Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Incredibly, Fowler’s company held Krogs Farm for several hours. From his observation point in the loft, Fowler heard German orders being shouted in the woods. Enemy planes flew constantly overhead. Around 6 p.m., they attacked the farm buildings.

  Fowler says: ‘Suddenly incendiary bullets were coming through the walls of the barn and setting fire to the straw. Captain Tweed, who had a stutter, ordered us to evacuate. Lance-Corporal Jacklin said: “Fowler, you take my Bren gun, I’ve got something in me eye.” A piece of shrapnel had blinded him. The private beside Jacklin had a bullet in his leg. I took them both down to the steps at the back of the house where the first-aid men were. Then I knocked my way out of the woodwork and dropped the Bren through the hole and jumped out and followed it. I was crawling along the old cart track leading to Vist when a voice from the other side called: “All right, Tommy, keep buggering on.” It was my old school pal Tommy Jinks in C Company, telling me to keep going.’

  The enemy in the woods were Austrian Alpine troops from 138 Gebirgsjäger Regiment, well trained, well equipped, fitter, with light field guns, MG-42 machine guns, machine pistols, and trench mortars that they fired from the side of half-track motorcycles. These were veterans from the Polish campaign, and the raw Territorials in their khaki uniforms made easy targets: untrained civilians until very recently – milkmen, wool-millers, solicitors – whose movements stood out against the snow and who lacked the materiel, skill and experience to defend themselves. The American journalist Leland Stowe arrived from Oslo in time to witness their rout. ‘Beside those German veterans, these fellows looked like boy scouts.’6

  Churchill had described his 1898 experience at Omdurman, the last great cavalry charge in history, as a battle where ‘ancient and modern confronted one another’.7 At Krogs Farm, and at Steinkjer, which high-level German bombers razed that afternoon, the situation was reversed. French officers complained about the lack of defensive weapons in the Namsos area, in a conversation that reached Colville in Downing Street. ‘The British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus, armed with bows and arrows against the onslaught of scientific warfare.’8

  A lack of specialist knowledge was rumoured to have compromised the expedition even before it had set sail. George Orwell heard that the War Office was ‘so ill-informed’ as not to know that Norwegian nights were short, imagining that troops which had to disembark in broad daylight ‘would have the cover of darkness’.9 The Minister of Supply, Leslie Burgin, boasted to journalists that he did not know ‘of any force which had been so splendidly equipped in so short a time’.10 But in a measured attack on the opening afternoon of the Norway Debate, the Liberal leader Archie Sinclair, who less than twelve months before had led the Liberals to vote against conscription, reminded MPs how Burgin had appeared in a press picture in a becoming white coat, while the troops at Namsos had no white coats at all. ‘Apparently he had the only one.’

  Once ashore, the soldiers were exposed without camouflage. An officer complained: ‘The Jerries could see us everywhere in the snow.11 They just mowed our men down.’

  Churchill’s interferences compounded the mess. Owing to the chaos of loading and unloading at Rosyth on 8 April, and the dividing of the convoy on 14 April, 146th Infantry Brigade had arrived in Namsos with anti-aircraft guns but without predictors, so that the ship’s carpenter had to contrive sights out of string and wood. One company was provided with magazines loaded with anti-aircraft rounds, which at once betrayed the men’s positions to German snipers. None of the correct shells for the three-inch mortars arrived, only smoke shells. When a corporal in the Sherwood Foresters fired off his first two rounds, ‘there was no explosion – oh no, just this bloody cloud of smoke’.12 Junior NCOs frequently did not have the requisite training to handle the Bren light machine guns. Field telephones were separated from their cables, and wireless equipment was rationed to two sets per battalion. ‘Even more important,’ said Martin Lindsay, ‘all the ground was covered in snow, and the only way to operate in it was with ski troops and we hadn’t got ski troops and therefore the troops were confined to the road.’13 The situation was no more satisfactory for the skiers of the French Chasseurs, who had landed without mules to pull their sledges, and, worse, without binding straps – making their skis unusable. A young Norwegian soldier later told Theodore Broch: ‘There seemed to be no order to anything.’14 The only rule was confusion. ‘We could hear our wounded crying in the woods, but we couldn’t get to them,’ reported one soldier.15 Joseph Kynoch would remember to his last breath the hellish din on St George’s Day: ‘… men shouting orders, wounded men screaming in pain, the horrendous shriek of the dive bombers and the explosion and dust of their bombs and the deadly song of flying shrapnel’.16

  Carton de Wiart wrote: ‘I felt in my bones the campaign was unlikely to be either long or successful.’17 The totality of the confusion can be measured by his reaction when he first heard the German destroyer Paul Jacobi open fire on Krogs Farm. He told Admiral Keyes on his return to London that he thought it was the British navy.

