Students of 1944 tend to fixate on the e astern and Western fronts, with the soviets pulverizing the Germans from one direction and the Anglo Americans punching from the other. The more I look at that bloody year, however, the more I focus on the situation in the far north and the massive German deployments in Norway and Finland.
The Germans first came to Scandinavia in 1940 for sensible reasons: to protect iron ore supplies bound for the Ruhr from neutral Sweden, to seize the long Norwegian coast as a staging area for U-boat operations against Britain, and to forestall an Allied invasion through Norway. By 1944, however, Norway had become a strategic backwater. The crack pot notion of a massive Norway landing never ranked high on the Allied list, and operation overlord’s success shrank interest in invading there to below zero.
And so we have 1944 and its curious strategic situation. With the soviets smashing an entire German army group in Belorussia, the other Allies swarming France, and every battlefront chewing up irreplaceable German manpower, the Wehrmacht nonetheless maintained a huge force on duty in Norway, doing… well, not much—holding somnolent ports, manning coastal guns that would never fire a shot in anger, and occupying cities and towns full of baleful Scandinavians. for these tasks the Germans assigned no fewer than 370,000 men.
Pause and ponder that number. As the German official history tells us, the troop commitment to Norway amounted to “more German soldiers, relative to the population, than in any other occupied territory,” including the Soviet Union. Those 370,000 men amounted to at least 15 divisions, the equivalent of two field armies—precisely what a hard-pressed Wehrmacht needed most down south.
But we aren’t done with Germany’s northern daydreaming. the Reich had yet another army, the 20th Mountain, in Lapland, the Finnish province that straddles the Arctic Circle. With three full corps—six divisions—plus the army-level formations of artillery, engineers, and transport, the 20th—200,000 men—was not on static occupation duty, but holding a front line contested by the soviets.
In Finland as in Norway, German strategy sprouted sensibly. In 1941 the Germans used Finland as a base from which to attack the northern U.S.S.R. those operations, with appellations like “Rein deer” and “silver fox,” aimed to take the key Arctic port of Murmansk. But the offensives fell short, victims of logistical woes, tough soviet opposition, and the unforgiving tundra. ever since, the German front, along the Litsa River, had hardly moved an inch. the Germans were in the U.S.S.R., but Murmansk, only 30 miles east by road, might as well have been on the moon.
In the summer of 1944 this quiet front suddenly plunged into chaos. A massive soviet offensive in June forced the Finns to ask for an armistice by September, and a second assault in October smashed the German position outside Murmansk. The 20th Mountain Army had to retreat, scurrying out of Finland and into Norway. soon more than half a million German troops were crowding Norway—about one man in field gray for every six Norwegian citizens, which must be some sort of perverse record—at the very moment that the Red Army was lunging to the Vistula River, undertaking its Shermanesque march against Berlin, and the western Allies were driving head long toward the German border.
This insane state of affairs traced to several causes, such as Hitler’s congenital refusal to countenance retreat and the German navy’s bitter insistence on holding Norwegian ports to the end. And even if the führer had relented, lack of trans port might have made it difficult to ferry the boys out of Norway and into battle.
Whatever the cause, 1944 was the year German strategy came of the rails. the Allies were driving hell-bent for the fatherland, eyes on the prize, while the Germans were frittering away their strength in senseless deployments illustrating the term “overstretch.” Hitler and company lost for many reasons, but prime among those reasons is that you cannot protect your turf when you have hundreds of thousands of men far away holding down forts long past saving.
Originally published in the April 2015 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
