Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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In London, strategic debate increasingly degenerated into shouting matches. Churchill shouted loudest, but his extravagant schemes were frustrated by lack of means to fulfil them. Ministers argued with each other, with the French, and with their service chiefs. Coordination between commanders was non-existent. In the space of a fortnight, six successive operational plans were drafted and discarded. The British were reluctantly persuaded that some show of assisting the Norwegians in defending the centre of their country was indispensable politically, if futile militarily. Landings at Namsos and Åndalsnes were executed in confusion and prompted relentless German bombing, which destroyed supply dumps as fast as they were created and reduced the wooden towns to ashes. At Namsos, French troops looted British stores; there were vehicle crashes caused by conflicting national opinions about right-and left-hand road priority. On 17 April Maj. Gen. Frederick Hotblack had just been briefed in London to lead an assault on Trondheim when he suffered a stroke and collapsed unconscious.
The British 148 Brigade, whose commander defied instructions from London and marched his men to offer direct support to the Norwegian army, was mercilessly mauled by the Germans before its three hundred survivors retreated by bus. A staff officer dispatched from Norway to the War Office to seek instructions returned to tell Maj. Gen. Adrian Carton de Wiart, leading another force: ‘You can do what you like, for they don’t know what they want done.’ British troops fought one engagement in which they acquitted themselves honourably, at Kvan on 24–25 April, before being obliged to fall back.
Thereafter in London, ministers and service chiefs favoured evacuation of Namsos and Åndalsnes. Neville Chamberlain, self-centred as ever, was fearful of bearing blame for failure. The press, encouraged by the government, had infused the British people with high hopes for the campaign; the BBC had talked absurdly about the Allies ‘throwing a ring of steel around Oslo’. Now, the prime minister mused to colleagues that it might be prudent to tell the House of Commons that the British had never intended to conduct long-term operations in central Norway. The French, arriving in London on 27 April for a meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council, were stunned by the proposal to quit, and demurred fiercely. Reynaud returned to Paris claiming success in galvanising Chamberlain and his colleagues: ‘We have shown them what to do and given them the will to do it.’ This was fanciful: two hours later, the British evacuation order was given. Pamela Street, a Wiltshire farmer’s daughter, wrote sadly in her diary: ‘The war goes on like a great big weight which gets a bit heavier every day.’
The Norwegian campaign spawned mistrust and indeed animosity between the British and French governments which proved irreparable, even after the fall of Chamberlain. To a colleague on 27 April, Reynaud deplored the inertia of British ministers, ‘old men who do not know how to take a risk’. Daladier told the French cabinet on 4 May: ‘We should ask the British what they want to do: they pushed for this war, and they wriggle out as soon as it is a matter of taking measures which could directly affect them.’ Shamefully, British local commanders were instructed not to tell the Norwegians they were leaving. Gen. Bernard Paget ignored this order, provoking an emotional scene with Norwegian C-in-C Otto Ruge, who said: ‘So Norway is to share the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland. But why? Why? Your troops haven’t been defeated!’ After this brief explosion, however, Ruge’s natural dignity and calm reasserted themselves. Some historians have criticised his defence of central Norway, but it is hard to imagine any deployment of his small forces that would have altered the outcome. When King Haakon and his government opted for exile in Britain, the army C-in-C refused to leave his men and insisted upon sharing their captivity.
At Namsos, Maj. Gen. Carton de Wiart obeyed the evacuation order without informing the neighbouring Norwegian commander, who suddenly found his flank in the air. After conducting a difficult retreat to the port, Ruge’s officer found only a heap of British stores, some wrecked vehicles, and a jaunty farewell note from Carton de Wiart. Gen. Claude Auchinleck, who assumed the Allied command at Narvik, later wrote to Ironside, the CIGS, in London: ‘The worst of it all is the need for lying to all and sundry in order to preserve secrecy. Situation vis a vis the Norwegians is particularly difficult, and one feels a most despicable creature in pretending that we are going on fighting when we are going to quit at once.’ In the far north, the British and French concentrated some 26,000 men to confront the 4,000 Germans who now held Narvik. Amazingly, even after the campaign in France began, the Allies sustained operations until the end of May, seizing the port on the 27th after days of dogged and skilful German resistance.
