Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  After the cancellation of ‘Avonmouth’, Churchill had written to France’s sixty-eight-year-old Commander-in-Chief, General Gamelin. ‘When an operation set for a particular day is postponed, the risks of leakage are, as you know so well, augmented.’135

  In contrast to the total secrecy demanded and achieved by Hitler, Allied security was, in David Dilks’s phrase, ‘deplorably insecure’.136 The trouble with the French, Chamberlain joked, was they could not keep a government for six months or a secret for half an hour. In Paris on 27 March, John Colville was shown ‘an alarming communiqué to the effect that the French had “leaked” about the project of laying a minefield in Norwegian waters and stopping the iron ore trade’.137 Next day, as Chamberlain was leaving No. 10 for the Supreme War Council meeting at the French Embassy, his attention was drawn to an article in Le Temps which ‘indicated a decision not to respect neutral territorial waters in view of their violation by Germany.’138 Chamberlain pointed the passage out to Premier Reynaud, who professed dismay. A denial was issued. But as the Swedish military attaché in London told General Ironside, after revealing that he too had heard that an Allied Force intended to land at Narvik: ‘You cannot keep anything secret with so many people with a finger in the pie.’139

  Gamelin on his visit to London that Thursday would accidentally leave behind Supreme War Council secrets in the foyer of a hotel owned by Italians.140 Yet British commanders were just as porous. A paragraph deleted from the final draft of The Gathering Storm describes the alleged state in which Major General Mackesy left for Narvik. The young female driver who conveyed Mackesy to his port of embarkation came immediately afterwards to the War Office ‘and stated it her duty to say that the General with 3 other officers on his staff had been heavily under the influence of liquor and she had heard their whole plan talked out as they went down in the car’.141 This was on 12 April, but the American General Raymond E. Lee, in Britain at the time, recorded that the Norway operations ‘were talked about so much that everyone in London had heard of them and the Germans knew all about them a considerable time before they started’.142

  Churchill had warned Geoffrey Shakespeare against discussing confidential information outside the Admiralty. ‘If anyone starts asking questions, change the subject and talk about the breeding of pigs.’143 Yet Churchill was not always obedient to his own instructions. On 2 February, he had dropped hints of British intentions at a secret conference with neutral press attachés. These remarks were noted in Germany. As was the row of Green Line buses waiting outside the Chelsea barracks of 1st Battalion Scots Guards.144 Written for anyone to read in large chalked letters on the side of the coaches: ‘See the midnight sun’, ‘North Pole Express’, ‘To Norway’.

  A French spanner in the works delayed ‘Wilfred’ by a further three days. Out of the blue, Daladier, who remained in charge of France’s defence, announced his concern about reprisals for the Rhine operation, ‘Royal Marine’. This was to have been conducted simultaneously to ‘Wilfred’, sending floating mines down the river. With set jaw, Daladier insisted that ‘Royal Marine’ be postponed by three months. The French War Committee agreed. Churchill flew over to Paris to break this ‘tragic impasse’, and to impress on both Reynaud and the divisive Daladier the folly of further delay.145

  On 5 April, after seven months of prevaricating, ‘Wilfred’ was given the green light to proceed by itself, on 8 April. But the consequences of the three lost days would be incalculable, as Hitler later acknowledged. ‘Thanks to our gaining a few hours’ advantage over the enemy, Britain’s most dangerous attempt failed; the attempt to strike us to the very heart in the North.’146

  The last-minute hiccup had coincided with Churchill’s promotion in a Cabinet reshuffle on 2 April,fn2 147, 148 putting him in charge of the Military Coordination Committee (MCC). The coordination of the fighting services had long been Churchill’s dream – ‘Winston has hankered after this all his life,’ Leo Amery had told Chamberlain eleven years earlier.149 In the calculation of the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Inskip, ‘1st L now becomes almost equal in power to the P.M. In fact, he is Lord Haldane’s Minister of Defence.’150 This was how Maisky interpreted the news – as did General von Falkenhorst, after hearing of Churchill’s boast that every German ship using the Skagerrak and Kattegat straits would now be sunk. It was, wrote Maisky, nothing less than ‘putting Churchill in charge of the armed forces of Great Britain’, which may have been how Churchill also perceived his promotion.151

  As it was, Chamberlain could report to his sister, ‘Winston is in seventh heaven … there is no misunderstanding between us.152 He has told me that he deeply appreciates the confidence I have given him and that he will endeavour to respond to it, and I know from various colleagues and others that he invariably speaks of me in the warmest & most loyal terms.’

