Royal Navy's Test

For the fifth time in 352 years, Britain's Royal Navy set forth last week to meet a major challenge to Britannia's rule of the waves. Under Effingham in 1588, Britain acquired that rule by beating the Armada of Spain in the English Channel. The French Navy of Louis XIV was vanquished at La Hogue (1692). Since then four other masters of bulging European powers have forced a showdown on that rule. Under Nelson at Aboukir Bay in 1798 and at Trafalgar in 1805 Britain's fleet crushed Napoleon's dream of making France an overseas power. Under Jellicoe at Jutland in 1916 Britain's fleet hurled back the challenge of Wilhelm II. Under Sir Dudley Pound Britain's fleet faced last week the challenge of Adolf Hitler.

Gun crews grinned and pummeled each other as they stripped, washed down with antiseptic and put on clean uniforms (to avoid infection if wounded), before going to battle stations, as the fleet put to sea for battle. If they expected another full-dress performance like Jutland, they reckoned without Hitler's strategy. He had no hope of winning in a concentrated battle between capital ships. His plan was so far as possible to avoid battle at sea, to divide his fleet into a number of small squadrons and scatter them as protection for numerous parties at strategic points along 1,200 miles of Norwegian seacoast.

Under such conditions sea battle was bound to be diffuse. In the usual foul weather up & down the Scandinavian coast, the first problem of Britain's Navy was to find the enemy, to avoid his mines and submarines, to brush aside his air craft and come to grips, here, there, anywhere with detachments of the German Fleet and its convoys.

Fog, snow, night and, above all, naval secrecy obscured the problem. Britain's "heavy stuff" (battleships and battle cruisers) lay over the horizon in the North Sea waiting for cruisers to call the cues. Cruisers in turn waited for destroy ers, airplanes, submarines to set the stage.

During the first night, with frightful weather continuing, Norway's coast de fenders first stole the show by sinking German advance forces, then upset the plot by falling treacherously into German hands so that their shore guns were turned against the Allies (see p. 22}. Before any thing was clear, Denmark was gobbled up by land and German troops were fighting in Norway. Meantime the first of five phases of naval operations had begun.

Phase One: Groping. On Monday scattered units of the German Fleet accompanying transports were at sea getting into position for landing Tuesday at daybreak.

Without yet knowing what was afoot, British vessels encountered Germans at two points far apart. In the Skagerrak a British submarine torpedoed the German transport Rio de Janeiro giving the first alarm that something serious was afoot (TIME, April 15). The other encounter was hundreds of miles away and not till several days later was its outcome known.

Monday morning the British destroyer Glowworm was proceeding with her flotilla to lay mines off the Norwegian coast when she lost a man overboard. Delayed in picking him up, the Glowworm was hurrying to overtake her companions when, northwest of Trondheim, she sighted a strange destroyer. "What ship is that?" she blinked in English. The answer was gunfire. After announcing that she had engaged an enemy destroyer, the Glowworm never reported to the Admiralty again. Several days later German sources told how the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper had come down and sunk her during the battle -- she had stumbled upon part of the German Fleet escorting transports north.

That night and next morning, German expeditionary forces steamed into Narvik, Trondheim, Stavanger, Bergen, Oslo. At Narvik German destroyers coming in through a snowstorm sank two old Norse coast defense ships at their moorings and one armed British ship, before they could fire a shot. At all other ports except Oslo and Kristiansand, landings were made without fighting.

Treachery ashore disarmed the Norwegian ships and coast gun crews at Norway's naval base of Horten, across Oslo Fjord from Moss. But the Norse mine layer Olav Tryggvason put in there unexpectedly for repairs Monday evening, unbeknownst to the plotters. When, before dawn, she beheld German warboats coming in unchallenged, she promptly torpedoed the cruiser Emden and a submarine. One coast gun crew in the narrows above Horten remained loyal long enough to sink the Blucher, but a minefield in the narrows was rendered harmless by Nor way's betrayers, just as a message from Vidkun Quisling, the No. 1 Nazi Fifth Columnist at Oslo, got the invaders past the harbor guards at Bergen.

Phase Two: Contact. Knowing at last what was afoot, Allied warships arrived in force off ports where the Nazis had landed.

But first their sweepers had to clear a path through German mines strewn from Denmark to Norway. Sending planes of the Naval Air Service to scout and bomb, the ships waited outside like belated terriers at rocky ratholes.

On Wednesday, out of the Kattegat steamed a second Nazi armada carrying troops and supplies. It was attacked by Allied ships in a fight lasting far into the night, along the Swedish coast from Goteborg to Stromstad. This time the Allies did their stuff. Swedes reported four Nazi cruisers were sunk and eight out of ten transports sent down or ashore. The sea was filled with dead, dying, drowning soldiers. Nevertheless, one German troopship managed to slip through to Oslo. All this fighting was apparently done by submarines and destroyers. Larger Allied ships were not risked close in.

Far at sea off Narvik, for example, at daybreak the battle cruiser Renown sighted the German battleship Scharnhorst escorted by the 10,000-ton cruiser Admiral Hipper. "The sea was running very high," First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill later explained. "Gales were blowing furiously, but our battle cruiser opened fire at 18,000 yards and after three minutes the enemy replied. The enemy almost immediately turned away and after nine minutes the Renown observed hits forward of the superstructure of the German. . . .

