Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  ‘Pretty awful!’ had been Cadogan’s assessment of the War Cabinet on 26 April.12 Concern about the blow to Britain’s prestige and the psychological effect on the public had led Ministers to order preparations for a withdrawal to go ahead ‘in the greatest secrecy’ – not even their French or Norwegian allies were to know.13 At the same time, the government hoped to postpone the evacuation until after the seizure of Narvik. Late in the day, Churchill’s first love had become everyone else’s beau idéal too.

  Anticipating success in Narvik, Samuel Hoare, the new Secretary of State for Air – the Ministry which had contributed perhaps least to the campaign – gave a broadcast in which he strove to outsoar Churchill for uplifting rhetoric. ‘Today our wings are spread over the Arctic.14 They are sheathed in ice. Tomorrow the sun of victory will touch them with its golden light, and the wings that flashed over the great waters of the north will bear us homewards once more to the “peace with honour” of a free people and the victory of a noble race.’

  The capture of Narvik, Chamberlain now decided, would mitigate the effects of the withdrawal from central Norway, and give the public something to celebrate. ‘We should then be able to claim it was a strategical triumph and emphasise that it was all part of our plan for concentrating our efforts on Narvik.’15

  As if these plans were not convoluted enough, Churchill had begun distancing himself from the rest of the Cabinet, pressing for a guerrilla force under Colonel Colin Gubbins to be left in the mountains behind Trondheim. Peter Fleming flew back to Namsos carrying a brown-paper bag stuffed with detonators for blowing up bridges and petrol dumps, and with orders to carry out ‘a secret, complicated and as it turned out impossible task’.16

  Fleming reported to Carton de Wiart on 30 April: ‘You can really do what you like, for they don’t know what they want done.’17 Carton de Wiart had reached the same conclusion on receiving a signal from General Massy on 27 April. ‘Evacuation decided in principle.18 Plan in your case gradual but rapid.’ His instructions from the War Office over the next five days reflected London’s continuing disarray. ‘First to evacuate, then to hold on, then to evacuate.’19 When Carton de Wiart remonstrated with Massy, saying that he considered an evacuation from Namsos ‘unsound in every way’, Massy replied in panic: ‘There is no, repeat no, question of any British or French troops being left behind at Namsos.’20

  The French were not told until 29 April. Through Fleming and Lindsay, instructions reached Frank Lodge in Steinkjer to pass on an oral message to the Chasseurs Alpins. ‘Orders have been received from the War Office that you should rejoin the main force and return to the point of embarkation.’21 After half a day’s trudge through the snow, Lodge came across the Chasseurs firing at a German reconnaissance plane that he recognised as ‘Sammy’. He delivered Fleming’s message, and asked the Chasseurs to follow him back to Namsos. For their retreat at least, the French troops possessed the proper equipment, recently arrived from Scotland. Without his own snowshoes or skis, Lodge was confined to a narrow path over the mountains, trekking single file in wet boots and socks through eighty miles of deep snow that froze at night to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Tom Fowler and B Company 4th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment retreated from Steinkjer on the evening of 22 April. Fowler says: ‘The Germans had bombed Steinkjer flat.’22 This was not the news that was broadcast on the BBC. Soldiers assembled around a farmhouse radio heard the announcer say in heartening tones that ‘British expeditionary forces are pressing forward steadily from all points where they have landed in Norway … In the Namsos sector British and French are advancing successfully towards Trondheim, where German forces may soon be isolated.’23

  Listening to this, Stowe’s Swedish photographer shook his head. ‘What’s the matter with those mugs? Are they crazy?’

  The German bombing had destroyed B Company’s kitbags of Arctic clothing, fur coats, special boots and socks, though this was not the setback it seemed. Carton de Wiart had observed that if his men ‘wore all these things they were scarcely able to move at all, and looked like paralysed bears’.24

  Fowler grabbed dry clothing from the ruins. Major Stokes was wearing pyjamas under his battledress. Private Turner, also from B Company, had on a dinner jacket and a ski cap.

  ‘We got moving,’ Fowler says. ‘Nobody had any food, nobody had any cigarettes, and we marched for two days like that, with nothing.’