  On the eve of Operation ‘Wilfred’, Churchill still failed to envisage the German response. At the War Cabinet on 3 April, confirmed in his new position, he ‘personally doubted whether the Germans would land a force in Scandinavia’.153 Lord Chatfield, whom Churchill had replaced as chair of the MCC, remarked that Churchill ‘always rather pooh-poohed the idea that Germany could do anything in Norway’.154

  At the same time, Churchill rather hoped that Germany would react to his innocent, rabbit-eared bait, and ‘commit some overt act upon the soil of Norway’.155 In the event of German counter-measures to ‘Wilfred’, Ironside and Gamelin had agreed to send British and French forces to occupy Narvik, Stavanger, Bergen and Trondheim. Troops hastily reassembled from the aborted ‘Avonmouth’ expedition to Finland were to make up the force, now renamed ‘R.4’. They would sail in three convoys from Rosyth ‘the moment the Germans set foot on Norwegian soil or there was clear evidence they intend to do so’.156

  Why Churchill failed to act on the mass of evidence that was brought to his attention remains unclear. He may have believed that the inferior Kriegsmarine would never risk a confrontation with the Royal Navy. Or he may have wished to minimise to the War Cabinet any cause for concern that, once raised, might again have postponed ‘Wilfred’. But the signs were there, and flashing, as Leo Amery told the House of Commons on 7 May. ‘It was known everywhere that Hitler had designs on Scandinavia.’

  In early April, there were reports of ships loaded with troops leaving Stettin; of bars and restaurants crowded with ‘new officers of all kinds’.157 Amery heard that RAF planes returning from leaflet drops on 6 April had flown over the Baltic ports ‘and found forts, docks, everywhere, brilliantly illuminated in order to enable the work of embarkation to proceed at full speed.158 What an opportunity for damaging the German expedition at the outset!’ But the accuracy of the intelligence was matched only by the Admiralty’s failure to interpret it correctly.

  The first signs of any movement reached the Admiralty at 6.37 a.m. on Sunday 7 April. A large unidentified German ship had been spotted the night before steaming north of Heligoland. Admiral Pound was salmon-fishing at Broadlands, and it was not thought necessary to disturb him. Then at 2.35 p.m., the Admiralty received a message from the British naval attaché in Denmark who that morning had driven south of Copenhagen to investigate rumours of German minesweepers. He observed ‘German warships Gneisenau or Blücher with two cruisers and three destroyers’, and remarked on ‘their probable Norwegian destination’.159 Ralph Edwards, duty captain at the Admiralty that evening, took this message straight to a ‘well dined’ Churchill who looked at it and said: ‘I don’t think so.’160, 161

  Nor had Churchill been perturbed earlier in the day by news that a German force of ‘100 Ships’ was reported passing through the Great Belt at 2 a.m. and that RAF Hudsons had sighted ‘one cruiser and six destroyers escorted by aircraft’ steering west of Horns Reef at 8.48 a.m.162 The suggestion that this unusual movement of enemy ships 100 miles from the German coast might signal a break-out from the Royal Navy’s blockade of German ports, and even form ‘some operation against southern Scandinavia’, as Vice Admiral Tom
Phillips, Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, had advised Churchill, was dismissed as ‘in principle fantastic’.163, 164 At that moment, it remained inconceivable that Germany would try to invade Western Norway, let alone Narvik, across 1,300 inhospitable miles of the North Sea. These ships were ‘evidently doing [an] exercise’.165

  At 2 p.m. in Scapa, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet, received a telegram from the Admiralty which bore Churchill’s imprint. ‘All these reports are of doubtful value and may well be only a further move in the war of nerves.’166

  On that afternoon of 7 April, Churchill still only had eyes for his imminent operation near Narvik.

