Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Slow and vulnerable to air attack, the Empress of Australia and the Chobry were approaching the coast after separating from the Narvik convoy the night before; each carried up to 1,700 men. Carton de Wiart ordered both liners to remain out at sea until dark. In the early hours of 16 April, they anchored off Lillesjona, 100 miles north of Namsos.

  Black against the snow, six German planes appeared in the afternoon while Fowler, Lodge and their equipment were being transferred onto faster destroyers. The howling of the bombs falling and the deafening explosions as they hit the water tested the nerves of the young Territorials of 146th Infantry Brigade. The curving white streaks were from Heinkel exhaust pipes, but Fowler and Lodge were soon exposed to the menace of Stuka dive-bombers. Fleming remembered how ‘a special attachment caused them, as they lunged almost vertically downwards, to emit a shrill deafening scream, and this, superimposed on the roar of their engines and the rattle of their guns, heightened the demoralising effect of their attacks’.42

  Their approach screened by rock walls, the Heinkels flew over repeatedly, their bombs narrowly missing the Empress of Australia. Frank Lodge had a clear memory of ‘naval lads tossing coins and betting which side of the ship the next bomb would fall!’ Tom Fowler marvels that none of the bombs struck home.43 ‘Our skipper guided the ship between them.44 Then two small naval boats tied up on each side, and we unloaded all our kit.’

  Ladders and chutes were propped up, the soldiers scrambled down, but many personal belongings and equipment fell into the fjord, later to be recovered by the Germans. Lodge wrote: ‘The names on the equipment, one of which was mine, were read out on German radio as being lost at sea.’45

  With the Territorials safely reboarded onto the faster ships, the destroyers left at full speed for Namsos, ‘in a flurry of frothing stern wash, curving bow waves and the tall thudding splashes of bomb burst’.46 In a freezing blizzard and four feet of snow, the greater part of two battalions were landed that night, taking advantage of the four hours of darkness. At midnight, Carton de Wiart sent a message to the War Office: ‘Have brought 1000 men to Namsos today … Enemy aircaft still bombing at leisure.’47 The crackle on Fleming’s wireless transmitter was ‘not dissimilar’, thought Lindsay, to the noise of ‘our rear gunner firing’.48

  On 18 April, Fleming watched the remainder of 146th Infantry Brigade disembark from the Chobry, ‘cumbered with enormous fur coats but short of transport and totally devoid of any supporting arms’.49 Anxious to get away before the quick dawn came, the Chobry sailed off with 130 tons of vital equipment, adding to the 170 tons of supplies and ammunition still on board the Empress of Australia.

  When Fowler and Lodge stepped ashore at Namsos, they found none of the normal apparatus of a base, merely Fleming and Lindsay, who swept the trampled snow on the jetty and directed the troops to grab their equipment and hide everything. It was up to ‘Flea’ and ‘Louse’, with such volunteer help as they could scrounge, to restore the status quo – ‘to put the gangways and the coils of rope and all the other stage-properties back where they had been the day before, so that the Luftwaffe’s first, early-morning emissary would take back to Trondheim the same mise-en-scène that his cameras had recorded yesterday’.

  German reconnaissance planes flew over three times a day. On 19 April, Fleming interrogated a pilot who had made a forced landing and been taken prisoner: he revealed that right up to noon on 18 April ‘German Intelligence did not know that a British force had landed at Namsos’.50

  For five nights, Fleming and Lindsay won their game of hide-and-seek, but on the evening of 19 April, the first French soldiers came ashore. The Chasseurs Alpins were regarded romantically by Churchill as ‘probably the best troops in the world’.51 Watching them disembark in their broad flopping berets, Fleming had doubts. ‘Chattering, overloaded, making noise for its own sake, they might have been Chinese.’52 Storm Evensen recalls that ‘everything the French couldn’t carry, they left on the docks.’ More provocative than the tall stacks of stores piled high on the wharf, the Chasseurs Alpins did not bother to keep undercover during the day, and they would ignore Carton de Wiart’s instructions not to fire on enemy planes.

