Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Romilly wrote that Whitworth’s bombardment had left German forces in Narvik ‘without a single ship, almost munitionless and almost foodless, and without communications except by air’.52 Out in Vestfjorden, Whitworth recognised that if there was a moment to strike then it was now. He signalled to Admiral Forbes at 10.10 p.m. that the German garrison was ‘thoroughly frightened’ and he recommended that ‘the town be occupied without delay’.53

  The hope which flared for Romilly’s parents that Giles would soon be rescued was echoed within the Admiralty by his uncle. What had been considered a major obstacle – ‘for which long and severe fighting will be required,’ Churchill had warned Pound – was suddenly no more than a mopping-up operation.54 In the afterglow of Whitworth’s victory, Churchill regarded Narvik as taken. Bounding ahead of himself, he saw no reason why the navy might not repeat a similar ‘deed of fame’ in central Norway to satisfy the ambitions of his Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.55 Some of the reinforcements destined for Narvik could without detriment to that operation, now called ‘Rupert Force’, be sent 400 miles south to Trondheim.

  At 2 a.m. Churchill went to see an exhausted and irritable General Ironside in his room at the War Office. It was the second time in two days that Churchill had interrupted Ironside in the early hours. At 1 a.m. on 12 April, he had already floated to Ironside the idea of despatching part of ‘Rupert Force’ to Namsos with a view to ‘staking out a claim’ for Trondheim.56 On that first occasion, Ralph Edwards had judged Churchill to be ‘half-cocked as usual’.57 Edwards reported that the meeting was going well ‘when Winston lost his temper and spoiled the whole show’.

  Ironside’s reaction had been hardly less stable. ‘Maddening,’ he barked back.58 He admitted in his diary: ‘I am afraid I lost my temper and banged on the table.’ He then snapped at Churchill to wait until the troops had taken Narvik. ‘A convoy packed for one place is not suitable for landing at another.’

  Yet barely forty-eight hours later, Ironside’s concern was rendered trifling to Churchill in the glare of Whitworth’s ‘brilliant operation’.59 Brimming with the latest naval action at Narvik, and under renewed pressure from Chamberlain – already the Prime Minister envisaged ‘a direct attack with warships up the fjiord “a la Narvik”’ – Churchill again confronted Ironside.60 ‘Tiny, we are going for the wrong place.61 We should go for Trondheim.’

  Ironside protested ‘with some heat’ that if part of the force approaching Narvik were detached, it stood to imperil both operations. But flexing his new authority as Chairman of the MCC, which gave him more influence over strategy, Churchill ‘on his own’, according to Admiral Godfrey, insisted that the rear half of the convoy, carrying the three Territorial Battalions of 146th Infantry Brigade, plus ‘the administrative services and much of the supplies for the troops in the front half’, should be diverted to Namsos.62 He tasked Ironside with landing forces further south at Åndalsnes as well. ‘This unexpected disruption,’ wrote Godfrey, ‘surpassed in futility the loading, unloading and reloading of the Dardanelles convoy at Alexandria in 1915.’

  By way of illustrating the point that ‘bright ideas in the middle of the night are not always very bright in the morning’, Churchill once told Major General Kennedy, Chief of Staff of the original operation to capture Narvik, of a dream in which a philosopher saw the secret of the universe revealed.63 He wrote it down on a piece of paper, and when he woke in the morning found that he had written: ‘A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole.’

  Churchill’s idea for seizing Trondheim carried the same whiff. ‘Left to myself I would have stuck to my first love, Narvik, but serving as I did a loyal chief and friendly Cabinet, I now looked forward to the exciting enterprise to which so many staid and cautious Ministers had given their strong adherence …’64

  The signal from the Admiralty reached the Narvik convoy at 7.28 p.m. on 14 April. Shortly afterwards, the Empress of Australia – with Fowler and Lodge on board, who had originally been loaded and prepared for Bergen, then unloaded and reloaded for Narvik – changed course again, this time for Namsos, as part of Churchill’s latest plan to take Trondheim. That same evening a message was sent from No. 10 via Wick in Scotland to Major General Ruge in Norway. Chamberlain had used a passage of Ruskin for his cipher. ‘WE ARE COMING AS FAST AS POSSIBLE AND IN GREAT STRENGTH’.65

