From One War to Another

Abstract

On 16 February 1940, there occurred a fortuitous event which may have had profound indirect consequences upon the course of the war, far beyond any which could have been foreseen by those who participated in the incident itself. During the previous year, the German battleship Graf Spee had operated in the South Atlantic against British vessels, and captured a large number of seamen, who were later transferred to an auxiliary vessel, the Altmark. When the Altmark and a British cruiser sighted each other off the coast of Norway, the German vessel took refuge in a fjord. Two Norwegian torpedo-boats were also in the vicinity. A British destroyer, the Cossack, was instructed:

Unless Norwegian torpedo-boat undertakes to convey Altmark to Bergen with a joint Anglo-Norwegian guard on board and a joint escort, you should board Altmark, liberate the prisoners and take possession of the ship pending further instructions.¹

Contact was made with the Norwegians, who replied that the Altmark had been examined at Bergen the previous day, and ‘that nothing was known of prisoners’. Eventually the Cossack manoeuvered alongside the Altmark, and a party boarded her. A fracas ensued in which there were several casualties; but between 300 and 400 Allied prisoners were found and released.

‘[Maisky] could assure me that the Soviet would be actuated entirely by its own interests, that we lived in a period of change, that anything might happen, that in the jungle the strangest animals got together if they felt that their joint interests made this advisable.’ R. A. Butler note, 31 January 1940, of interview with Soviet Ambassador. FO 371/24843, fos 296–8