The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (282 page)

Some of the unpleasant news was inherent in the War Office’s disposition of forces, and it had little choice there. The country’s trained troops were all in France. Those sent to Norway were largely territorials who had been called up only eight months earlier—salesmen, bank tellers, farmers, truck drivers, haulage contractors: men who knew very little about infantry combat. Their grievances were harder to explain. Along the line that started with the CIGS and descended to the rifle company commander, mismanagement had been, at times, scandalous. The territorials were equipped to fight Germans who had been under fire in Poland and carried complete equipment, including sealskin caps and uniforms lined with sheepskin. Pack saddles for reindeer may have been provided the Tommies (though they would have been useless, the reindeer having sensibly retreated inland) but no Tommy had been issued the one piece of gear essential in Norway: skis. Every Norwegian civilian, every enemy soldier had them. So did the French
Chasseurs Alpins
, trained for this sort of fighting, but once ashore they discovered that the navy had neglected to land their bindings, without which the skis were useless.

This kind of elementary error multiplied as time passed. Two territorial battalions were issued a dozen tourist maps of all Norway; their objective wasn’t on them. Admiralty orders were often slow, hesitant, countermanded, reissued, and countermanded again. One cruiser squadron was about to depart Rosyth with an expeditionary force when the Admiralty learned Nazi battle cruisers had been spotted nearby; the squadron commander was ordered to put “the soldiers ashore, even without their equipment, and join the Fleet at sea.” By the time the soldiers were reunited with their ships, their original objective was in enemy hands.

The worst blunders were committed in an operation Churchill had opposed, a stratagem designed by civilians sitting around the cabinet table fifteen hundred miles from the scene of action. The leadership in Whitehall had been weakened by divided counsel from the beginning, and basic disagreements surfaced over what Britain’s chief military objective in Norway should be. Churchill argued that it had been, and should continue to be, Narvik. That was why the Germans were there; that was where the Allies wanted them out. But other members of the War Cabinet, and soon they were a majority, had favored throwing the Nazis out of Trondheim, Norway’s ancient capital, nearly halfway between the peninsula’s southern tip and Narvik. King Haakon VII and his government, fleeing from Oslo, begged the British to take Trondheim back, thereby giving them a rallying point to organize Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation. Halifax, as a peer, took royal requests very seriously. He buttressed his case: Trondheim would provide the Allies with a superb harbor, a base for the buildup of fifty thousand troops, a nearby airfield which would support several fighter squadrons, and direct railway contact with Sweden, which—a non sequitur he did not attempt to unravel—would “greatly improve the chances of Swedish intervention.” The possibility of Sweden declaring war on the Reich was zero. Hitler had warned the Swedes of dire consequences if they abandoned strict neutrality and, Shirer wrote on Wednesday, April 10, “As far as I can learn the Swedes are scared stiff [and] will not come to the aid of their Norwegian brethren.”
¹⁸⁶

On Saturday, April 13, with troop transports crossing the North Sea toward Narvik, Halifax told the War Cabinet they should be diverted to Trondheim because “The most important point is to seize Trondheim and the railways leading from that port across the peninsula.” Ironside vigorously disagreed; Churchill also opposed the switch, protesting that Trondheim, unlike Narvik, was “a much more speculative affair.” But only Secretary for War Stanley supported him. Simon joined Halifax and Chamberlain; otherwise, Simon said, the Norwegians and Swedes would believe they were “only interested in Narvik.” When the War Cabinet had decided to mine Norwegian territorial waters—clear evidence that Britain’s intent in Norway was confined to crippling the Reich’s war effort—Simon had not raised this novel proposition that public relations should play a role in fixing military objectives. He and his colleagues now rejected Churchill’s proposal that no further commitment be made.
¹⁸⁷

