Churchill tends to be an obvious scapegoat for his rivals and for those who did not like him, so that when his colleagues wrote their memoirs they clung to his faults. A recent study of his stewardship of the military expedition to Norway has pointed out that virtually ‘every misstep and miscalculation during this campaign has been attributed directly to Churchill at one time or another’.15
Even now, it is not possible to explain how much of the defeat of the Allied counter-attack against the German invasion can be laid at Churchill’s door. For one thing, a lot of material is missing. When Stephen Roskill went to work in the Cabinet Office’s History Section in 1949, he discovered that the Admiralty’s War Diary had been destroyed, plus ‘all the daily signals’.16
From the picture that can be obtained from surviving records, it is unfair to blame Churchill for all that went wrong, as it is disingenuous to maintain, as Churchill did, that he had ‘no power to take and enforce decisions’, being merely one voice in a War Cabinet of nine.17 The truth is not found in the middle, but rather in a zigzag between impetuous decisions based on sudden intuitions which Churchill forced through, and then, when things did not go according to his plan, his willingness to retreat behind the shelter of collective responsibility. As far as Chamberlain was concerned, up until 27 April when the order was given to evacuate all Allied troops from Namsos and Åndalsnes, ‘no decision over Norway has been taken against his advice’.18 On the other hand, vital decisions were made by Churchill without the knowledge or agreement of the War Cabinet, starting on 8 April, the day of Operation ‘Wilfred’.
At the 11.30 a.m. War Cabinet on Monday 8 April, Churchill had given details of the minefield that had been laid six hours earlier in Vestfjorden.
Next, Churchill responded to the proliferation of Intelligence reports which indicated that a considerable force of heavy German ships had entered the North Sea, sailing northwards. He revealed that Admiral Forbes had left Scapa the previous evening at 8.30 with three battleships, two cruisers and ten destroyers to intercept them. Churchill admitted to Ministers that he had initially found it ‘hard to believe’ that Narvik ‘could possibly be’ the target for this sudden activity.19 The obvious presumption, based on a reading of Wegener’s book on German strategy, was that the enemy vessels – believed to include two of Germany’s biggest battleships – were heading for the North Atlantic to attack British convoys, as they had hoped to do for twenty years. Information received during the last three hours, however, had now convinced Churchill that the German force was ‘undoubtedly making towards Narvik’, but they would ‘no doubt be engaged’ by the Royal Navy.20
‘He sounded optimistic,’ Halifax wrote in his diary.21 ‘I hope he is right.’
Obscured from Halifax in the friction of war, and from the habit that Chamberlain shared with Churchill of keeping his Cabinet colleagues in the dark, was that an amphibious operation had become a purely naval one, but without any Minister at the Cabinet table registering the consequences. Bundled up in a list of measures announced by the First Lord was an important decision that the Cabinet had not discussed. Four cruisers of Admiral Cunningham’s First Cruiser Squadron at Rosyth, which had been on the point of sailing as part of ‘R.4’ for the purpose of forestalling the Germans at Stavanger and Bergen, in the event of a German reaction to ‘Wilfred’, were instead departing imminently to join Forbes and the Home Fleet in the North Sea. General Sir Ian Jacob, Military Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet, had ‘the clearest possible memory’ of Chamberlain asking Churchill whether the cruisers had sailed, or could sail, to put troops ashore in Norway, as intended, and Churchill looking ‘decidedly sheepish’, before replying that the troops had already disembarked in Rosyth so that the cruisers could leave to follow the Fleet.22 ‘The Prime Minister said “Oh,” and there was a distinct silence.’ Without regard to the broader requirements of Allied aims, and without a word to anyone in the War Cabinet, Churchill had unilaterally cancelled ‘R.4’, so ensuring that any landing operations could not be carried out in the near future. Nearly every setback experienced thereafter in the Norway Campaign flowed from this decision.
