Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  For most of the exhausted government leaders, that nightmarish first day of war finally came to an end in Elverum. Only the king, his family, and several key ministers pushed on to the tiny snow-covered hamlet of Nybergsund, which was considered safer from German bombs. From there, Crown Prince Olav sent his wife, Princess Märtha, and their three children to Sweden, the princess’s homeland.

  The following day, Haakon agreed to meet with Curt Bräuer in Elverum. Employing a mixture of flattery and threats, the German minister promised the king that if he accepted the German demands, he would retain the honors and perquisites of his position and Norway would escape further destruction; if he did not, all resistance would be ruthlessly crushed. The demands, Bräuer said, included not only capitulation but the naming of Vidkun Quisling, the fifty-two-year-old leader of Norway’s minuscule Nazi Party, as the new prime minister of Norway.

  Haakon was astonished and outraged at the thought of Quisling heading the Norwegian government. Quisling’s party, which had never won more than 2 percent of the vote in any election, was considered a joke in Norway, while he and his men, in the words of Sigrid Undset, were thought of as “hysterical half-men.” His voice filled with fury, the king told Bräuer that he “could not appoint a government that did not enjoy the confidence of the Norwegian people, and several elections had shown that Quisling did not enjoy such confidence.”

  Returning to Nybergsund that night, Haakon briefed his son and ministers on Bräuer’s demands. On the run for more than twenty-four hours, the unshaven, disheveled men were suffering from both physical and emotional exhaustion. Several of them, badly frightened by the Germans’ efforts to capture them and despondent over the apparent hopelessness of Norway’s situation, believed they should give in and negotiate for peace without delay. The country was totally unprepared to fight Germany, they argued; if it tried to resist, it would be committing national suicide. They noted that Britain had sent word that its forces would come to Norway’s aid as soon as possible. But after what had happened in Czechoslovakia and Poland, how could anyone in his right mind put trust in British promises? The government must capitulate now.

  The tall, ramrod-straight Haakon was well aware that his ministers had never paid much attention to his advice and counsel in the past. This time, though, the future of his adopted country was at stake, and he was determined to follow his conscience and speak his mind. “The government is free to decide,” he said in an unsteady voice, “but I shall make my own position clear: I cannot accept the German demands. This would conflict with everything I have considered to be my duty as king ever since I came to Norway almost thirty-five years ago.” If the government chose otherwise, he would abdicate, renouncing the throne of Norway for himself and his family.

  “That instant burnt itself into my memory,” recalled Trygve Lie, the minister of supply and a future secretary general of the United Nations. “Having said these words, the King gazed intently at Prince Olav. For a long while, he was unable to resume, then he bent over the table and burst into tears. Prince Olav also had tears in his eyes.” Raising his head, Haakon struggled to control his emotions. “The government must now make its decision,” he said.

  His unequivocal stand ended all talk of capitulation. Swayed by his resolve and his willingness to sacrifice his throne for principle, the ministers, including the most defeatist, voted to reject the ultimatum. While Halvdan Koht phoned the news to Bräuer, Haakon and his prime minister signed a proclamation, which was broadcast over Norwegian radio, rejecting the German demands and calling on Norwegians to resist the invaders with all their might. When news of Haakon’s intransigence reached Hitler the following morning, the German leader flew into one of his trademark rages. How dare “this ridiculously small country and its petty king” defy him! The time for talking was over, Hitler declared. Haakon VII of Norway must be tracked down and killed.

