Iron Ore and Section D: The Oxelösund Operation

Abstract

When during the Phoney War, the British government began to consider seriously the question of taking forceful unilateral action to cut off the supply of Swedish iron ore to Germany, a variety of schemes aimed at assisting in the attainment of this goal came up for examination. One of these was for a special operation directed against the port of Oxelosund, through which the bulk of the ore from the central orefields in particular from the large Grangesberg Export Field was shipped. There is no shortage of references to Oxelosund in the relevant British documents of the time and one can pick up the thread of development from the first lord's nagging worry expressed in his note to the assistant chief of the naval staff on the 29th of September 1939, about ore seeping through the port, to his recommendation of December I 6th that 'the ore from Oxelosund, the main ice-free port in the Baltic, must also be prevented by methods which will be neither diplomatic nor military.' What these methods might be, was spelled out more fully by the chiefs of staff in their report of December 3 1 st, where they noted that the port could be put out of action either by blocking the harbour (thus encouraging the formation of ice) or by the destruction of the mechanical loading apparatus on the docks.' This latter project, they considered, was worthy of detailed examination and they calculated that if it were successfully executed, it might mean the interruption of the flow of iron ore from the port for six months or more. At the meeting of the war cabinet, on 9 January, it was agreed that the prime minister with certain of his cabinet colleagues, should examine ' the special problem' of the export from Oxelosund and eight days later, Cadogan was recording in his diary that a meeting with the prime minister, the foreign secretary, the first lord, the minister for the coordination of defence, the minister without portfolio and Colonel Menzies, the chief of the SIS, about sabotage in Sweden, had left him with the impression that things were ' quite satisfactory and hopeful'. However, the proposed sabotage at Oxelosund was to miscarry hopelessly. Although the exact origins of the Oxelosund operation remain obscure, a certain amount of routine contingency planning had evidently been undertaken at an earlier stage by the newly established Section D of SIS.2 In the summer of 1938, an Englishman in his mid-thirties made a tour of the main orefields and ore ports of Sweden. His name