Without news, and prone to mood swings, Churchill vacillated between thinking that the German assault presaged the much anticipated onslaught on the west, and elation that Hitler had overstepped himself like Napoleon when in 1807 the French Emperor invaded Portugal and Spain. Churchill signalled to Admiral Forbes: ‘I consider Germans have made strategic error in incurring commitments on Norwegian coast which we can probably wipe out in a short time.’22
Churchill was observed in his upbeat mood by Colville. ‘The First Lord (who at last sees a chance of action) is jubilant and maintains that our failure to destroy the German fleet up to the present is only due to the bad visibility and very rough water in the North Sea.’23 According to the military expert Basil Liddell Hart, Churchill was ‘even more exultantly confident when news first came’, and talked of how it provided an opportunity to attack Germany from air bases in Denmark, ‘not then aware that Denmark had been overrun in a few hours’.24 Others might have been stunned, but Churchill was caught up in the moment’s heat, exercising his full capacities, and revelling in it. Infected by his enthusiasm, Lloyd George’s Private Secretary, A. J. Sylvester, believed in certain whispers he had heard, ‘that something very considerable is happening at sea and that good news is on the way’.25 Sylvester’s private information was that an elaborate trap had been laid for the Germans and they had fallen into it.
In fact, Churchill was depending for his local knowledge on the last report that Giles Romilly had telephoned through to the Express. At noon, Churchill still believed that there might be ‘only one enemy ship’ in Narvik: the German transport Jan Wellem.26 Then through the fog there started to filter reports which presented ‘an entirely different situation’.27 George VI visited the Admiralty War Room in the afternoon. Churchill was proudly showing the King the position of the fleet off Norway when the ‘gloomy news’ came in that German forces were in possession not merely of Narvik, and therefore of Giles, but all the main ports.28 The King later wrote in his diary: ‘I have spent a bad day.’
A frantic edge had crept into Churchill’s behaviour by the time that he chaired the second Military Coordination Committee meeting at 9.30 p.m. in General Ismay’s room in Richmond Terrace. A new report that Narvik was in fact held by six German destroyers and one submarine had been received by the First Lord, Ironside grumbled, ‘with monkeyish humour’.29 At the same time, Churchill annoyed the Air Minister Samuel Hoare by ‘nagging at everybody’.30 Churchill offloaded his frustration on Admiral Forbes who, from his position further south, had proposed for parts of the Home Fleet to attack Bergen and Trondheim with dispositions that Forbes insisted were ‘excellent’.31 Churchill had been all in favour of this plan a little earlier. He now flatly rejected it, and argued instead for the ‘paramount necessity’ to capture Narvik ‘with the utmost expedition’.32 He refused to wait just a few more hours for reinforcements to come up, and announced that he intended to rush in a destroyer flotilla the following dawn. Despite the ‘lack of information’, he assured Halifax that German forces at Narvik stood to be mowed down ‘like cut flowers’.33, 34
Narvik was situated in a ‘very large, wild, mountainous country’, Churchill told the House of Commons two days later – and ‘freedom, it is said, dwells in the mountains’. All of a sudden, a small town in Norway had come to represent that freedom. In the days ahead, Narvik continued to hold a unique place in Churchill’s duel against Hitler. When the editor of the Manchester Guardian visited the Admiralty on 1 May, Churchill drew him to his desk ‘and said “Look at it! It’s quite clear, isn’t it – except for this document.”35 There was one lying on the top of the top drawer and he picked it up and said “Narvik!”’
From 9 April, Churchill bent his energies to seizing this snowbound peninsula, where his nephew was held captive. For everyone else, Narvik was little more than ‘a sideshow in the Arctic’, in Peter Fleming’s phrase.36 But for Churchill it remained his ‘first love’, his ‘pet’, ‘the trophy at which all Europe is looking’ – in which Norway would play a liberating role, freeing Europe from Hitler as the Iberian Peninsula had brought down Napoleon.37, 38
At 7.04 p.m. on 10 April, the Admiralty sent another message to Forbes, summoning him north. ‘As enemy is now established at Narvik recapture of that place takes priority over operations against Bergen and Trondheim.’39
The bombardment that Giles Romilly heard in Narvik early on 10 April was the first of the Royal Navy’s two counter-attacks.
