‘Jack had seen combined operations by the score, few of them a pleasant memory; and the likelihood of miserable jealousies between army and navy, the divided command, to say nothing of disconnected councils, were clear in his mind.’ These thoughts expressed by Patrick O’Brian’s fictional Captain Jack Aubrey accurately describe the actual situation of British and French forces before and throughout their campaign in Norway in April and May 1940.
Between January and early April 1940, wrote Brian Bond, ‘Anglo-French discussions of strategic options focused to an astonishing extent on the possibility of armed intervention in Scandinavia’, both to prevent German control of Swedish iron ore supplies and to distract Germany from an offensive on the Western Front. There was also ‘the hair-raising possibility’ that aid to Finland would add the Soviet Union to the enemies of France and Britain. Churchill, as ever, was impatient for action, ‘anywhere but on the north-east frontiers of France’, where the main German army might be encountered. Henry Pownall, then Gort’s chief of staff, described the intention to aid Finland as ‘the child of those master strategists Winston and Ironside. Of all the hare-brained projects I have heard of this is the most foolish; its inception smacks all too alarmingly of Gallipoli.’
On 25 March 1939, in a paper sent to Chamberlain, Churchill argued that ‘command of the Baltic is vital’ to Germany. As soon as he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty early in September, he began planning a Baltic operation. The Royal Navy would seize command of the entire sea, destroy the German navy en route, and sever German links with Scandinavia. Sweden’s iron ore would be denied to Hitler and the effect on German industry, asserted Churchill, would be catastrophic. A vital source of raw materials for weapons of all kinds would be eliminated and the Soviet Union would be encouraged to act against a common enemy. For that reason he named the plan ‘Catherine’ in memory of that famous ruler: ‘because Russia lay in the background of my thought.’
The plan looked well; on a map that took no account of geography, climate or the resources and level of training of Britain, her allies and enemies. As ever, Churchill desired action. He told Pound (an obedient First Sea Lord, kept in office long after he was obviously too ill to cope) on 5 December that he could never be responsible for a naval strategy excluding ‘the offensive principle’, adding on the 25th: ‘The supreme strategy is to carry the war into a theatre where we can bring superior forces to bear, and where a decision can be obtained which rules all other theatres. We have to select from a host of dangers the one which can best be dealt with and which, if dealt with, causes the others to fall away.’
What mattered was offensive spirit: he believed that ‘Britain could by boldness command the northern waters’. Under his direction, the Royal Navy showed an ‘extraordinary willingness’ to be offensive. It was ‘spared the disaster which would surely have followed’, concluded Gerhard Weinberg, had his ‘pet project’ in the Baltic been attempted. He was, wrote Correlli Barnett, ‘a compulsive opportunist and an unrealistic strategist’ and Catherine was only the first of many bold ventures which cost heavy casualties.
It was to have been led by four powerful battleships which would sweep aside any surface opposition, untroubled by aerial opposition. ‘Battleships could be taken into the Baltic,’ wrote William Manchester, ‘but RAF fighters could not accompany them; the ships would be under constant, heavy attack from land-based enemy aircraft.’ Churchill had the answer to that danger: a memorandum of 12 September ‘to strengthen the armour deck so as to give exceptional protection against air attack’.
In spite of his long awareness of air power, he believed as strongly as any ‘gun and battleship’ sailor that the fleet’s own anti-aircraft fire would be enough to protect it. As for mines, the construction of twelve ‘mine bumpers’ with a ‘heavy fore end to take the shock of any exploding mine’ would give adequate protection. Churchill had no evidence for what was merely an assertion. In any case, as he assured President Roosevelt on 16 October: ‘We have not been at all impressed with the accuracy of the German air bombing of our warships. They seem to have no effective bomb sights.’ That too was merely assertion.
Mercifully, Catherine ‘shrivelled under scrutiny’, as did several other proposed masterstrokes during the next six years. Pound emphasised the air threat and the fact that the operation would rely upon Sweden and the Soviet Union to provide naval bases: most unlikely in either case. For a host of practical problems, Catherine died. No responsible person, then or later, approved Catherine; except, as Churchill wrote in his memoirs, Admiral Tom Phillips who later drowned in the South China Sea, convinced until almost his last breath that capital ships could resist aerial attack.
Catherine belonged, wrote Barnett, in the same ‘cigar-butt strategy’ as Churchill’s plan to capture Borkum in 1915 or ‘even the Dardanelles expedition itself: glibly attractive when arrowed broadly on a map of Europe, but a nonsense in terms of the technical means and military forces available, of the enemy’s potential reaction, and of all the wider political and strategic probabilities’.
Thwarted over Catherine, Churchill now devised operation Wilfred. During the winter, the Swedish port of Lulea freezes over. The Germans, who usually shipped iron ore from that port, were therefore obliged to transport it overland by rail to the ice-free Norwegian port of Narvik and then by sea to Germany, keeping well within neutral Norway’s territorial waters. On 19 September 1939 Churchill urged the mining of these waters in order to force the traffic away from the coast, into the open sea, where the Royal Navy could intercept it. Infringing the neutrality of Norway and Sweden did not trouble him.
