The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (279 page)

He was gathering himself for the final flourish, shoulders hunched, brow lowered, swaying slightly, holding them all in his stern gaze. It wasn’t a Bore War when Churchill spoke of it; it wasn’t squalid or demeaning; it wasn’t, in fact, like modern war at all. Destroying the Nazis and their führer became a noble mission, and by investing it with the aura of heroes like Nelson, men Englishmen had honored since childhood, he made the Union Jack ripple and St. George’s sword gleam. To the action off the Plate, he said, there had recently been added an epilogue, the feat of “the
Cossack
and her flotilla,” a gallant rescue, “under the nose of the enemy and amid the tangles of one-sided neutrality, of the British captives taken from the sunken German raider…. And to Nelson’s signal of 135 years ago, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ there may now be added last week’s no less proud reply: ‘
The Navy is here!
’ ”
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The Guildhall exploded in a roaring, standing ovation.

In his diary Hoare grumbled about “Winston overbidding the market in his speeches,” but it was a popular speech. No one had fewer illusions about combat than Siegfried Sassoon, who had been court-martialed for publishing his powerful antiwar poems while serving as a junior officer in the first war. Now he wrote Eddie Marsh: “What an apotheosis Winston is enjoying! I suppose he is the most popular—as well as being the ablest—political figure in England. He must be glorying in the deeds of the Navy, who are indeed superb. And W himself has certainly put up a grand performance.”
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His last four words—“The Navy is here!”—wrote Laurence Thompson, “gripped the public mind. It was felt that, dull and unenterprising though the conduct of the war might be on land and sea, the navy was eternally there; and so it heroically was, bearing with the Merchant Navy the heaviest burden of the war.” England had gone to war no more eagerly than the French, and as a people the British were less vulnerable to slogans and political melodrama. But as divisions deepened in Paris and the rest of France, Britons grew more united. If they had to fight they would. And though it seemed on that Friday that the Royal Navy had preempted the national consciousness, British soldiers were about to take the field against Nazi troops for the first time. It was to be an inauspicious opening.
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For Hitler the Royal Navy’s coup de main in Jösing Fjord was “
unerträglich
”—“intolerable.” He was enraged that the German seamen on the
Altmark
had not fought harder. According to Jodl’s diary he raved, “
Kein Widerstand, Keine engl. Verluste!
” (“No resistance, no British losses!”). This seems hard on the four Germans who had been killed in the firefight, but the Führer had his own yardstick of valor; he reserved his approval for men who had been worthy of
him
. Two days later, on February 19, Jodl’s diary reveals, “The Führer pressed energetically” for the completion of
Weserübung
—the code name for plans to occupy Norway—issuing orders to “equip ships; put units in readiness.” To lead this operation he summoned a corps commander from the western front, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who had fought in Finland at the end of the last war. Later, under interrogation in Nuremberg, Falkenhorst said he had the impression that it was the
Altmark
incident which led Hitler to “carry out the plan now.”
¹⁵⁹

