Eighty Years Ago This Week

The British campaign in central Norway more-or-less collapsed in the face of its own stratgical incoherence and German units operating on internal lines. The Germans had near complete air superiority; British supply bases were devastated by the Luftwaffe . The British were commanded by General Adrian Carton de Wiart, a much decorated veteran of the First World War in which he had been severely wounded eight times; it was said of him that he had one eye, one arm and, surprisingly, only one Victoria Cross. But bravery was not enough. The British abandoned Trondheim as an objective; it had been chosen on purely political grounds anyway. The evacuation of the southern component of the force began from Andalsnes and the northern element fought a successful rear-guard action in difficult terrain at Kvam, but in London the decision had been taken to pull out of the central region entirely.  The information reaching London was fragmentary and confused, but the opposition did not...

British involvement in the Norwegian campaign got firmly under way. Even though Britain had had adequate intelligence of the German invasion plan, the operations were largely improvised. Before the invasion Britain had been working on plans to land in the north of the country – under the pretext of assisting the Finns against the USSR – and block exports of iron ore to Germany. This was a pet project of Winston Churchill and he was at odds with the desire of British generals to focus on Trondheim in the centre. In the event the British divided their forces between both zones.  Recapturing Trondheim from the Germans became a political priority, advocated by the Norwegian government as proof that Britain meant business. The British began by considering a seaborne attack up the fjord. This was briefly championed by Churchill in an unhappy echo of his plans for the Dardanelles in 1915. This was dropped and the British opted for a poorly focused land operation. Separate army b...

The announcement that a new government with a complete cabinet had been formed in Norway under the leadership of the head of the country’s Nazi party, Vidkun Quisling, proved to be over hasty. King Haakon refused to approve Quisling’s seizure of power, which largely deprived him of his potential value as puppet ruler. The Germans dispensed with any pretence that they were anything but conquerors and appointed Josef Terboven as Reichskommissar . The only immediate outcome of Quisling’s attempted coup was to add a new word to the English language with quisling becoming a generic term for any collaborator or traitor. Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s arch-appeaser right-hand man, was swiftly rechristened Sir Horace Quisling. The Royal Navy went into action against the units of the Kriegsmarine that had brought German invasion forces to the north of Norway through the port of Narvik. British destroyers twice entered the fjord in what came to be known as the first and second bat...