In spring 1940, Winston Churchill was still pushing his plan for a British military intervention

in neutral Norway to block the Germans from using Norwegian waters as a means of avoiding the British

blockade of Germany. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler was all too aware of British interest in Norway and was considering a plan to intervene first.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Welcome. The The Episode 320, Operation Vaser U-Bung

Today's story begins exactly where the previous episode left off.

In February 1940, when the Royal Navy first became aware that the German supply ship, Altmark,

was en route back to Germany via Norwegian coastal waters.

As you know from that episode, Altmark had accompanied and supplied the German pocket battleship

Admiral Graf Schpeia during that ship's raids of British merchant shipping in the South Atlantic in late

1939.

Graf Schpeia got involved in a battle with three British cruisers in December and fled to Montevideo, where the captain ordered his ship scuttled.

But Altmark escaped and began making its way back to Germany alone.

She proceeded north through the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean, steering clear of the British Isles, and on into the Norwegian Sea.

There Altmark turned east until it reached the territorial waters of neutral Norway, then began following the Norwegian coastline southward, toward home.

Altmark was far from the only German ship to take advantage of Norway. line southward toward home.

Altmark was far from the only German ship to take advantage of Norway's neutral waters.

German freighters regularly hauled high-grade Swedish iron ore from the northern Norwegian port of Narvik to German steel mills, which in turn fed the German tank and arms factories

that supplied the German war machine.

And as you also know, the free passage of German ships through Norwegian waters, right under the

noses of the Royal Navy, as it were, was a source of great frustration to the Admiralty and its first Lord Winston Churchill.

Churchill had already brought to the British War Cabinet proposals to mine Norwegian waters

...