‘Zum Befehl, Herr Hauptmann.’
Eschig rose to his feet as Weiss went out in search of the cognac, which was ‘filed’ in the bottom drawer of his desk in the outer office. He turned to the window and gazed down at the green-uniformed Geheime Feld Polizei strolling along the sunlit Akersgate, standing by the grand portals of the Storting, the parliament buildings. The May sky was a vivid blue and the pale sun painted the city of Oslo with pastel colours. Yes, he thought, it was right to keep the file secure somewhere. He thought of Sweeny and felt all the more certain of this. The Norwegian police might want to know the truth about the Stavanger murders one day.
‘Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis arnica veritas,’ he muttered.
Feldwebel Weiss entered with a glass.
‘Herr Hauptmann?’ he frowned. ‘You said something?’
Eschig turned. ‘“Plato is dear to me, Socrates is dear but truth is dearer still.” It’s of no importance, Weiss, just something some Roman said a long, long time ago.’
EPILOGUE
The conduct of the campaign in Norway brought forth increasing criticism of the British Government in general and of Neville Chamberlain in particular. On May 7, the day Sweeny, Woods and Inge Stenersen arrived back in London, a two-day debate on Norway began in the House of Commons. It was clear that Chamberlain had lost support even within his own party and one of the leading Conservative backbenchers, Leo S. Amery, voiced the opinion of many when he echoed the famous words Oliver Cromwell used to dismiss a Parliament in former times: ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’ The Labour Party leader, Herbert Morrison, announced that his party intended to divide the House on the issue, and even though Chamberlain and the Government survived the ensuing vote of confidence by 281 to 200, it was clear that several Conservatives had voted with the Opposition. For three days there was a crisis within the British Cabinet and then, on May 10, Chamberlain spoke to the nation on the radio. It was the very day the Germans began their sweep through neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg.
‘I had no doubt in my mind,’ Chamberlain said, ‘that some new and drastic action must be taken if confidence was to be given to the House of Commons, and the war carried on with the energy and vigour essential to victory … In the afternoon of today it was apparent that the essential unity could be secured under another Prime Minister though not myself. In these circumstances my duty was plain.’
Chamberlain resigned at 6.00 pm that Friday. It was well known in Government circles that he wanted to nominate Lord Halifax, a man who shared all his political ideals, as Prime Minister. However, it was Winston Spencer Churchill who emerged as the new leader. On May 12 he told the nation that he had nothing to offer them but ‘blood, tears, toil and sweat’ but on the following day, speaking in the House of Commons, he promised his total commitment to victory. ‘Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terrors, victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.’
Even as Churchill took office, the situation for the Allies in Norway was going from bad to worse. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Cork and Orrery, had already decided that the 24,500 men of the Allied command would have to be evacuated. The position in Norway was untenable. Nonetheless, he gave orders for a final attack on the northern town of Narvik, still held by the Germans, and it fell on May 28. Even as the Norwegian town fell, though, the Germans were achieving crushing victories as they swept across a front of 175 miles through neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg to outflank the French defence of the Maginot Line. Soon another, a more fateful evacuation would be beginning — the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.
On June 1 Lord Cork told the Norwegian Government of his decision to pull the Allied troops out of Norway. Commencing on the night of June 6, the British, French and Poles began their embarkation while the Norwegian troops withdrew to specially selected areas where they were given a choice — disband and disperse before being captured by the Germans or, like several other Norwegian units, make a strategic withdrawal over the mountains into neutral Sweden for internment. The third alternative, of course, was to surrender to the Germans. There were not enough troopships to evacuate the remnants of the six divisions of Norway’s mainly militia army. On June 7, King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav, with members of the Norwegian Government and the Allied Legations, embarked on HMS Devonshire from the town of Tromso to go into a bitter exile in England. In the early hours of June 8 the final parties of Royal Engineers and Military Police, in charge of the pierheads, embarked on their transports.
In the withdrawal the Allies took another savage defeat. One of the two aircraft carriers involved in operations, HMS Glorious, which had been brought with the Ark Royal from the Mediterranean, together with her destroyer escorts, Ardent and Acasta, was spotted by the German battleship Gneisenau. The German ship opened fire with her 11-inch guns from a range of fourteen miles. The Ardent, trying to buy time for the carrier, went full steam ahead for the Gneisenau, guns blazing. Shells from the German warship tore her apart and capsized her. The Gneisenau then hit the Glorious and 1,474 officers and men with 41 Royal Air Force pilots and personnel, went to their deaths. The Acasta turned on the enemy in fury and made for her but within moments the little destroyer had been blasted out of the water.
Having watched the departure of the Allied forces, the King and the Norwegian Government from Tromso, the commander-in-chief of the Norwegian forces, General Otto Ruge, who had refused to go into exile, preferring to stay and share whatever hardships now befell his defeated army, broadcast to the nation: ‘The first chapter in our struggle for freedom is over and we have a dark time to face in a conquered country. But the war continues on other fronts. Norwegians are joining in the struggle there. The day will come when you can raise your heads again.’
