At 4.37 a.m., Broch was woken by a terrific blast, followed by another. His small daughter appeared barefoot in the doorway. ‘Is it Christmas?’ Broch thought that it might be the Ore Company, dynamiting.
At the Royal Hotel, two ‘abominable, insulting bangs’ also woke Romilly who had been chatting with Broch in the lobby a few hours before.9 ‘I was going to Bergen that morning and fretting a bit because I knew I had to get up early to catch the boat; an 8-inch gun was my alarm-clock – three hours too early.’10
The person who leapt out of bed was five foot six, dark-haired, and rather pugnacious-looking, says his son. ‘What he did next was very stupid of him, and it banged him up for five years.’11
Romilly pulled open the burgundy curtains, but all he could see in the leaden half-light was snow and driving sleet. He called the hall clerk, who stammered: ‘Yes. Yes. It is trouble in the river.’ Romilly laced on his boots and ran downstairs, into the lounge where he had drunk beer with young officers from the Norwegian coastal vessel Norge. Unbeknownst to him, the Norge had just been sunk by the German destroyer Bernd von Arnim in the first explosion, with the loss of 105 men; a second coastal vessel Eidsvold had been sunk by the destroyer Wilhelm Heidkamp, with the loss of 177.
Now crowding the lounge were officers of the Norwegian garrison ‘buttoning shirts over hairy chests, fumbling with boots, buckling belts … picking sleep off their eyelids’. Romilly followed them outside, rifles clutched, down the slippery slope leading to the quay. The dawn fog pulsed with flames. Then out of the mist there emerged several shapes, kneeling on one knee and with rifles at the shoulder, ‘as close, straight, and fixed as altar rails’.12 The German troops wore white camouflage tunics, and had wrapped white towels around their helmets. The Norwegian soldiers whispered amongst themselves. Their orders had been to fight any invader who threatened their country’s neutrality, but one of them pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and waved it in surrender.
‘I dashed back,’ Romilly wrote in the diary that he lent to Churchill after the war, ‘but they were already on my heels. They went in brandishing pistols, shouting for “papers!” and for the British Consul. They were screaming for him. A posse was rushed up to his room. He was gone.’13
Romilly’s hotel swarmed with German officers, grenades dangling from belts. Their claret-collared commander, Lieutenant General Eduard Dietl of 139th Mountain Regiment, arrived by taxi; tall, with a narrow sharp face and a slight stoop, he was followed indoors by the cab driver, who complained that the general had not paid his fare from the pier. Dietl issued a polite declaration explaining his mission. ‘I want to make it clear from the start that we have come as friends, to protect your country against any further British breaks of your neutrality … Norway is now occupied peacefully in the name of Der Führer.’14
The British Consul, George Gibbs, a sixty-year-old former naval captain, had fled the hotel to a tool-shed on the outskirts of Narvik, where he lived out the next three weeks posing as a deaf mute. Romilly was not so lucky. He wrote to his parents three weeks later: ‘I got captured through being too interested in the “story”!’15 An armed guard escorted Romilly into the hotel reception office where the flaxen-haired proprietress ‘fluttered around crazily … She barely understood my request to settle my bill.’16 Romilly’s British passport was confiscated. His first wife Mary remembers: ‘He was upset that he hadn’t thrown it away.17 He could have posed as a Swede.’ He was locked in his room. The German soldier posted outside his door commiserated. ‘Das ist Pech für Sie.’18 This is bad luck for you.
At 9 p.m., dressed in a Swedish fur hat and carrying a brown suitcase, Romilly was marched downstairs and across the railway line, through the snow, to the Villaveien school, an austere, four-storey building next to a black stone church. A light was switched on, bodies stirred. Romilly stood in a classroom, desks pushed together – and lying on the wooden floor dozens of men covered with blankets, sailors from five British ore ships.
‘What ship are you off, brother?’
Romilly replied that he was a journalist.
‘Room for you here, journy!’19
The light was switched off.
Romilly had lived in the East End, distributing copies of the Daily Worker, before he went to fight for the Communists in Spain. He felt a kinship with these sailors. Mary says: ‘When I read his account of him in the schoolroom, I thought: “This is the real Giles.”’
At 4.30 a.m. on 10 April there were explosions, gunfire, sirens. Out in the harbour, a naval battle was going on. The prolonged bombardment rattled the windows.