The assault was led by Captain Warburton-Lee on HMS Hardy who had commanded the escort force of five destroyers for the minelayers in Operation ‘Wilfred’. At noon on 9 April, when there was still believed to be a single German ship in Narvik, Warburton-Lee had received an encouraging signal from the Admiralty. ‘It is at your discretion to land forces if you think you can recapture Narvik from number of enemy present.’40 The signal was relayed to Warburton-Lee’s superiors, Admiral Forbes and Vice Admiral Whitworth, and had the effect of disempowering each of them and of isolating Warburton-Lee, a reserved, thoughtful Welshman known as ‘Wash’, who took himself off for half an hour to brood on the implications. Confused by the signal, Forbes was reluctant to break radio silence to seek clarification. An infuriated Whitworth later regretted ‘that I did not intervene and order Warburton-Lee to postpone his attack’ – an attack, Whitworth went on, which had resulted from ‘the Admiralty’s intolerable action in communicating direct to ships under my command and entirely ignoring my presence’.41, 42 Had Whitworth discussed the situation with Churchill, says Geirr Haarr, he would most likely have advised for Warburton-Lee to wait a few hours until his back-up arrived, and meanwhile plug the entrance to the fjord. ‘There was no reason to go into Narvik, since whatever was in there had to come out.’
Without anyone to turn to, Warburton-Lee had to decide on his own. At 4.20 a.m. the next day he led his destroyers through a snowstorm into Narvik harbour, where he found not one enemy transport ship but ten German destroyers. At the cost of his life and his ship, he engaged them.
On 10 April, Frances Partridge wrote in her diary: ‘8 a.m. news.44 In a battle off Narvik described as “wholly successful” we lost two destroyers and a third damaged.’ First reports suggested a trouncing victory for the Allies, with the Norwegian government announcing the recapture of Narvik. The Daily Express trumpeted: ‘It ranks with Cadiz where we singed the King of Spain’s beard.’ The New Statesman was ululatory. ‘A miraculous change took place as news began to filter through of the greatest naval action of the century.’43 In the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, the novelist Margery Allingham had interpreted the uncanny inactivity of the Phoney War to mean that ‘something considerable was being done very quietly indeed’.45 Now, after months of preparation, Britain had gone into battle and won a great victory, apparently.
In his statement to the Commons on 10 April, Chamberlain said that he could not tell the House about ongoing operations, but he confirmed that five British destroyers had steamed up the fjord and engaged six German destroyers, sinking one and heavily hitting three others, plus sinking ‘six merchant ships’. This much at least was accurate, and the information was joyfully received by the old lady who served tea in the Lobby bar. ‘There’s something about a naval action that stirs the blood as nothing can do on land or in the air.’46 But the day brought more uplifting news, concerning all of Norway. At 9.30 p.m., the not always easy Canadian Prime Minister, William Mackenzie King, received word that ‘the British had effected the landing of troops at Bergen and Trondheim and had captured both places.47 Also that British troops had landed at Oslo and were fighting the Germans there … If this is true it will have a considerable effect on the whole war.’
With reports that the Fleet was involved there was a palpable stiffening of morale, noted the editor of the Sunday Despatch, Collin Brooks. ‘Everywhere, in the streets and in office lifts, there was a new satisfaction in this strange war.’48 One London charlady was overheard telling another London charlady: ‘Y
ou can take it from me, while one bloody brick stands on another old Churchill will never let us give in.’49 In Glasgow, a man on Pam Ashford’s tram home kept exclaiming: ‘“We have the Germans bottled up, bottled up!!!”50 … For myself, the strongest feelings are pride in the Navy and satisfaction that we have emerged from that detestable calm we called the War of Nerves.’ Hitler’s defeat seemed imminent. A soldier on the Clyde about to embark for Narvik had heard that ‘the shores of Norway are clogged with drowned Germans’.51
Studying the headlines on 11 April, the Transport Minister Euan Wallace found himself questioning the optimistic exaggeration behind the claims. ‘The papers were full of the most glowing accounts of British naval victories up and down the coast of Norway, but, reading them through carefully, they were qualified by reference to reports received from outside sources; and before I went to the War Cabinet at 12.30 we had already learned that the situation was not as depicted in the Press.’52
After lunching with the travel writer Peter Fleming, who was now working as an Intelligence officer, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, hurried to the Commons to hear Churchill’s statement. ‘The world was all agog for news from the North Sea … everything was saved up for Winston’s speech at 3.45.’53
Churchill’s much anticipated first statement to Parliament about the news from Norway was broadcast around the world, and later cited by Labour’s deputy leader Arthur Greenwood as evidence that the First Lord had raised expectations that were not only false but downright dangerous. ‘In that speech he led this House, the country and the neutrals to believe that victory, swift, certain, was bound to come.’54 The left-wing MP Stafford Cripps was even more critical, telling the Commons during the Norway Debate that it was largely Churchill’s speech on 11 April that had had ‘such a damaging effect on our prestige’.55
Even so, Churchill’s bombastic message was in strange contrast to his collapsed appearance and tired delivery which startled everyone who witnessed it.
