Inferno - Max Hastings [33]
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, Capt. 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, 11 April, 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 General 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, alike 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 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;