  The following day, April 11, Haakon was conferring with his ministers at an inn in Nybergsund when the pastoral quiet was suddenly shattered by the honking of a car horn—the prearranged signal for imminent danger. The king, his son, and the ministers ran out of the inn toward a nearby grove of trees, flinging themselves onto the ground as six German dive-bombers whined overhead and raked the village and grove with machine-gun fire. Wheeling around, the planes made several more passes, strafing and dropping incendiary bombs as they went. When the attack finally ended, Norway’s leaders—wet, cold, and bloody from scratches—rose stiffly to their feet. Nybergsund itself was ablaze, but remarkably the raid had resulted in only two casualties, both of them villagers. When one of the bombers was shot down several days later, the pilot’s diary was found with this entry: “The king, the Government, all annihilated…”

  Once again, Haakon and his party headed north, into the wild, mountainous, and glacier-bound landscape of central Norway. Their convoy of vehicles, painted white for camouflage, crept along rough, narrow hairpin roads bordered by sheer peaks and seemingly bottomless mountain chasms. Cars broke down or were stuck in the snow, and more than once during the next two weeks, Haakon, who was in a car driven by his son, was separated from the government ministers, neither party knowing where the other was or whether anyone else was still alive. Ceaselessly tracking them, the Germans bombed and strafed every place they were thought to be. At the first sight or sound of a plane overhead, the king and his party headed for the nearest cover—trees, a rock, anything they could use to hide below or behind.

  Throughout these long early-spring days, they stopped whenever they could—to rest, conduct government business, attempt to find out what was going on in the rest of Norway, and consult intermittently with the British, French, and American diplomats who were doing their best to keep up with them. Inevitably, however, reports of approaching German troops or Luftwaffe aircraft would force them onward.

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  NOTWITHSTANDING THEIR VIKING HERITAGE, the Norwegians were “not good haters,” as one of their leaders later noted. But it didn’t take long for most of them to develop a fierce hatred of the Germans—“an army of marauders,” in the words of Sigrid Undset, “who came to live where they have not built, to reap where they have not sown, to rule over a people they have never served.” The king’s defiant rejection of Germany’s demands served as a stimulus for national resistance. Germany had conquered all of Norway’s major ports but not the interior of the country, and once their initial shock and confusion had worn off, the Norwegians began to fight back. In the days following the invasion, young men by the thousands wandered the countryside, trying to find army units they could join.

  At first, the army was also in turmoil: its demoralized commander in chief favored surrender or negotiation with the Germans. Backed by King Haakon, the cabinet replaced him with General Otto Ruge, a tall, craggy-faced former army chief of staff, who cobbled together a 40,000-man army from the fast-growing stream of citizen volunteers who poured out of their cities and towns by foot, on skis and bicycles, in cars, trucks, and buses. Although many were excellent marksmen who had brought along their own rifles and pistols, they had no artillery, tanks, antitank weapons, or air support in their skirmishes with the well-equipped, well-trained Germans.

  Ruge’s strategy was to play for time, to contain the Germans long enough in the south to allow an orderly retreat and stabilization of the front in central Norway. “With the weak and improvised forces we had at our disposal, it was impossible for us to engage in any decisive battle before the Allies came to our aid,” he later recalled. “Our small forces fought without respite, without reserves, always in the front line, against heavy artillery, tanks, and bombers….For three weeks, our divisions held out until at last, the Allies began to arrive.”

  Despite increasingly desperate appeals from Norway, it took Britain almost a week to cobble together an expedition to go to its assistance. Even though, as Ruge noted, the British must have realized that their mining of Norway’s waters would provoke a German response, the Chamberlain government
was as stunned by the invasion as the Norwegians. “The idea of an operation of this scope against Scandinavia had never entered my head,” confessed General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose members included the War Cabinet and the heads of the military services. “So far as I knew, we had not a vestige of a plan to deal with it.”

  Making matters worse, the British military commanders knew almost nothing about Norway and its terrain. “There were no maps,” said one officer. “We had to tear them out of geography books and send [someone] to the Norwegian travel agency to buy a Baedeker. From the Norwegian embassy and a series of tourist agencies, we gathered an armful of travel advertisement folders.” The photos in those brochures, he added, “provided the only clues as to what our prospective theater of operations looked like.” The British, a Norwegian historian later observed, hadn’t the slightest “elementary knowledge of things Norwegian.”

