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Secret Alliances

Page 19

by Tony Insall


  It was important for the Norwegian government to be able to participate as fully as possible in discussions about future operations in Norway, not just because of concerns over sovereignty, but also to maintain its position as the authority in control over resistance activities. Its standing was still affected by the disastrous campaign in 1940, its relations with Milorg were uncertain, and there were known to be concerns about whether it would seek to use its position to secure its own political future after the liberation of Norway. This latter point was resolved by statements in December 1942 and April 1943 which made clear that on its return to Norway the government would resign and a temporary replacement would arrange for early elections. The creation of the ANCC and the consequent improvement in relations between Milorg and SOE also made a difference. The ANCC did not simply deal with operational matters, but also played an important role in developing policy and resolving the misunderstandings and setbacks which occasionally continued to occur.||

  In May 1942 Hansteen attended a meeting because he wished to discuss SOE’s role in the reconquest of Norway and to start to examine the coordination of activities in London, Stockholm and Norway and the division of responsibility and control between British and Norwegian officers in SOE training camps in Aviemore as well as in the Shetlands. He also stressed the vital need for a greater and better interchange of advance information between SOE and SIS in view of the disaster which had taken place in Telavåg (see Chapter 7).34 Over the next few months, both Hansteen and SOE worked on longer-term plans for Norway, and reached agreement on policies which would allow for a much closer degree of cooperation between SOE and Milorg, with provision of SOE resources for training and supply of Milorg and its members, as well as direct radio contact with London. SOE would continue with sabotage operations, but with more limited objectives, and they would have a greater degree of freedom in the north, where Milorg had been able to achieve little.35 Thereafter, there were better relations and better communication, to which the incremental benefits of SOE training would contribute. SOE arranged a visit for Hansteen, Crown Prince Olav and Leif Tronstad to SOE’s training camp for Norwegians in Aviemore, STS 26, and also to Shetland, in October 1942. It went well. Hansteen said that he had not previously appreciated quite how much training was being done; he was impressed with the value of their work and the visit helped to inspire confidence.

  These improvements were more than overdue. In terms of organisation, planning and effectiveness, none of the parties involved had hitherto achieved as much as they would have liked. For example, SOE’s early planning was fairly crude – as sometimes was their grasp of detail. In June 1941, Dalton wrote to Churchill that ‘in Norway we have created a trained secret force of considerable strength, to which we intend to supply arms as soon as the nights lengthen. This force, which includes a special company of parachute troops, is controlled by SOE HQ here by secret wireless.’36 (No such parachute troops existed. The first SOE agent to be dropped by air was Cheese in January 1942.) Shortly afterwards in July, he provided Churchill with an outline plan for September 1941 to October 1942. He anticipated that by October 1942, SOE would have recruited 500 men for sabotage groups in Norway and would be able to deploy an army of 19,000 men – producing detailed estimates of the large quantities of equipment which would be required. There is nothing, here or elsewhere, to show how these figures were worked out: they were unrealistic for this period.37 During this time too, Milorg had its problems. Poor security and extensive overcentralisation made it vulnerable to German investigation, which led to many German arrests in the early autumn of 1941, mainly in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen. Finally, there is a remarkable story of SOE highhandedness when in the summer of 1941 Milorg sent a letter to Britain for King Haakon, which described its views on the role it should play in Norway in keeping a low profile and preparing for liberation. It was not delivered to him but passed instead to SOE by John Rognes. Rognes was a former senior member of Milorg, recalled to London by Torp to work for the Norwegian High Command, who acted as a link between SOE and Milorg. Sporborg drafted a reply, which he called a ‘directive’, which emphasised the need for continued active resistance. He showed it to Lie and Fleischer. Lie assumed (but did not check) that it had been seen by Nygaardsvold, while Fleischer was quite satisfied with it. Both were content for the ‘directive’ to be presented to Milorg as an expression of the views of their government.38 It was sent to Stockholm for delivery to Milorg on 8 August.39 This was a telling example of Norwegian inability to exercise control of key elements of the resistance – as well as of SOE’s rather autocratic assumption of the extent of its authority at that time.

  Unlike SOE, SIS was never competing with an organisation based in Norway in this way, and so had a much easier run. There were other indigenous intelligence gathering organisations, but their objectives were different and so the risks of conflict were small. Indeed, from early 1943, SIS provided significant support and training for the largest of them, XU, as it developed. SOE accepted that their relationship with the Norwegians needed to be different from that of SIS. After the arrest of members of Skylark B and Milorg in Trondheim in September 1942 (caused by insecure links between them), Menzies’ deputy in SIS commented:

  If we had never passed messages through Skylark B for the Norwegians, the service would probably have still been functioning. It was important and of great value to Admiralty … If we were only to take bodies of different nationalities, work them ourselves and keep them away from their so-called national governments, things would go much better.

  Hambro replied, ‘I agree that SIS could and should work without the cooperation of the allied government concerned. I cannot see how SOE can work with the vast organisation that they require without the allied government concerned.’40 Fortunately, Hansteen was able to develop the Norwegian High Command into a more effective organisation, better equipped to liaise with SIS. Relations between SIS and FO.II, and their respective section chiefs Eric Welsh and Finn Nagell, worked (in general) quite smoothly.

