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 officers was unimpressive – the shocking incompetence of Glorious’s captain was chiefly responsible for the carrier’s loss; the weakness of British warship anti-aircraft defences was painfully exposed. The 10 and 13 April attacks on German destroyers at Narvik, and later evacuations of Anglo-French ground forces, were the only naval operations to be creditably handled. British conduct towards Norway was characterised by bad faith, or at least a lack of frankness which amounted to the same thing. It is remarkable that the Norwegians proved so quickly forgiving, becoming staunch allies both in exile and in their occupied homeland. No action within British powers could have averted the German conquest, once the Royal Navy missed its best chance on 9 April. But the moral ignobility and military incompetence of the campaign reflected poorly upon Britain’s politicians and commanders. If the scale of operations was small compared with those that now followed, it reflected failures of will, leadership, equipment, tactics and training which would be repeated on a much wider stage.
The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed. The consequences of such an outcome for Britain, and for the world, could have been catastrophic, because his government might well have chosen a negotiated peace with Hitler. But only posterity can thus discern a consolation for the Norwegian débâcle which was denied to all the contemporary participants save the victorious Germans.
2 THE FALL OF FRANCE
On the evening of 9 May 1940, French troops on the Western Front heard ‘a vast murmuring’ in the German lines; word was passed back that the enemy was moving. Commanders chose to believe that this, like earlier such alarms, was false. Though the German assault upon Holland, Belgium and France began at 0435 on 10 May, it was 0630 before Allied C-in-C General Maurice Gamelin was awakened in his bed, five hours after the first warning from the outposts. Following the long-anticipated pleas for assistance that now arrived from governments in Brussels and The Hague, neutrals in the path of the German storm, Gamelin ordered an advance to the river Dyle in Belgium, fulfilling his longstanding contingency plan. The British Expeditionary Force’s nine divisions and the best of France’s forces – twenty-nine divisions of First, Seventh and Ninth Armies – began rolling north-eastwards. The Luftwaffe made no serious attempt to interfere, for this was exactly where Hitler wanted the Allies to go. Their departure removed a critical threat to the flank of the main German armies, which were thrusting forward further south.
The defences of Holland and Belgium were smashed open. In the first hours of 10 May, glider-landed Luftwaffe paratroops secured the vital Eben Emael fort, covering the Albert Canal – built by a German construction company which obligingly provided its blueprints to Hitler’s planners – and two bridges across the Maas at Maastricht. Even as Churchill took