  6

  FLEA AND LOUSE

  ‘We disembarked, our odd little party being the first British troops to land in Norway.’1

  MARTIN LINDSAY, 17 May 1940

  ‘No single action of mine had done anybody in Namsos any good.’2

  PETER FLEMING, 16 May 1970

  The War Cabinet’s vacillations infuriated France’s new Prime Minister Paul Reynaud. ‘While the Germans were disembarking a division each week in Norway, we still had not a man there.’3

  This changed on 14 April when two Intelligence officers, Captain Peter Fleming of the Grenadier Guards and Captain Martin Lindsay of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, landed in a flying boat in Namsenfjorden, ‘wounding the still dark surface of the water with that wonderful arrogant swish which a Sunderland makes’.4

  Fleming, code-named ‘Flea’, and Lindsay, code-named ‘Louse’, were the vanguard of a new operation, ‘Henry’. Their mission: to prepare the path for Tribal-class destroyers to land the first Allied troops in central Norway. ‘A better pair never existed,’ said their commanding officer Major General Carton de Wiart, ‘my idea of the perfect staff officers, dispensing entirely with paper.’5 It is no exaggeration to say that the information which ‘Flea’ and ‘Louse’ carried in their heads back to London three weeks later altered the course of the Norway Debate, and assisted in Chamberlain’s removal from office.

  Fleming was the self-deprecating elder brother of the novelist Ian; Lindsay, a fellow travel writer who had crossed Greenland by sledge (twice), and trekked on foot through the Congo. At the time of the German invasion of Norway, Lindsay was the prospective Conservative candidate for the Lincolnshire constituency of Brigg.

  Intrinsically modest, Fleming never spoke of his role in the Norwegian Campaign. His biographer Duff Hart-Davis knew him from the age of twelve, and says: ‘He was taciturn to a fault, and talked less and less as he got older.’6 Already well regarded for his books about the Amazon and China, and tipped as a future editor of The Times, Fleming had, according to Anthony Powell, ‘a preoccupation, almost an obsession, with not appearing to “show off”’.7 Joan Bright Astley worked in the same office at Military Intelligence Research on the day that Fleming walked out ‘imperturbably’ for Namsos. ‘He was a four-square, basic, solitary sort of person immune to luxury, to heat or to cold, with a brick-like quality which made him the most staunch of friends and a kindness which made him the least vindictive of enemies.8 He was in a way a famous figure not only because of his early and romantic success as explorer and writer and his marriage to one of our best actresses Celia Johnson, but also because he kept his own brand of personality intact and dignified, dealt with all men as equals and used his pen honestly and well.’

  Fleming had lost his father early, and was a friend to men of his father’s age, like the editor of The Times and the Foreign Secretary. He wrote in his diary on the day of the Russian–Nazi pact in August 1939: ‘Should have been shooting grouse with G.9 Dawson and Halifax, but the crisis is on us and one almost saves a cartridge for the Germans.’

  Another of Fleming’s father figures was Churchill, who knew Fleming as ‘my dear Peter’.10 Fleming’s habit of speaking ‘terribly slowly’ caused Churchill to complain that he was ‘a slow-motion picture’.11 But Fleming was also a film that spooled Churchill back to the First War, and to his friendship with Peter’s father, Major Valentine Fleming, MP for Henley, ‘for whom I had a deep affection’.12 Hart-Davis says: ‘Churchill carried over his affection from Valentine to Peter.’

  Churchill was in the same regiment as Valentine Fleming, the Oxfordshire Hussars, and had written his obituary in The Times
after he was killed instantaneously by a shell in France in May 1917. Churchill’s eulogy included this moving line: ‘As the war lengthens and intensifies and the extending lists appear, it seems as if one watched at night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished in the distance in the darkness one by one.’13

  Alert, methodical, resolute, Valentine Fleming had died a hero’s death in the front line, serving in the first Yeomanry regiment to come under fire. A similar desire to prove himself consumed his eldest son, something noticed by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who met Peter Fleming in China. After abandoning their defensive attitude, ‘a blend of anti-Etonianism and professional jealousy’, Isherwood wrote that ‘Auden and I recited passages from an imaginary travel book called With Fleming to the Front’.14

  Fleming’s opportunity to emulate his father came at 5 p.m. on 12 April, when he received the order ‘to proceed by air to the Namsos area with a small party in order to carry out reconnaissance, and to take any necessary measures to conceal and facilitate the landing of an Allied Expeditionary Force’.15 He telephoned Martin Lindsay, with whom he had planned a mission to China, recently aborted. ‘Come to Norway.’16 The Director of Military Intelligence, seeing them off three hours later, advised Fleming to keep a diary – ‘which I am doing’.

