Inferno - Max Hastings [34]
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Ashore, even where they were outnumbered, German troops displayed greater energy and better tactics than the Allies. A Norwegian officer, Col. 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 Adm. Lord Cork and Orrery, the peppery, monocled naval commander, to advance against the port. Cork sought to inspirit the soldier by marching ashore himself; a notably short man, he was obliged to abandon both his reconnaissance and his assault ambitions when he immediately plunged waist-deep into a snowdrift.
In London, strategic debate increasingly degenerated into shouting matches. Churchill shouted loudest, but his extravagant schemes were frustrated by lack of means to fulfil them. Ministers argued with one another, with the French, and with their service chiefs. Coordination between commanders was nonexistent. In the space of a fortnight, six successive operational plans were drafted and discarded. The British were reluctantly persuaded that some show of assisting the Norwegians in defending the centre of their country was indispensable politically, if futile militarily. Landings at Namsos and Åndalsnes were executed in confusion and prompted relentless German bombing, which destroyed supply dumps as fast as they were created and reduced the wooden towns to ashes. At Namsos, French troops looted British stores; there were vehicle crashes caused by conflicting national opinions about right- and left-hand road priority. On 17 April Maj. Gen. Frederick Hotblack had just been briefed in London to lead an assault on Trondheim when he suffered a stroke and collapsed unconscious.
The British 148th Brigade, whose commander defied instructions from London and marched his men to offer direct support to the Norwegian army, was mercilessly mauled by the Germans before its 300 survivors retreated by bus. A staff officer dispatched from Norway to the War Office to seek instructions returned to tell Maj. Gen. Adrian Carlton de Wiart, leading another force: “You can do what you like, for