The origins of
Weserübung
were more ambiguous than might appear to be the case. In his war memoirs Churchill wrote that “Hitler’s decision to invade Norway had… been taken on December 14, and the staff work was proceeding under Keitel.” The only relevant event on December 14 had been a meeting between Hitler and Major Vidkun Quisling, a former Norwegian minister of defense, who had fallen under the Nazi spell and whose present ambition was to betray his country to the Reich. Admiral Raeder had urged the Führer to exploit this man’s twisted allegiance, and Hitler had scheduled the interview because he wanted “to form an impression of him.” Afterward, the Führer had put him on the payroll “to combat British propaganda” and strengthen Norway’s Nazi party, an organization which existed almost entirely in Quisling’s imagination. But
Weserübung
had not been Hitler’s idea. In fact it was the only unprovoked Nazi aggression which wasn’t. It was drawn up by the Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine on orders from Raeder alone, which also made it unique; the Wehrmacht high command and its Generalstab were not consulted, and Göring wasn’t even told until the execution of the plan was hours away.
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Hitler was aware of it, of course; to embark on so ambitious a venture without keeping the chancellor fully informed would have been worth an officer’s life. Hitler also knew how the kaiser’s Imperial Fleet had been frustrated in the last war, bottled up in the Baltic by the British blockade, with no access to the high seas; and he knew his navy was determined to thwart the Royal Navy in any future conflict by establishing bases in Norway. In October, during a long report to the Führer on Kriegsmarine operations, Raeder had mentioned this objective, and according to Raeder’s Nuremberg testimony, Hitler “saw at once the significance of the Norwegian operation.” After the outbreak of the Russo-Finnish war several weeks later, the Führer also became alert to the danger implicit in reports that the Allies were forming expeditions to support the Finns, a pretext which threatened the lifeblood of his munitions factories in the Ruhr valley, where the smokestack barons needed fifteen million tons of iron ore every year and counted on Sweden for eleven million tons of it. The existence of
Weserübung
could be misinterpreted by civilians as proof of planned aggression. It wasn’t; professional soldiers in every nation know that during peacetime general staffs draw up plans contemplating hostilities with other powers, even though the likelihood that they will ever be needed is very small. The War Department in Washington, for example, had drafted detailed instructions for invasions of virtually every country on the Continent.
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The fact—established beyond doubt at Nuremberg and in captured documents—was that Hitler did not
want
to occupy Norway. During his interview with Quisling, which was recorded in shorthand and transcribed, he said that he “would prefer Norway, as well as the rest of Scandinavia, to remain completely neutral”; he was not interested in schemes which would “enlarge the theater of war.” A neutral Norway meant the Reich could import Swedish ore without British interference. There is strong evidence that he impressed this on Raeder; on January 13, the official war diary of the Kriegsmarine mentioned Scandinavia in passing and noted that “the most favorable solution would be the maintenance of Norway’s neutrality.” But both the Führer and his naval staff established caveats. “If the enemy were preparing to spread the war” in Scandinavia, Hitler said, he would “take steps to guard against that threat.” Similarly, the Kriegsmarine’s war diary expressed anxiety that “England intends to occupy Norway with the tacit agreement of the Norwegian government.” The dubious source for this was Quisling, who also told Hitler that the
Cossack
’s boarding of the
Altmark
had been prearranged. The government in Oslo, he said, was England’s willing accomplice; the Norwegian gunboats had been ordered to take no action, thereby hoodwinking the Third Reich and its führer. That was the kind of meat upon which this Caesar fed, but the records of his conferences with Raeder show that he was still hesitant, still convinced that “maintenance of Norway’s neutrality is the best thing,” and—this on March 9—that so perilous an operation, pitting his small fleet against the legendary might of the Royal Navy, was “contrary to all the principles of naval warfare.” Yet in that same conference he called the occupation of Norway “
dringend
”—“urgent.” Ambivalence was not characteristic of the Reich’s supreme
Kriegsherr
, but he seems to have been indecisive here.
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On the last Thursday in March William L. Shirer observed in his diary: “Germany cannot stay in the war unless she continues to receive Swedish iron, most of which is shipped from the Norwegian port of Narvik on German vessels which evade the blockade by feeling their way down the Norwegian coast…. Some of us have wondered why Churchill has never done anything about this. Now it begins to look as if he may.” It was reported in Berlin that “a squadron of at least nine of HM’s destroyers was concentrated off the Norwegian coast and that in several instances Nazi freighters carrying iron had received warning shots.” The Wilhelmstrasse told Shirer they would “watch” Churchill, and a key source assured him that “if British destroyers go into Norwegian territorial waters Germany will act.” Act how? he wondered. “The German navy is no match for the British.”
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Evidence that the Royal Navy was closing in had been accumulating since March 13, when a concentration of RN submarines had been reported off Norway. The next day the Germans had intercepted a message alerting all Allied transports to prepare to sail on two hours’ notice; the day after that a party of French officers arrived in Bergen. Hitler did not reach his final decision, however, until Monday, April 1. Signals from Oslo, picked up by Germans monitoring all radio traffic in northern Europe, revealed that Norwegians manning coastal guns and antiaircraft batteries were being instructed to open fire on any unidentified vessels without asking permission from their superiors. Obviously Norway was expecting action and preparing for it. If
Weserübung
was to achieve surprise—essential to success—the Führer would have to move fast; the invasion was ordered to begin April 9. He prepared his explanation to the international audience: “The government of the Reich has learned that the British intend to land in Norway.”
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The world outside the Reich, jaded by his
gross Lügen
, would dismiss this new accusation as another absurd Nazi lie. But for once the Führer was telling the unvarnished truth.