  Leland Stowe recorded this ‘catastrophic British defeat’ for the Chicago Daily News.18 Everyone told the same bitter story. ‘It’s the planes.19 We’ve got no planes. The Jerries have been bombing us all afternoon – and shelling us on our right flank from the fjord. It’s been bloody awful.’ ‘What we need are planes, and planes as fast as we can get them.’20 ‘I’m glad you’re a reporter.21 For God’s sake, tell them we’ve got to have airplanes and anti-aircraft guns.’22 ‘For God’s sake, why don’t they give us planes?’

  In Somaliland in November 1914, Carton de Wiart had watched British DH9 bombers dropping 460-pound bombs on the Dervishes, and muttered: ‘Damned unfair!’ The planes were under the control of the Admiralty in London, of which Churchill was then chief.23 Twenty-six years on, Churchill was again in charge, and Carton de Wiart had never been more in need of air cover. ‘Still I waited for news of our naval attack which was to be my signal to take Trondheim, but still it did not come.’24

  On 17 April, the War Office fixed the combined attack on Trondheim for the 22nd and briefed Major General Frederick Hotblack who was to command the landing force, impressing on him the ‘paramount need for speed’.25 Hotblack – nicknamed ‘Boots’ – was hurrying home from the Athenaeum Club shortly after midnight when, in an accident that seemed of a shape with the campaign, he slipped down the Duke of York Steps and seriously injured himself. He was picked up unconscious and taken to Millbank hospital. One of his brigade commanders, Brigadier Horatio Pettus Berney-Ficklin, was next day appointed to replace him, but his plane crashed on landing at Kirkwall, leaving Berney-Ficklin unconscious. Ironside questioned in his diary whether the operation was jinxed. ‘A peculiar fatality over this wretched Trondheim attack.26 Two of our best commanders knocked out as they had just got the plans.’

  At 5.15 p.m. on 19 April, a third commander, Major General Bernard Paget, a large-nosed, sharp-tongued martinet, who had been wounded four times, rendering his left arm as useless as Carton de Wiart’s, received a call saying that he was to catch a train for Scotland at 10.15 p.m. ‘The only clue as to my task was that I should bring warm clothing with me.’27 An hour later, Paget was telephoned again. Plans had changed. He was now to report at the War Office in London at 10.30 next morning, 20 April. There, Ironside told him that he was to assume command of 148th Infantry Brigade, the second of 49th (West Riding) Division’s three Territorial Army brigades, which under the name of ‘Sickle Force’ had landed two nights before at the small port of Åndalsnes. Paget’s orders were to organise the base at Åndalsnes, and ‘to co-operate with the Norwegian Army in preventing the Northward advance of the German army based in Southern Norway.’ Oddly, no mention was made of a major direct assault on Trondheim, even though this was the priority of Lieutenant General Hugh Massy who the day before had been appointed Commander of the North-Wester
n Expeditionary Force, in charge both of Paget and Carton de Wiart. Massy wrote: ‘My instructions, as I understood them, were to capture Trondheim.’28

  With little intelligence information available, Paget had to create his headquarters from scratch. His Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Nicholson, recalled that everything was in a state of constant improvisation. Once again, the men lacked maps. ‘We had to tear them out of geography books and send the ADC to the Norwegian Travel Agency to buy a Baedeker and collect any brochures he could find.’29

  Von Falkenhorst had had two months to prepare; Paget five days. One of Paget’s three infantry brigades was left in Rosyth, with sappers and medical equipment. Most of the A.A. guns and transport sank off Bergen on 21 April with the torpedoing of the supply ship Cedarbank. The materiel that did eventually make its way to Norway proved useless.