‘Small nations,’ he told the War Cabinet in December, ‘must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedom.’ Such was Wilfred’s birth, but he grew up into the first major Allied offensive of the war, a plan to seize Narvik and even the ore fields. As with Catherine, Churchill’s guiding thought was that Britain controlled the sea and Germany did not. He disregarded the fact that Germany controlled the air, had ample ground forces and sufficient naval strength.
With a campaign in France and the Low Countries pending, and his thoughts never far from an assault on the Soviet Union, Hitler had been prepared to see the Scandinavian countries remain neutral. Sweden was complaisant; Denmark too small to matter; and Norway could be left alone, for the time being. However, the British and French made so much noise during so many months and took so little action that Hitler’s attention was drawn to Norway’s strategic importance and he decided to strike first, which he did on 7 April 1940.
Chamberlain famously crowed to a Conservative Party meeting on the 5th that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ and Churchill observed after the war that ‘this proved an ill-judged utterance’. So it was, but Churchill was no wiser at the time. He supposed that the movement north of German ships was an attempt to bring on a sea battle to win control of the North Atlantic. Four cruisers and transport vessels, packed with troops, had been held in the Clyde, to meet the danger of an invasion of Norway, but Churchill had the troops put ashore so that the cruisers could put to sea at once to take part in what he hoped would be another Jutland, only this time ending in a crushing British victory.
In his memoirs, Churchill described ‘a ramshackle campaign’, one for which he bore major responsibility. Forces were hastily assembled with too few aircraft, anti-tank guns or transport. No thought was given to training men of different services to work closely together. The Allied command structure, wrote Weinberg, ‘was chaotic and further hampered by examples of that gross incompetence on the part of British generals which would continue to bedevil the British Army at least until the summer of 1942’. The contrast with Hugh Dowding’s Fighter Command could not be clearer.
Richard Peirse (deputy CAS) had written to Dowding on 4 April about plans to prevent ships carrying ore from Narvik to German ports by laying mines in Norwegian waters from the 8th onwards. The Germans may invade Norway, Peirse continued, and if they do we – the British and French – will send ships and men to resist them. Not much air support would be required, he airily supposed: one squadron of obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes and one flight of virtually defenceless Westland Lysanders for reconnaissance. Peirse, a Trenchardist, refused to consider seriously any use for aircraft other than as offensive bombers or defensive fighters, both types operating independently. Combined operations – between sailors, soldiers, airmen and allies – carefully planned in a single headquarters were not yet dreamt of.
Consequently, from start to finish, wrote John Terraine, Anglo-French operations in Norway ‘display an amateurishness and feebleness which to this day [1984] can make the reader alternately blush and shiver’. Weinberg, writing a decade later, agreed. British generals showed ‘gross incompetence’ then and up to the summer of 1942. True, but the other services, British and French, were no better. Jock Colville, one of Chamberlain’s secretaries, who later served Churchill, noted in his diary on 27 April 1940: ‘The plain truth of the matter is that we have inadvisedly landed an insufficient number of troops without adequate equipment or support from the air, and we have met or are meeting with a serious reverse.’ Colville thought the chiefs of staff were much to blame, ‘and also Winston who fusses but does nothing’.
A week later, on 3 May, Colville quoted some French officers who said: ‘The British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus, armed with bows and arrows against the onslaught of scientific warfare.’ In his memoirs, Churchill – hard pressed by his co-authors – admitted that the British response to the German invasion of Norway had been a disaster, but as usual, and like Gallipoli he found scapegoats and wriggled adroitly to minimise his personal responsibility.
The loss of the aircraft carrier Glorious was worse than mere incompetence. Her captain, Guy D’Oyly-Hughes, was permitted to sail from Norwegian waters towards Britain on 8 June escorted by only two destroyers for no better reason than a desire to court-martial the officer in charge of flying as soon as he berthed. D’Oyly-Hughes failed to send up air patrols when he had ample time to do so. All three ships were caught and easily sunk by two German battlecruisers, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. Only forty-five – not including D’Oyly-Hughes – of more than 1,000 men aboard the three ships survived. For forty years the Admiralty claimed that the carrier needed to sail virtually unattended because she was short of fuel, but this was not so.
The Allies had approved plans on 28 March 1940 for landing seven battalions in three different places, all without air cover, in a huge country with poor communications and still in the grip of winter. The navy began to roll mines into Norwegian waters on 9 April, but the Germans had moved first and fastest. Sea, land and air forces had swept into Denmark and Norway on the 7th. ‘I consider Germans have made strategic error,’ Churchill signalled Admiral Charles Forbes on 9 April, ‘in incurring commitments on Norwegian coast which we can probably wipe out in a short time.’ He repeated this opinion in the Commons two days later.