Easter had arrived a week before Hitler’s decision, and after the harsh winter England was celebrating an unseasonably warm four-day weekend. Traffic to Brighton was heavy. Over two hundred visitors were turned away from a hotel in Weston-super-Mare, and Blackpool landladies enjoyed one of their most profitable holidays in memory. Seaside resorts were unusually crowded; Britons hoped to hear warlike sounds over the water, the eruption of an exploding torpedo, perhaps, or the rattle of machine-gun fire. They heard none. Europe was at war but peaceful. The ominous news from Scandinavia attracted little attention. Hitler take Norway? With the Royal Navy barring the way? What a hope! And if he got it, what would he do with it? The British public, editors had learned, regarded Scandinavia as boring.

What they
did
want was summed up in a
Daily Express
story headed “
COME ON HITLER
!
DARES IRONSIDE
.” The six-foot-four CIGS was in hiding, suffering the mortification of a man blindsided by a clever newspaperman. Reith’s Ministry of Information had persuaded him to grant an interview to an American reporter, suggesting that he paint the rosiest possible picture. Tiny had thought he was talking off the record, and was staggered to learn that the
Express
owned British rights to whatever the American wrote. And so, to his horror, he found himself quoted as yearning for a clash with the Führer: “We would welcome a go at him. Frankly, we would welcome an attack. We are sure of ourselves. We have no fears.” Actually, he spoke for millions of Englishmen weary of waiting for the monster to make his next move. At No. 10 Colville had wondered, a month after the fall of Poland, “whether all that has happened has been part of a gigantic bluff.” Three months later he noted that a “number of people seem to be thinking that Hitler will not take the offensive, but may even be in a position to win a long war of inactivity—or at least to ruin us economically…. There is thus, for the first time, a feeling that we may have to start the fighting, and Winston even gave a hint to that effect in his speech on Saturday.”
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In the teeth of vehement Foreign Office opposition, led by Halifax, Churchill since late September 1939 had sought cabinet approval of his plan to mine the Leads “by every means and on all occasions,” as he later put it. The farthest his colleagues would go was on February 19, when they authorized the Admiralty “to make all preparations” to lay a minefield in Norwegian territorial waters so that, should he be given actual approval, “there would be no delay in carrying out the operation.” But ten days later, the authorization was rescinded. The tide turned for Winston on March 28, when the Allied Supreme War Council approved the plan, and on April 1—the day Hitler, unknown to them, gave the green light to
Weserübung
—the War Cabinet set April 5 for the operation. Churchill decided that because it was “so small and innocent,” the mining operation should be called “Wilfred”—the name of a comic strip character in the
Daily Mirror
. He pointed out that the minelaying “might lead the Germans to take forcible action against Norwegian territory, and so give us an opportunity for landing forces on Norwegian soil with the consent of the Norwegian government”; and he proposed that “we should continue in a state of readiness to despatch a light force to Narvik.” The Supreme War Council went farther; on April 8 a British brigade and a contingent of French troops would be sent to Narvik to “clear the port and advance to the Swedish frontier.” Other forces would land at Stavanger, Bergen, and Trondheim “to deny these bases to the enemy.”
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