On a chilly April night in 1940, leading officials of the Norwegian government were invited to the German legation in Oslo for the screening of a new film. The engraved invitations, sent by German minister Curt Bräuer, directed the guests to wear “full dress and orders,” which indicated a gala formal occasion. But for the white-tie, bemedaled audience seated in the legation’s drawing room, the evening turned out to be anything but festive.
Horrific images filled the screen from the film’s beginning: dead horses, machine-gunned civilians, a city consumed in flames. Entitled Baptism of Fire, the movie was a documentary depicting the German conquest of Poland in September 1939; it portrayed in especially graphic detail the devastation caused by the bombing of Warsaw. This, Bräuer said after the screening, was what other countries could expect if they dared resist German attempts “to defend them from England.” Appalled by the harrowing footage, Bräuer’s guests were puzzled as to why the German diplomat thought it necessary to show the movie to them. What could any of this have to do with peaceful, neutral Norway?
Four nights later, just after midnight, those same officials were awakened by urgent phone calls informing them that several ships of unknown origin had entered the fjord leading to Oslo. A sea fog blanketing the fjord made it impossible to identify the ghostly armada’s markings. Within minutes, however, the mystery of their nationality was solved when reports of surprise German attacks on every major port in Norway and Denmark began flooding Norwegian government offices.
Aboard the German heavy cruiser Blücher, General Erwin Engelbrecht, who commanded the attack force heading for Oslo, reviewed his orders with his subordinates. In just a few hours, more than a thousand troops, equipped with minutely detailed maps and photographs of the Norwegian capital, were to disembark from the Blücher in Oslo’s harbor. Their assignment was to slip into the sleeping city and storm government buildings, the state radio station, and the royal palace. Before noon, King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, and the rest of the royal family would be under arrest and the Norwegian government under German control. A band, also on board the Blücher, would play “Deutschland über Alles” in the city’s center to celebrate Germany’s triumph, while German military officials took over administration of the country and its two most important material assets—its merchant marine and its gold.
When a Norwegian patrol boat spotted the flotilla and had the temerity to issue a challenge, the boat was machine-gunned and sunk. Farther up the fjord, two small island forts, alerted by the patrol boat, also fired on the ships, but the heavy fog made accurate sighting impossible and the vessels swept on untouched. Shortly before 4 A.M., the convoy approached Oscarsborg Fortress, an island stronghold built in the mid–nineteenth century and Oslo’s last major line of defense. The Blücher’s captain was as unperturbed by the sight of the fortress as he had been by the pesky patrol boat. On his charts and maps, Oscarsborg was identified as a museum and its two antiquated cannons described as obsolete.
The maps and charts were wrong on both counts. The fortress was operational, and so were the old cannons, fondly called “Moses” and “Aaron” by their crews. The fog lifted a bit, and as the darkened silhouettes of the ships came into view, a searchlight on the mainland suddenly illuminated the Blücher. Moses and Aaron erupted at point-blank range, their shells crashing into the 12,000-ton heavy cruiser. One shell smashed into the Blücher’s bridge, destroying its gunnery and navigational controls, while another slammed into a storeroom filled with aviation fuel. Shore batteries also began firing. Within seconds, the Blücher was ablaze, the flames leaping high into the air, burning off the fog, and lighting up the snow-covered banks of the fjord.
With a great roar, the ship’s torpedo magazine exploded, and less than an hour later, the Blücher, commissioned only seven months before, rolled over on its side and sank. Nearly one thousand men went down with her, including most of the elite troops assigned to capture the royal family and government officials. General Engelbrecht was one of the several hundred survivors who escaped the burning oil covering the fjord’s surface and swam frantically to shore.
Throughout that day—April 9, 1940—Hitler’s audacious, meticulously planned invasion of Denmark and Norway had gone almost exactly as planned. By early afternoon, virtually all the Führer’s major objectives along the 1,500 miles of Norwegian coastline had been taken—all, that is, except Oslo, the political, economic, and communications center of Norway and the key to the operation’s eventual success.
AT 1:30 A.M. ON APRIL 9, the man atop Germany’s most wanted list of Norwegians was awakened by his aide-de-camp. “Majesty,” the aide said urgently, “we are at war!” The news came as no surprise to King Haakon VII. He had been expecting—and dreading—it for years. In 1932, he had told the British admiral Sir John Kelly, “If Hitler comes to power in Germany and manages to hold on to it, then we shall have a war in Europe before another decade is over.”
