Narvik is a kind-of-new town. It was created in the early 20th century to provide a year-round port to export iron ore discovered in the Sweden mountains, as the Swedish port of Lulea freezes up in the winter. My tour guide explained that the mining company made of $4 billion USD in 2023, with about one-quarter of that being profit. Two-thirds of the ore goes thru Narvik. So, it’s kind of a big thing.

Narvik is at the end of a fjord, and it’s hard to express the views. The surrounding hills/mountains are so sheer I couldn’t get a decent picture to help describe it, so here’s a view of the port-side. The distant snow covered mountain are in all direction.

My tour today was focused on the World War 2 aspects of Narvik. I’m not a big WW2 history buff, but I have heard of the Battles of Narvik. I won’t dive into the details, but I found this amusing: The Narvik WW2 museum shares a building with the local library and the courts. That is such a 20,000-person town thing to do.

In the two months of the Battles, over 60 ships, 80 planes and 8000 soldiers on all sides were lost. This was the first major defeat of the Nazis, but then the invasion of France happened and the allies abandoned Norway. Over the years after over 16,000 foreign POWs died in Norway. The guides emphasized how the museum was there for education since children now did not have any experience with actual war. Before the Ukraine conflict, that is. OK, enough current events.

The small museum is nicely put together, and the director gave us a briefing and showed a (very old, outdated) film before starting the tour. As a prior-Army guy I enjoyed the tour. The thing that really grabbed my attention was a cut out of the battleship Tirpitz‘s armor belt. The ship was famously in the Norwegian fjords during much of WW2, famously threatening Allied convoys to the UK and Russia. And it was crazy armored. In the picture, next to it was a suitcase-sized radio set.

I have an evening “Try to See Northern Lights” tour. We’ll see.