The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [27]
Once France fell in June 1940, the Germans had the Alsace-Lorraine iron-ore fields and the Atlantic ports that took the place of Gällivare and Trondheim. But 125,000 square miles of Norway still needed to be garrisoned for much of the rest of the war by at least twelve German divisions, totalling around 350,000 men. Hitler expected an attack on Norway for several years after 1940, and kept an inordinate number of troops idle there who could have been far better employed on the Eastern Front; it was not until after D-Day in June 1944 that they were brought south. He was right to fear an attack there, however, as Churchill always wanted to secure northern Norway for the Allies and prevent its use by the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe in their interdicting of the convoys that were sent to Murmansk after Hitler had invaded Russia. The ice-free ports of the Northern Cape were certainly useful to Germany in that respect.
The German invasion of Denmark legitimized the Allies’ capture of Reykjavik and the Faroe Isles the following month, which were to yield air bases vital to the anti-submarine campaigns of the battle of the Atlantic. Furthermore, no fewer than 4.6 million tons of shipping – Norway had the fourth-largest merchant navy in the world in 1939 – were added to Allied resources, and used from Murmansk to the Pacific.45 Since the entire aggregate of all Allied losses by submarines did not exceed that figure until December 1941, the Germans had to pay a high price for violating Norwegian sovereignty twenty-four hours before the Allies did.
Speaking of Adolf Hitler in the Central Hall, Westminster on 4 April, only five days before the German invasion of Norway, Neville Chamberlain said: ‘One thing is certain – he missed the bus.’ Along with his prophecy of ‘Peace in our time’ after meeting Hitler at Munich, it was one of his less impressive predictions, but he was not the only person to have spoken too soon. Churchill also told the House of Commons on 11 April that ‘We are greatly advantaged by… the strategic blunder into which our mortal enemy has been provoked.’ The Norway campaign was a serious setback for the Allies, but if it achieved nothing else, the two-day House of Commons debate on the subject on 7 and 8 May 1940 did at least destroy the Chamberlain Government, and bring to power an energetic coalition under the premiership of Churchill, ironically enough the Briton most directly responsible for the Norway expedition and the Admiralty’s unimpressive part in it.
Winston Churchill’s most important, most dangerous but ultimately his most constructive characteristic had always been his impatience. He had exhibited impatience throughout his life, both with himself and with the world around him, especially during the imperial and world wars in which he had risen to prominence in British public life. By May 1940 he was sixty-five years old, yet still at the height of his very considerable intellectual and oratorical powers. His long years of largely unheeded warnings about the rise of Nazism had given him an unassailable moral right to the premiership during the parliamentary crisis that month, and he grasped it as soon as it