  In the early hours of Monday 8 April, Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee on HMS Hardy escorted four destroyers of 20th Minelaying Flotilla inside Norwegian territorial waters to mine the approaches to the Leads south of Vestfjorden, in a severe violation of Norwegian neutrality. ‘The war is going to start quite soon,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘I am going to start it.’167

  The Swedish Foreign Secretary was in London that morning. When he learned that the Royal Navy had laid mines off the north Norwegian coast, he told Cadogan that the British had done ‘the silliest thing in history’.168

  The First Lord was elated, though. A combination of his recent new powers to direct the policy of the fighting services, and the opportunity to take charge of his first serious offensive naval action since Gallipoli, made him more cheerful than his colleagues had seen him in months. To General Ironside, ‘he was like a boy this morning describing what he had done to meet the Germans’.169 Churchill had telephoned Halifax at breakfast to tell him that the operation had ‘all gone without a hitch’.170 He was still buoyant when Halifax saw him at Cabinet, and he continued to be in a state of barely suppressed euphoria when he dined that evening with two members of the War Cabinet: Oliver Stanley, Secretary of State for War, and Samuel Hoare, the new Secretary of State for Air. ‘Winston very optimistic,’ Hoare wrote in his diary.171 ‘Delighted with minelaying, and sure that he had scored off the Germans. He went off completely confident and happy at 10.30.’

  Churchill’s pleasure was shared by a public famished for signs that the navy was there, and that Herr Hitler had indeed missed the bus. At 5.30 p.m. Pam Ashford, a secretary in Glasgow, was travelling home from work. ‘The man who sat next to me on the bus spread his paper out very wide, and said to me, “the battle has begun”.172 He beamed. In all my 22 years in Scotland, never has a stranger spoken to me on a vehicle.’

  4

  THE FIRST CRUNCH

  ‘Faultless timing,’ said Basil cheerfully.1 ‘That’s always been Hitler’s strong point.’

  EVELYN WAUGH, Put Out More Flags

  The Phoney War ended for General Ismay with a telephone call that woke him from a profound sleep in the early hours of 9 April. ‘It was the Duty Officer at the War Cabinet office.2 I could not make head or tail of what he was saying, in spite of frequent requests for repetition; so suspecting the trouble, I suggested that he should draw the black-out curtains, switch on the lights, find his false teeth and say it all over again. My diagnosis was evidently correct, because after a pause he started speaking again and was perfectly intelligible. His report was brutal in its simplicity. The Germans had seized Copenhagen, Oslo and the main ports of Norway. As I hurried into my clothes, I realised, for the first time in my life, the devastating and demoralising effect of surprise.’

  Cadogan was telephoned at the Foreign Office at 8 a.m. ‘No news from the Fleet – “wireless silence” – rather ominous.3 Germans seem to have got in to Narvik! How?!’

  Thirty minutes later, General Ironside denied reports that Narvik had been taken. ‘Our information was that the Germans were not in occupation there,’ he advised the War Cabinet, at which it was agreed that ‘R.4’, the forces assembled at Rosyth, should depart at once for Narvik, Bergen and Trondheim.4

  The silence of the Fleet – a standard security measure – gave Colville and the No. 10 staff nothing to go on. ‘We listened to the news which was derived almost entirely from German sources: scarcely a word from our own.’5 Pious statements from Berlin announced that Germany had occupied Denmark and Norway ‘to protect their freedom and independence’. At 11 a.m., von Ribbentrop held a press conference. ‘The German Government has the proof that French and British General Staff officers were already on Scandinavian soil, preparing the way for an Allied landing.’6 He boasted that no Englishman or Frenchman would be able to set foot in Norway till the war was over. The government-controlled press was ecstatic – ‘One of the most brilliant feats of all time’ (Angriff); ‘Germany saves Scandinavia!’ (Völkischer Beobachter). Meanwhile, Hitler celebrated with a group of his closest collaborators. ‘In the same way as from the year 1866 Bismarck’s Reich evolved, the greater Germanic Reich will come into being from to-day.’7

  The Ambassador in London who represented Nazi Germany’s new Soviet ally had had no forewarning. ‘What a sharp and unexpected turn of events!’ Maisky wrote in his diary.8 ‘Only yesterday the British were planning for a lengthy Sitz-Krieg; today, the Germans have made Blitz-Krieg the order of the day.’

