personal responsibility for the woes that will befall our country and our people if German demands are rejected…The government is free to decide, but I shall make my own position clear: I cannot accept…This would conflict with everything I have considered to be my duty as a king.’ Rather than bow to Berlin’s insistence that he should endorse Quisling, he would abdicate. The old king lapsed into silence for several long moments, then burst into tears. At last, he continued: ‘The government must now take its decision. It is not bound by my position…Yet I felt it was my duty to make it known.’
The Norwegians committed themselves to fight, to buy time for Allied assistance to come. Next day, the 11th, Haakon and his son Prince Olav were communing with their ministers when the Germans bombed and strafed Nybergsund in an attempt to decapitate the national leadership. The politicians threw themselves into a pigsty while the king and his aides took cover in a nearby wood. No one was killed, and though the Norwegians were shaken by the Heinkels’ repeated machine-gunning, their resolve remained unbroken. Haakon was shocked to see civilians exposed to German fire. ‘I could not bear to watch…children crouching in the snow as bullets mowed down the trees and branches rained down on them,’ he said. He declared that never again would he seek refuge in a place where his presence imperilled innocents.
Monarch and politicians briefly discussed seeking sanctuary in Sweden, a notion favoured by the prime minister. Haakon would have none of this, and Norway’s leaders moved to Lillehammer to continue the struggle. Poor, broken old Gen. Laake was replaced as commander-in-chief by the courageous and energetic Gen. Otto Ruge, to whom a British officer paid the supreme compliment of asserting that he resembled a master of foxhounds. Norway’s belated mobilisation was chaotic, since its southern depots and armouries were in German hands, but most of the 40,000 men who responded were passionate patriots. Frank Foley, the British Secret Service’s man in Oslo, cabled tersely: ‘You cannot conceive pitiable condition material this army, but men fine types.’ In the weeks that followed, some Norwegians played heroic parts in their nation’s defence. The country had few large towns; much of its population was scattered in communities beside deep-sea fjords, connected by narrow roads passing through defiles between mountain ranges. German, British and French commanders, surprised to find themselves fighting in Norway, were alike reduced to assembling intelligence about the battlefield by buying Baedeker travel guides from their local bookshops in Berlin, London and Paris.
The makeshift Anglo-French landing forces sent to Norway in the weeks following the German invasion defied parody. Almost every effective unit of the British Army was deployed in France; only twelve half-trained Territorial battalions were available to cross the North Sea. These were dispatched piecemeal, to pursue objectives changed almost hourly. They lacked maps, transport and radios to communicate with each other, far less with London. They disembarked with few heavy weapons or anti-aircraft guns, their stores and ammunition jumbled in hopeless confusion aboard the transport ships. The soldiers felt wholly disorientated. George Parsons landed with his company at Mojoen: ‘Imagine how we felt when we saw a towering ice-capped mountain in front of us standing about 2,000 feet high. We south London boys, we had never seen a mountain before, most of us had never been to sea.’
Ashore, even where German troops were outnumbered, they displayed greater energy and better tactics than the Allies. A Norwegian officer, Colonel David Thue, reported to his government that one British unit was composed of ‘very young lads who appeared to come from the slums of London. They have taken a very close interest in the women of Romsdal, and engaged in wholesale looting of stores and houses…They would run like hares at the first sound of an aircraft engine.’ The British Foreign Office reported in the later stages of the campaign: ‘Drunk British troops…on one occasion quarrelled with and eventually fired upon some Norwegian fishermen…Some of the British Army officers…behaved “with the arrogance of Prussians” and the naval officers were…so cautious and suspicious that they treated every Norwegian as a Fifth Columnist and refused to believe vital information when it was given them.’
It is hard to exaggerate the chaos of the Allies’ decision-making, or the cynicism of their treatment of the hapless Norwegians. The British government made extravagant promises of aid, while knowing that it lacked means to fulfil them. The War Cabinet’s chief interest was Narvik and the possibility of seizing and holding a perimeter around it to block the German winter iron-ore route from Sweden. Narvik fjord was the scene of fierce naval clashes, in which both sides suffered severe destroyer losses. A small British landing force established itself on an offshore island, where its general resolutely rejected the urgings of Admiral Lord Cork and Orrery, the peppery, monocled naval commander, to advance against the port. Cork sought to inspirit the soldier by marching ashore himself; a notably short man, he was obliged to abandon both his reconnaissance and his assault ambitions when he immediately plunged waist-deep into a snowdrift.
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