  When British land forces finally put ashore in central Norway, Norwegian officers were astonished at the raw troops’ lack of equipment and training. Although deep snow and ice still covered the ground in much of the country, almost none of the British soldiers had been provided with snowshoes or skis. They were also without almost everything else they needed—transport, artillery, antiaircraft weapons, communications gear, fighter cover, medical equipment, even food.

  Pounded by the Wehrmacht and strafed by the Luftwaffe, the green British troops were overwhelmed. “We’ve been massacred! Simply massacred!” a young lieutenant exploded after a battle that ended in a rout of British forces. “It’s been bloody awful!” Leland Stowe, a Chicago Daily News reporter who covered the British campaign, later called it “one of the costliest and most inexplicable bungles in military history.” Echoing that sentiment, the disconsolate General Edmund Ironside, who as chief of the Imperial General Staff headed the British Army, wrote in his diary: “Always too late. Changing plans and nobody directing. To bed very upset at the thought of our incompetence.”

  Shortly after the British landed in Norway, Chamberlain’s government canceled a planned attack on the key port of Trondheim. Late in April, without informing the Norwegian government or army, it decided to pull out of central Norway altogether, only nine days after its troops had arrived. When, against orders, the British commander shamefacedly informed Ruge on April 28 of the evacuation, the Norwegian general retorted, “So Norway is to share the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland! But why? Why? Your troops haven’t been defeated!” Overcome with fury, he left the room. After regaining his composure, he returned and calmly said to his British counterpart, “Please tell me what help I can give you to carry out your orders.” For the next forty-eight hours, Ruge’s forces supported the British in their retreat to the coast.

  The day after Ruge learned of the evacuation, the British government sent the cruiser Glasgow to pick up King Haakon and his ministers from the pretty coastal town of Molde, their latest refuge, and take them north to Tromsø, a little polar community some two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. “You are killing us!” exclaimed Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht when he and other members of the government were informed of the British troop withdrawal. Yet Koht and the others had little choice but to leave. Molde, under heavy German bombardment for more than a day, had become an inferno. High-explosive and incendiary bombs screamed and thundered through the air, reducing houses, shops, churches, and factories to little more than rubble.

  Late that evening, cars carrying the royals and government officials sped through town, dodging walls of flame and showers of shattering glass. It was, one official later said, “like driving through Hell.” Much of the harbor was also ablaze, and when the king’s party pulled up to the quay at which the cruiser was moored, the ship’s fire hoses were pouring water on the conflagration.

  As Haakon and his companions boarded the Glasgow, dozens of British seamen and Norwegian soldiers worked furiously to load hundreds of boxes of gold bullion—Norway’s gold reserves—into the cruiser’s hold. After being smuggled out of the Bank of Norway and dispatched on a cross-country hegira as perilous as that of the king, the gold had been stored in the cellar of a Molde textile factory. That night, as the factory burned, Norwegian civilians and troops fought smoke, flames, and falling timbers to retrieve the gold and load it onto trucks, which then sped to the harbor.

  Only about half the gold had been loaded aboard the Glasgow when the jetty to which the ship was moored caught fire, too. Ordering a halt to the transfer, the Glasgow’s captain put his vessel full astern. Taking half the jetty with her, the Glasgow made her escape, zigzagging wildly down the fjord toward the open sea.*2

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  WITH HAAKON SAFE FROM the Germans, at least for the moment, and with British troops on their way home from central Norway, Ruge’s forces surrendered to the Germans on May 3. In Britain, Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of the evacuation stunned his countrymen; the realization that the world’s greatest sea power had been humiliated by Germany ignited a wave of fury and fear throughout the nation.