Ruge left the makeshift studio to commence negotiations for an armistice with the Germans and to eventually be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.
Until April, 1945, Norway was to lie under the conquering heel of the Third Reich. Yet it was to be a double-edged victory for the Führer. Ever fearful that the Allies would invade Norway again, Hitler was forced to maintain a considerable army there. Indeed, the opening of a European front by a flanking movement in Norway occurred to Churchill several times during the war and only the impracticality of the terrain caused the idea to be shelved. Nonetheless, in terms of the tens of thousands of men, the equipment and the German naval forces which were kept tied up in Norway in case of an attack, in addition to the increasing activities of the ‘Home Army’, the Norwegian resistance, the conquest of Norway became more of a liability than an asset to the Third Reich.
When Churchill formed his Government after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, he appointed Chamberlain as Lord President of the Council in order to demonstrate that there was no split within the Conservative Party. Yet it was becoming obvious that Chamberlain was ill and that his condition was, in fact, serious. He was examined by his personal physician, Lord Horder, in July and on July 24 he underwent an exploratory operation performed by Mr Edward G. Slesinger, the senior surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London. Slesinger was an expert on abdominal and goitre surgery as well as fractures and was the Hunterian Professor of the Royal College of Surgeons. A major operation was needed and Chamberlain was told frankly that he had an ‘even chance’ of recovery. The official statement to the public was that the operation was ‘for the relief of intestinal symptoms of an obstructive nature’.
On July 29, while recovering at Nuffield House, Chamberlain wrote: ‘I understand that I am a model patient. From the professional point of view my progress is entirely satisfactory but my personal opinion is that I have had fair hell.’ He was allowed to return home to Highfield Park, Heckfield, near Basingstoke, in mid-August. In September he left his Hampshire home to go to the House of Commons but realized that he was unable to stand the
strain of his normal duties. On October 3 he resigned office in Government and in the Conservative Party, although he still remained the Member of Parliament for the Edgbaston constituency of Birmingham, which seat he held with a 21,862 vote over Labour’s J. Adshead. But it was clear that Chamberlain would not be able to stand at the next election. On October 9 Winston Churchill, now elected to the leadership of the Conservative Party, remarked that Neville Chamberlain’s withdrawal from active public life was a heavy and painful loss. His tone now was a little more respectful than his previous comment on Chamberlain: ‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last.’
That the operation which Chamberlain had undergone had not been successful was becoming obvious to everyone. On October 14 the King and Queen paid a visit to Chamberlain’s home and stayed half-an-hour. On the same day Chamberlain’s son Frank, a 2nd Lieutenant in the 69th AA Brigade of the Royal Artillery, was given embarkation leave to visit his father. Chamberlain had written to his friend, the controversial United States ambassador Joseph Kennedy, ‘Since my illness makes it impossible for me to be of further service to my country, my great concern is not to be a burden to my wife and family, so perhaps God in His mercy will take me soon.’
On Saturday, November 9, at 5.30 pm, Neville Chamberlain died. The Daily Telegraph, in an obituary published on November 11, said:
‘Mr Chamberlain was, perhaps, not the ideal war leader, gifted though he was with exceptional and hereditary political aptitudes; but no one could have applied himself more vehemently to the task than he did once the die was cast. Perhaps the Prime Minister’s words may be his epitaph: “You did all you could for peace, you did all you could for victory”.’
Winston Churchill went on to make a further comment: ‘He met the approach of death with a steady eye. If he grieved at all it was that he could not be a spectator to our victory, but I think he died with the confident knowledge that his country had at last turned the corner.’
On November 14 Neville Chamberlain was buried, with all the pomp and ceremony due to a leader of his country, in the marbled splendour of the vaults of Westminster Abbey.
Yet there is another grave, far away from this famed resting place of great statesmen, of captains and kings, which is equally important. It lies near a bluff shrouded by snow mists on a bleak Swedish mountain, not far from the Norwegian border, where fresh snowfalls and high winds make constant drifts so that the wooden cross that once marked the spot has rotted and blown away. Now there is nothing to mark the grave and the most discerning eye could not spot it, even if there were no whirling snow clouds to obscure the vision and take the breath away.
The scenery here is ever-changing in the gusting snowstorms and strong winds which snatch at anything that is not secure. There is no marker, no solemn inscription, nothing to indicate the grave. Yet that grave exists, somewhere under the drifting snow and winter ice … If there was to be an epitaph for that grave it might well be the words of Friedrich von Schiller: ‘What the reason of the ant laboriously drags into a heap, the wind of accident will collect in one breath.’
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The Valkyrie Directive Page 26