"Thereafter her whole armament stopped firing, but later, after having turned, she began firing under local control. . . . The Renown had to push to 24 knots through very heavy seas breaking over her forward gun turrets, and, after a further two minutes of firing, a vertical column of smoke from what they called a possible second hit was observed in the Scharnhorst, who then turned away and retired at high speed. ..." The Renown, with her low freeboard, could not follow at speed through seas which the Scharnhorst, with high, flaring bows like U. S. battlecraft, rode easily. The Hipper, dodging about, laid down smokescreens and they both escaped.

Hero of Narvik. The Scharnhorst and Admiral Hipper were detailed to cover the Narvik landing effected by the six Nazi destroyers. Had the Renown not chased after them, she might have been a great help to Captain B. A. Warburton Warburton-Lee, commanding five light destroyers, who wirelessed the Admiralty for permission to go in and clean out Narvik. The Admiralty told him to use his own judgment and wished him an unreassuring "good luck." He flashed, "Going into action," and swept up the fjord against fierce battle odds. Concentrating his ships' fire on six German merchantmen in the harbor (supply ships not yet unloaded), Captain Warburton-Lee sank them all but took a fearful shellacking from his heavier armed foes, of whom the British could sink only one, set three aflame. Down went the British Hunter. Captain Warburton-Lee was killed, his Hardy so badly damaged it had to be beached. The Hostile and Havock withdrew to save the crippled Hotspur. On their way out they met and sank the German vessel Ravenfels, full of ammunition.

As things turned out, the damaged Nazi expedition at Narvik got reinforcements before the British came at them again, but not nearly enough (see below). The raid by the H-class under Hero Warburton-Lee was a critical engagement in the entire Scandinavian campaign.

Phase Three: Harrying. Almost before Norway knew what was happening, the Nazi Air Force had on the first day secured the rugged peninsula's few useful landing fields * three at Oslo, one at Stavanger, one near Trondheim. From these bases German bombers, escorted by fighters, soon soared out to test World War II's delayed issue of bomber v. battleship. Off Bergen the Germans claimed their bombs sank the heavy cruiser York, crippled an aircraft carrier, damaged two battleships. They also said they sank two British submarines, damaged the French dreadnought Dunkerque, sank the heavy cruiser Foch. The British replied that a 1,000-lb. bomb hit full on the battleship Rodney's, deck but her deck armor (16 1/2 inches) resisted it; that other ships were attacked but not put out of action, for example the light cruiser Aurora, flagship of the destroyers, whose destroyer escort Gurkha did go down.

British bombers counterattacked the Nazis' Norwegian bases, strafing planes on the ground, blowing up a fuel and ammunition dump, attacking Nazi warships hiding in fjords. Bombers of the Naval Air Service made their debut by claiming the destruction of a cruiser moored in Bergen.

Torpedo-carrying planes claimed a German destroyer in Trondheim. A squadron of heavy bombers penetrated by night to a seaplane base on the Baltic, blew up a munitions ship passing through the Great Belt. But on the face of it the Germans had the advantage by air, with many more planes and with land bases on both sides of the 75-mile-wide Skagerrak.

Phase Four: Blockade. Having sunk by its own account one-third of Germany's fighting ships the Allied fleet settled down to the lengthy task of trying to isolate and destroy the rest. First step was the swift and probably very sketchy laying of vast Allied minefields extending from Dutch waters in the North Sea, around the flat, sandy, northern prong of what in less than 24 hours ceased to be Denmark, in the Kattegat right down through the Danish Belts (straits) and then, amazingly, clear across the Baltic to Memel and Lithuania.

For this work mine-laying destroyers (including the three escaped Polish vessels) were used, with mine-laying submarines and planes to push into the farthest reaches. Leaving a path 20 miles wide for neutral Sweden, the Allies said they mined also the northern half of the Skagerrak, up into Oslo Fjord. For an added fillip they said their mines were of a new type against which there was no known defense. Used in these operations undoubtedly were plenty of France's big submarines which can lay 150 mines per trip. Somewhere along the line the British Spearfish took a crack at the Admiral Scheer, one of Germany's two remaining pocket-battleships, and believed her speared by two torpedoes.

The minefields were to perform the triple function of locking out from home what was left of the German Navy, locking in further supply ships, and lightening the blockaders' sea-patrol task. By sowing so wide an area, even if sketchily, they would make arduous work for Nazi minesweepers, already working overtime to clear the Skagerrak and Kattegat. Nevertheless, nine more Nazi troopships made landings inside Fredrikstad before the week's end. A lot of noise at sea Thursday and Friday which observers took for heavy fighting was doubtless German countermining, i.e., firing depth charges to explode mines which, if laid too close together, may be touched off like a string of firecrackers.