Churchill’s deplorable performance in the Chamber must be seen in the context of this private admission to Admiral Pound the previous day: ‘We have been completely outwitted.’56 However combative his public image, behind the scenes he was wobbling. Reports that the Germans had got to Narvik had made everyone at the Admiralty ‘terribly despondent’, according to Eric Seal, his personal Private Secretary.57 Seal was with Churchill when the news of the invasion arrived, and he confided to his wife: ‘I was very worried … about Winston, who was knocked right out.’ On top of that, there was the blow of Giles Romilly’s inevitable capture.
Churchill’s closest political confidant, his Parliamentary Private Secretary Brendan Bracken, was a sponge for his master’s moods, and it is possible that Bracken was fantasising about Giles’s fate at the hands of the Nazis when he movingly reduced Ronald Tree’s son, on leave from the army, to tears, by describing in great detail the ‘entirely fictitious’ death of Bracken’s allegedly combatant brother in Narvik.58
In the dearth of news, it was natural for Churchill to imagine that something terrible had happened to his nephew. Seal went on: ‘I had to manoeuvre him to bed.’59
When Anthony Eden called in at the Admiralty War Room after dinner on 10 April, he was surprised to find Churchill in so vulnerable a state. Churchill had bitter things to say about the ambitious Air Minister, Samuel Hoare, of whom one source in Parliament wrote in his diary: ‘It is said of Sam Hoare that he is so slippery and so INTENT that he would do anything and anybody – to be made Prime Minister.’60 Eden also disliked Hoare, nicknaming him ‘Aunt Tabitha’, and he registered Churchill’s alarm that Hoare was taking advantage of the evident turmoil within the Admiralty to promote himself: ‘He is indignant with Sam whom he suspects of being eager to score off him … “A snake” and some stronger epithets.’61, 62
Uncharacteristically late for Cabinet on the morning of his speech, Churchill wrote an abject note to Chamberlain. ‘I must apologise for not having sufficiently gripped this issue in my mind this morning, but I only came in after the discussion had begun.’63
A few hours later, at 3.48 p.m., showing ‘obvious signs of strain’ according to the Independent Liberal MP Clement Davies, Churchill stood up to give the House the ‘fullest possible information’ about the situation in Norway.64
Churchill’s shambolic and lacklustre appearance is not the Churchill who has been handed down to us. Halifax wrote in his diary: ‘His speech in the House does not seem to have gone too well.’65 Harold Nicolson was appalled. ‘He hesitates, gets his notes in the wrong order, puts on the wrong pair of spectacles, fumbles for the right pair, keeps on saying “Sweden” when he means “Denmark”, and one way and another makes a lamentable performance.’66
Another disconcerted diarist was the Soviet Ambassador. ‘I had never seen him in such a state.67 He clearly hadn’t slept for several nights. He was pale, couldn’t find the right words, stumbled and kept getting mixed up. There was not a trace of his usual parliamentary brilliance.’
Churchill produced lame arguments to explain the German breakthrough: bad weather, the vastness of the sea, the impossibility of controlling it all, and so on. For Dawson, it was a dreadful anti-climax. ‘As I listened to his long and rather laboured narrative, I kept hoping for some dramatic revelation.68 But there was none.’
The First Lord admitted that British forces were yet to take Narvik or Trondheim, contrary to what Members might have heard. He claimed not to be dismayed, though. ‘I must declare to the House that I feel greatly advantaged by what has occurred.’ He concluded: ‘We have probably arrived now at the first main crunch of the war,’ and he called on the need for ‘unceasing and increasing vigour to turn to the utmost profit the strategic blunder into which our mortal enemy has been provoked’.