In the North Sea at the time, and maintaining radio silence, Admiral Forbes only later that afternoon and ‘much to my surprise’ heard about the instructions to disembark, confounding Churchill’s claim that ‘all these decisive steps were concerted with the Commander-in-Chief’.23 Nor was Churchill accurate in saying that the troops had already been marched ashore. Admiral Pound telephoned the order to Rosyth at 11.30 a.m., as the War Cabinet prepared to meet.24 It was confirmed by an Admiralty order at 12.16 p.m., and probably did not reach Admiral Cunningham until 12.30 p.m. at the earliest – that is to say, after the Cabinet was over. Had Chamberlain known the true situation – i.e. that troops were still on board – he might have chosen to countermand Churchill’s order.
Was Churchill free to make this decision without expecting Cabinet approval? The question is left unclear by the way that Chamberlain had set up his government. Chamberlain did not want anything in the nature of a small War Cabinet, because he was confident that he could do the job himself. He was a strong Prime Minister who brooked no brother near the throne, and he did not wish to have any Chief of Staff or Minister interfering. What this meant in practice was that there was no regulated system. Churchill was filling power in a vacuum created by the lack of central machinery, which the Admiralty was better equipped to fill than the two other services. Such a situation inevitably led to the Admiralty taking command, and Churchill was not reluctant to accept the implications.
The peremptory unloading of battalions earmarked for western Norway proved to be a tactical error of the first magnitude. There is no argument that the responsibility lay with Churchill, who had been caught with his pants down. In struggling to haul them up, he proceeded to commit blunder after strategic blunder. As the colonel in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Put Out More Flags told Cedric Lyne, the unfortunate officer in charge of embarking his regiment for Norway: ‘You seem to have made a pretty good muck-up.’25
Churchill’s intervention was to have huge repercussions. We can never know what would have happened if the ‘R.4’ troops had been sent to Bergen, Stavanger and Trondheim on 9 April with adequate naval support, and had Sola airport been recaptured. Norway might well have resisted a British landing. But the war might also have followed a different course. Geirr Haarr has spent seventeen years studying the Norwegian Campaign. ‘Though I generally do not like to speculate too much, it would have meant hard fighting and probably more destruction in Norway than what was eventually experienced, but it may also have meant no attack on the Western Front on 10 May.’26
Instead, Churchill’s order to disembark, made on his own initiative at the outset, laid the unstable foundation for a campaign in which, Harold Macmillan observed, ‘everything went wrong from start’.27
By chasing a naval victory, the Admiralty lost the initiative. Churchill and Pound had perceived that a naval operation was developing – possibly another battle of Jutland – and made a naval response, freeing up as many ships as they could. A quarter of a century after Jutland, Churchill was still reacting in the old tradition. Entrenched in Admiralty thinking that an unusual movement of heavy German ships meant a break-out into the Atlantic, he had failed to recognise that ‘Weserübung’ was an operation, according to the War Diary of the German Naval Staff, which ‘violated all the rules of naval warfare’.28
In the Admiralty Map Room, Churchill had kept his eyes trained north-west on the seas between the Shetlands and Iceland, and south towards the Skagerrak. In spite of ample warnings, he failed to look north-north-east, on which of all places he should have focused: Narvik. As a former First Lord, Leo Amery, told the Commons three weeks later: ‘Rarely in history can a feint have been more successful.’29
Someone directly touched by Churchill’s order was a twenty-one-year-old private in 4th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment. Today, Tom Fowler is ninety-seven and one of the very
last survivors of the Norway Campaign. It was the experience of Territorials like Fowler, raw, half-trained, poorly equipped, hopelessly led, which provided the ammunition for the opposition’s assault on the government in the Norway Debate.
Fowler was a milk-delivery boy in Spalding when he was called up. He learned how to use a rifle, and on 8 April, with kitbag packed, got on a train to the Royal Naval dockyard at Rosyth and there, in the morning, boarded the heavy cruiser HMS Berwick. In the event of a German counter-measure, the Berwick was destined for Bergen. Fowler says: ‘We hadn’t been on deck more than a few minutes before the captain spoke on the siren: “You have two hours to get off this boat with your kit or I’ll dump it overboard.”30 We learned she was going out to meet a German battleship that had just left Denmark.’
At 2.15 p.m. the cruisers departed in a hurry, leaving four battalions on the quay, but with their machine guns, mortars and equipment still on board.