The confusion of loyalties and nationalities that would become a notable feature of the war was illustrated by the presence among Narvik’s attackers of some Spanish republicans, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion after being evicted from their own country. ‘Those officers who had misgivings about welcoming [them] into the Legion (they dubbed them all communists) were gratified by their fighting prowess,’ wrote Captain Pierre Lapie. ‘[One of] the young Spaniards who attacked a German machine-gun post behind Elvegard…was mown down by fire at only a few yards’ distance. Another sprang forward and smashed the head of the gunner with his rifle butt.’ The regimental war diary described the Legionnaires’ ascent of the steep hill before Narvik, where they met a fierce counter-attack: ‘Captaine de Guittaut was killed and Lieutenant Garoux severely wounded. Led by Lieutenant Vadot, the company managed to halt the counter-attack and the Germans fell back, abandoning their dead and wounded…Sergeant Szabo being the first man to set foot in the town.’
It was all for nothing: immediately after capturing the town and burying their dead, the Allies began to re-embark, recognising that their position was strategically untenable. The Norwegians were left to contemplate hundreds of wrecked homes and dead civilians. Their monarch and government sailed for Britain on 7 June aboard a Royal Navy cruiser. Some Norwegians undertook epic journeys to escape from German occupation and join the Allied struggle, several being assisted by the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm, the remarkable woman intellectual Aleksandra Kollontai, to travel eastwards around the world and eventually reach Britain.
The evacuation of central Norway, under heavy air attack, shocked and dismayed the British public at home. Student Christopher Tomlin wrote on 3 May: ‘I am stunned, very disillusioned and afraid of our retreat…Mr. Chamberlain…made me believe we would drive the Germans out of Scandinavia. Now the wind is out of my sails; I feel subdued and expect to hear more bad news…Haven’t we, can’t we find, more men of Churchill’s breed?’ In truth, the First Sea Lord bore substantial responsibility for the rash and muddled deployments in Norway. Britain’s armed forces lacked resources to intervene effectively; their bungled gestures mocked the tragedy of the Norwegian people. But Churchill’s rhetoric and bellicosity, in contrast to the prime minister’s manifest feebleness of purpose, prompted a surge of public enthusiasm for a change of government, which infected the chamber of the House of Commons. On 10 May, the prime minister resigned. Next day King George VI invited Churchill to form a government.
The Germans suffered the heaviest casualties in the Norwegian campaign – 5,296 compared with the British 4,500, most of the latter incurred when the carrier Glorious and its escorts were sunk by the battlecruiser Scharnhorst on 8 June. The French and a Polish exile contingent lost 530 dead, the Norwegians about 1,800. The Luftwaffe lost 242 planes, the RAF 112. Three British cruisers, seven destroyers, an aircraft carrier and four submarines were sunk, against three German cruisers, ten destroyers, and six submarines. Four further German cruisers and six destroyers were badly damaged.
The conquest of Norway provided Hitler with naval and air bases which became important when he later invaded Russia, and exploited them to impede the shipment of Allied supplies to Murmansk. He was content to leave Sweden unmolested and neutral: his strategic dominance ensured that the Swedes maintained shipments of iron ore to Germany, and dared not risk offering comfort to the Allies. Yet Hitler paid a price for Norway. Obsessed with holding the country against a prospective British assault, until almost the war’s end he deployed 350,000 men there, a major drain on his manpower resources. And German naval losses in the Norwegian campaign proved a critical factor in making a subsequent invasion of Britain unrealistic.
The British were chiefly responsible for conducting Allied operations in Norway, and must thus bear overwhelming blame for their failure. Lack of resources explained much, but the performance of the Royal Navy’s senior