The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (281 page)

Strategic thinking at the Admiralty had foundered on this reef—the conviction that in this war, as in the last, superior British sea power foreclosed a German invasion of the Norwegian coast. Admiral Forbes, commander in chief of the Home Fleet, discovered that “the scale of attack that would be developed against our military forces on shore and our naval forces off the Norwegian coast were grievously underestimated when the operations were undertaken.” In the opinion of S. W. Roskill, the naval historian, those most blind in their conviction that Britannia’s traditional sea power ruled the waves were the Chiefs of Staff, particularly Pound and Ironside. But the first lord of the Admiralty should be added to the list. Churchill, being Churchill, did not hesitate to assume command when he deemed it necessary. Godfrey refers to “Churchill’s dictatorial behavior” and quotes a senior officer as saying that “Pound proved unable to prevent Winston from running wild during the Norwegian campaign.” These, it should be noted, are the views of career officers, united in their loyalty to one another. Sir Eric Seal, who was Churchill’s principal private secretary at the Admiralty, vehemently denies Admiral Godfrey’s charges: “It is perfectly true that he spent a good deal of time in the War Room, which had a tremendous fascination for him. To infer from this that he assumed control is, in the circumstances, almost malicious. It is certainly unwarranted, and false.”
¹⁷⁸

There was a bedrock issue here, and it transcended a clash of personalities, which can almost always be assumed in assessing relationships between Churchill and those who differed with him. War had changed. And those who had seen the Luftwaffe knew it in their bones. According to Gamelin, who was in London on April 26 for a meeting of the Supreme Council, Pound told him: “It is impossible to do anything against the enemy’s superior air power.” The first sea lord had told the
généralissime
that Polish tales of the Nazis’ fearsome bomber fleet had not been exaggerated. The following day, Reynaud said, he found the Admiralty “terrorized by the effects of the bombing.” In citing the Admiralty he cannot have included its first lord. Nevertheless, the Luftwaffe’s performance had so impressed England’s military establishment—less at sea than by its tactical support of Wehrmacht infantry—that they felt the French needed to prepare for it.
¹⁷⁹

But something else is wrong here. What the admirals say and write about air power in the Norwegian campaign is not consistent with what was done. Ships were
not
sacrificed to aircraft in the name of sea power. The Luftwaffe had confirmed conclusions already reached. With very few exceptions, Churchill among them, flag officers had been alert to the peril in the sky long before war was declared. Perhaps the most significant military event in the struggle for Norway was the decision—made in the first hours of the German attack—to send no British vessels except submarines into the Skagerrak. All German shipping had to pass through this channel between the Baltic and North seas. If it had been barred, neither supplies nor reinforcements could have been sent to German troops already committed. It is only seventy miles wide, and in Nelson’s day, or even Jellicoe’s, Britain’s ships of the line would have annihilated them. But now in 1940 the Nazis quickly seized all usable Norwegian airfields, which meant that the Luftwaffe, with over a thousand planes committed to the operation, dominated the sky over the Skagerrak, and the admirals refused to risk their battlewagons to air power. In the 135 years since Trafalgar, sea power had permitted a small island to control its future and build the greatest empire in history. Now tiny little craft, hardly more expensive than ammunition for an 18-inch gun, could deny strategic waters to the mightiest navy the world had ever known.
¹⁸⁰