  Peter Fleming’s team of six was known as ‘No. 10 Military Mission’. It comprised Fleming, Lindsay, two signals sergeants – with two Marconi wireless sets ‘to communicate with the fleet’ – and two Norwegian-speaking officers.17 On the flight to the Orkneys, Fleming wrote to a friend: ‘Nobody, even in the War Office, knows what the job is.’18

  He discovered this on a morning of squalls and sleet as a Sunderland carried the party to Namsos. During the flight, Fleming received a signal for him to ‘ascertain whether the town was held by Norwegians, and – if it was – to land and cover the disembarkation of a naval party that night’.19 The message ended ‘ESSENTIAL OBSERVE SECRECY’ – a pious hope, Fleming remarked, as the four-engined flying boat roared up a fjord and flew for thirteen miles between white jagged cliffs.

  ‘Suddenly, swinging round a bend, we saw Namsos ahead of us.’20

  The plane circled low over a little wooden town tucked under a rocky outcrop. Peering down through field glasses, Fleming saw smoke rise from one or two chimneys. The only sign of life was a ginger cat picking its way along a street of trampled snow. ‘We had no more idea than Mr Neville Chamberlain whether the Germans were in the town or not.’21

  Gunners at the alert, the plane touched down near the small village of Bangsund on the other side of the fjord at 3.30 p.m.

  An agitated Norwegian rowed out to meet them. No Germans were in the area, he assured Fleming. But the British were fortunate: this was the first afternoon when there had not been a Luftwaffe reconnaissance seaplane flying backwards and forwards overhead – searching the ground, in Evelyn Waugh’s image, ‘like an old woman after a lost coin’.22

  Fleming sent one of his Norwegian-speaking officers ashore to ring the police at Namsos to stop outgoing telephone calls and to prevent cars from leaving town. The Sunderland then flew the short distance back to Namsos and taxied up to the wooden quay, evoking from the assembled populace ‘a susurrus which we chose to interpret as a cheer’.23

  Storm Evensen, now ninety-seven, was part of the welcoming crowd. He says: ‘I was there when the Sunderland flew in and the English officer came ashore.24 I couldn’t see the pilot or passengers for the mist on the windows.’

  Fleming climbed up onto the wharf, followed by his team. Twelve days later, he wrote in a secret report to the War Office: ‘It is perhaps of interest to record my belief (which I cannot confirm here) that we were the first British troops to land in Norway.’fn1 25 In a short speech, he told the crowd that with their assistance they would kill every German in the land, ‘and once more there would be peace in Norway.’26

  The Sunderland flew off at 4.30 p.m., with instructions to send a ‘coast clear’ message. Fleming made a quick reconnaissance, ‘buying up all the white cloth in the town for camouflage, arranging for billets and air raid warnings’.27 He then persuaded the harbourmaster to produce four Norwegian sailors to help pilot in the destroyers waiting at the mouth of the fjord. The suspicion that Fleming might be a German officer in disguise was resolved that night as the Mashona, Matabele and Somali appeared, and landed 341 marines.

  The marines had disembarked when, at 2 a.m., Fleming received a signal that Major General Carton de Wiart was to arrive in a Sunderland at dawn.

  With eyepatch and sling, Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC, looked like a pirate. He was one of several First World War heroes whom Churchill revered, as he had Fleming’s father, and who were brought back into service for the Norwegian Campaign. Carton de Wiart recalled the circumstances of his appointment. ‘In the middle of one night there was a telephone message for me to report to the War Office.28 It dawned on me the reason might be Norway, especially as I had never been there and knew nothing about it. Norway it was, and I was ordered to go there immediately to take command of the Central Norwegian Expeditionary Force.’