Hitler had come to power, but Norway’s political leaders had ignored the king’s repeated urging to strengthen the country’s shockingly weak defenses. Like other Scandinavian nations, Norway had long since abandoned its bellicose Viking heritage: peace, not war, was deeply rooted in its psyche. Norwegians had little admiration for military heroes, of whom their country, in any case, had few. Much more esteemed were the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, chosen annually by the Norwegian parliament. “It was very difficult to be a military man in prewar Norway,” noted one of the few army officers on active duty in April 1940.
In the late 1930s, this seagoing country’s navy had only seventy ships: its two largest were the oldest ironclads in the world, affectionately called “my old bathtubs” by the naval chief of staff. The tiny Norwegian army, armed with vintage rifles and cannons, had no submachine or antiaircraft guns. The cavalry was supposed to be equipped with tanks, but the money appropriated by the government was so infinitesimal that only one tank had been purchased, “so that Norwegian soldiers could at least see one sample in their lifetime.” Field maneuvers had not been held for years—they had been abolished as a way of saving money—and many brigade commanders had never even met their men.
Norway’s military vulnerability, however, was of little concern to its government leaders. The country had been at peace for well over a century, had successfully maintained its neutrality during World War I, and intended to remain neutral in the future. Money should be spent on social reforms, Norway’s leaders believed, not on building up the military. In the view of most Norwegians, “war was the kind of thing that happened in other parts of the world,” noted Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian novelist who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. “How many of us had ever seriously believed it could happen in Norway?”
Having made a close study of Hitler, including reading Mein Kampf in the early 1930s, the sixty-seven-year-old king was far less sanguine. If war broke out, his peaceable northern kingdom, though militarily defenseless, would have great strategic importance. Facing Britain to the west, it provided a gateway to the North Atlantic. To the south, it had access to the Baltic Sea and the German coast. Not least, it controlled the northwest sea route through which iron ore from Sweden was shipped to Germany, the ore’s main customer. And then there was Norway’s far-flung merchant marine fleet, a glittering prize for Hitler or any other belligerent.
But whenever Haakon raised these and other points, government leaders disregarded them—and him. Most Norwegian officials scorned the monarchy as a useless relic of a bygone age and believed it should have no influence in government matters. Many thought there should be no monarchy at all. As much as he loved Norway, Haakon sometimes felt unwelcome there, at least in government circles. Not infrequently, he felt like the foreigner he once had been.
UNTIL HE BECAME KING OF NORWAY, Haakon VII, the second son of the crown prince of Denmark, had barely set foot in the country. He did not learn to speak Norwegian until the age of thirty-three, shortly before his reign began. Known as Prince Carl in Denmark, he had been a modest, unassuming young royal who grew up believing he would never be king of anything, for which he was profoundly grateful. His mother had reportedly pressured him to marry the young Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, but he had resisted, wanting nothing to do with the pomp and formality of official court life. Instead, he wooed and won his first cousin Maud, the sports-mad daughter of King Edward VII of Britain, who was as anxious for a quiet life, out of the limelight, as he was.*1 At the time of his marriage, Carl, who sported a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, was an officer in the Danish navy and planned to make it his career.
But in 1905, Norway’s declaration of independence from Sweden turned the life of the sailor prince upside down. The century-old union between the two countries had never been an equal one: Sweden, whose kings ruled both nations, had been the dominant partner from the beginning, and Norway had been growing increasingly restive. To lessen the chance of forceful Swedish opposition to their peaceful rebellion, Norwegian leaders said they would welcome a junior member of Sweden’s royal family as the country’s new monarch. Prince Carl, whose maternal grandfather was the king of Sweden and Norway, was the obvious choice.
The prince, however, was appalled at the idea. Not only did he want to remain in the Danish navy, he knew virtually nothing about Norway and its people. He was also acutely aware that many citizens of Norway, which had abolished its aristocracy in the nineteenth century, were in favor of a republic, not a monarchy. Under heavy pressure from his father-in-law, Edward VII, among others, he finally agreed—but only if Norway held a referendum on the issue. When 88 percent of the electorate voted for a monarchy, Carl was crowned, taking the ancient Norwegian royal name of Haakon. (His wife, English to the core, refused to renounce her given name: she was known as Queen Maud until the day she died in 1938. She continued, as she always had done, to address her husband as Charles, the Anglified version of Carl. “I actually have plans to make him completely English,” she confided to her diary early in their courtship.)