  The Major General landed ashore in a whaler that night. He had recruited Fleming to act as his Staff Officer. Fleming wrote in his diary: ‘Took Carton de W back to our pleasant billet.’53

  The wooden house that Fleming had secured as Carton de Wiart’s HQ still stands on the top of a steep grass bank below the Klompen rock face, overlooking the town. It is one of the few buildings in Namsos to have survived the Luftwaffe’s blanket bombing. Their ‘elfin-like’ cook was Fanny Fahsing, a pregnant twenty-six-year-old who had au-paired for a couple in Wimbledon, and spoke English.54 Her daughter describes the night that Fanny met Carton de Wiart. ‘She thought it was a ghost because he came into the hallway in a white nightshirt and a black eyepatch and one arm and wearing a nightcap.55 “Oh my God!” she said. He wanted water for his bath.’

  For the brief span of the Namsos campaign, Fleming served as the General’s batman, driver, chief of staff and cook.

  Carton de Wiart’s written instructions had been issued when 146th Infantry Brigade was at sea, on the way to Narvik as part of ‘Rupert Force’. His ever-shifting responsibilities as Allied commander of what was now ‘Maurice Force’ were shaped to a single purpose: the recapture of Trondheim, 134 miles south. ‘My orders were to take Trondheim whenever a naval attack took place.’56

  The plan for a ‘pincer movement’ which Churchill had proposed to Ironside had evolved.57 On 13 April, Churchill sketched out ‘a new conception for Operation “Maurice”’, landing the troops directly at Trondheim.58 This plan had since altered again. ‘Maurice Force’ was to disembark at Namsos and strike southwards down the road to Trondheim. Meanwhile, a second Allied contingent, ‘Sickle Force’, would push north along the railway from Åndalsnes, at the end of Romsdalsfjord 180 miles south-west of Trondheim.

  Subordinated to the main prong, ‘Maurice Force’ and ‘Sickle Force’ were to act as diversions – ‘to confuse and distract the enemy in order that the blow may be delivered with full surprise and force at the centre’.59

  Churchill explained this tridentine operation in signals to Admiral Forbes, whom he had earlier ordered north to Narvik. The middle and main thrust – the hammer blow – was to be delivered by Forbes, who would sail south again for a full-scale direct naval assault on Trondheim. Rather along the lines of Churchill’s attempt to force the Dardanelles, the battleships of the Home Fleet would attack the coastal batteries. Then cruisers and destroyers with troop transports would advance thirty miles up the Trondheim fjord and cover the landing. This was to take place on 22 or 23 April, and Forbes, who at once expressed objections, saying that he had no high explosive shells for a bombardment, was instructed by Churchill to consider ‘this important project further’.60 The Operation was to be called ‘Hammer’.

  Carton de Wiart’s immediate priority was to find vehicles to carry his troops towards Trondheim. Most civilians in Namsos had taken the precaution of driving their cars out of town. With Fleming, Carton de Wiart called at the home of Storm Evensen, whose father was the local head of General Motors and whose elder brother Birger worked for Shell and had access to petrol supplies. Evensen was present at the meeting during which Birger agreed to chauffeur Carton de Wiart in the family’s 1937 dark blue Chevrolet.

  The bulk of the remaining vehicles in Namsos were milk-lorries. Evensen’s father telephoned the local dairy to make these available. Evensen, aged eighteen, volunteered as a driver. He says: ‘I myself ferried British troops to the front line in a 1934 milk-truck.’

  German Intelligence had intercepted Carton de Wiart’s signals to London. Hitler’s suspicion that something was going on was confirmed by a Reuter’s report at 10 p.m. on 19 April that British soldiers had landed at Namsos. On the same day, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe ‘to destroy places outside the German-occupied coastal cities occupied by the Englis
h, or announced to be occupied, without consideration for the local population’.61 The fig leaf that Germany was coming to assist the beleaguered Norwegians was about to be blasted off.

  At first light on 20 April, a German seaplane flew over. By now, British troops were accustomed to reconnaissance aircraft, giving them nicknames like ‘Sammy’ and ‘George’ and ‘Faithful Freddie’. The Chasseurs Alpins, instead of hiding, stood up and fired their machine guns.

  Later that morning, church bells rang out – a warning that enemy aircraft had been spotted. Storm Evensen was on the quay. He had performed a U-turn, so that the Scottish soldiers he was taking to the front line at Steinkjer could jump straight from the trawler HMS Rutlandshire into the back of his milk-lorry. Just then, another reconnaissance plane glided silently past, engines off. Evensen says: ‘There was a roaring sound as the engines switched on, and the plane went directly over our heads.’62 The soldiers scrambled back on board ship and opened fire with a Lewis gun while the Rutlandshire prepared to cast off. Evensen was accelerating away when a wave of German bombers flew high overhead.