  Like Fleming, Carton de Wiart was brave and modest, never mentioning in his autobiography that he had won a VC. Like Fleming, he had lost a parent young. The two men got on from the start. It was the experience of serving under Carton de Wiart in Norway that motivated Fleming to write the General’s biography after the war. In notes for this unfinished project, Fleming located the source of Carton de Wiart’s bravery and the ‘cocoon of self-sufficiency into which he was always ready to retire’ in the desertion by and total disappearance of his mother Ernestine immediately after he was born.29 ‘He believed and occasionally confided to intimate friends that she was a Circassian, bought by his father in a Turkish slave-market from at least partly chivalrous motives.’

  A tall, wiry man of great physical strength, with abnormally slender wrists and legs, and skin that tanned easily, Carton de Wiart was the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, who once came back from a raid across no man’s land ‘with the dripping head of a German sentry in either hand’.30 He also happened to be, as Fleming wrote in his diary four days after meeting him, ‘a damn nice man’.31

  Born in Brussels, Carton de Wiart was brought up in Cairo and educated at Balliol, from which he ran away under an assumed name to join Paget’s Horse to fight the Boers. An ‘absolute non-ducker’ who held that consequences were meant to be damned and risks to be taken, he lost his left eye in Somalia in a fight against ‘the mad Mullah’, Haji Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan. In the Dervish fort at Shimber Berris, Carton de Wiart leapt in, ‘swatting the muzzles of the defenders’ muskets with the broken shaft of a polo stick’, and sustained a glancing blow.32 ‘I’ve lost my bloody eye!’ he complained to his friend Hastings Ismay who found him in a trench near the fort, his face bandaged in a blood-soaked handkerchief.

  Carton de Wiart lost his left hand in the second battle of Ypres. A machine-gunner remarked: ‘My godfather, he must have had a large spare-parts box.’33 It did not prevent Carton de Wiart from hurling grenades at the enemy with his remaining hand after tearing out the safety pins with his teeth. He sustained in action ‘between 20 and 30 wounds’, calculated Fleming, his wounds healing ‘in the sort of swift, sure uncomplicated way that is more characteristic of a primitive race’.34 He refused to wear wound stripes. ‘Any damn fool can see that I have been wounded.’ Of his injuries, none cut deeper than his mother’s desertion. Forty years after she abandoned her son, Ernestine wrote him an affectionate letter upon reading about his exploits. ‘She said she was married to a Frenchman in Bordeaux by whom she had several children.’ Carton de Wiart sent a courteous reply, but they never met.

  Fleming regarded Carton de Wiart as ‘a rather cool, sensible, experienced officer who because of these attributes has consistently been called on to handle unusual and generally unorthodox situations’.35 On paper, he was the ideal commander
to sort out the mess in Norway. Yet as Carton de Wiart swiftly found out, the Norway operation was ‘a campaign for which the book does not cater’.36 Six days after Carton de Wiart landed in Namsos, Churchill was forced to admit ‘that no operation of this character had ever been carried out in similar circumstances before’.37 By then Namsos had become, in the words of a Swedish reporter, ‘the most thoroughly bombed city in the world’, after German planes had reduced the wooden houses to their foundations and added a fresh verb to Churchill’s vocabulary: to be ‘Namsosed’.

  Delayed by a blizzard, Carton de Wiart’s flying boat was strafed by a German fighter as it landed at the mouth of Namsenfjorden, wounding his staff officer in the knee – he had to return to England in the same plane. Carton de Wiart wrote: ‘We did not seem set for victory from the start.’38 He refused to get into the Sunderland’s wobbly rubber dinghy, and waited until the Me-110 had fired all its ammunition and flown off.

  Fleming went out to meet him in a launch. Their first encounter took place on board HMS Afridi, commanded by Captain Vian who had seized the Altmark. Fleming gave Carton de Wiart the local information he had collected ‘which would be of assistance to the forces going ashore’.39 But Carton de Wiart had counted sixty bombs aimed at the destroyer HMS Somali, which was acting as his communications link to London, and his solitary ferocious eye saw what was needed. He sent a signal to the War Office registering ‘the difficulties presented by the enemy air activity whereas we have no planes at all’.40 Vian identified in a sentence the outstanding characteristic of the Norway Campaign: ‘The cards were held by the aircraft.’41 Everyone in the War Office had banked on open skies in Norway, but in the steep narrow fjords it was hard to spot the enemy planes. They came over the mountains without warning.