The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [26]
Up at Narvik the Allied force, which had landed at Harstad in the Lofoten Islands on 14 April, soon numbered 20,000 to the Germans’ 4,000. Although inter-Allied co-operation worked well, relations between the British Army and Navy collapsed at Narvik because they were, incredibly enough, acting under contradictory instructions. Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery had been ordered to take Narvik whatever happened, whereas the commander of the land forces, Major-General Pierse Mackesy, had been authorized to wait for the thaw before taking the town. While the admiral and the general argued, and Mackesy tried to pull Cork out of the battle, German supplies reached the town, gun emplacements were built and enemy morale soared. Mackesy, whose troops had inexplicably had their snow-shoes offloaded in Scotland, had a point, however, as Cork discovered for himself when he went out to reconnoitre the position and slipped up to his waist in snow.41 These inter-service problems were soon dealt with, but reflected badly on the Chamberlain Government at the time.
Some fine Polish mountain troops, two battalions of the French Foreign Legion and General Béthouart’s Chasseurs Alpins, as well as the British and the Norwegians, were finally to take Narvik on 27 May, capturing a well-equipped airfield with wire-mesh landing strips and camouflaged shelters. However, after Hitler’s victories in France and the Low Countries, such a tiny Scandinavian foothold was untenable, and the Narvik force was evacuated between 2 and 7 June, along with the Norwegian royal family and Government, but not Otto Ruge, who decided to stay with his men and was imprisoned. The Germans ran Norway directly until February 1942 when the Norwegian Nazi Vidkun Quisling was appointed minister-president and was permitted to run the most autonomous of all the Reich’s puppet governments, because the Germans knew they could trust him ideologically. He had made his name as a humanitarian during the Russian famines and Armenian refugee crises of the 1920s, although his dreams of world federation under Nordic leadership never appealed to the Norwegian electorate, and his small Nasjonal Samling party was only ever a marginal force in the 1930s.42 The Norwegians despised him throughout his period of rule, and had the court trying him for high treason somehow not imposed the death penalty upon him in 1945, his prison guards had agreed among themselves to murder him anyhow.
On 8 June, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau intercepted the British aircraft carrier Glorious (carrying two squadrons of aircraft, including Hurricanes) and her escort destroyers Acasta and Ardent, and sank all three, although not before the skipper of Acasta, Commander C. E. Glasfurd, had sailed his ship straight at the enemy and managed to launch a torpedo that damaged Scharnhorst moments before she was herself sunk by a salvo from the cruiser’s 11-inch guns. The only man in Acasta to survive the sinking, after three days on a raft in the North Sea, Leading Seaman C. G. ‘Nick’ Carter, recalled: ‘When I was in the water I saw the captain leaning over the bridge, take a cigarette from a case and light it. We shouted to him to come on our raft, he waved “Goodbye and good luck” – the end of a gallant man.’43
A number of factors had coalesced to make the Norway campaign a disaster for the Allies, including frequent changes of plan, radio sets that General Sir Claude Auchinleck thought worse than the ones used on India’s North-West Frontier, and 1919-era Arctic boots that were several sizes too large, meaning that ‘days were devoted to doctoring’.44 Although the Allies were humiliated in Norway, and the myth of the invincibility of the Führer and his master race that had been sedulously promoted