  It was snowing hard as they slithered northwards through the mud slush and the trees. They began to tear off and throw away their respirators, haversacks, overcoats, even their helmets – the pine branches scraping against the steel made too much noise. Fowler’s hands were puffy and red with chilblains. At night, his feet and legs were too cold to feel. After stumbling through Asp, Namdalseid, Rodhammer and Skage, Fowler’s platoon reached Namsos, and boarded the French merchant ship El Kantara on 2 May. Lieutenant Colonel Walter Hingston of 1/4 King’s Own Yorkshire Light was one of those who threaded their way in the half-light between the remains of wooden houses, with only their brick chimneys standing ‘like blackened totem poles’, to the wharf.25 Looking back on that day, Hingston doubted ‘whether British troops have ever been forced to retire with so little effort on the part of the enemy.26 On the other hand, it is also doubtful if a British force have ever before been asked to do so much with so little.’

  As at Gallipoli, the evacuation from Norway was the only decently organised part of the campaign. The night before, 5,084 troops of Paget’s ‘Sickle Force’ had been successfully extricated from Åndalsnes. That left Carton de Wiart, as he bleakly saw it, ‘the only unenvied pebble on the beach.27 Alone against the might of Germany.’

  Operation ‘Klaxon’, the evacuation of Carton de Wiart’s 6,200 men from Namsos, was scheduled for the night of 1 May. But a dense sea mist prevented Captain Louis Mountbatten and his 5th Destroyer Flotilla from running up the fjord. Under the cover of fog, Mountbatten had turned back and passed the night at sea.

  On ‘that last, endless day’ as Carton de Wiart called it, there was time enough for Fowler, Lodge, Fleming and Lindsay to absorb the devastation.28 According to a Times correspondent in Namsos, three days of incessant German bombing raids had resulted in an ‘absolute destruction such as has never been witnessed in any war before.29 It is impossible to see where the streets used to run. All is just one knee-deep amorphous mass of charred and blackened debris.’

  In the town’s razed centre, Lindsay was reminded of pictures of Ypres. The thick snow did nothing to muffle the crackle of burning timber, like odd rifle shots, and banging and hammering from suspended pieces of steel. ‘It sounded as if the dead were trying to force their way up through the ruins.’30

  Hjørdis Mikalsen, then aged twelve, went looking for her cat in the ruins, until someone told her that there was no point, the French would have eaten Nusse. ‘Our house was pulverised,’ she says.31 ‘There was nothing left, not even a mug. Only a ghastly burnt smell that lingered for months and months.’

  What had occurred at Namsos gave birth to a new word. Churchill wrote in a passage that he cut from the final manuscript of The Gathering Storm: ‘The expression which I certainly used long afterwards, ‘We mustn’t get Namsosed’, embodied that feeling of dread for this experience.’32 The word ‘Namsosed’ was to flash across Churchill’s mind the following month at Dunkirk, during the North African landings, and in Sicily – to remind him of the ‘perils and horrors of landing, or of evacuation, without the command of the air’.

  Chamberlain had warned Churchill at the outset of the danger from the Luftwaffe. Norway had proved the Prime Minister right. He wrote to his sister that ‘this brief campaign has taught our people, many of whom were much in need of teaching, the importance of the air factor’.33 The navy in particular, observed Peter Fleming, who had served in the frontmost line, had formed ‘for the first time, a just and most disturbing appreciation of its limits in the face of air power’.34

  The ships came in through the sea
mist. After a campaign lasting sixteen days, ‘Maurice Force’ was evacuated in the course of a few hours on the night of 2 May. ‘It was the fog which saved them,’ wrote Ironside.35

  On HMS Afridi, Captain Vian waited for thirty-five men from the Hallamshire Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment who had covered the retreat. At 3.15 a.m. with the rearguard safely on board, the Afridi cast off. In his final action before sailing, Vian ordered his pom-pom guns to open fire on the vehicles, now massed on the quay, which had arrived a few days earlier, and which, Fleming wrote, ‘had made possible our withdrawal’.36 There was no time to load all the equipment that Carton de Wiart had requested. Six of the Chasseurs’ newly delivered A.A. guns had had to be pushed into the fjord.

  Fleming’s instructions to embark on the Afridi with his men were changed as they waited to board. He came away with Lindsay and Carton de Wiart on HMS York. Fleming watched the last stragglers clatter onto the wharf through ‘a sour, charred, flat mass of rubble, eerily and dangerously illuminated by a huge dump of inextinguishably burning coal’.