With Haakon as monarch, Norway boasted the most egalitarian kingdom in the world. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, an aide to Queen Maud’s father, once said that Norway was “so socialistic that a King and Queen seemed out of place.” After a visit to Oslo in 1911, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to an acquaintance that the insertion of a royal family into the most democratic society in Europe was like “Vermont offhandedly trying the experiment of having a King.”
King Haakon VII with his wife, Queen Maud, and son, Crown Prince Olav.
Haakon, who frequently described his position as that of “a very democratic president for life,” was known to his people as “Herre Konge” (“Mr. King”) rather than “Your Majesty.” The royal family lived simply, with Queen Maud often doing her own shopping. In his frequent tours of the country and travels abroad, Haakon impressed those he met with his friendliness and wry sense of humor. Once, at a gathering of the British royal family at Windsor, he noticed a youthful distant cousin of his, Lord Frederick Cambridge, standing awkwardly by himself in a corner. He marched over and vigorously shook the young peer’s hand. “You don’t know me,” he said. “Let me introduce myself. I’m old Norway.”
As close as he was to his British relatives and as much as he loved their country, Haakon was horrified by the refusal of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government to confront Hitler over his repeated aggressions in the 1930s. After World War II began in September 1939, Norway, like other neutral European countries, made clear that it wanted no part of a military alliance with a nation that, along with France, had handed over much of Czechoslovakia to the Führer and then, having declared war against Germany for invading Poland, had failed to do anything to aid the Poles. “All the small nations now understand that we in the future have to look after ourselves,” Haakon wrote chidingly to his nephew, Britain’s King George VI.
Until the spring of 1940, the war was a conflict in name only. Chamberlain and most officials in his government had no interest in and no intention of fighting a real war. They had imposed an economic blockade against Hitler and seemed to think that this would be enough to bring him to his knees.
Winston Churchill, Chamberlain’s first lord of the admiralty and the British Cabinet’s only bellicose member, strongly disagreed with Chamberlain’s “phony war” strategy. From the war’s first day, he demanded that Britain take the offensive against Germany—but not on German soil. The confrontation, he said, should come in the waters of Norway. He repeatedly urged the British government to stop the shipment of Swedish iron ore, vital to Germany’s armament industry, along Norway’s coastline. When both Norway and Sweden protested that idea, Churchill was infuriated by their reluctance to become battlefields for the warring powers. “We are fighting to re-establish the reign of law and to protect the liberties of small countries,” he told the War Cabinet (a claim that both Poland and Czechoslovakia might have found hard to stomach). “Small nations must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedoms….Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.”
After hesitating for months, Chamberlain finally gave in to Churchill’s pressure. At dawn on April 8, 1940, British ships began sowing mines along the Norwegian coast. Hitler, who weeks earlier had said he would forestall any British move on Norway, had already ordered his high command to implement carefully prepared plans for the following day’s surprise attack and occupation of both Norway and Denmark.
In most respects, Germany’s land, sea, and air assault on the two Scandinavian countries was a brilliant success. Before it began, Hitler had decreed that the kings of Norway and Denmark must be prevented from escaping “at all costs.” In Copenhagen, the Germans had no trouble finding King Christian X of Denmark, Haakon’s sixty-nine-year-old brother, who capitulated as ordered. But bad weather and the sinking of the Blücher had upset the split-second timing of the assault on Oslo. When German troops finally entered the royal palace, government buildings, and the Bank of Norway that afternoon, they found only frightened low-level government employees and piles of papers burning in furnaces and fireplaces. The bank vaults lay empty, with no trace of the country’s gold bullion. The king and government leaders had vanished, too.
WHEN THE RESIDENTS OF OSLO awoke on April 9, they found their world, so neatly ordered the day before, in chaos. Although the Germans had not yet entered the city, Luftwaffe bombers crisscrossed the sky overhead, and the muffled crump of bombs could be heard in the distance. Columns of thick black smoke from the burning government documents spiraled upward. Beautiful Oslo, with its verdant parks, hills, and forests, now lay open to an enemy it never knew it had.