Later that morning, German soldiers moved the prisoners to a classroom on the floor above. Beyond the church spire, the harbour lay in sunshine. Thick black smoke rose from the oily water which was now ‘a forest of mast tops of sunken ships’.20 Of the twenty-seven merchant ships anchored there the night before, only half remained afloat following what Romilly learned had been a counter-attack by the Royal Navy.
Major Alfred Haussels, a ‘dominating and brutal’ Nazi, was in charge of the British prisoners.21 He ordered that new quarters be procured for them. The rooms did not need to be good.
At 4 p.m., the British merchant seamen plus Romilly walked with their gear in a ragged column down the hill to a café on the corner of the main square where they joined fourteen survivors of the destroyer HMS Hunter who sat in blankets ‘without a stitch of clothing between them’. The Hunter had gone down in the dawn engagement, her sailors having to plug a shell hole in the engine room with towels. Fished out of the middle of the icy fjord, the men were still shivering.
The 109 prisoners were jammed in tight in the long narrow Café Iris. Some stretched themselves out on glass-topped tables placed end to end, which cracked. Romilly elbowed himself space on the brown lino floor and used the woollen dressing gown that he had managed to bring with him as a blanket.
The enormous café windows had a panorama of all that was going on in town. Romilly could see the harbour and watch the ships steam in and out. From the British sailors, from an Austrian guard and from Mayor Broch, who visited the prisoners, he was able to scribble out a ‘very rapid survey of first few days as prisoner … Stiff toilet roll only writing paper available.’22
Romilly had arrived in Narvik on 5 April from Sweden after receiving a midnight call from the Daily Express to go and report ‘on the general situation there and also on any possible developments arising out of it, should there be any’.23 There had been whispers all winter that the British Navy planned to halt Germany’s iron supply by laying mines at the southern approaches to Vestfjorden, the wide fjord that formed the entrance to Ofotfjorden and to Narvik harbour. The Narvik operation, codenamed ‘Wilfred’, had remained Churchill’s ‘pet project’ throughout the Phoney War. Only on 5 April had the Supreme War Council given it the go-ahead. ‘Wilfred’ was fixed for 8 April.
Before taking part in the British counter-attack on 10 April, HMS Hunter had been one of the destroyers accompanying the minelayers. The last man overboard succeeded in rescuing the Hunter’s log, which Romilly transcribed. ‘Monday April 8, 3 a.m. entered Norwegian waters. Minelaying. Armed Norwegian trawler asked what we were doing. He said: ‘F … off.’ He was informed that there was a minefield ahead of him …’
A total of 234 Mark 17 contact mines, each containing 1,210 kilograms of TNT, were laid at a depth of twelve feet in the approaches to Vestfjorden, in a triangular shape ‘from shore to seven miles out’.24 Half an hour later, a broadcast made to the world explained the necessity for this action in Norwegian territorial waters.
But the Germans had outmanoeuvred the Allies. Even as the Admiralty congratulated itself for seizing the initiative, military planners in London and Paris failed to recognise that they were on the back foot already. At the same time as the minelaying was taking place, unsuspected by the British and French, despite no shortage of warning signs, the largest invasion fleet that Germany had put to sea in twenty years was converging at twen
ty-two knots per hour on the Norwegian coast.
One of Romilly’s Austrian guards told him: ‘In war, speed is everything!’ The guard revealed how ten German destroyers had left Wesermünde on 6 April, and had taken a little over two days to reach Narvik, 1,240 miles away.25 Bad weather had allowed the convoy to slip past the British fleet into Vestfjorden. The British minefield was too near the coast to be in the way of the German ships.
