The Sinking of the Blücher
The forty-year-old torpedoes
This is the detail that makes the story. The battery on Nordre Kaholmen was built between 1898 and 1901, and the two torpedoes it fired into the most modern warship in the sound that morning were roughly four decades old. A nineteenth-century installation, guns that had been standing there for a lifetime, and a crew that decided to use them without waiting to be told twice.
How many died is genuinely disputed
Store norske leksikon gives a range of 700 to 1,000 dead. One historian cites 600 to 1,000. Another source puts it at about 320. A fourth says plainly that the toll is unknown. Those are not small differences and no amount of confident writing closes them. Any page that gives you one number for the Blücher is choosing a source and not telling you it chose. The honest answer is that the count has never been settled, and the figure most often cited falls somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand.
The escape story, corrected
The version that circulates is that sinking the Blücher let the king and the government escape. It did not, and the timeline says so. The king, the government and about a hundred members of the Storting had already decided to leave Oslo the night before, acting on intelligence about approaching warships. Their train left Østbanen at around 07:23 to 07:30. Blücher went down at about 06:21 — roughly an hour earlier. The evacuation was already under way before the first gun fired.
What the sinking actually did is more interesting than the myth. Blücher was the German flagship and she was carrying the troops and administrators meant to seize the capital at dawn. Losing her in the narrows delayed the occupation of Oslo by hours and gave an evacuation that was already moving the room it needed to get clear. That is a real and decisive outcome. It is just not the one in the film version.
None of this is visible from an Oslofjord sightseeing cruise. The Drøbak Sound is far south of the city and the boats from the City Hall quays turn around long before it — Oscarsborg, and how to actually get there.
Where to go for it
Drøbak, reached by Ruter’s B21 and B22 lines, weekends in spring and autumn and daily in summer. That is a day of its own, not an add-on to a harbour cruise. Drøbak and the narrows.
Frequently asked questions
How was the Blücher sunk?
By Oscarsborg Fortress in the Drøbak Sound on 9 April 1940. Two of its three 28 cm Krupp guns fired — “Moses” and “Aron”, not “Josva” — and the underwater torpedo battery on Nordre Kaholmen, built 1898 to 1901, then hit her with two torpedoes about forty years old. The fortress.
How many people died on the Blücher?
It has never been settled. Store norske leksikon gives 700 to 1,000; one historian cites 600 to 1,000; another source says about 320; a fourth states the toll is unknown. Anyone quoting a single figure has picked a source without saying so.
Did the Blücher sinking let the king escape?
Not in the way the story is usually told. The king, the government and about a hundred members of the Storting had already decided to leave the night before, and their train left Østbanen at around 07:23 to 07:30, roughly an hour after the ship went down at about 06:21. The sinking delayed the occupation of Oslo and gave an evacuation already under way the room it needed.