Weserübung
, as conducted by Falkenhorst, was marked by meticulous planning, speed, and professionalism. German captains, entering Norwegian ports in the predawn darkness, answered gunners’ challenges in English. One parachute battalion floated down to take the airstrips at Oslo and Stavanger—the first use of paratroops in war, and it was very impressive. Narvik had been taken by what Colville called “a Trojan Horse manoeuvre”; freighters which usually bore iron ore carried Nazi soldiers in their holds. (“Very clever,” said a cabinet minister, “and we were ninnies, we were ninnies!”) Hitler’s naval commitment had been large, but only 8,850 troops had been sent north in the first wave, and no landing was made by more than 2,000 men. Except for elements from a mountain division, none of Falkenhorst’s soldiers came from elite units. Yet once dug in, they were almost impossible to dislodge. In Narvik 2,000 Austrian alpine troops, reinforced by another 2,000 German seamen, held off a British force—at one point 25,000 troops—week after week. In their lightning stroke the Nazis had not only occupied every major Norwegian airfield; they had also taken over the country’s radio and telephone networks and seized all five major ports. The
Völkischer Beobachter
ran a banner headline in red ink and end-of-the-world type: “
GERMANY SAVES SCANDINAVIA
!” Churchill seemed stunned. He told Pound, “We have been completely outwitted.” Thursday, April 11, he prepared an account of these tumultuous events for Parliament. The
Daily Mail
reported that “A thousand people packed the pavements outside the House of Commons. ‘Where’s Winnie?’ they asked after other Ministers had arrived. ‘Wonder if he’ll be smiling. You can always tell what’s in the air by Winnie’s face.’ ” But when he appeared his expression was forbidding, and inside, as he arose, he faced what he later described as “a disturbed and indignant House of Commons.” Nicolson, watching from his backbencher seat, wrote that the House

Colville disagreed. Although Churchill was “less polished than usual,” he wrote, he was “witty,” causing “amusement by saying that Denmark had had most to fear from Germany of all the neutrals, because she had been the most recent to negotiate a non-aggression pact with her. He wisely damped down the absurd over-optimism of this morning’s newspapers, but made a good case for the navy’s achievements during the past few days.” The public preferred the jingoism of Fleet Street, however, and was slow to accept the emerging truth. All they knew, or wanted to know, was that the Nazi navy was at loose along the thousand-mile Scandinavian peninsula, stopping here and there to leave contingents of troops, and the Royal Navy, led by Admiral Forbes, was in hot pursuit. No true Englishman could doubt which force would emerge triumphant. Even Churchill, rallying, told the War Cabinet, “We have the Germans where we want them.” Colville noted: “The First Lord (who at last sees a chance of action) is jubilant and maintains that our failure to destroy the German fleet up to the present is only due to the bad visibility and very rough weather in the North Sea, while if the German ships fly for home they will leave their garrisons exposed to our expeditionary forces.”
The Listener
quoted an enraptured Hoare as having told the nation over the BBC: “Today our wings are spread over the Arctic. They are sheathed in ice. Tomorrow the sun of victory will touch them with its golden light, and the wings that flashed over the great waters of the North will bear us homewards once more to the ‘peace with honour’ of a free people and the victory of a noble race.”
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The Times
was reminded of Napoleon’s (Iberian) peninsula war. The
Express
wrote of the British storming of Narvik, which the British had not stormed, that it had “an Elizabethan ring to it. It ranks with Cadiz where we singed the King of Spain’s beard.” The
Daily Mirror
told its readers that despite the need for a speedy response to the German challenge, all cold-weather gear had been provided, including pack saddles for reindeer; and the
Daily Mail
reported: “The British Navy has embarked on a glorious enterprise. Hitler is shaken by the hammer blows of our sailors and airmen.”
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In his memoirs Gamelin writes that upon hearing that German ships were on the move, he urged Ironside to hurry the dispatch of troops to Norway—Gamelin approved of fighting Germans anywhere except in France—but the CIGS replied: “With us the Admiralty is all-powerful; it likes to organize everything methodically. It is convinced that it can prevent any German landing on the coast of Norway.” Churchill confirmed him. On the second day after the German landings, Shirer noted in his diary: “The BBC quotes Churchill as having said in the House of Commons today that ‘Hitler committed a grave strategical error’ and that the British navy will now take the Norwegian coast and sink all the ships in the Skagerrak and the Kattegat. God, I hope he’s right.” He was wrong. No one doubted that Raeder’s fleet paled beside the Royal Navy, but the Norwegian coastline is 2,100 miles long, deeply incised by fjords, some several miles deep, fringed with thousands of islands, and throughout April a heavy mist lay over all of it. Except in contested ports the RN couldn’t
find
all the German ships.
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They found some, though, and the early days shone with tales of heroism. In the first confrontation between ships of the two navies, the Nazi heavy cruiser
Admiral Hipper
(13,000 tons) bore down on the British destroyer
Glowworm
(1,350 tons), all guns firing. In a magnificent beau geste the destroyer, hopelessly trapped, turned as if to flee, threw out a smoke screen, and when the
Hipper
charged into it, rammed her at flank speed, tearing away 130 feet of her armor belt and her starboard tubes. As the gallant
Glowworm
went down, her crew could see the huge heavy cruiser beginning to list under 500 tons of ingested seawater. And the British failure to take Narvik wasn’t the navy’s fault. On Wednesday, April 10, the day after ten German destroyers had taken Narvik and landed two battalions commanded by General Eduard Dietl, five British destroyers entered the harbor, sank two of the enemy destroyers, damaged the other three, and sank all but one of the Nazi cargo vessels. As they were leaving the harbor, the RN ships sighted the other five German destroyers. This time the British were outgunned. One of their destroyers was sunk, a second beached, and one of the three surviving vessels was damaged.