  Conspicuous in his soft red hat, Carton de Wiart had not informed the Norwegians until the last moment that the Allies were deserting them. At 10.40 p.m., as the first Allied soldiers embarked, he entrusted his driver, Birger Evensen, with ‘a very important task’.37 Birger was to take a letter from Carton de Wiart to Colonel Ole Getz at the Norwegian 5th Brigade HQ. ‘It is with the deepest regret that I must let you know that we must evacuate this area … Our one hope is that we may return and help you bring your campaign to a successful conclusion.38 Believe us.’

  In Wiltshire, it had been a beautiful May day, with the sun belting down on the sycamores under a blue sky. Frances Partridge felt ‘physically sick’ when she heard on the evening news about the complete withdrawal of British troops from central Norway.39 ‘What I’m suffering from is the crushing of a hope, built on stronger foundations than I knew, of the war being ended quickly through the Norwegian campaign, and the realisation again of the immense strength of Germany.’

  The German High Command issued a statement. ‘In unresting pursuit of the wildly retreating English, German troops reached Åndalsnes and raised the Reich war flag there at 3 p.m. today.’40 William Shirer in Berlin witnessed Hitler’s crowing. ‘It would be hard to exaggerate the feeling of triumph in the Third Reich today … Germany has at last met the great British Empire in a straight fight and won hands down.’41

  In Ottawa, an apprehensive Canadian Prime Minister wrote in his diary: ‘Hitler claims complete victory, has given the German Commander decoration of “Iron Cross”.’42

  Medals and badges were also distributed to von Falkenhorst’s troops. Awarded to all airmen, sailors and Alpenjägers, the ‘Narvik Spange’ entwined a propeller, an anchor and an edelweiss to mark the first occasion when Germany’s three armed services had fought together. To strengthen his depleted Kriegsmarine, Admiral Raeder introduced a new Type-36A destroyer, unofficially named ‘the Narvik class’.

  Few attempts in Britain were made to celebrate the ‘Norway veterans’, and no specific Norway Campaign medal was struck. Frank Lodge was given a temporary medal ribbon, and later ordered to remove it and hand it back. Towards the end of his life he visited the Imperial War Museum with his wife Elaine. She says: ‘There was a whole wall celebrating the battles of the Second World War, and he couldn’t find Norway.43 “They’ve forgotten us, they don’t want to know.”’ Lodge felt that he had been obliterated once already. On his return from Namsos, he learned that his parents had held a special service, believing him to have drowned in the icy waters off Lillesjona.

  Some 1,896 British servicemen were killed, severely wounded or went missing in Norway, roughly the same number as Germans; and another 2,500 at sea. Of the 1,896, an estimated 150 died in battle. Tom Fowler’s battalion lost eight men in and around Steinkjer. It took another seventy years to establish most of their graves. Two of the Lincolnshire Regiment’s dead, Harry Prike and Ronald Smith, were wrongly named on a war memorial at Verdal, twenty miles from their actual burial places. These two young Lincolnshire territorials were the first British soldiers to fall in direct combat with the enemy in the Second World War. A third grave carried the name of stretcher-bearer Private Joseph Croft, from Woolwich. In fact, Croft was taken prisoner on 22 April, and ended up in a POW camp in Poland. After the war, he returned to Woolwich, for the rest of his life unaware that he was presumed buried at Skei church, five miles east of Steinjker. The body in the pine woods undisturbed in the snow for seven weeks was that of someone else.

  In Britain, moves to bury the Norway Campaign commenced almost at once. Tom Fowler went on leave as soon as he got home, and was told by senior officers not to talk about Norway. On a visit to a friend in Lincoln Barracks, he was stopped by the sergeant who asked where his cap badge was. ‘I said: “I lost it.”44 “Where’s your rifle?” “I lost it.” “Your respirator?” “Lost it.” “Where did you manage to lose all this stuff?” “In Norway, sarge.” “Oh, you are one of them,” he said with a bit of disgust, as though it was a crime we’d committed.’

  Since returning to Krogs Farm in 2010, Fowler has not stopped talking about what he witnessed there in April 1940. ‘Seven days a week,’ grumbles his wife Gwen. ‘That’s why I take my hearing aid out.’ Ignoring her, he repeats: ‘We were the first ones into action. I say so, but nobody takes an interest. You never hear of Norway.’