  ‘Sickle Force’ was composed of units that had been destined for an unopposed landing at Stavanger as part of ‘R.4’; hastily unloaded at Rosyth on 8 April, reloaded on 13 April for Namsos on the liner Orion as ‘Maurice Force’; and at the last moment ordered to Åndalsnes on the night of 16 April.

  The result of equipment not being stowed tactically was tremendous confusion – with stores slung ashore in short order and carried off into the holds of five different ships with no method or inventory. There was never a chance of sorting them in the blackout, wrote Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, assigned to the Brigade from the War Office. ‘The scene below decks had become a sort of Storeman’s Inferno, with shadowy figures burrowing about in the semi-darkness of shaded lamps and torches.’30 Colonel Beckwith, Commanding Officer of the Sherwood Foresters, peered down into the hold, appalled. At the bottom was ‘a vast pyramid of stores of every description, with men of a number of units climbing over it like flies searching for anything with their unit’s markings’.31

  On 21 April, the nine o’clock news announced that General Paget was at Lillehammer and that all was going well in Norway. Paget had not yet left Rosyth. When he arrived at a smouldering Åndalsnes on 25 April and received his first grim briefing, he learned that ‘Sickle Force’ had landed 1,750 men a week before, but with no artillery, no tanks, no armoured cars, no transport, no medical services, no signals equipment, and four anti-aircraft guns – though Nicholson had noticed ‘several fishing rods and many sporting guns’.32

  This was the force that Chamberlain had promised to send in ‘great strength’ to fight ‘in full association’ with Major General Ruge, and for which the Norwegian Commander-in-Chief had been waiting in a state of impatience and desperation since 14 April.33, 34

  In response to persistent appeals from Ruge and 2nd Norwegian Division, instead of marching north on Trondheim, 148th Infantry Brigade had moved south-east to Lillehammer to ward off a German advance from Oslo. The newly appointed British military attaché had confirmed that the situation there was so critical that unless reinforcements arrived within twenty-four hours the front was unlikely to hold. Against tanks, artillery and overwhelming air power, the British had suffered 700 casualties, and the commander of 1/5th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Guy German, was taken prisoner with several officers. Paget had assumed control of a brigade that was reduced to six officers and 300 men, and had ceased to function as a military unit.

  The situation disappointed more than surprised the local Norwegian commander in Åndalsnes. Oberst Thue had watched the British forces file ashore, young, small, skinny and pale, and he considered them to be ‘little more than children and riff raff – the only thing they were good at was insulting women and stealing whatever they came across in shops and private homes.’35

  The Germans had swept clean through in armoured cars and lorries full of troops, covered by planes operating from Norwegian airfields. By 26 April, the bombers and fighters still available to Luftflotte V had established what Peter Fleming called ‘the Luftwaffe’s almost unchallenged supremacy in the air’.36 The key German advantage was that the Luftwaffe could seize aerodromes like Stavanger with airborne troops, fly in supplies, and commence operations at once. In sad contrast, the RAF’s hopelessly outmatched force of 240 aircraft, of which only two thirds were in service, proved unable to intervene from distant bases in Lincolnshire and Scotland until the army could secure a local airfield with railway access. A frustrated Halifax wrote in his diary that ‘with no aerodromes our fighters cannot get there’.37

  The difficulties for the bombers were considerable. The Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens had to fly enormous distances in shortening nights over great stretches of sea in often abysmal conditions. After flying up to 750 miles – the extreme range of bombers – attacks were then based on ‘information necessarily some hours out of date’, and the targets were easy to miss, having to be located from torn-out town plans from Baedeker guides.38 Another restriction was the Allied order for air activity: in the first three days of the Norway Campaign, German-held airfields could only be attacked by machine guns and not by bombs. Between 7 April and 10 May, Bomber Command lost 31 aircraft in 782 sorties.

  Namsos was out of range, so Allied air support took the flimsy shape of sixty-minute patrols over Åndalsnes. For the rest of the time, Dudley Clarke observed, German pilots flew ‘just as they liked’.39 Major Desmond Fitzgerald had lain in the fjords around Åndalsnes, being bombed hourly day after day – a scene which Evelyn Waugh wove into Put Out More Flags. Meeting Waugh on his return, Fitzgerald criticised the pitiful response of the RAF which ‘constantly flew without their distinguishing signs and neglected to give answering signals; were constantly fired on and sometimes brought down’.40 On 23 April, three Coastal Command Hudsons from 224 Squadron approached Åndalsnes, one of which was shot into the fjord by batteries from the cruiser HMS Curacoa; the two others were damaged, but managed to return to base.