He seems to have quite forgotten the changes in warfare brought about by a weapon which he had done so much to foster before and during the Great War. The French were no help, in the first meeting between the army commander, Maurice Gamelin and Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, after Germany occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, Gamelin told Reynaud that a French brigade had been poised to go to Scandinavia. Reynaud asked where it was. In the Alps, Gamelin replied: to prevent its detection by German spies.
The Luftwaffe used more than 1,000 aircraft in Norway, leapfrogging units north from one well-equipped airfield to another. Land-based RAF fighters were unable to challenge them and the navy’s sea-borne fighters were few and of inferior performance. Churchill decided that Trondheim should be the main target and ‘threw myself with increasing confidence into this daring adventure’. His disregard of the Luftwaffe was remarkable for a man of his past experience. Admiral Forbes told him: ‘Shore batteries could no doubt be either destroyed or dominated by battleships in daylight’ but the main task was ‘an opposed landing, of which ample warning has been given, under continuous air attack’. The operation would cause heavy losses in men, weapons and ships. Churchill refused to accept Forbes’s considered judgement. It is as if the Dardanelles disaster had never happened.
Failure in central Norway in no way lessened Churchill’s enthusiasm for a crack at Narvik. Major-General Pierse Mackesy told the War Office on 20 April that a successful opposed landing there was impossible: ‘A landing from open boats must be ruled out absolutely.’ Admiral the Earl of Cork and Orrery agreed. Churchill’s response was hysterical: ‘If this officer appears to be spreading a bad spirit through the higher ranks of the land force,’ he told Cork, ‘do not hesitate to relieve him or place him under arrest.’ Cork did neither and assured Churchill that nothing could be done without air cover. Major Millis Jefferis (who had been to Åndalsnes) reported to the War Cabinet that ‘the moral effect’ of seeing aircraft coming, unable to take cover, made it impossible for troops to withstand ‘complete air superiority of the kind the Germans had enjoyed in Norway’. Churchill was unmoved, but agreed to Cork’s request that he present on 6 May to Cabinet the unanimous objections of men on the spot. He stressed ‘how very serious the repercussions of a defeat at Narvik would be’, adding an argument that was always close to his heart: defeat would have ‘a devastating effect on world opinion’, wherever and by whomever that might be expressed.
German forces launched a devastating invasion of France on 10 May. Churchill became Prime Minister on that day and found time to complain to Cork on the 20th. ‘I am increasingly disappointed by the stagnation which appears to rule in the military operations around Narvik, and delay in occupying the town itself.’ As usual, he ignored the lack of air cover and, as usual, Cork reminded him. Although Narvik was taken a few days later, it was abandoned almost at once as a result of greater disasters in France. ‘All the principles of combined operations’, wrote Henry Pownall on 30 April, ‘so carefully studied in peace, seem to have been thrown to the winds’ and forces were ‘expected to maintain themselves in the face of an absolute air supremacy’.
The official historian of the campaign concluded that underrating air power was the most obvious lesson of the campaign. Churchill had been ‘one of the most powerful guiding influences’ in Norway, as he had been at Antwerp, the Dardanelles, against the Bolsheviks and at Chanak. His life-long enthusiasm for ‘forlorn endeavour in remote places’ cost many men their lives during his years as Prime Minister. Chamberlain – a man with no claim to be a war lord – had questioned Churchill’s desire to invade Norway as early as 2 January 1940 on the obvious ground that British ships would be exposed to Luftwaffe attack, operating from bases in southern Norway, where ‘they could develop a most serious air threat’. Churchill waved away his objection: a German invasion of Norway, he declared, ‘would be vexatious but would in no way be decisive’ and pressed on with a plan that was ‘ill-considered, ill-founded and absurdly optimistic’.
A. J. P. Taylor commented on ‘the curious contradiction in Churchill’s nature as a strategist’: for years he had emphasised the importance of air power – more so than any other politician – yet when it came to action, he could not resist the call of tradition and romance. He imagined that the Royal Navy could still assert its old supremacy unaided.
After the disaster, Churchill claimed, as usual, that it was not of his making. He had in fact disregarded the need for air power. German satisfaction in a complete victory was tempered by the fact that most of her small fleet of warships was sunk or disabled. Unless Hitler persuaded the British to make peace or his air force overcame the RAF in air battles over Britain, there could be no invasion. Perhaps there would have been merely a peaceful occupation. In the absence of Churchill, with all his faults, no other politician could have called upon the British people to resist any terms that seemed at all reasonable. Quite the reverse: most influential politicians would have ‘behaved sensibly’ in the wake of France’s collapse. It was Churchill, he alone, who made it possible for Dowding’s Fighter Command, greatly aided by the Royal Navy and by the brave, though inadequately equipped, crews of Bomber Command to stem, if not turn, the Nazi tide.