  The police log recorded that the first bomb fell at 10.11 a.m. near the railhead. From then on, bombs fell every one or two minutes, the planes coming in lower and lower after their pilots realised that Namsos was not defended by A.A. guns. It was Hitler’s birthday, and there are people still alive in Namsos who will tell you that they read ‘AH’ written in the sky with smoke trails. As a birthday present to the Führer three years before, allegedly, Goering had bombed Guernica.

  Fleming saw the station explode in successive gouts of black, and timber flying through the air. ‘“Dispersons!” cried the French, and took to the rocks like rabbits, annoying C de W who lounged about in his red hat and refused the disguise of a naval balaclava.’63 In black eyepatch and empty sleeve, Carton de Wiart lit a cigarette with his only hand. ‘Damned Frogs – they’re all the same. One bang and they’re off.’

  Martin Lindsay was breakfasting at the Grand Hotel near the quay. He ran outside, and succeeded in getting clear of the town by stages, but a British naval officer, Captain Blake, who had taken shelter in the cellar was fatally wounded when the hotel received a direct hit. Worried about Lindsay, in a quieter moment Fleming went to the hotel and saw Blake lying under a table, ‘almost certainly dead’.

  The bombing stopped at 1.08 p.m. and the German planes flew on to Trondheim to refuel. A total of fifty-three He-111 and Ju-88 bombers had set off at 7.30 a.m. from airfields in Denmark. In the afternoon, they attacked the remainder of the town, dropping incendiary bombs and ‘making even thinking virtually impossible’, according to a journalist.64 Lindsay reported: ‘Huge fires were soon blazing everywhere.65 In the middle of the fiery furnace one man took shelter in a refrigerator and froze to death.’ Another fugitive hid in a waterlogged open grave in the churchyard. ‘Most people huddled under trees and rocks just outside the town, crouching under any cover available, holding their breath during the whistle of each falling bomb, and shuddering as it detonated; several grazed their faces trying to get closer into the rocks in their anxiety to avoid that rain of death.’

  Evensen’s milk-lorry was still packed with guns and ammunition from the Rutlandshire. He says: ‘I felt I had to move the truck before it blew up.’ He drove down Harbour Street past Jakob Agesen’s shoe shop, a wooden building that had been blown apart. ‘There were piles of white shoe-boxes scattered in the street. I tried to be careful, to drive round the new shoes, then I remembered this was war, so I drove straight through.’ Evensen parked the lorry by the hospital, left the key in the ignition and raced home. He was running across the Namsen bridge when a German plane released its bombs into the water. ‘The column of water shooting up was like a waterfall upside down.’ But the image Evensen recalls most vividly was of zigzagging for his life down an avenue of trees – ‘looking for thicker trees to hide behind’ – while a Heinkel shot at him. Even Carton de Wiart was prepared to admit that ‘it is a most unnerving and unpleasant sensation to be peppered at from a plane bearing straight down on one, and takes a lot of getting used to’.66

  German planes flew low, machine-gunning people as they ran up the streets or into the woods. Fleming wrote: ‘They went for our trawlers in the fjord and eventually sank one (Rutlandshire) with more casualties.’67 Evensen watched the Rutlandshire going down – the same ship from which he had picked up the Scottish soldiers – two He-111s circling and shooting, and a huge explosion. He says: ‘I saw the bridge thrown up in the air and hitting the water.’ Next day, he found parts of the bridge on the beach: the wooden wheel with two spokes, and a triangular piece of metal with a big porthole that he carried home and used for the next forty years as a table.

  Led by Carton de Wiart and Fleming in the Evensen family Chevrolet, a line of milk-trucks had set off at 12.30 p.m. for the two-hour drive to Steinkjer. The convoy had left Namsos, according to Fleming, before the Luftwaffe ‘blew the town to hell with incendiaries’.68 He and Carton de Wiart got back around 7 p.m., when Namsos was ‘nothing but a loud fire’, with the church gutted and the hours on the clock face showing like a skeleton.