The attack on Trondheim, it is now clear, derived from the lack of policy. At the outset, Britain’s goal had been to stop the Swedish ore shipments. To reach their objective they needed Narvik. Implicit in the decision to take Trondheim was a decision to retake all Norway. The country’s strategic value was small. And whether it could be conquered by anyone is doubtful; of its 119,240 square miles only 4 percent was inhabitable. Seizing its chief ports was one thing; keeping them, as Hitler was to discover, was another. That required the consent of the Norwegian people, and it was not forthcoming. The country had been taken by fewer than 10,000 German soldiers. Then the Norwegian underground began to organize, and it began its work by killing Nazi sentries. Despite the conquerors’ policy of killing one hundred civilians for every murdered German, nearly 400,000 Nazi troops were tied down in Norway when Hitler’s need for them elsewhere would be urgent.

“Although Narvik was my pet,” Churchill wrote, he was serving “a respected chief and friendly Cabinet”; since they had decided to make the effort at Trondheim, he threw himself “into this daring adventure, and was willing that the Fleet should risk the weak batteries at the entrance to the fiord, the possible minefields, and, most serious, the air.” The British ships’ “very powerful antiaircraft armament” would be, he believed, equal to the Luftwaffe. But on April 18 the Chiefs of Staff, wary of the Luftwaffe, decided the risks of a frontal assault were too great. Therefore, Trondheim was to be enveloped by two forces already put ashore at ports still in Norwegian hands. One (“Sickleforce”) was at Andalsnes, a hundred miles southwest of the city; the other (“Mauriceforce”) at Namsos, far to the northeast. Originally they had been landed as diversions. Now, as Churchill wrote, they would “develop a pincer movement on Trondheim from north and south.”
¹⁸⁸

Neither Trondheim pincer had a chance. The British were relying on the Norwegians for their information, and the Norwegians either blundered or were cleverly misled by the Germans, who were expecting an attack at this strategic harbor. Had the attackers known that Trondheim was now defended by 120,000 Nazi troops, outnumbering them six to one and reinforced with tanks and several Luftwaffe squadrons, they would have kept their distance. To do the job properly, six or seven divisions would have to have been withdrawn from France. Moreover, there were difficulties with the terrain. And the Germans were not likely to be deceived by the two-pronged attack; it was the textbook alternative to a frontal assault, and they knew where the British would be coming.

Reinforcing the small forces already ashore at Namsos and Andalsnes presented other problems. Namsos in particular looked forbidding. Later there would be questions in Parliament over why the troop transports did not carry the infantry all the way in to the Namsos docks; the implication was that the War Cabinet had overruled the navy. No one who had seen Namsos would have asked. Only one approach was possible: a fifteen-mile-long fjord, too narrow and winding for any ships but destroyers, to which the assault brigades were transferred. Furthermore, the transfer was an invitation to confusion, and confusion resulted. The transports departed with Mauriceforce’s ammunition, rations, heavy weapons—and the brigade’s commanding officer.

None of the planners seem to have given much thought to the weather at that latitude. Churchill did; Namsos, he found, was “under four feet of snow and offered no concealment from the air.” Indeed, at each of their Norwegian objectives meteorologists forecast further “dense falls of snow” which could “paralyse all movement of our troops, unequipped and untrained for such conditions.” They were waging war in a very cold climate. The men had mistakenly been left with only two days’ supplies. The distance was long, movement was clogged by snowdrifts, and the reinforced German garrison, when told the British were ashore in force, landed parties to intercept them. Mauriceforce Tommies could only hope that Sickleforce’s luck was better.
¹⁸⁹

