oerlikon fire but it failed to deter the crews who leapt overboard and scrambled ashore. The third, SS Eismeer, was left on the open water as its crew abandoned ship. While Onslow dealt with the Fohn, and sent boarding parties aboard the two beached steamers, Oribi steamed up the Ulvesund and landed a party of Commandos, Group 5, just south of the village of North Vaagso. Here the Commandos encountered only light resistance and they quickly rounded up the crews of the beached vessels as well as the town’s chief collaborator. Their detachment of sappers cratered the coast road connecting South Vaagso and wrecked the telephone exchange.
Out on the Ulvesund, Onslow and Oribi had just finished sinking the steamers and the armed trawler when a German merchant ship, the Anita L. M. Russ, accompanied by a tug, appeared from the north. By the time they realised their blunder, the guns of the destroyers were already lined up. Seconds later, both vessels had been holed and were sinking fast. In a matter of minutes, the destroyers had eliminated 15,000 tons of enemy shipping. Their tasks completed, Group 5 withdrew to the landing site to re-embark the Oribi, harassed by a platoon of German infantry all the way to the shoreline. Seeing the threat to the Commandos, the captains of Onslow and Oribi turned all their guns towards land and opened up on the enemy, which allowed the men to clamber aboard without taking casualties.
The Norwegian troops under Captain Linge, back in their homeland, were desperate to get into the fight. In addition to their assault role, they were tasked with rounding up collaborators and seizing documents from the HQ. Working close to 4th Troop, led by Captain Forrester, they made their way along the buildings on the waterfront towards the German HQ in the Ulversund Hotel in the middle of the main street. The HQ had become a strongpoint of German resistance, commanded by the nava
l harbourmaster who had earlier ignored the lookout who had raised the alarm about the approaching naval force. Speed was of the essence if they were to take the HQ before the Germans had a chance to destroy the paperwork – but progress was hard. Fourth Troop had already lost two officers – Komrower, crushed beneath the flaming landing craft, and another taken out by a sniper bullet to the neck. The fighting was confused and intense. Gunfire crackled across the town, and the air was filled with the shrieks and groans of injured and dying soldiers and petrified civilians against a backdrop of exploding grenades, mortars and naval shells. The Commandos poured fire from their Tommy guns and Bren guns into windows and doorways, shattering glass, splintering wood, and kicking up puffs of ice and snow. The difficulty of the assault was made worse by having to ensure that Norwegian residents cowering in their homes did not end up as collateral casualties. Bursting in and out of houses and rooms, the Commandos had a split second to decide whether to open fire. Before lobbing a hand grenade through a window they had to make sure it was a German and not a local in there.