  Louis Spears compared the impact to live shells exploding at a picnic. ‘Little girls could not be more taken aback had they found some of their dolls developing genuine whooping cough and going blue in the face.’9 Incredulity was a common response. Lunching at the Beefsteak, Harold Nicolson was assured by another member that there was ‘no chance of Narvik having been occupied’.10 It was a misreading. This seemed confirmed at 4 p.m. by a hesitant Prime Minister in the Commons. When asked whether German troops were in Narvik, Chamberlain replied that he was ‘very doubtful’, and that it was ‘very possible’ they had landed in a port with ‘a very similar name’ 800 miles to the south, Larvik.fn1 11, 12, 13

  Equal confusion reigned in Paris, where General Gamelin arrived at the Quai d’Orsay to find Premier Reynaud ‘despatches in hand, trying to locate on the map the names which appeared in the telegrams’.14 Reynaud asked Gamelin what he thought they should do, and said it was a cruel surprise for the Allies to find themselves anticipated in ‘an operation we had devised for our convenience’. Unmoved, Gamelin answered: ‘War consists of the unexpected.’

  The confusion in London and Paris was nothing to that felt in Norway, which had battled so hard to remain neutral. When the Norwegian King – shortly to become a symbol of national resistance – was told that Norway was at war with Germany, he badly wanted to know whether ‘Norway was against Germany or with her’.15 At 7.32 p.m., Quisling removed all doubt after he entered the national radio station in Oslo, and created outrage in the general population by giving a five-minute broadcast in which he announced that he was taking over as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to form a national government, and then read out a list of eight ministers none of whom were known.

  The Allied governments knew no more than they were able to sift from Leland Stowe, who told the story of Quisling in a way that made people suspicious thereafter of any Norwegian. The details amazed. Hitler was turning out to be the Bonaparte of a mad wonderland, thought Spears. ‘Judging by the way the Germans descended on Norway, it was quite obvious the walrus was right – pigs had wings!’16 The Chancellor, John Simon, could not disguise his admiration for the Nazis’ ‘clock-like precision’.17 It was very clever, he told colleagues, ‘and we were ninnies, we were ninnies!’18

  How the Germans had taken Norway from under the teeth of the British Navy was the mystery. ‘The Navy is here!’ had been Churchill’s war cry. Yet Ambassador Maisky, listening to Chamberlain’s statement in Parliament, reported that ‘all had one and the same question on their minds: where the devil was our navy? … in the corridors of the House, the navy’s miraculous disappearance was the only subject of conversation.’19

  Somewhere out in the North Sea, trying to block exits into the Atlantic, the much superior forces of the Home Fleet continued to scan the blurred horizon, with the penny only now begi
nning to drop that Norway and not the Atlantic was the enemy’s destination, and that the movements reported forty-eight hours earlier formed no part of any nautical exercise. Not since the Dreadnought hoax of 1910, when, led by Neville Chamberlain’s brother-in-law, a group of fake African princes inspected the fleet and bestowed invented honours, had the Royal Navy provoked such derision. Ironside was scathing. ‘We have bungled badly … a frightful piece of carelessness on the part of the Navy.’20 He feared that Hitler’s move on Norway was a curtain-raiser for an attack nearer home.

  Impatient, Churchill awaited signals from the North Sea, where a violent storm was now raging. He telegraphed Admiral Forbes, the Home Fleet’s Commander-in-Chief, asking him to break radio silence. ‘It is sometimes difficult to understand what you are doing and why.’21 The difficulty of communicating in order to mount a counter-attack was exacerbated by a damaged wireless aerial on Vice Admiral William ‘Jock’ Whitworth’s flagship HMS Renown, and a failure to supply some destroyers with the correct signalling instructions. In atrocious weather, which prevented their execution and in some instances their reception, orders and counter-orders streamed out from the Admiralty into the fog.