Fowler carried his gear back to Camp 4 near Dunfermline: battledress, respirator, pouch, water bottle, and a 1914 Lee Enfield rifle. Four days later, he boarded a pre-war cruise ship, Empress of Australia, and was told to go down to the second deck for his new kit. The issue was the same as for winter in Tientsin, coldest of the army stations. Part of it was left over from the aborted Finnish Campaign: Marks & Spencer overalls for snow warfare, and an old stock of badges from the Non-Intervention Committee, with the NI turned upside down, Amery recalled, ‘so that it stands as IN for “International”’.31 Fowler was given a leather jacket, a pair of heavy boots, eight pairs of socks, three pairs of gloves, and a sleeping bag.
His ship sailed at 10 p.m. on 11 April in a convoy of twenty-five vessels that included four other liners, a battleship, two cruisers and twelve destroyers. For many of these young men it was their first trip at sea. There were high buffeting waves, and kippers for breakfast. Travelling also on the Empress of Australia in one of three Territorial Battalions of 146th Infantry Brigade was Frank Lodge, a nineteen-year-old Intelligence private with 4th Battalion King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI). Lodge wrote in an unpublished memoir: ‘I, along with the majority, went to the side of the ship and deposited the fish back to the fish.’
On the Monarch of Bermuda was forty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Walter Faulkner of 1st Battalion Irish Guards who would be buried in Narvik. He summoned his officers to the liner’s stateroom to reveal to them the orders that he had received in London. They were to land in Narvik, and occupy the peninsula. Maps would be issued. Then, hours later: ‘Gentlemen, I have just heard that neither of these is possible.33 The maps are in another ship and the Germans are in Narvik. H.Q.s are now trying to choose another base.’
Without warning on the evening of 14 April the convoy split in half. The Empress of Australia and two other liners dropped behind, veering south. There had been a further change of plan.
Tom Fowler says: ‘I didn’t know where we were going.’
On 12 April, a pressing message had come from Britain’s phlegmatic Minister to Oslo, Sir Cecil Dormer. He had handed the keys of the British Legation to Florence Harriman, and then joined the fugitive Norwegian King and government near the Swedish border. Dormer managed to wire a telegram to the Foreign Office. ‘Military assistance at Trondheim is first necessity.34 Seizure of Narvik of little assistance to Norwegian government.’
Trondheim – the ancient capital, where new kings were blessed – controlled the central and narrowest part of Norway, and was considered by almost every authority except Churchill of greater strategic significance than Narvik, 400 miles north. It possessed a deep harbour with extensive quays, an airfield, and a railway line, and in the view adopted by the War Office it was ‘the only base from which effective military action can be undertaken’.35 A force in occupation of Trondheim would be able to cut off the north of Norway from the south.
Blame has fallen on Churchill for diverting limited military resources away from Narvik before the town was captured. In fact, Halifax was behind the premature move to shoot Trondheim up the strategic scale. Only after the complete failure of the operation would Halifax admit that he had not been competent from a military point of view to judge whether Trondheim should have been the target. ‘It really is the devil having to express opinions on what is often such speculative knowledge.’36
A rumour leaked out from high in the Foreign Office that Lord Halifax had ‘threatened to resign unless Trondheim was attacked’ – even if such was not his habit; nor did the nature of his friendly, respectful relations with Chamberlain suggest anything of the kind.37 Still, it was rare for the Foreign Secretary to adopt a firm position on military matters. When he did so on 12 April, the War Cabinet took note. Halifax had been briefed by his Deputy Under-Secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, who wrote in a memo that ‘for all practical purposes, Norway ends at Trondheim’ – Narvik, Churchill’s baby, was no more important than John o’ Groats.38 Cadogan, too, emphasised that Trondheim was ‘the only thing that matters in Scandinavian eyes’.39
The situation was fast-moving. The Foreign Office had not known until a few hours earlier who was the head of the Norwegian army, or if it had surrendered. Halifax quickly measured the political implications, and he now insisted that securing Trondheim was ‘imperative from the political point of view’.40 The operation to take Narvik could wait if necessary.