  Interventions by Lie

  In addition to propaganda and operations on the Norwegian coast, it is worth looking at a selection of the other areas where Lie chose to become involved, to understand the impact of some of his interventions. In May 1941, he suggested that ten Norwegians (including Sigurd Jakobsen, who had run SIS’s first station, Hardware) sentenced to death by the Germans, might be exchanged with Germans held by the British. The matter became less urgent when their sentences were commuted, but by then SIS and the Security Service had become involved. The Norwegians still wished to know whether such exchanges might be possible in any future cases involving death sentences. SIS suggested that quislings captured during the Lofoten raids might be suitable. The Security Service firmly ruled out the release of any Germans, but provided details of just two quislings who might be appropriate choices.41 The matter was not pursued further. In November 1941, Lie asked Collier to urge the British to stop bombing herring oil factories, as he had evidence to show that the output of these factories no longer went to Germany in any form but was used for feeding Norwegian civilians, whose food situation was getting steadily worse. He argued instead for interfering with other German activities more vigorously than hitherto, such as exports of electrolytic copper, for which the Germans had recently built a new plant. Warner passed this to the Ministry of Economic Warfare.42 In April 1942, he asked the Foreign Office whether they could arrange with the Admiralty for a warship to be sent to northern Norway to intercept the Skjerstad, which had left Trondheim for Finnmark with 500 teachers crammed on board, part of the group which would be forced to live in extreme conditions for a long period. Warner approached the Admiralty to support the request, but was told that it would not be possible to arrange anything in the time available.43 This was not the only time the Admiralty was requested to intercept a ship on the Norwegian coast. SOE approached them in April 1943 to request assistance when the SIS station Upsilon in Tromsø reported on 10 April that th
ose who had been arrested by the Germans in the aftermath of the ill-fated SOE Operation MARTIN were being transported later that day, under sentence of death, on the Ragnvald Jarl from Tromsø to Trondheim.44 Once again the Admiralty was unable to help in the time available.**

  There were other subjects on which Lie expressed himself more forcefully, for example, the extent of uncontrolled sabotage in Norway, which were thought to have been caused by the communists. In September 1942, Lie stressed the need for coordination of these actions to the Soviet ambassador to his government, Bogomolov, because of concerns about German reprisals. He also told the Foreign Office that the Norwegians could not be expected to encourage sabotage so long as there was no British bombing of German installations in Norway. He wanted to see more of it. In the meantime, he thought it wise to go slow on sabotage. SIS were consulted about this, and in order to protect their interests, predictably felt that ‘there is little to be said for encouraging the Norwegians to undertake isolated and uncoordinated acts of sabotage and violence … which frequently cause the arrests of precisely those elements of opposition who would in the future be most useful to the allies’.45

  Lie sometimes expressed himself more strongly to SOE than he did to the Foreign Office. For example, in November 1942, he told Hambro that he was very negative about Anglo-Norwegian relations. He had sent a message to the Ministry of War Transport saying that unless extra aircraft were made available for the Stockholm service, a key lifeline for both the Norwegian government and the British agencies, and a continuing source of contention, the Norwegian government would refuse to allow the Norwegian ships in Gothenburg to sail to Britain with their valuable cargoes. (These were consignments of ball bearings, used in the manufacture of aircraft engines and important armaments.) Hambro had actually gone to see Lie to try to persuade him not to make this stipulation, but was too late. Lie said he and colleagues thought they had been badly treated by Britain in the past twelve months. They had been promised many things by Churchill, in return for which they had given many concessions. But the promises had not been fulfilled. They needed better transport to bring back more Norwegian refugees to Britain. Hambro mollified Lie to some extent by telling him of the steps which were being taken with the various British ministries, and the constraints under which they were operating. But the lack of aircraft was a critical problem, and it took time before it was even partially resolved. In the meantime, Lie did not carry out his threat about the cargo ships in Gothenburg.46

  Post-war bases in Norway

  But Lie was not only interested in the conduct of the war. With a mixture of optimism and far-sightedness, by January 1941 the Norwegian government had set up a committee to consider what Norway might want from the post-war peace settlement. Lie told Dormer that for the maintenance of peace in the Atlantic it was essential that Britain, the United States and Norway should jointly be responsible for naval, air and military defence of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes by having bases there – and both Britain and the United States should have bases in Norway. He returned to this theme quite frequently. The initial Admiralty response was lukewarm, but Sargent was much more positive. He noted that one of the major post-war problems would be to enable Britain to maintain its position vis-à-vis the continent. He judged that the failure of France would make American cooperation essential. He thought that Lie’s suggestion might offer a practical means of achieving this – and that there might be similar Anglo-American bases in Portugal, Iceland and even Dakar.47 Lie continued to plug away and spoke about his plan publicly in Oxford in November. By then, Collier concluded that there would be much advantage in committing the Norwegian government to certain principles of post-war collaboration and Lie’s approach offered a good chance of achieving this. In December, Lie discussed his plans with Eden who was broadly positive but asked Lie what he thought about possible Russian involvement. Lie replied that he had considered that possibility, and was quite clear that he did not want Russia in the North Atlantic. He added, with further foresight, that part of the reason for suggesting an Anglo-Norwegian alliance was to be prepared if Russia were to present demands.48 The Foreign Office remained interested, and Lie obtained positive responses when he broached the idea with the Dutch and Belgians. In April 1942 he told Collier though that he was aware that he was regarded as too pro-British – and advised him to avoid emphasising that side of the agreement which would involve the use of Norwegian bases by the British fleet. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk about bases. Talk about mutual defence arrangements.’49