It wasn’t. It was worse. Afterward, Hoare said that one reason for the Trondheim operation was to secure airfields; but the Germans had taken them all, and therefore the RAF could not challenge the Luftwaffe. “In that case,” Lloyd George acidly observed in the House of Commons, “we ought to have had picked men, and not a kind of scratch team… because the Germans had picked men, as is generally accepted. We sent there, I think, a Territorial brigade, which had not had much training.” The territorials were in fact only part of the force put ashore at Andalsnes—a small fishing port unsuitable for the debarkation of soldiers and equipment—but their experience was typical. They lacked mortar ammunition, radios, accurate maps, or fire-control equipment for their antiaircraft weapons. Their orders called for a northward march toward Trondheim, but the Norwegian commander who met them, and who had participated in planning the mission in London, persuaded their brigadier to reinforce exhausted Norwegian forces in Lillehammer, eighty miles to the southeast. An eighty-mile march with combat gear is grueling for veteran infantrymen in suitable terrain. The territorials, whom one Norwegian officer described as looking like “untrained steel workers from the Midlands”—which some of them were—reached Lillehammer wearier than the men they were reinforcing. And before they could be billeted the Germans pounced on them.
¹⁹⁰

Quickly outflanked, they fell back. That night a panzer battalion seized Lillehammer. Once more they fell back, to the banks of a river, where the enemy tanks routed them. Once more the territorials retreated, forty-five miles this time, and along the way units became separated from the rest of the brigade. Their plight was pitiable. Now and then they would spot a lone Norwegian on a nearby crest, staring down, in amazement or contempt, at their lack of skis. Wading through the deep snow was like crossing a bog, and because they lacked compasses, they dared not leave roads, which sometimes took them in strange directions. In the early hours of April 20 two companies, staggering slowly through a dense snowstorm, reached a town which natives identified as Nykirke. The Norwegians produced a map. Studying it, the soldiers discovered that they were now two hundred miles from Trondheim, which they were supposed to capture, and were moving in the opposite direction.

Risking security, they phoned a hotel which the Norwegians told them was battalion headquarters. “Lucky you rang,” said a cheerful English voice on the other end. “We were just wondering what was happening to you.” Keeping in touch now, they set off with new instructions. Along the way they learned that the freighter carrying their transport and Bren carriers had been torpedoed and that the Royal Navy had been unable to prevent the Germans from landing tanks. They thought themselves lost again, but the panzers quickly tracked them down, whereupon they learned that their antitank gun, with its brutal kickback, did not penetrate enemy armor. They withdrew into a forest, but the enemy mortared them into the open, where the tanks machine-gunned them. Having achieved nothing, they had ceased to exist as a fighting force.

That was also true of the main body. Of the original force under his command, the brigadier could count only 300 soldiers and nine junior officers. He sent the survivors back to Andalsnes for evacuation. It was not that easy. The enemy followed the column, as vultures do; stragglers, moving in groups of two or three, roamed the hills, hoping to find sympathetic Norwegians, but most were found first by unsympathetic Germans. A few reached Sweden and were interned. By now the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff were aware of the disaster. Mauriceforce and Sickleforce had been in Norway ten days; neither had gained a yard; between them they had lost 1,559 men. Those who had succeeded in eluding capture were in danger. Those in London who had sent them there had no choice; as many as possible had to be evacuated. Thanks to the Norwegians—who paid a terrible price when the Nazis tracked them down—1,800 Sickleforce troops stumbled aboard blacked-out transports on the night of April 30. In the morning, under constant Luftwaffe attack, another 1,300 men were picked up, and, that night, 1,000 more. Mauriceforce, more fortunate, had lost only 157 troops. But the sacrifice there had been equally pointless.

H
itler scorned Britain’s Trondheim adventure as “
ein Fall von leichtsinnigen Dilettantismus
” (“a case of frivolous dilettantism”). At the Supreme War Council on April 27, Reynaud had predicted that an Allied failure in central Norway “would come as a great shock to public opinion,” and might be followed by an Allied capitulation to the Reich. However, the council had agreed that the Trondheim plan must be abandoned because of the enemy’s air superiority. On May 1 Nicolson noted having “a talk with Buck De la Warr and Stephen King-Hall in former’s room at the House of Lords. Buck seems to think that if Norway is lost, the P.M. will have to resign.” The next day, when the evacuation from Andalsnes was announced, Amery telephoned Hoare and angrily told him: “The government must go.”
¹⁹¹