Phase Five: Extermination. Three days after Hero Warburton-Lee's raid, the battleship Warspite arrived off Narvik accompanied by the remains of the H-class destroyers, plus the heavier (1,870 ton) "Tribal" destroyer flotilla including the famed Cossack (which raided the prison ship Altmark in Norwegian waters in February). This heavy force plowed up the fjord, silenced the Nazis' shore guns, sank seven destroyers, stood by to watch Norwegian shore forces clean out the landing party of 5,000 Nazis.

What Is Command? "When we speak of command of the sea," said Winston Churchill, in his first report to the House of Commons on the week's activities, "that does not mean that the Royal Navy and its French Allies command every part of the sea at the same moment or at every moment. . . . Anything more foolish than to suggest that the life and strength of the Royal Navy . . . should have been expended in merely ceaselessly patrolling up and down the Norwegian coast as targets for U-boats on the chance that Hitler might launch a blow like this cannot be imagined. . . ." But that did not explain why the Royal Navy let the Germans cross and recross the Skagerrak. The explanation is that with Nazi air power and submarines the Skagerrak is an unhealthy spot for British as well as Nazi ships except on swift raids.

A fifth convoying phase of the battle apparently began this week when Britain announced that British troops had been landed at "several points." Evidently the Royal Navy waited until it considered the German expeditionary force thoroughly isolated by sea, and sufficiently checked by air, to make landing parties less disastrous than, for example, in the Gallipoli adventure. That costly expedition was conceived by the present First Lord of the Admiralty.

Sir Dudley. The light destroyer raid on Narvik was characteristic of the Royal Navy at its most daring. It resembled in daring the British attempt in 1918 to plug up the harbors of Zeebrugge and Ostend, an attempt that was planned by Sir Dudley Pound, now Admiral of the Fleet.

The father of Alfred Dudley Pickman Rogers Pound was a barrister, his mother a Bostonian, and he was born on the sea-lapped Isle of Wight. Like many another boy of approved middle-class background, between 13 1/3 and 13 2/3 years of age, he stood for the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Pound, D., was found acceptable and, though at heart rebellious against Dartmouth's archaic rules and curriculum, held his hot young tongue through the 44-month course, emerged to enjoy a series of good appointments. Recognizing their potential, he made torpedoes his first specialty, in 1905 became torpedo expert in the Home Fleet's new flagship, King Edward VII. Thereafter he zigzagged upward, between the fleet and the Admiralty, admired and liked by Dartmouth colleagues above and below him.

Like most of the men (on both sides) who are running this war, Sir Dudley has a bed in an office off his chart-hung war room, in & out of which he goes many times nightly to confer with the Operations staff. His bed hour, 10 p.m., is seldom observed because Winston Churchill's habit is to work until 2 a.m. or later and an elevator connects the Churchill and Pound quarters. The First Sea Lord invariably rises at 7 a.m., but catches up with naps in the afternoon. He seldom sees Lady Pound, who runs Knitted-Garments-for-the-Navy. Of their two sons, the elder is a captain of Marines, the younger an R. N. lieutenant, lately transferred off the Cossack.

Sir Dudley is an "all-arounder" whose thoroughness is not pedantic, whose energy succumbs to neither red tape nor his chronic arthritis. He is also a good bluffer when occasion demands. With precious few rounds of ammunition on his economy-stripped ships, when he was chief of staff to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1935 he cheekily told the Italians where to head in.

Under First Sea Lord Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley, Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet is Admiral Sir Charles Morton Forbes, 60, a softspoken, blue-eyed, pint-sized gunnery specialist who reached the top without social pull, who likes to prune his own apple trees, whose second wife is a Swede. He saw the carnage at the Dardanelles as executive officer of the Queen Elizabeth, was the late Admiral Earl Jellicoe's fleet gunnery officer at Jutland in the Iron Duke, for which he got the D. S. O.

At the Warspite's truck when she shouldered into Narvik flew the flag of Vice Admiral William ("Jock") Whitworth, Commander of the Battle Cruiser Squadron, at heart a small-ship man, "the Beatty of this war." He has twin sons, aged 29, in the Navy. Commander of the Destroyer Flotillas is Vice Admiral Ronald H. C. Hallifax whose flagship, the light cruiser Aurora, was air-bombed the same day as Sir Charles's Rodney and with like effect.

The Admiral of the Royal Navy who had the worst time last week, whom all the others hoped to assist, was hollow-cheeked King Haakon of Norway (honorary).

Opposed to these men are Admiral Rolf Carls, whose slight acquaintance the British made off Spain in 1936-37 when he was there in the Deutschland, and Admiral General Alfred Saalwaechter, a former U-boat commander, sent out to assist Carls in Adolf Hitler's cold-blooded act of sacrificing his scattered Navy to gain windows on the Atlantic. Opposed to that sacrifice, on the ground that the situation it would create could not be maintained, was the German Navy's Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, again reported last week to be out of a job.

Sheer sacrifice was what the German Navy's performance really boiled down to. Winston Churchill was not merely rhetorical when, after only three days of fighting, he called the Nazi Navy already "deeply mutilated" in respect to cruisers, "a mere counter to be cast away for a particular operation."

* Swedes last week took ingenious precaution against this fundamental Blitzkrieg move by parking thousands of taxicabs and other automobiles all over their main airfields.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.