  Less than twenty-four hours after arriving in Norway, Paget sent a message to General Massy. His troops could not endure more than another four days unless ‘adequate air support was forthcoming’.41

  In London, Massy had promised Paget sixty fighter aircraft. On 24 April, eighteen Gladiator Mark II fighters were flown ashore from the carrier HMS Glorious and landed on an iced-over lake thirty-five miles from Åndalsnes. Maps issued to Wing Commander Victor McClure had persuaded him that he was headed for the Middle East. ‘We saw ourselves in singlets and shorts under a burning desert sun …’ Exposed on the unsheltered lake at Lesjaskog, McClure’s carburettor froze overnight, and his out-of-date biplane was unable to take off – ‘plumb at the mercy of anything that buzzed along’ – when the Luftwaffe appeared at 7.45 the next morning.42 He-111s and Ju-88s attacked in V-formations throughout the day, leaving 132 craters in the ice. By nightfall, there were five Gladiators left, and these were in danger of sinking into the lake. The last Gladiator was destroyed the following evening.

  A small force of Whitley bombers did attempt to bomb Trondheim airfield on 22 and 23 April, but failed to locate it.

  Paget never spoke to his son Julian about what he had experienced in Norway, save to suggest that it was ‘a scenario that even the most sadistic of instructors at the Staff College would not have dared to devise for his students’.43 And the situation was about to get worse. Operation ‘Hammer’ was in the balance.

  Churchill had sent Chamberlain a note clamping together ‘the various & changing plans wh are now afoot’.44 The complicated progress of the Norway Campaign proved hard for the Prime Minister to hold in one hand. Even today Churchill’s initiatives resist easy summary, and nowhere more so than in the seaborne assault on Trondheim.

  Chamberlain complained to his sister that ‘Winston changed his mind four times over Trondheim’.45 Churchill was initially against it, ordering Forbes and the Home Fleet back up to Narvik on 10 April; then grudgingly in favour, under pressure from Halifax and Chamberlain; then fully in favour; then, under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff and the Admiralty, reluctantly against it; finally in favour again on 25 April, before res
igning himself to evacuation.

  At first opposed to ‘Hammer’ because it might prejudice ‘Rupert’, Churchill had swiftly become its chief champion – to such a degree that his account in The Gathering Storm, according to Admiral Godfrey, ‘gave no idea of the fervour and relentless determination with which Churchill … advocated the assault on Trondheim’.46 On 15 April, Churchill wrote to George VI. ‘We are aiming at Trondheim wh will be an even greater prize than Narvik.’47 He told the Military Coordination Committee that nothing should ‘prejudice the effectiveness of the central thrust’.48 The assault would be fraught with risks – but, if successful, another ‘brilliant’ operation, offering ‘the opportunity for a deed of fame’.49

  The ferocity of German air power had sobered Admiral Forbes, though. The navy Commander-in-Chief had considered Churchill’s important project, and announced that he was ‘not … very keen on forcing his way into Trondheim because of the risk of air attack’.50 Forbes told Churchill that the operation was not feasible ‘unless you are prepared to face very heavy losses in troops and transports’.51

  To Churchill’s annoyance, Forbes’s misgivings were shared by the Chiefs of Staff at a moment when Churchill’s relations with them had deteriorated further. Less than a fortnight had passed since Chamberlain had entrusted Churchill with the chairmanship of the Military Coordination Committee. In that brief time, the First Lord appeared to have descended the rungs from ‘seventh heaven’ to the deck of a ship simmering with mutiny.

  The MCC had a pet name: ‘The Crazy Gang’.52 Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, Chief of Staff for the British Expeditionary Force, predicted that ‘with Winston as chairman they are likely to be extremely volatile’. Within days, General Jacob, the War Cabinet’s Military Assistant, had come to recognise that Churchill was ‘unpredictable and meddlesome, and quite unsuited to handle his colleagues in a team’.53 In Lloyd George’s office in the Commons, A. J. Sylvester heard a joke. ‘They may not be fighting in France; but they are in the War Office!’