In the grip of his Narvik obsession, Churchill was not in a mood to wait. His recommendation made only the day before, and accepted by the War Cabinet and the Supreme War Council, was that the capture of Narvik might take two weeks, and until then ‘no serious operations’ could be undertaken against Bergen or Trondheim.41 Halifax’s move threatened to undermine everything that he had been working towards. Churchill pointed out that an opposed landing in Trondheim would be a very difficult operation, and might ‘lead to a bloody repulse’.42 Preparations for another attack on Narvik by Admiral Whitworth were well advanced. This followed Captain Warburton-Lee’s action two days earlier, which would earn him a posthumous VC – the first of the war. On 10 April, Warburton-Lee, having sunk two and damaged three of the enemy’s ten destroyers, was mortally injured by a shell that exploded in the bridge of the Hardy shortly after he had sent the signal: ‘Keep on engaging the enemy’. No one was more susceptible than Churchill to the orders of a heroic sailor who had died on a nearby beach, and he wanted to ensure that ‘Wash’ Lee’s last instruction was obeyed.
Whitworth had sought permission to lead the attack, and Churchill was apprehensive of any proposal which might ‘mar its integrity or delay its speed’.43 He promised Halifax: ‘Once Narvik is cleared up, and we are established there, very good forces will be available for other enterprises.’44
But Churchill was unable to budge the Foreign Secretary, who had the support of the War Cabinet.
Bowing to the majority, Churchill only with great reluctance accepted the ‘very important political factor’.45 He revealed that he was already, in fact, investigating the landing of a small force at Namsos, a timber port a hundred miles north-east of Trondheim. Perhaps Namsos could operate as a forward base from which British troops might advance on Trondheim once the operation in Narvik was wound up.
At the 11.30 a.m. War Cabinet next day, Churchill’s hopes of keeping Narvik the priority suffered a further setback when the Prime Minister sided with Halifax in favour of shifting operations to support the Norwegian army in central Norway. Chamberlain was swayed not only by his Foreign Secretary, but by Admiral Evans who had telegrammed from Stockholm: ‘Most urgent that Trondheim be captured forthwith’; and by Prime Minister Reynaud from Paris: ‘Trondheim is now the vital point.’46, 47
Chamberlain’s resolve was further strengthened that afternoon by a series of frantic appeals transmitted to the mountains of Scotland from a portable wireless rigged to a hotel flagstaff near Hamar. These requested ‘immediate military and aerial assistance’ and culminated in a personal message to the Prime Minister.48
The ciphered telegram h
ad been sent by MI6 officer Frank Foley, using an emergency code based on a copy of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. It was composed by Major General Otto Ruge, the new Commander-in-Chief of Norway’s armed forces, who told Chamberlain that ‘we began this war in the belief that the British Government would act at once’, and if Ruge did not receive assistance ‘today or tomorrow’, then the war would end in a few days.49 In separate messages, Foley added that Ruge was ‘a very level-headed man’ and that his troops were ‘fighting almost with bare fists … unless Trondheim is captured at once by a ruthless attack, there will be a first class disaster from which the Allies will find it hard to recover.’50
Ruge’s appeal reached London at 5 p.m. Chamberlain was still framing his response when a signal arrived from Admiral Whitworth in the Norwegian Sea which determined the course that the Allies would take.
Propped up on pillows at Huntington Park and avid for news of his son, Colonel Romilly was revived to read in the Hereford Times how on 13 April Whitworth had sailed up Vestfjorden in the battleship Warspite with nine destroyers, and sunk all eight remaining German destroyers which had carried German troops to Narvik.
In the overcrowded Café Iris, Giles Romilly and the other British prisoners ran to the windows and watched ten biplanes swoop overhead – Swordfish from the carrier Furious. ‘One plane in diffys – disappeared very low over house, pilot waving from cockpit.’51 There was the muffled throb of faraway guns and the louder thump of bombs in the harbour. Romilly’s diary catches the chaos: fires on the quayside; German sailors straggling ashore in clinging soaked uniforms, gold buttons hanging loose; the wounded heaved up into lorries. ‘Three black horses careered over the bridge. Red X cars dashed down towards harbour.’ One of the makeshift ambulances, with tasselled curtains, was the iron-ore director’s car. ‘The window panes were misted with our breath.’
Six Minutes in May Page 10