The German destroyers each carried up to 200 mountain troops, all able to ski. The diary of a young Alpine soldier from Steiermark, Klaus Herman Klaushauser, dated 7 April 1940, and later found by Mayor Broch in the abandoned German quarters at the Seamen’s Home, described a parade in Bremen on 6 April and speeches by officers who assured Klaushauser that he was about to fight for the Führer in one of the most audacious military expeditions in history. Their destination was not disclosed. Chatting in their hammocks, the men guessed Scotland, Iceland or the French Channel ports. Not till 8 April were they informed that it was Norway. Klaushauser wrote: ‘We did not know very much about the country or about the people we were going to visit,’ but one of his officers explained it over a beer. ‘We were to protect our racial brethren and bring the New Order to the Land of the Midnight Sun.’26
The explosions that woke Romilly in the Royal Hotel were part of a meticulous surprise attack across Norway that had been planned since February. Oslo, 900 miles south of Narvik, was occupied at 2 p.m. by a few hundred lightly armed troops flown in by Ju-52 transport aircraft. Leland Stowe, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, stood on his hotel balcony and watched them marching three abreast down the main street while a military band played ‘Schön blüh’n die Heckenrosen’ – How beautiful bloom the wild roses. ‘Six mounted Norwegian policemen led the way. We could scarcely believe our eyes.’ Behind the police ambled a pouchy-eyed general – the invasion force commander Nikolaus von Falkenhorst – and then came the German regulars with machine guns on their shoulders. ‘They were hard muscled and they had lots of iron in their faces, the coolest cucumbers I have ever seen in uniform anywhere.’27 With the same ruthless speed and suddenness, German troops had seized Bergen, Trondheim, and – in the first offensive use of parachutists in history – the airport at Stavanger. Locked up in the Café Iris, Giles Romilly was prevented from reporting what Stowe was excitably telling himself was maybe ‘the most important and constructive story you have ever filed for a newspaper at any time in your life’.28 It fell to Stowe from his restricted and not well-informed vantage point to reveal to the world how ‘an unbelievable Nazi plot’ had been perpetrated ‘almost without a hitch and with amazing boldness and efficiency … within the incredible space of 12 staggering fantastic hours’.29
More than a week had passed when a German lieutenant in a forage cap ordered Romilly to pack and come with him back to the hotel. It was Romilly’s first exercise in nine days, during which he had lived ‘practically on starvation ration’.30 The soles of his boots slid about on the thawing uphill road, and he felt weak. What he remembered afterwards was ‘the snow, snow, snow and terrible gauntness of Narvik’.31 He wrote to his parents: ‘You can’t imagine how mortally sick of snow one gets – really a painful feeling.’32 It returned him to a Christmas at Chartwell when he had built an igloo with his brother and cousins.
The lieutenant led the way into the lounge. There was blackout paper on the windows. Romilly watched the carcasses of eleven pigs file past on the shoulders of German marines.
‘Well, Mr Romilly, how do you feel now?’ the lieutenant asked.
A black beard had grown over Romilly’s face. He had no clean underpants and had a racking headache after surviving on dry bread and coffee in sub-zero temperatures. In Kiruna, which he had visited prior to Narvik, the trams which carried the miners up the side of the iron mountain were centrally heated for ten months of the year. In the Café Iris, there had been no insulation against the cold.
‘Fairly well, thank you.’
‘What will your uncle say when he hears what has happened to you?’
‘I don’t suppose I shall be a consideration of policy.’
‘You have an uncle who is a high personality in English politics, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, Churchill.’33
A proclamation by General von Falkenhorst had singled out Romilly’s uncle as the British politician responsible for the presence of German troops in Norway. ‘Winston Churchill, the greatest warmonger of the century, who already during the First World War was a disaster for all mankind, has openly declared that legal factors will not stop him. He has prepared the attack on the Norwegian and Danish coasts.34 Days ago he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British armed forces.’
Early on 23 April, Romilly was removed from Narvik by flying boat. His last diary entry read: ‘The Nazis are taking me to Germany.35 I was only able to write this because one of the plane’s engines failing to fire and so they have dumped me in the Café Iris again to await completion of repairs. I am leaving these notes behind me in the hope that they will somehow be delivered in England.’
The Daily Express had reported Romilly’s arrest under the headline: ‘Nephew of Churchill Held.’ Churchill tried to make light of the news at the 11.30 a.m. War Cabinet on 12 April. He told Halifax that it ‘caused him no concern at all; the Nazis were welcome to him’.36
Yet Churchill had been a young journalist held by the enemy – as a prisoner of the Boers – and there are signs that he was affected by his nephew’s capture. While his concern for Romilly did not govern his strategy, it haunted Churchill for a substantial part of the ensuing Norway Campaign; not in the forefront of his mind, but in the sense that he was constantly thinking about it.