  ‘The whole thing is so damned silly.’45 That was the last thought of Evelyn Waugh’s dandy-aesthete Cedric Lyne, before a bullet killed him instantly in the mountains above Åndalsnes. In this respect, Hitler was right about the British invasion. ‘From the military point of view, it can only be described as frivolous dilettantism.’46 The campaign had been such a ‘lamentable, footling, butter-fingered’ shambles that the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson suggested that from now on the Women’s Auxiliary should be entrusted to hold the Western Front.47

  German losses at sea were considerable, but so were Germany’s gains. She had safeguarded her principal supply of iron ore, in the same stroke denying export of Swedish ore to Britain from Narvik. She also had bases which were much nearer to ports in the north of England and Scotland. No one regarded Hitler’s advantage with more trepidation than General Ironside. ‘We are on the defensive and the Germans have the initiative.48 He can do what he likes. Where will he go next?’

  In Oslo, on the eve of the German attack, Curt Bräuer, the Nazi Minister, had invited 220 guests at short notice to his Embassy to watch a documentary ‘peace’ film Feuertaufe, about the invasion of Poland. In the final scene, a map of Britain went up in flames to the music of Wagner, fulfilling the promise that Hitler had made six years before in his interviews with Dr Rauschning: ‘Today there is no such thing as an island.49 I shall land on the shores of Britain. I shall destroy her towns from the mainland.’

  In Ottawa, Canada’s Prime Minister believed that he was witnessing the overshadowing of the British Empire by the most devilish powers the world had ever seen. ‘It must be a dark and sombre night in the British isles.’50

  Harold Nicolson learned of the evacuation at Lord Salisbury’s house in Arlington Street, where he found a downcast crowd of government critics, including Louis Spears who thought that ‘we were heading for complete disaster’.51 If the Germans could invade Norway with impunity, why not Scotland? ‘The general impression is that we may lose the war,’ wrote Nicolson.52 ‘We part in gloom.’

  Sprawled out on a big red armchair in Halifax’s room at the Foreign Office, the American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy reported in his bluff Boston voice that a meeting of US attachés had agreed that England ‘would be beaten’ in the war.53

  In her Wiltshire farmhouse on that grilling hot evening, Frances Partridge watched a friend, looking pale and ill, turn to her husband Ralph.

  ‘You don’t think it’s possible we might lose the war?’

  ‘Certainly it’s possible.’54

  A German invasion loo
ked likeliest to those who had fought her soldiers, sailors and pilots in Norway. The fear of it preoccupied Peter Fleming as the convoy steamed home from Namsos. In an unpublished novel that he began to write shortly after arriving back in England, he imagined the worst. ‘For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, 1940 will be part of the ABC of history like 1066 before it: the year in which England was conquered.’55

  With his own candid eyes, Fleming had seen the capabilities of the German war machine. The Luftwaffe delivered its final punch to ‘Maurice Force’ as the Allied ships entered the open sea, after having disembarked from Namsos without leaving a man behind. At 8.45 a.m., German dive-bombers attacked the French destroyer Bison and HMS Afridi, sinking both vessels. Fleming and Lindsay felt that they should have been among the 105 dead. Ordered home on the Afridi, they would not easily forget how they had been switched to HMS York at the very last moment.

  Fleming wrote of his experience: ‘When men escape from mortal danger, the mere act of survival has a curiously moving and even exhilarating effect upon them.’56 At the same time, he knew that ‘however daringly executed, a military evacuation is an ignoble proceeding … it leaves behind it bitterness and a squalid havoc’.57 Reprieved, both Fleming and Lindsay resolved, as soon as they got back, to expose the deficiencies in Britain’s armed forces and political leadership; the former through his contacts on The Times, the latter by using his political connections in the House of Commons.

  In the secret report that he had prepared for Churchill three days earlier, Fleming wrote of Martin Lindsay that he had been nothing but ‘untiring, resourceful and cool’.58 As the York pitched home through the heavy swell, and the tired soldiers slept or sang or vomited on the crowded decks, Lindsay gave vent to raw anger. His daughter says: ‘My father was direct.59 He was very determined and convincing, and made as many enemies as friends, but if he thought someone should know something, he would tell them, definitely.’