Norway was thus being approached by two navies on a collision course. Neither adversary knew that the other was on the move, nor did neutral Norway know that it was about to be engulfed in a broadening war.
THE GREAT GAMBLE that Hitler had taken was endangering his navy. The German command knew very well that the British Navy was much stronger. Its members hoped that the invasion would catch both Britain and Norway by surprise and that their objectives could be secured before either country could respond.
There was also a calculation in the British plans. If Germany reacted to the mining by attempting an invasion of Norway, the Allies would then have the pretense for breaching Norway’s neutrality and pursuing their own occupation of vital ports such as Narvik.
The mining took place as planned early on April 8, which put British ships in Norwegian waters as the German fleet approached. The first encounter was between the British destroyer Glowworm and two German destroyers and the German cruiser Hipper. The Glowworm was badly damaged but managed to ram and damage the Hipper before sinking.
Other German ships were also sighted as they approached Norway. A Polish submarine sank a German troop transport ship, and the German cruiser Blücher was sunk by fire from a coastal battery guarding the entrance to the port of Oslo. But the Germans landed most of their troops safely at Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and other ports. Paratroopers took control of airports and airfields.
A much smaller force landed at Copenhagen and seized Danish airfields, meeting little resistance. Under the threat of bombardment, the Danish government capitulated within six hours. The Germans captured most of their objectives as planned on April 9. Despite the many Allied sightings of, and encounters with, the German fleet, Hitler had taken the two neutral countries and the Allies by surprise.
THE FRENCH COMMAND was baffled. No sooner had Reynaud digested the welcome report of the successful British mining operation than a news flash of the German fleet’s movement toward Norway reached him. He contacted Adm. Jean Darlan, who was completely unaware of any German maneuvers.
On the morning of April 9, as reports of German successes in taking ports came in, General Gamelin told Reynaud, “You are wrong to get excited. We must wait for more complete information. This is a simple incident of war. Wars are full of unexpected news.”
The French and British governments pledged their full assistance to Norway. The newspapers condemned the German attacks on two neutral countries. Le Figaro asked, “Will the lesson be learned by other neutrals?”
AFTER THE SUCCESSFUL troop landings, the German Navy did not fare well. The next day, April 10, five British destroyers caught five German destroyers in Narvik harbor, sinking two and damaging the other three. Ten British dive-bombers sank a cruiser in Bergen. Then, on April 13, the battleship HMS Warspite, supported by nine destroyers, sank or crippled the eight remaining German destroyers that had offloaded troops at Narvik, as well as one U-boat. In just a few days, the German Navy had lost half of her destroyers and much of her entire surface fleet.
Le Figaro heralded the news in a bold headline, calling it an “Overwhelming Naval Victory” at Narvik. A summary of the developments in Norway concluded: “The situation is thus better in Norway than it first appeared.”
The losses suffered by the German Navy boosted Reynaud’s confidence. The premier outlined his government’s approach to the war in a secret session of the Senate on April 18. “It would be absurd to throw ourselves head-on against the Siegfried Line [Germany’s fortified western front],” Reynaud explained. Rather, he offered that the best strategy was to deprive Germany “of the supplies which are vital for her in making war—iron ore from the north [Sweden] and oil from the south … It is only by engaging in these distant operations against the enemy that we can employ our sole superiority over Germany—naval power.” Such distant operations offered the added appeal, of course, of shifting the war away from French soil.
Reynaud summed up the war policy as “defensive on land, offensive in blockading Germany.” He told the Chamber of Deputies, “It is extremely doubtful that Hitler has the means of taking the offensive.”
The vast majority of Parisians believed the same. The running joke around the capital in April was prompted by the report in a newspaper of a speech in which Goebbels purportedly claimed that Hitler would be in Paris by June 15.
At the Petit Casino, a comedian asked the orchestra leader, “Have you been to the École Berlitz?”
The bandleader asked, “Why?”
“To learn German, so you can talk to Adolf when he gets here.”
The crowd howled with laughter.
Goebbels would be off by eight days.
MARCHING AND MORSE CODE
Just as the news from Norway signaled that the war was taking a new turn, Jacques Monod reported for duty. His mind was focused not on the war, however, but on his separation from Odette. His first posting was not to Versailles, but to Montpellier, in the far south of the country almost five hundred miles from Paris and even farther from Dinard—too far for a casual visit. Jacques bridged the distance by writing to Odette virtually every day, telling her after his first full day in the barracks, “Don’t worry about me, the only things I am thinking about are the fact that our separation will not be very long, and that we know for sure that we will be very close to each other in a few weeks.” Jacques reminded Odette that what mattered was not his immediate assignment, but the branch to which he would be assigned after the short course of basic training in Montpellier ended. That was supposed to be the École des Transmissions (Signaling School) of the 28th Military Engineers in Versailles. He reassured Odette: “Except for rotten luck, I will be sent there [Versailles] soon.”