A few hours earlier, as the Blücher had steamed toward Oslo in the predawn darkness, German minister Curt Bräuer had confronted the Norwegian foreign minister, Halvdan Koht, with a demand for Norway’s surrender, emphasizing “how completely senseless all resistance would be.” Though dazed by the sudden attack, Koht had the wit to remind Bräuer of Hitler’s remark about Czechoslovakia’s capitulation after Munich—that “the nation that bowed meekly to an aggressor without offering resistance was not worthy to live.” With that, he rejected the German demand.
Before joining the king and other government officials aboard the special train that spirited them away that morning, Koht told a radio journalist that Norway was at war with Germany, that the king and government had escaped, and, incorrectly, that a general mobilization was now in effect. In response to his announcement, which was broadcast throughout the country, thousands of young men, suitcases in hand, headed for the nearest military center, only to be informed that it was all a mistake. “Reservists and volunteers left recruiting stations in tears when told there were no arms for them,” a British diplomat recalled. In the Norwegian capital, dazed crowds gathered in front of newspaper bulletin boards, swapping fears and rumors.
Some Oslo residents, however, already had all the information they needed: the Germans were coming, and they must flee the capital before the invaders arrived. Sigrid Undset hurriedly packed a couple of suitcases and left. The fifty-seven-year-old novelist had been a strong and vocal critic of Hitler since the early 1930s; her books had been banned in Germany shortly after the Führer took control of the government.
A young German émigré named Willy Brandt was also in danger. The twenty-six-year-old Brandt, who had battled Nazis in the streets even before they came to power in Germany and had been deprived of his citizenship as a result, had found asylum in Norway seven years earlier. After studying at the University of Oslo, he had become a journalist and was closely allied to top figures in the country’s ruling Labor Party. He was also heavily involved in the work of German émigré groups trying to stimulate opposition to Hitler in their homeland. Early that morning, he had been awakened by an urgent phone call: he must get out of the city as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, he was, as he wrote later, “in flight again”—whisked away to a safe house in the suburbs of Oslo, where he was picked up by a couple of leading Norwegian politicians and driven to safety. Brandt, who would become one of Germany’s most eminent postwar chancellors, was eventually spirited out of the country to neutral Sweden. He spent the war there as a journalist and propagandist for “the cause of a free Norway.”
Oslo residents watch as German troops march into the city in April 1940.
KING HAAKON AND THE government leaders, meanwhile, escaped to Hamar, a town eighty miles north of Oslo. As their train left the capital early that morning, a long line of trucks idled outside the Bank of Norway, a black granite building near Oslo’s harbor, waiting to be loaded with hundreds of boxes and barrels containing the lifeblood of Norway’s economy: fifty tons of gold bullion totaling $55 million ($915 million today). Far more foresighted than government officials, the bank’s director had made plans months before to evacuate the gold reserves to a secret bombproof vault in the town of Lillehammer, 114 miles north of Oslo, in case of attack.
In Hamar, the Norwegian parliament immediately went into session in the local movie theater, while hundreds more people—civil servants, businessmen, journalists, and foreign diplomats—poured into the little town, occupying all its hotel rooms and crowding its slushy streets. Government ministers bought up Hamar’s entire stock of paper and pencils to transact Cabinet business, and government clerks began unpacking the crates of documents they had brought from Oslo. “I think we all, subconsciously, expected to settle down comfortably there,” recalled Florence “Daisy” Harriman, a former New York socialite turned social reformer whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed U.S. minister to Norway. “We were not yet ready to imagine that the King and Government would be hunted like wild animals.”
In midevening, the fragile sense of security was shattered when the parliament’s president, Carl Hambro, interrupted a debate to announce that German forces were heading toward Hamar and that a train was waiting at the station to take the king and government away. Officials grabbed their hats and coats and ran for the door. Ten minutes later, the train departed, heading for Elverum, a town higher in the mountains and closer to the Swedish border.
For most of the exhausted government leaders, that nightmarish first day of war finally came to an end in Elverum. Only the king, his family, and several key ministers pushed on to the tiny snow-covered hamlet of Nybergsund, which was considered safer from German bombs. From there, Crown Prince Olav sent his wife, Princess Märtha, and their three children to Sweden, the princess’s homeland.
