Iceland review - 2019, Page 91

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Iceland Review
Hotel Marina
I C E L A N D I C R E S T A U R A N T & B A R
T a b l e R e s e r v a t i o n s : + 3 5 4 5 1 7 1 8 0 0 - f o r r e t t a b a r i n n . i s
Tasty local cuisine
by the old harbour
Nýlendugata 14, 101 Reykjavik
In all the chaos of the Second World War, Iceland’s role
in the Battle of the Atlantic may be among the least
appreciated. Enduring six years, it was the longest
and deadliest of all of World War II’s battles. Some
3,500 Allied merchant ships were sunk along with
175 warships, with a staggering loss of 72,000 Allied
sailors. However, the Nazi’s bloody achievement was
not without tremendous cost to them as well: of the
1,200 U-boats built throughout the war, 783 were sunk
with a loss of 30,000 Kriegsmarine sailors. These
ludicrous 75% death rates made the job of the Atlantic
sailor, whether Allied or Axis, the most dangerous in
the entire war.
An island surrounded
Eighty years after Britain and France’s declaration of
war on Nazi Germany following the invasion of Poland,
the amount of doubt and cynicism that had hung in
the air at the time is generally ignored or forgotten.
But Europeans were terrified. The Soviets had made a
peace treaty with the belligerent Germans, leaving the
Allies with no way to check the Nazi eastern expansion.
After a relatively non-eventful winter of 1939-40, on
April 9, 1940 the Nazi Wehrmacht overran Denmark in
a matter of hours and the very next day took the British
and French completely by surprise with a success-
ful invasion of Norway, quickly forcing the Allies to
retreat from their defensive positions and evacuate the
country.
Within three weeks, the Wehrmacht invaded
Holland and Belgium, and conquered Luxembourg. By
mid-summer, Britain’s most important ally France had
surrendered to Hitler’s regime and Churchill’s Britain
stood alone. Defeat at the hands of the German armed
forces in France wiped away any British hopes for stop-
ping Hitler on mainland Europe. The remaining British
troops beat a hasty retreat at Dunkirk, abandoning
hundreds of aircraft, tanks, and other vital armaments.
Kriegsmarine warships sank Britain’s biggest aircraft
carrier and several other battleships, shaking Britain’s
leaders’ faith in the Royal Navy.
From late summer 1940, with Norwegian and main-
land European ports under Nazi control, U-boats could
surround Britain, torpedoing merchant ships critical
for British food and fuel. The Luftwaffe outnumbered
the Royal Air Force and began to press its advantage
with deadly air raids on London and military targets
day after day. In a dark mood, Winston Churchill told a
close advisor, “You and I will be dead in three months’
time.” Thankfully, the venerable Prime Minister kept
his private cynicism mostly to himself and delivered
successive rousing, defiant speeches that were elemen-
tal to maintaining British morale, such as his famous
address to Parliament in May 1940: “I have nothing to
offer you except blood, sweat and tears...”
Unexpected guests
Shortly after 3.00am on Friday morning, May 10, 1940,
over a calm twilight sky above Reykjavík, a lone sin-
gle-engine amphibious aircraft droned noisily, catching
the attention of a few wakeful Icelanders. The British
pilot was on the lookout for U-boat activity in Faxaflói
bay that might imperil Britain’s fleet of warships; but he
had inadvertently flown directly over the city, waking
the startled residents for whom aircraft were a rarity.
The Chief of Police was informed of the incursion and
arrived at the city’s harbour to the imposing sight
of a hulking warship from which hundreds of armed
soldiers were disembarking while six other battleships
approached menacingly. At first no one was even sure
what nation had just invaded.
When the Second World War had begun some nine
months earlier, Iceland had wasted no time in declar-
ing neutrality, feeling an ocean away from the growing
hostilities. In the first four months of the war, German
U-boats sank 114 Allied merchant ships, but Icelanders
maintained the hope that as long as they flew the
Icelandic flag their ships would be spared. At first, this
strategy to ward off U-boat attacks was successful, but
“Whoever has Iceland controls
the entrances into and exits
from the Atlantic.”
— Unidentified German Kriegsmarine Naval Officer