Icelandic armed forces - part I

Iceland is probably among the more mysterious NATO countries. It has for decades officially claimed to maintain no armed forces and that claim was even acknowledged by NATO as can be seen towards the end in the following video.

To support this it is also sometimes claimed that the country's constitution forbids or forbade the forming of standing armies despite the fact that the exact opposite is true.

The truth appears to be convoluted in this matter.

In the 1990s following the dissolution of the USSR Icelandic historians started to research the Soviet archives and interview former KGB agents. To their surprise these agents praised the professionalism of their colleagues in the Icelandic  secret service an agency these historians had never heard of before and was generally unknown in Icelandic society.

As it turned out the Icelandic government had formed this counter-intelligence service in the 1930s within the Directorate for Immigration. It's primary purpose was to protect the country from Soviet and later Nazi German agents.  It operated in utmost secrecy until the very end of the Cold War without so much as a newspaper article indicating its existence. All of its operations and successes during the period had been attributed to the regular Police forces and vigilance of upstanding citizens.

[Icelandic militia gun-club in the late 19th century. Iceland had a vibrant nationalistic militia culture until the end of WWI when it started to diminish.]

Similarly the Icelandic government decided in the late 1930s to form an armed defence force to protect the country. This was again mostly caused by the perceived Nazi German and Soviet threat. Although it was already in the 1920s when Iceland got its first taste of communist threat. When a violent and armed mob of communists defeated the catpital police force repeatedly and refused to hand over a teenage boy suffering from a contagious disease.  This led the government to permit Icelandic militia riflemen under the leadership of the newly formed Icelandic Coast Guard to defeat them. Which they then did in short order.

[Commander Jóhann P. Jónsson of the Icelandic Coast Guard led the combined Coast Guard and militia force in the 1920s.]

By the late 1930s the government felt however that this level of defence which the Coast Guard and militia provided  was insufficient. Which was hardly surprising due to their sharp decline in quality as a result of the global economical depression. Thus the police force was ordered to study modern warfare tactics and leadership which they could then in turn teach the reserve force and together they would form a national defence with the pre-existing Coast Guard and militia.

[Icelandic police officers training in Iceland just before WWII.]

This plan was understandably not advertised, not only was the nation threatened by the communists who had kept up their violence throughout the 1930s but now they also had allies in the form of Nazi Germany as made apparent by their joint invasion of Poland in 1939.

However the arrival of British troops in the spring of 1940 lightened the burden on the Icelandic nation in this regard. Formation of a national defence force was put on hold for the duration of the war, although the Coast Guard was strengthened very considerably because of the submarine and mine threat caused by the belligerents. The Coast Guard received hundreds of Lee Enfield rifles from the British government and other equipment for disposal of drifting mines as well as depth charges and machine guns for self defence against German submarines and aircraft.

[Icelandic Coast Guard vessel Þór. Much of the burden of cleaning drift mines in the North Atlantic fell on the Icelandic Coast Guard during and after WWII.]

The end of the war and withdrawal of the foreign troops caused the Icelandic government to consider very seriously how to ensure the security of the nation. These discussions eventually led to Iceland becoming one of the founding members of NATO. But even before that the Icelandic police force had continued to restart the earlier plan on forming a national army and even sent some of its officers abroad for training.

[Icelandic police officers during training exercises in Sweden in 1948 where they studied new concepts in the Swedish theory of Total War.] 

To be continued...