  There was still a long way to go before the end of the war and, despite his enthusiasm, Lie was unable to maintain momentum for his idea. After the war he was elected the first Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Norway temporarily reverted to a policy of neutrality known as ‘bridge-building’. In February 1948, amid growing tension following the takeover of power by communist governments in Eastern Europe, Norway decided to commit to the western defence alliance, which became NATO. But there were no foreign bases in Norway.

  This was not the only area where Lie took such a forward position. He also started to suggest more aggressive actions be taken in Norway. For example, he proposed that fish-preserving factories in Trondheim and Bodø should be bombed – though he stressed that he was anxious that it should not get out that this was on his recommendation, because some of his colleagues were opposed to it. When Sargent queried this, he was told that the output of herring oil factories continued to be used exclusively for feeding the Norwegian population, whereas the product of fish-preserving factories went to Germany. Soon afterwards, SOE considered attacking four of these factories, which exported some 25,000 tons of frozen fish to Germany, and considered including an Office of Strategic Services detachment among the raiding parties. However, the mechanics proved to be too difficult, mainly because of the distances involved, and the plans were dropped.50 Later, in March, Collier reported Lie’s request for some bombing attacks in Norway to lift the morale of Norwegians who had been discouraged by the fall of Singapore as well as the undignified conclusion of the Lofoten raid. He thought that a few bombs on a German aerodrome would have a disproportionate effect and demonstrate continued commitment.51 Sargent passed this on to the Chief of the Air Staff, pointing out that confiscation of radios made it harder for Norwegians to know what was going on. This exchange probably also helped to plant the seed which (following Lie’s intervention about sabotage described above) led Wilson, a few months later, to suggest that the RAF should be asked to bomb Victoria Terrasse, where the Gestapo had its headquarters, to disrupt a large rally planned by Quisling in September 1942 to mark the anniversary of his accession to power.52 Following a request by Selborne to Sir Archie Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, the operation was carried out by four Mosquitoes and was very successful. Hansteen wrote to Selborne to thank him, saying that the raid would help to keep up the spirit of the Norwegian population. ‘They are facing a hard winter and need all the encouragement which can be given to them.’53 Lie later told Collier that Quisling had been furious because the Norwegian victims had been almost exclusively NS members working for the Germans. The Air Ministry expressed willingness to carry out further daylight raids with Mosquitoes, as they saw their value. Wilson so informed Tronstad, but it proved difficult to find another suitable target which was not too heavily defended.54

  There was, however, one subject which neither Lie, nor Torp, appears to have raised with the British in London. This concerned the wish to escape of General Ruge, who was interned in Offlag IV-B in Königstein, Saxony. The British military attaché in Berne reported in December 1941 that the Norwegian minister had told him about a request from Ruge, which had been passed on by a recently released French general. He stated that the Norwegians wished to discuss with someone in London the possibility of providing Ruge with appropriate travel documents and suitable advice on travel by train to Switzerland. Northern Department noted that SIS had passed this information on to MI9, the org
anisation responsible for the escape and evasion of Allied prisoners of war, which was ready to provide suitable assistance. They decided not to ask the War Office to raise it with Torp. In the event, Ruge’s circumstances changed and an escape was no longer possible for him.55

  Foreign Office intelligence requirements for SIS

  And what of the Foreign Office? It is sometimes argued that the role of the Foreign Office is of less importance in wartime. This was generally not so as far as its relations with the governments in exile of occupied countries were concerned. It was certainly not the case for Norway, where both Eden and senior officials sometimes played an important role in negotiating outcomes which took account of Norwegian concerns. However, in order to be able to do this, the Foreign Office needed to obtain independently as clear an idea as possible of the situation in occupied Norway, to enable it to understand the background to Norwegian requests and to decide how far to go in accommodating them. Even relatively early in the war SIS was sometimes able to help by providing reporting or comment, though it was not always accurate. For example, in April 1941 the American consul in Oslo reported (inaccurately, as it turned out) on German troop numbers in Norway, based on the quantity of ration cards which had been issued, and added that there was evidence that German forces were equipped with gas bombs. SIS was able to dismiss the gas threat, stating that they had investigated it in Oslo, Stavanger and elsewhere. In each case they had established that the supposed bombs were fuel tanks slung under aircraft wings to provide additional range.56

 

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