Jacques regaled Odette with the details of his daily routine, and stories about his new mates in the barracks. On his second full day, he reported:
Training started seriously today. We have to know how to march, to turn around, to salute, and so on. I assure you that it is not that boring and it is often even funny. The incredible awkwardness of a number of poor devils is absolutely hilarious. There is in particular one poor man who cannot manage to march and whose walk is simply amazing …
Luckily the people in the barracks are all good sorts, although there is sometimes a certain austerity, on the account of the presence of two priests and a seminarian. As expected, I am already on a first-name basis with one of the priests, the pastor of a parish in Lyon. But I am a little afraid that he will try to save my soul.
Jacques’s letters were unfailingly upbeat. He told Odette that the food was fine, his bed was comfortable, and that he even enjoyed the long marches, which were making him fit despite the stress on his weaker left leg. He loved learning Morse code, which was required of everyone in his branch. He was getting good at transmission. The hardest part for everyone was receiving messages and learning the sounds of the dots and dashes, but Jacques found that his musical ear and sense of rhythm gave him an advantage. After receiving a package from Odette containing a blanket and some sweets, which earned him the envy of the barracks, he demonstrated his proficiency at the bottom of his return letter:
. _ _ _. _ . _ .. _ _. (“Je t’aime”)
Jacques was able to confirm the official information that courses would begin in Versailles on May 7, so he would be in Montpellier for about twenty days in total. Odette was buoyed by Jacques’s news and by his spirit. She wrote to his parents and marveled at his morale, his curiosity about everything, and the energy with which he approached every task. She told them: “I hope after the war, he will not want to remain in the Army!”
In three weeks, Jacques expressed only two complaints. First, when four days went by without letters from Odette due to problems with the mail, he wrote to her, “I’ve been feeling very isolated and far away from you … If only you knew how I am waiting for them, and how those four days are centuries.” And second, he was so busy and isolated that he did not know what was going on outside the base. He asked Odette, “What
is happening in the world my sweetheart? It seems to me that I don’t know anything anymore. I have a hard time reading the newspapers, I read them irregularly and I really don’t know anymore where things stand.”
THE STRANGER
Camus could not help but read the newspaper, and he was much less optimistic about unfolding events than his fellow Parisians, or the propagandists at Paris-Soir. As the Norwegian front opened, he wrote to a friend, “Events are going at such speed that the only wise and courageous attitude to have is silence. This can be used as a sort of sustained meditation which will prepare us for the future.” Camus felt that his only option was to “wait and work.”
He was also not at all enamored with Paris, whose pace Camus found overwhelming. “You can’t live here, you can only work and vibrate here,” he told a fellow writer.
When he came back from Paris-Soir to his room at the Hôtel Madison, on the Left Bank of the Seine and facing the historic Saint-Germain-des-Prés church, he shut out the outside world and focused on his novel. He had worked at it, on and off, and in various versions, for more than three years. Threads of the story, its characters, and its atmosphere came from the people and places in Algeria he knew so well, as well as his reporting experiences with the Alger Républicain. Speaking of Algiers, he told Francine, “I see the form and content around me in the poverty … the simple people, and their resigned indifference. They give an image of a rather frightening world without tenderness.” The protagonist-narrator of the story is Meursault, a clerk living in Algiers who is indifferent to events and conventions of everyday life. Meursault exhibits no grief at his mother’s death, no interest in the question of marriage to his girlfriend, no remorse over his killing of a man, and, most important to Camus’s philosophical intentions, no belief or interest in God, not even when facing execution. Camus explored several different titles such as A Happy Man, A Free Man, and A Man Like Any Other before settling on The Stranger.
When he arrived in Paris, he thought he had already written about three-quarters of the story. Thereafter, he wrote like “a desperate man,” often suffering from headaches and fevers that tested his endurance. The challenge that he had given himself was to express a philosophical idea—the absurd—and reactions to it in novel form. It was a studied effort. Camus’s extensive reading and literary reviews had made him an acute observer of literary styles. In a review he wrote of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea), Camus suggested, “A novel is only philosophy put into images, and in a good novel, all the philosophy goes into the images.”
To craft those images, Camus drew upon his own sense of isolation in Paris, of being a stranger. His first entry in his notebook after arriving in the city was:
What is the meaning of this sudden awakening—in this dark room—with the sounds of a suddenly strange city? And everything is strange to me … What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures?…
Strange, confess that everything is strange to me.