Three days later the Royal Navy was back, this time with a battleship and a flotilla of destroyers. Every enemy vessel still afloat was sent to the bottom. The commander of the RN task force radioed that Dietl and his men, stunned and disorganized, had taken to the hills. Since Narvik was wide open, he suggested, it should be occupied at once “by the main landing force.” The next day an advance part of three infantry battalions arrived. Unfortunately, they were led by Major General P. J. Mackesy, a windy officer cast in the same mold as those who had lost Gallipoli in the first war. Mackesy decided landing at Narvik was too perilous; instead he went ashore at Harstad. There were no Germans in Harstad, only friendly Norwegians. But it was thirty-five miles north of Narvik, his objective.

The
Daily Mail
’s guess that Hitler had been badly shaken was not wide of the mark. Jodl’s diary quivers with phrases describing Hitler’s loss of self-control, his terror that he might lose his gamble, how he was always trembling on the verge of hysteria and sometimes plunged into it. “
Führer ist zunehmend beunruhigt über die englischen Landungen
” (“Führer is increasingly worried about the English landings”) reads one of the milder entries. The Royal Navy’s Narvik victory and the flight of Dietl, one of Hitler’s old Bavarian cronies, led to “terrible excitement.” Hitler demanded that Dietl and his men be “evacuated by air—an impossibility.” Then: “Renewed crisis… an hysterical attack.” “Chaos of leadership is again threatening.” “Each piece of bad news leads to the worst fears.” Hitler never had been able to take the rough with the smooth, and as the war proceeded his violence increased. As campaigns go,
Weserübung
had entailed no great risks except to Raeder’s surface vessels, which were considered expendable, and setbacks had been few. Between the lines of Jodl’s diary one reads the anxious question: If the Führer carries on like this in what is almost a textbook victory, how might he behave in the face of defeat?
¹⁸⁵

In overplaying local successes and ignoring Britain’s strategic dilemma, Fleet Street was merely following the line taken by briefing officers at the Admiralty, War Office, and Air Ministry—a press policy usually adopted by military men who are losing a struggle and cannot understand why. Totalitarian regimes can suppress bad news to the end, until the civilian comes to find his home in flames and his wife raped by an enemy he thought was about to surrender. In democracies the lid cannot be kept on long. Editors and publishers are willing to play the game in wartime, but when they send trusted correspondents to the front they will print their dispatches. And soldiers write home. Censors may cut military information which the enemy would find useful, but excluding details of the men’s day-to-day life is impossible, and it was precisely there that the British people began to grasp the unwelcome fact that those responsible for the Norwegian campaign were mismanaging it.

Nearly three weeks of action had passed before Englishmen became aware of a cold, cruel shaft of light they recognized as truth. It arrived when several British newspapers quoted the distinguished U.S. foreign correspondent Leland Stowe. Stowe was in Norway, and he had described the plight of an English battalion dumped into Norway, untrained, poorly armed, lacking artillery, antiaircraft weapons, or fighter cover. After four days’ fighting, half of the men had been killed, wounded, or captured by the Germans; the rest had fallen back. An officer had told Stowe, “We’ve simply been massacred.” The War Office dismissed the dispatch as “an obvious distortion of the facts.” But the English newspapermen in Norway also were talking to soldiers, and they were confirming the American.