The following day, Haakon agreed to meet with Curt Bräuer in Elverum. Employing a mixture of flattery and threats, the German minister promised the king that if he accepted the German demands, he would retain the honors and perquisites of his position and Norway would escape further destruction; if he did not, all resistance would be ruthlessly crushed. The demands, Bräuer said, included not only capitulation but the naming of Vidkun Quisling, the fifty-two-year-old leader of Norway’s minuscule Nazi Party, as the new prime minister of Norway.
Haakon was astonished and outraged at the thought of Quisling heading the Norwegian government. Quisling’s party, which had never won more than 2 percent of the vote in any election, was considered a joke in Norway, while he and his men, in the words of Sigrid Undset, were thought of as “hysterical half-men.” His voice filled with fury, the king told Bräuer that he “could not appoint a government that did not enjoy the confidence of the Norwegian people, and several elections had shown that Quisling did not enjoy such confidence.”
Returning to Nybergsund that night, Haakon briefed his son and ministers on Bräuer’s demands. On the run for more than twenty-four hours, the unshaven, disheveled men were suffering from both physical and emotional exhaustion. Several of them, badly frightened by the Germans’ efforts to capture them and despondent over the apparent hopelessness of Norway’s situation, believed they should give in and negotiate for peace without delay. The country was totally unprepared to fight Germany, they argued; if it tried to resist, it would be committing national suicide. They noted that Britain had sent word that its forces would come to Norway’s aid as soon as possible. But after what had happened in Czechoslovakia and Poland, how could anyone in his right mind put trust in British promises? The government must capitulate now.
The tall, ramrod-straight Haakon was well aware that his ministers had never paid much attention to his advice and counsel in the past. This time, though, the future of his adopted country was at stake, and he was determined to follow his conscience and speak his mind. “The government is free to decide,” he said in an unsteady voice, “but I shall make my own position clear: I cannot accept the German demands. This would conflict with everything I have considered to be my duty as king ever since I came to Norway almost thirty-five years ago.” If the government chose otherwise, he would abdicate, renouncing the throne of Norway for himself and his family.
“That instant burnt itself into my memory,” recalled Trygve Lie, the minister of supply and a future secretary general of the United Nations. “Having said these words, the King gazed intently at Prince Olav. For a long while, he was unable to resume, then he bent over the table and burst into tears. Prince Olav also had tears in his eyes.” Raising his head, Haakon struggled to control his emotions. “The government must now make its decision,” he said.
His unequivocal stand ended all talk of capitulation. Swayed by his resolve and his willingness to sacrifice his throne for principle, the ministers, including the most defeatist, voted to reject the ultimatum. While Halvdan Koht phoned the news to Bräuer, Haakon and his prime minister signed a proclamation, which was broadcast over Norwegian radio, rejecting the German demands and calling on Norwegians to resist the invaders with all their might. When news of Haakon’s intransigence reached Hitler the following morning, the German leader flew into one of his trademark rages. How dare “this ridiculously small country and its petty king” defy him! The time for talking was over, Hitler declared. Haakon VII of Norway must be tracked down and killed.
The following day, April 11, Haakon was conferring with his ministers at an inn in Nybergsund when the pastoral quiet was suddenly shattered by the honking of a car horn—the prearranged signal for imminent danger. The king, his son, and the ministers ran out of the inn toward a nearby grove of trees, flinging themselves onto the ground as six German dive-bombers whined overhead and raked the village and grove with machine-gun fire. Wheeling around, the planes made several more passes, strafing and dropping incendiary bombs as they went. When the attack finally ended, Norway’s leaders—wet, cold, and bloody from scratches—rose stiffly to their feet. Nybergsund itself was ablaze, but remarkably the raid had resulted in only two casualties, both of them villagers. When one of the bombers was shot down several days later, the pilot’s diary was found with this entry: “The king, the Government, all annihilated…”
Once again, Haakon and his party headed north, into the wild, mountainous, and glacier-bound landscape of central Norway. Their convoy of vehicles, painted white for camouflage, crept along rough, narrow hairpin roads bordered by sheer peaks and seemingly bottomless mountain chasms. Cars broke down or were stuck in the snow, and more than once during the next two weeks, Haakon, who was in a car driven by his son, was separated from the government ministers, neither party knowing where the other was or whether anyone else was still alive. Ceaselessly tracking them, the Germans bombed and strafed every place they were thought to be. At the first sight or sound of a plane overhead, the king and his party headed for the nearest cover—trees, a rock, anything they could use to hide below or behind.