  Aware that they were facing political disaster, Chamberlain and his ministers now cast about for a scapegoat. At a meeting of the War Cabinet, Winston Churchill, who as first lord of the admiralty had been the main architect of the slapdash Norwegian campaign, asserted that “blame should be attached not to us but to the neutrals, and we should take every opportunity of bringing this point up.” Following his own advice, Churchill declared in the House of Commons, “The strict observance of neutrality by Norway has been a contributory cause to the sufferings to which she is now exposed and to the limits of the aid which we can give her.” Many members of Parliament, however, refused to accept Churchill’s argument. Dissatisfaction with the Chamberlain government’s dilatory conduct of the war boiled over in a vitriolic two-day debate in the House on May 7 and 8; at its end, the prime minister barely won a vote of confidence.

  Meanwhile, the Norwegians continued to resist. Although the war in southern and central Norway was over, an Allied force in the far north, composed of British, French, Polish, and Norwegian troops, was slowly gaining the upper hand over the Germans in a struggle for the crucial port of Narvik. Then, on May 10, a tsunami of events consigned the war in Norway to oblivion. Early that morning, millions of German troops, accompanied by swarms of tanks and aircraft, swept into the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in a lightning assault from the North Sea to the Moselle River. After being tested in Poland and Scandinavia, Hitler’s blitzkrieg was now slicing through the very heart of Europe.

  That same afternoon, Neville Chamberlain, persuaded that he no longer commanded the confidence of the majority of his party and informed that neither Liberal nor Labour MPs would join a coalition government under his leadership, advised King George VI to send for Winston Churchill as the next prime minister. Years later, Churchill would acknowledge that “considering the prominent part I played [in the Norway disaster]…it was a marvel that I survived.” But, as the most prominent prewar opponent of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, he was seen, quite rightly, as the only major political figure in Britain with the energy, drive, and determination to lead the country in wartime.

  On May 13, he proved his mettle as a warrior in a soaring speech to the House. “You ask what is our aim?” he said. “I can answer in one word: victory. Victory at all costs; victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be.” That single word, as far-fetched as its achievement seemed to be in those dark early days, would remain his touchstone for the war’s duration.

  * * *

  *1 Carl’s father, King Frederick VIII of Denmark, was the brother of Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII.

  *2 The rest of the gold was loaded onto small fishing boats, which finally made it to Tromsø as well. From there, all the gold reserves were dispatched to the United States and Canada for safekeeping.

  In the predawn hours of May 10, 1940, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands gently shook he
r daughter awake. “They have come,” she told Princess Juliana.

  This time, the early-morning invaders arrived from the air. They dropped by the thousands over bright green polders and fields ablaze with red and yellow tulips, over steeples and windmills, over the orange-tiled roofs of peaceful Holland. Awakened by the roar of aircraft overhead, the Dutch, many still in nightgowns and pajamas, poured from their homes and peered upward. While milkmen distributed their wares door-to-door and housewives headed to market, German parachutists were landing in country gardens and city streets. To some of the children looking on, it seemed like a fascinating new game.

  Queen Wilhelmina knew otherwise. Like King Haakon, she had been warning her government for years of the growing danger of Hitler and Germany, but, as in Norway, government officials had paid no heed to their monarch. The queen “had been expecting Nazis for a long time,” recalled Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, a law student at Leiden University at the time of the German invasion. “In this she was almost alone in Holland.” Even after all the other countries fell, “the entire Dutch nation refused to believe that we would be next. When war engulfed us, we didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.”

  Except for a brief war in 1830, when Belgium had risen up and gained independence from the Netherlands, the Dutch had lived in peace for 125 years, ever since they had joined the British in fighting Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Like the Norwegians, they had managed to stay neutral during the Great War, and until May 10, they had clung to the hope and belief that they could do so in this war, too.

  But even if the unthinkable happened and Germany did attack, the Dutch were sure they could bottle up the invaders by using the defensive tactics that they had successfully employed against Spain and France centuries before. In the event of an incursion, thousands of acres of land in the northeast and south would be flooded while the Dutch army pulled back to defend Fortress Holland—the country’s western provinces, containing its major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Leiden, and The Hague.