Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [41]
Only in the north was some kind of equilibrium established. The Narvik area was out of range of German air cover, and the British and French forces landed here were numerically superior to the Germans left stranded by their naval defeat. The Allies handily held the town, but did not quite get up enough momentum to drive the Germans over the border into Sweden and internment. Before the issue was decided, however, the campaign of France had opened, and the Allied forces, by then built up to 24,000, were pulled out in early June as the magnitude of the French disaster overwhelmed all other considerations. By then, the last Norwegian units were breaking up, King Haakon VII and his ministers had escaped to Britain and set up a government in exile, and Norway, like Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Denmark, was gone.
The results of all this were problematic but significant, both in the long and the short term. The Norwegian campaign made the Allies look pretty inept. Britain had been confident that the Royal Navy ruled wherever the water would float a keel; no one up to that point had any real experience of the relative value of air power versus sea power, or the ways in which they might have to be combined. It was therefore an inordinate shock to the British view of themselves and of the way the war ought to be fought, that German air power might reach across the open sea and snatch a country practically from under their noses. Again, since it was difficult to judge the effect of air superiority on land fighting also, their military response had looked as ill-handled as their naval one. Probably the most important side effect of all this was the fall of the Chamberlain government. In early April, he had announced complacently in the House of Commons that Hitler “had missed the bus.” Then came Norway. Ironically, it was partly through Churchill’s riding off in all directions at once that the campaign went quite as badly as it did, yet popular fury hit on Chamberlain the appeaser, rather than Churchill the fighter. Chamberlain resigned on the 10th and Churchill came to power as a result of a disaster that he himself had done as much as any one man to engineer.
On the other side of the fence, Norway made the Germans look as good as it did the Allies look bad. There had been close cooperation between land, sea, and air units, and the machine had functioned smoothly; setbacks and shortcomings were promptly rectified, and the Germans showed themselves to be expert opportunists. They derived very real benefits; the Swedish iron ore supply was now secured for the rest of the war. They also had a safe funnel to get raiders out into the Atlantic, and later on they would have both air and naval bases from which to attack Allied convoys to north Russia. The British blockade was further loosened, and the problems of controlling the sea magnified for them.
But there were drawbacks to this as well. For practical purposes the German Navy had been crippled, and its efficiency and its numbers were diminished for months to come. Later in the year, one of the items that would militate against the invasion of Britain would be the weakness of the navy, stemming in good part from its wounds in Norway. There was also the fact that the more territory Hitler conquered, the more he would have to garrison. He was always tied up in fantasies about Nordic Scandinavia and its military significance, and eventually he would put more than a quarter of a million men in Norway and Denmark, and keep them there for the rest of the