Throughout these long early-spring days, they stopped whenever they could—to rest, conduct government business, attempt to find out what was going on in the rest of Norway, and consult intermittently with the British, French, and American diplomats who were doing their best to keep up with them. Inevitably, however, reports of approaching German troops or Luftwaffe aircraft would force them onward.
NOTWITHSTANDING THEIR VIKING HERITAGE, the Norwegians were “not good haters,” as one of their leaders later noted. But it didn’t take long for most of them to develop a fierce hatred of the Germans—“an army of marauders,” in the words of Sigrid Undset, “who came to live where they have not built, to reap where they have not sown, to rule over a people they have never served.” The king’s defiant rejection of Germany’s demands served as a stimulus for national resistance. Germany had conquered all of Norway’s major ports but not the interior of the country, and once their initial shock and confusion had worn off, the Norwegians began to fight back. In the days following the invasion, young men by the thousands wandered the countryside, trying to find army units they could join.
At first, the army was also in turmoil: its demoralized commander in chief favored surrender or negotiation with the Germans. Backed by King Haakon, the cabinet replaced him with General Otto Ruge, a tall, craggy-faced former army chief of staff, who cobbled together a 40,000-man army from the fast-growing stream of citizen volunteers who poured out of their cities and towns by foot, on skis and bicycles, in cars, trucks, and buses. Although many were excellent marksmen who had brought along their own rifles and pistols, they had no artillery, tanks, antitank weapons, or air support in their skirmishes with the well-equipped, well-trained Germans.
Ruge’s strategy was to play for time, to contain the Germans long enough in the south to allow an orderly retreat and stabilization of the front in central Norway. “With the weak and improvised forces we had at our disposal, it was impossible for us to engage in any decisive battle before the Allies came to our aid,” he later recalled. “Our small forces fought without respite, without reserves, always in the front line, against heavy artillery, tanks, and bombers….For three weeks, our divisions held out until at last, the Allies began to arrive.”
Despite increasingly desperate appeals from Norway, it took Britain almost a week to cobble together an expedition to go to its assistance. Even though, as Ruge noted, the British must have realized that their mining of Norway’s waters would provoke a German response, the Chamberlain government was as stunned by the invasion as the Norwegians. “The idea of an operation of this scope against Scandinavia had never entered my head,” confessed General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose members included the War Cabinet and the heads of the military services. “So far as I knew, we had not a vestige of a plan to deal with it.”
Making matters worse, the British military commanders knew almost nothing about Norway and its terrain. “There were no maps,” said one officer. “We had to tear them out of geography books and send [someone] to the Norwegian travel agency to buy a Baedeker. From the Norwegian embassy and a series of tourist agencies, we gathered an armful of travel advertisement folders.” The photos in those brochures, he added, “provided the only clues as to what our prospective theater of operations looked like.” The British, a Norwegian historian later observed, hadn’t the slightest “elementary knowledge of things Norwegian.”
When British land forces finally put ashore in central Norway, Norwegian officers were astonished at the raw troops’ lack of equipment and training. Although deep snow and ice still covered the ground in much of the country, almost none of the British soldiers had been provided with snowshoes or skis. They were also without almost everything else they needed—transport, artillery, antiaircraft weapons, communications gear, fighter cover, medical equipment, even food.
Pounded by the Wehrmacht and strafed by the Luftwaffe, the green British troops were overwhelmed. “We’ve been massacred! Simply massacred!” a young lieutenant exploded after a battle that ended in a rout of British forces. “It’s been bloody awful!” Leland Stowe, a Chicago Daily News reporter who covered the British campaign, later called it “one of the costliest and most inexplicable bungles in military history.” Echoing that sentiment, the disconsolate General Edmund Ironside, who as chief of the Imperial General Staff headed the British Army, wrote in his diary: “Always too late. Changing plans and nobody directing. To bed very upset at the thought of our incompetence.”
Shortly after the British landed in Norway, Chamberlain’s government canceled a planned attack on the key port of Trondheim. Late in April, without informing the Norwegian government or army, it decided to pull out of central Norway altogether, only nine days after its troops had arrived. When, against orders, the British commander shamefacedly informed Ruge on April 28 of the evacuation, the Norwegian general retorted, “So Norway is to share the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland! But why? Why? Your troops haven’t been defeated!” Overcome with fury, he left the room. After regaining his composure, he returned and calmly said to his British counterpart, “Please tell me what help I can give you to carry out your orders.” For the next forty-eight hours, Ruge’s forces supported the British in their retreat to the coast.
