Operation Wilfred - Background

Background

With the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, Britain and France initiated a naval blockade to weaken Germany by depriving her of the vital imports she needed to sustain her war effort. One of the most crucial imports was iron ore, needed to manufacture the steel which was used to build the ships, tanks and aircraft for the German armed forces. The primary source of this commodity was via neutral Sweden, deliveries of which Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty was intent on preventing to restrict Germany′s ability to fight. To do this, he developed a plan to mine the Norwegian Corridor, the sheltered sea lanes along Norway′s craggy western coast which the German ships used to transport the ore within neutral waters back to their home ports. By doing this, Churchill hoped to force the ore ships out into the open sea where the blockading ships of Contraband Control could sink or capture them.

Britain and France were anxious to prevent a Nazi takeover of Scandinavia that would greatly reduce the effectiveness of the blockade and secure indefinite supplies of the iron ore. Such a move would also provide the Germans with many more sea ports and bases from which they could fly bombing and reconnaissance missions over Britain. To prevent this from happening, the Allies considered their own benevolent occupation of the two neutral countries, but the plan eventually came to nothing.

By late March 1940, the plan to mine the Norwegian waters—which Churchill had been urging his colleagues to authorise but which for a variety of reasons had still not been carried out—had become linked with a separate plan to send naval mines down the Rhine to destroy German bridges and shipping further downstream. This plan—known as Operation Royal Marine—was seen by the British as a way of striking back for the heavy damage and loss of life the Germans had inflicted on them by the use of the magnetic mine, but the French vetoed the plan, fearful it would bring a wider German retaliation against them.

On 3 April, the British began to receive reports of heavy build-ups of shipping and troops in the Baltic German ports of Rostock, Stettin and Swinemunde. It was assumed that this was part of a force being sent to counter an Allied move against Scandinavia, (the Germans had some awareness of Allied plans as a result of their own intelligence) and so that same day the British took the decision to proceed with the mining of the iron ore route separately from Operation Royal Marine, setting a date of 8 April for the Admiralty to implement it. Envisaging that Operation Wilfred would provoke a furious enemy response notwithstanding the preparations already underway in their Baltic ports, a parallel initiative called Plan R4 was ordered to prevent German landings by sending strong British and French forces to occupy the key Norwegian ports of Narvik, Stavanger, Bergen and Trondheim before marching to the Swedish frontier and taking control of the iron ore sites.

Because it seemed relatively minor and innocent in scope the plan was named Operation Wilfred, after a naïve character in the long running Daily Mirror newspaper comic strip Pip, Squeak and Wilfred.