All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [32]
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