The day after Ruge learned of the evacuation, the British government sent the cruiser Glasgow to pick up King Haakon and his ministers from the pretty coastal town of Molde, their latest refuge, and take them north to Tromsø, a little polar community some two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. “You are killing us!” exclaimed Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht when he and other members of the government were informed of the British troop withdrawal. Yet Koht and the others had little choice but to leave. Molde, under heavy German bombardment for more than a day, had become an inferno. High-explosive and incendiary bombs screamed and thundered through the air, reducing houses, shops, churches, and factories to little more than rubble.
Late that evening, cars carrying the royals and government officials sped through town, dodging walls of flame and showers of shattering glass. It was, one official later said, “like driving through Hell.” Much of the harbor was also ablaze, and when the king’s party pulled up to the quay at which the cruiser was moored, the ship’s fire hoses were pouring water on the conflagration.
As Haakon and his companions boarded the Glasgow, dozens of British seamen and Norwegian soldiers worked furiously to load hundreds of boxes of gold bullion—Norway’s gold reserves—into the cruiser’s hold. After being smuggled out of the Bank of Norway and dispatched on a cross-country hegira as perilous as that of the king, the gold had been stored in the cellar of a Molde textile factory. That night, as the factory burned, Norwegian civilians and troops fought smoke, flames, and falling timbers to retrieve the gold and load it onto trucks, which then sped to the harbor.
Only about half the gold had been loaded aboard the Glasgow when the jetty to which the ship was moored caught fire, too. Ordering a halt to the transfer, the Glasgow’s captain put his vessel full astern. Taking half the jetty with her, the Glasgow made her escape, zigzagging wildly down the fjord toward the open sea.*2
WITH HAAKON SAFE FROM the Germans, at least for the moment, and with British troops on their way home from central Norway, Ruge’s forces surrendered to the Germans on May 3. In Britain, Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of the evacuation stunned his countrymen; the realization that the world’s greatest sea power had been humiliated by Germany ignited a wave of fury and fear throughout the nation.
Aware that they were facing political disaster, Chamberlain and his ministers now cast about for a scapegoat. At a meeting of the War Cabinet, Winston Churchill, who as first lord of the admiralty had been the main architect of the slapdash Norwegian campaign, asserted that “blame should be attached not to us but to the neutrals, and we should take every opportunity of bringing this point up.” Following his own advice, Churchill declared in the House of Commons, “The strict observance of neutrality by Norway has been a contributory cause to the sufferings to which she is now exposed and to the limits of the aid which we can give her.” Many members of Parliament, however, refused to accept Churchill’s argument. Dissatisfaction with the Chamberlain government’s dilatory conduct of the war boiled over in a vitriolic two-day debate in the House on May 7 and 8; at its end, the prime minister barely won a vote of confidence.
Meanwhile, the Norwegians continued to resist. Although the war in southern and central Norway was over, an Allied force in the far north, composed of British, French, Polish, and Norwegian troops, was slowly gaining the upper hand over the Germans in a struggle for the crucial port of Narvik. Then, on May 10, a tsunami of events consigned the war in Norway to oblivion. Early that morning, millions of German troops, accompanied by swarms of tanks and aircraft, swept into the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in a lightning assault from the North Sea to the Moselle River. After being tested in Poland and Scandinavia, Hitler’s blitzkrieg was now slicing through the very heart of Europe.
That same afternoon, Neville Chamberlain, persuaded that he no longer commanded the confidence of the majority of his party and informed that neither Liberal nor Labour MPs would join a coalition government under his leadership, advised King George VI to send for Winston Churchill as the next prime minister. Years later, Churchill would acknowledge that “considering the prominent part I played [in the Norway disaster]…it was a marvel that I survived.” But, as the most prominent prewar opponent of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, he was seen, quite rightly, as the only major political figure in Britain with the energy, drive, and determination to lead the country in wartime.
On May 13, he proved his mettle as a warrior in a soaring speech to the House. “You ask what is our aim?” he said. “I can answer in one word: victory. Victory at all costs; victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be.” That single word, as far-fetched as its achievement seemed to be in those dark early days, would remain his touchstone for the war’s duration.