Time and again in the Norway Debate, politicians stood up to ask why Churchill had attached ‘undue importance’ to this ore-town and to question his indestructible enthusiasm for seizing it. Narvik was a dead end – geographically and from most military and political aspects. Once the Germans had taken Narvik, the sensible thing would have been to leave them there, says Geirr Haarr, Norway’s foremost authority on the campaign. ‘The British have stopped the iron ore.37 The Germans can’t be reinforced by sea, and their airlift capacity is minuscule. But Churchill is hooked on the north, obsessed. He uses all arguments for an attack, and shelves all those against. Narvik becomes a slogan. Why is he hooked?’
No satisfying answer is found in the records.
When speculating about Romilly’s role in Churchill’s motivations for focusing on Narvik, it is interesting to note the rumours concerning Romilly’s younger brother Esmond. Esmond’s wife, Jessica Mitford, learned the story of Esmond’s paternity from her sister Nancy. ‘“Everyone knows he’s Winston’s son.” I pressed for details and she told me about a Mediterranean cruise on which the Romillys and the Churchills went some months before Esmond’s birth and during which Churchill had an affair with his sister-in-law … I don’t think I took the story too seriously. Nancy had a wonderfully active imagination.’38
There is no disputing that Winston and Romilly’s mother, Clementine’s sister Nellie, were close. Churchill called her ‘La Nellinita’. Nellie, in a letter to Churchill four weeks after Romilly’s capture, called him ‘my dearest love’. John Colville once caught them together on a sofa in Chequers, where Churchill was ‘reading telegrams, dictating manuscript comments, and carrying on a conversation with Mrs Romilly (who was most outrageously reading the telegrams too) all at the same time’.39 In order to unpick the puzzle of Churchill’s stubborn attachment to Narvik during the two weeks when Giles Romilly was held prisoner there, Churchill’s emotional ties with Giles and his mother have to be considered.
Nellie divided her life between a cottage on the Chartwell estate, where she helped Clementine with household chores, and Huntington Park in Herefordshire, looking after her sick husband, who battled with throat cancer.
Giles’s father was Colonel Bertram Romilly, described in Misdeal, a self-pitying novel that Nellie wrote un
der a pseudonym, as ‘a stern-looking man with an expression of permanent sorrow on his face …’40 In 1915, while fighting with the Scots Guards in France, Bertram had suffered a head wound which for the rest of his life made him sensitive to noise and stress. Invalided home from Neuve Chapelle, he had fallen in love with Nellie, then working as a nurse, who accepted his second proposal only after a doctor said that much depended on her, even though a voice seemed to whisper: ‘No, no. Escape while there is yet time.’41 Her sister Clementine wrote to Churchill: ‘I don’t believe she loves him at all, but is simply marrying him out of pity.’42
It was a difficult marriage. Giles and Esmond knew their father as a semi-invalid in constant pain who sat stiffly upright and said little, hoping only that they would join the Brigade of Guards. He was absent during much of their childhood – ‘a perambulating vacuum’ in Stephen Spender’s phrase – first as Military Governor of Galilee, then as Chief Instructor of the Military School in Cairo.43 Inevitably, the boys viewed their famous uncle as a more effective paternal figure. Like Bertram, Churchill had seen action in South Africa, the Sudan, and in France, where the family legend was that he had worn Colonel Romilly’s uniform while waiting at St Omer for an offer of higher military employment. Giles’s wife Mary was told the story of how Churchill had squeezed into his brother-in-law’s much smaller uniform when, after Gallipoli, he had quitted politics and returned to his first career of soldiering.
Now retired, Bertram lived at Huntington Park, the family’s 400-acre estate near Kington, in a gloomy mid-Georgian country house which Giles later bulldozed, considering it ‘a big-shouldered structure of decent brick, though architecturally a heap of luggage’.44 Giles was much fonder of his uncle’s house in Kent, which became a second home. He and Esmond spent their holidays and Christmases at Chartwell, where Churchill nicknamed them ‘the Lambs’ – after Nellie’s habit of leaving table ‘to see how the lambs were’. They were staying there when Churchill was working on the second volume of Marlborough. He impressed both brothers with the way that he concentrated on his work, and was willing to ask an expert about some particular technical problem. For the first part of the morning, Esmond recalled, the expert delivered a lecture to their uncle. ‘For the latter part, my uncle delivered the same lecture to the expert!’45
Six Minutes in May Page 4
