- 10 Apr 2024 13:07
#15311522
April 10, Wednesday
After 24 hours, Danish king orders a ceasefire and surrender
German troops are in occupation of all Denmark. As a German General Staff paper confidently predicted, the occupation has taken a mere 24 hours. Denmark’s airfields, ports, islands, and inlets are now available to the Germans as forward bases for their attack on Norway, now in its second day.
The invasion began at 5 am yesterday when three troopships sailed silently into Copenhagen harbor. A lone policeman who resisted the invaders with a pistol fell, and the city was taken without further fighting. Simultaneously, trawlers escorted by E-boats brought German troops into all of Denmark’s ports and major islands, giving them control of the vital sea passages, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, between Denmark and Norway. At the same time, airborne troops landed at the airfield of Aalborg, and motorized troops crossed Denmark’s land frontier at Flensburg and Tondern. At Gjedser, a ferry came in carrying troops and an armored train.
After twelve Danish deaths, King Christian X ordered a ceasefire at about 6 am. The Danish C-in-C, General Pryor, recalling an earlier battle at Copenhagen, applied the Nelson touch and ignored the order. Then, at 6:45 am, the king sent his personal adjutant to ensure it was obeyed. The occupation puts Germany in an unprecedented legal position. Since Denmark has not resisted, Denmark is not at war with Germany. It is still neutral. The Germans are faced with a coalition government embracing most Danish democratic parties, which they cannot depose without undermining their claims, however tenuous, of not threatening other neutral nations.
German justification for the occupation is that it had to act to prevent the Allies from occupying northern Norway and depriving Germany of its iron ore supply from neutral Sweden. The most crucial gain for Germany is control of the airfields at Aalborg, at the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula—a key strategic location in the air battle for Norway and patrolling the sea passages to Germany’s Baltic ports.
British cause heavy German naval loss despite fleet delays
With battle ensigns straining from their mainmasts and all guns blazing, six British destroyers race through a snowstorm today to surprise a larger flotilla of German ships at the end of a Norwegian fjord. In the short and furious battle that follows, two German destroyers are sunk and two more crippled. Two British destroyers, Hardy and Hunter, are sunk and their flotilla commander, Captain Warburton-Lee, is killed in the engagement.
The naval action off Norway began with a mine-laying operation aimed at forcing ships carrying iron ore to Germany out of neutral Norwegian waters. The operation was set to begin on April 8th, and on April 5th, a force left Scapa Flow under Vice-Admiral Whitworth.
The destroyer Glowworm was separated from the force when one of her seamen was washed overboard in heavy seas. The last heard from her was that she was sinking after taking on the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. Four minelayers and Warburton-Lee’s destroyers joined Whitworth’s force.
As early as April 4th the admiralty had intelligence of a German move on Norway, and signs of naval activity in the Baltic grew stronger on April 6th. The admiralty concentrated on the possibility of a breakout of German warships via the North Sea to the North Atlantic rather than the invasion of Norway. Thus, when major German naval groups were known to be heading northwest into the North Sea, and the Home Fleet finally sailed, it steered northeast, leaving the central North Sea uncovered.
By April 8th the Germans’ invasion intentions were clearer, and Admiral Forbes, the C-in-C, adjusted course and sent more destroyers to the mine-laying force to the north.
The next day, the Germans lost two cruisers, one sunk by a submarine, the other by torpedoes fired by the Norwegians in Oslo fjord.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke