All Hell Let Loose (10 page)

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NORWAY

The smaller nations of Europe strove to escape involvement in the war. Most resisted association with Germany, which required acceptance of Hitler’s hegemony, but even those that favoured the objectives of the democracies were wary of joining them in belligerence. Historic experience argued that they would thus expose themselves to the horrors of war for small advantage: the fate of Poland and Finland highlighted the Allies’ inability to protect the dictators’ chosen victims. Holland and the Scandinavian countries had contrived to remain neutral in World War I. Why should they not do so again? In the winter of 1939–40, all took pains to avoid provoking Hitler. The Norwegians were more apprehensive about British designs on their coastline than German ones. At 0130 on 9 April, an aide awoke King Haakon of Norway to report: ‘Majesty, we are at war!’ The monarch promptly demanded: ‘Against whom?’

Despite repeated warnings that a German invasion was imminent, the country’s tiny army had not been mobilised. The capital was quickly blacked out, but old General Kristian Laake, Norway’s commander-in-chief, responded feebly to news that German warships were approaching up Oslo Fjord: he ordered reservists to be mustered by mail – which would assemble them under arms only on 11 April. His staff officers remonstrated, but Laake was in flight from reality: ‘A little exercise should do these units no harm!’ he declared indulgently. German warships entered ports and began to disembark troops. The Norwegians, French and British had alike deluded themselves that Hitler would never dare to invade Norway in the face of the Royal Navy. Yet poor intelligence and misjudged deployments caused the Admiralty to forfeit its best opportunities to wreak havoc, as the Germans landed on 9 April. Thereafter, although the invaders suffered severe attrition at sea, so too did the Royal Navy at the hands of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Norway’s nearest coastline lay four hundred miles from Britain, beyond range of land-based air cover. The vulnerability of ships to bomber attack was soon brutally exposed.

The most dramatic development that first morning of the campaign took place in Oslo Fjord shortly after 0400, as the new cruiser
Blücher
, carrying thousands of German troops, approached Oscarsborg. The ancient fortress’s two nineteenth-century cannon, named ‘Moses’ and ‘Aaron’, were laboriously loaded. Local commander Colonel Birger Eriksen, knowing the gunners’ limitations, held his fire until the last moment. The cruiser was only five hundred yards offshore when the antique weapons belched flame. One shell hit the cruiser’s anti-aircraft control centre, while the other smashed into an aviation fuel store, causing a pillar of flame to leap skywards. After suffering two further hits from shore-launched torpedoes, within minutes
Blücher
was engulfed in fire and listing heavily, her ammunition exploding. The ship sank with the loss of a thousand German lives.

Confusion and black comedy then overtook Norway’s capital. The designated assault commander, Gen. Erich Engelbrecht, was a passenger on the stricken
Blücher
. He was rescued from the fjord by Norwegians who took him prisoner, leaving the invaders temporarily leaderless. Gen. Laake fled the city in the wake of his staff, first taking a tramcar, then attempting unsuccessfully to hitchhike, at last catching a train. The Norwegian government offered its resignation, which was rejected by the king. The national parliament, the Storting, entered emergency session, with fierce arguments about the merits of surrender. Ministers suggested demolishing key bridges to impede the invaders, but several deputies dissented as ‘this would mean destroying valuable architectural works’. The British ambassador delivered a message from London promising aid, but was vague about when this might materialise. German paratroopers secured Oslo airport, and most of Norway’s south-western ports were soon in enemy hands. The first elements of six divisions disembarked and deployed, while the government fled northwards.

Among stunned spectators of the invaders’ arrival was a nineteen-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee named Ruth Maier. On 10 April, in the Oslo suburb of Lillestrøm, she described in her diary a scene that was becoming a tragic commonplace of Europe: ‘I think of the Germans more as a natural disaster than as a people … We watch as people stream out of basements and crowd together in the streets with perambulators, woollen blankets and babies. They sit on lorries, horse carts, taxis and private cars. It’s like a film I saw: Finnish, Polish, Albanian, Chinese refugees … It is so simple and so sad: people are “evacuated” with woollen blankets, silver cutlery and babies in their arms. They are fleeing from bombs.’

The Norwegians displayed implacable hostility to their invaders. Even when compelled to acknowledge subjection, they were unimpressed by explanations. Ruth Maier heard three German soldiers tell a cluster of Oslo residents that 60,000 German civilians had been murdered by the Poles before the Wehrmacht intervened to save their ethnic brethren. Ruth laughed:

The faith of most Germans in the virtue as well as the expediency of their mission was fortified by its swift success. The invaders closed their grip on southern Norway, having secured communications with the homeland by occupying the intervening Danish peninsula almost without resistance. The Norwegian Storting met again in the little town of Elverum, forty miles north of Oslo, where its deliberations were sharpened by news that the Germans had nominated a traitor to lead a puppet regime in Oslo. ‘We now have a Kuusinen government,’ declared the prime minister contemptuously: he alluded to Finnish communist Otto Kuusinen, who collaborated with Stalin’s invasion of Finland. But Norway’s counterpart, Vidkun Quisling, would become much more notorious, his name passing into the English language.

Four busloads of German paratroopers on their way to Elverum came under fire from a roadblock manned by members of a local rifle club; the Norwegians drove the attackers back in disarray, mortally wounding the German air attaché Captain Eberhard Spiller, who had been tasked to arrest the nation’s leadership. The royal family and ministers decamped to the little village of Nybergsund. King Haakon VII was a tall, gaunt, sixty-seven-year-old Dane, elected monarch when the Norwegians gained independence from Sweden in 1905. In 1940, he displayed dignity and courage. At a government council held amid the deep snow of Nybergsund on the evening of 10 April, he told ministers in a high, quavering voice: ‘I am profoundly moved at the idea of having to assume 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 Invasion of Norway

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.