  At 9.30 p.m. HMS Nubian arrived, guided by a red glow in the cold night sky. Commander Ravenhill rounded the last promontory and saw a mass of flames from end to end, ‘and the glare on the snows of the surrounding mountains produced an unforgettable spectacle’.69

  In the early hours of 21 April, Birger Evensen drove Carton de Wiart down to the fjord to board the Nubian. He waited while the General sent an urgent signal to the War Office. ‘Enemy aircraft have almost completely destroyed Namsos … I see little chance of carrying out decisive, or indeed, any operation, unless enemy air activity is considerably restricted.’70

  7

  THE FIRST LAND BATTLE

  ‘People say Churchill is tactless, that his judgement is erratic, that he flies off at a tangent, that he has a burning desire to trespass upon the domain of the naval strategist.’

  DAVID LINDSAY, diary February 1940

  ‘What we are entitled to ask is a very serious question: By whom and on whose authority was the indispensable hammer blow at Trondheim itself countermanded?’

  LEO AMERY MP, House of Commons, 7 May 1940

  ‘Wild horses will not drag from me whose hand it was. All I can say is that it was a dead hand and came from above.’

  COMMANDER ROBERT BOWER MP,

  House of Commons, 8 May 1940

  In the freezing cold and dark, travelling only by night, Privates Tom Fowler and Frank Lodge had pressed on south towards the front line at Steinkjer. It was now that they realised how badly prepared they were. General Ironside had boasted that the occupation force was the finest equipped in the world. Yet their artillery and heavy weapons had been left on board the transport ships, and other essential equipment was still in the holds of HMS Berwick and HMS York. Fowler slipped and slithered into battle clutching his .303 rifle; Lodge, a revolver and ten rounds of ammunition.

  Progress was unwieldy and slow. From Namsos, they had to tramp their way through dense-packed snow without skis, without sledges, without snowshoes, without even the correct maps. Lodge had been given a fifty-year-old map for Bergen hundreds of miles away, ‘so I had to go and find out where we were’.1 One of his officers tore a map off a classroom wall showing the towns that they were supposed to be recapturing. The coordinates proved even harder to establish for French troops coming ashore at Namsos: they were furnished with maps of Berlin.

  The Territorials of B Company 4th Lincolnshire Regiment reached Steinkjer on 19 April and billeted for two nights in a school. Fowler says: ‘That’s where I had a cooked meal.’2 At 4.05 a.m. on Sunday 21 April, he was woken with news that a lookout had spotted ‘a 300-tons’ ship in the supposedly frozen narrows leading from Trondheimsfjorden to Steinkjer. At 6.25 a.m., an Intelligence report suggested that up to 400 enemy troops had landed on the ice with motorbikes and were advancing towards Vist four miles from Steinkjer.

 
; Under the command of Captain Reggie Tweed, a Horncastle solicitor, B Company headed to Vist in a convoy of lorries and buses provided by locals. They arrived at 9 a.m., climbed out, and began marching west towards Korsen, but because of an inaccurate map took a wrong turning. Instead of proceeding to Korsen, they walked down a narrow track, five-foot banks of snow on either side, through a wood, towards Krogs Farm. They had travelled two miles when scouts from No. 10 Platoon came under fire. A junior officer yelled out: ‘Fix bayonets!’ The men rolled into the snow, and waited while Tweed brought Fowler’s Platoon up into Krogs.3 It was here, in a Norwegian farmyard beside a pine wood, that the first land battle in the Second World War took place between British and German troops.

  The farmer’s daughter who witnessed it still lives at Krogs. Torlaug Werstad points at the red barn across the yard, and she is twelve again, and the telephone is ringing with news that the Germans have landed from a big ship, and all at once incendiary bombs are exploding in the barn where she has locked up her horses and cattle, and through the flames she can hear the animals’ cries and tracer bullets from a machine gun concealed in the pine trees, and she watches a British soldier leap down from the barn into the snow and disappear in the smoke.4

  Tom Fowler was that soldier. He says: ‘We were in a farm building full of hay, looking through a crack in the wood.5 We were supposed to be looking for Germans.’ But the enemy was hard to make out against the snow. ‘They were white shadows in the distance. They’d got sledges, and machine guns and white coats. We had nothing. Just what we stood in – not even a kitbag. We had left our kitbags behind which lorries were to bring up later.’

  The last living member of ‘Maurice Force’, Fowler sits beside his gas fire in Spalding and hammers it out. ‘We had not one aeroplane. We had no ammunition. We had no mortar of any description.’ Against the Luftwaffe’s incendiaries, four-inch mortars, and the unending barrage of five-inch naval artillery from the German destroyer Paul Jacobi, Fowler had his 1914 Lee Enfield rifle and a satchel containing four dozen cartridges.