His message was unconvincing. Maisky noted that the audience was visibly disappointed. ‘The prevailing mood was one of growing irritation and concern for the future.69 But Chamberlain, sitting on the front bench next to Churchill, was clearly pleased. No wonder: Churchill’s failure is Chamberlain’s success.’
After his speech, Churchill stood by the outer doors to the Chamber talking to Admiral Keyes, while he took snuff from the Doorkeeper. A reporter watched him move in slow steps across the Lobby, ‘looking bent and tired, and like a man who was getting no sleep – but smiling …’70 General Ironside who had seen more of Churchill than most in the past few days remarked that ‘his physique must be marvellous but I cannot think he would make a good Prime Minister.71 He has not got the necessary stability for guiding the others.’
5
IN GREAT STRENGTH
‘Everyone said “Lyne made nonsense of the embarkation.”’1
EVELYN WAUGH, Put Out More Flags
‘Norway was a disaster from beginning to end.’2
ROBERT BLAKE
If Operation ‘Weserübung’ was perceived as a masterpiece of tactical improvisation, then the opposite was true of the British response, in which Churchill played a controlling part. Admiral Keyes, an old friend from the Gallipoli Campaign, put to Churchill five days later what he saw as the essence of the problem. ‘You provoked action by declaring you would break the Narvik iron ore trade and were not ready for every conceivable counter stroke (however unlikely) which the enemy might make …’
Lack of preparation was one thing, but other difficulties sprang from the impossibility of stopping Churchill ‘running riot’, as one anonymous senior officer complained in a letter to Admiral Godfrey.4, 3 Now that battle was joined, the First Lord’s ‘zest for taking charge’ became a source of muddle and chaos.5 The widespread public assumption that Churchill was an effective war leader was not shared by those who served under Churchill at the Admiralty between September and May, or sat with him in the War Cabinet and on the Military Coordination Committee. A ‘stimulating martyrdom’ was how General Alan Brooke later described the experience of working with a chief who was ‘constitutionally incapable of not interfering with his e
ntire heart, soul and mind in any operation, great or small, of which he had cognizance, whether strategical, tactical or technical’.6 Admiral Godfrey was especially damning about the efficacy of Churchill’s interferences in the Norway Campaign. ‘The tragedy of Churchill was that the thing he loved most he did least well, i.e. strategy.7 Early on in the war his decisions were invariably wrong and caused us to lose ships, men etc. unnecessarily and to have the stuff at the wrong place. If you didn’t agree with him you were axed …’ As for what Admiral Cunningham called the First Lord’s ‘tormenting telegraphic prods’, Godfrey went on: ‘Mr Churchill would resort to any subterfuge to get his way, and not the least tantalising procedure was his trick of drafting telegrams as if they originated in the Admiralty.’ General Sir John Dill, who succeeded Ironside as CIGS, found Churchill’s work methods worryingly reminiscent of an earlier campaign.8 ‘All the careful teachings of the Staff College were ignored, the chain of command disrupted and … every military sin perpetrated at the Dardanelles repeated on a more extended scale.’9
Churchill viewed his position differently. He blamed the failures in Norway on the impediments thrown up by official machinery, and afterwards claimed that he had had ‘an exceptional measure of responsibility but no power of effective direction’.10 His Private Secretary defended him, saying that it was ‘almost malicious’ to infer that Churchill had ever assumed control: he sat at a table where everyone had a voice, and if anything it was Chamberlain’s dominating influence which was the key to understanding the whole campaign.11 But seated at the same table had been Geoffrey Shakespeare – who observed ‘how firmly Churchill has his finger on the Admiralty’s pulse’ – and Captain Ralph Edwards, whose frustrations on 29 April boiled over into his diary.12 ‘Winston entered the fray and decided against the recommendation of the Naval staff.13 This interference is appalling and we don’t appear strong enough to stand up to it.’ Even an ardent supporter like Bob Boothby dismissed as absurd the notion that Churchill never interfered in Admiralty decisions. ‘The exact opposite is true.14 He never stopped.’
Six Minutes in May Page 9