HE SENT PROGRESS reports in love letters to his fiancée, Francine, as well as to Yvonne Ducailar, and to his former roommate and lover Christiane Gallindo, who typed his drafts. To Yvonne, he declared that he was working as if he were on a “tightrope, in passionate and solitary tension.” To Francine, he explained, “I’ve never worked so much. This room is miserable. I live alone and I am weary, but I don’t know if it’s despite all this or because of it that I am writing all I wanted to write. Soon I will be able to judge what I am worth and decide one way or another.”
At times, he sensed the story was all falling into place, telling Christiane that “at certain moments, what power and lucidity I feel in myself!” Other days, he despaired. After rereading all that he had written, he wrote to Francine that “it seemed a failure from the ground up.”
The urgency with which he wrote was also spurred by the uncertainties created by the new developments in the war. As much as Camus tried to insulate himself in his room, when at Paris-Soir he could not avoid hearing the news and feeling the anxiety in the capital. One letter to Yvonne began, “I am writing to you from the newspaper office, amid the general hysteria created by events here. Men will die by the thousands so there is something to be excited about.” Indeed, he might be one of those soldiers, as he was due to take another examination for the draft in May. He assured Yvonne, “I don’t care if I am accepted. What I have to do and live through, I can do as well in the middle of battle as in the middle of Paris.” He then added in Meursault-like fashion, “As for the risks of death, they are of no importance.”
On May 1, he completed his first draft of The Stranger. He wrote immediately to Francine:
I am writing to you at night. I have just finished my novel and I’m too overexcited to think of sleeping. No doubt my work isn’t finished. I have things to go over, others to add and rewrite. But the fact is, I’ve finished and I wrote the last sentence. Why do I turn immediately to you? I have the manuscript in front of me, and I think of all it cost me in effort and will—how much involvement it required—to sacrifice other thoughts, other desires to remain in its atmosphere … I am going to put these pages in my drawer and start work on my essay, and in two weeks I’ll take it out again and rework the novel.
BLUNDER
With the loss of the protection of their destroyers, and the ability to withdraw if necessary, the relatively small force of German troops in Norway was very vulnerable. Hitler was so concerned that his generals had to talk him out of abandoning Narvik.
The Allies decided to mount a counterattack to retake some ports. The original plan was to concentrate on Narvik. But Norway’s King Haakon IV requested that Trondheim also be recaptured. The British complied with the king and divided their available assault forces between the two objectives.
One force was landed both north and south of Trondheim, with the mission to attack it from the flanks. The soldiers never reached the town. The British were outflanked by the Germans, who had complete command of the air. The British were forced to retreat, then ordered to evacuate a little more than a week after landing. The Trondheim assault forces suffered more than 1,500 casualties without taking any ground.
A second force landed near Narvik. With their original strength reduced by the Trondheim mission, it was decided not to attempt an assault on Narvik right away and to wait to amass a larger, overwhelming force. By early May, nothing had yet happened.
With the crisis in Norway averted, Hitler turned his attention to other plans.
THE DEVELOPMENTS IN the Norway campaign were followed very closely in both London and Paris. The failure to take Trondheim and the delay in attacking Narvik would have dire political repercussions. The first major operation of the war under Chamberlain’s direction had been bungled, no matter how rosy a picture the prime minister tried to paint to the House of Commons on May 7, of how the British troops “man for man showed themselves superior to their foes.”
The opposition mocked his explanation for the “reverse” in Norway with shouts of “Hitler missed the bus”—painfully reminding Chamberlain of his boast a month earlier. Then, a succession of speakers voiced their doubts about Chamberlain’s leadership.
After patiently waiting his turn, Leo Amery, a friend and fellow party member of Chamberlain’s, held the floor for more than an hour: “I confess that I did not feel there was one sentence in the prime minister’s speech this afternoon which suggested that the government either foresaw what Germany meant to do, or came to a clear decision when it knew what Germany had done, or acted swiftly or consistently throughout the whole of this lamentable affair.” Amery continued, “What we have lost is one of those opportunities which do not recur in war. If we could have captured and held Trondheim … then we might well have imposed a strain on Germany which might have made Norway to Hitler what Spain was to Napoleon.”
Amery urged, “We cannot go on as we are. There must be a change … This is war, not peace … Just as our peace-time system is unsuitable for war conditions, s
o does it tend to breed peace-time statesmen who are not too well fitted for the conduct of war … Somehow or other we must get into the Government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory.” Amery looked straight at Chamberlain and, quoting Oliver Cromwell, said, “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
The debate continued into the night and the next day. David Lloyd George, prime minister during World War I, continued the drumbeat of opposition, opining that “nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war than that he [Chamberlain] surrender the seals of office.”
Pummeled from every quarter, Chamberlain spent the next day—Thursday, May 9—consulting with his advisers and vacillating between holding on to office and resigning.
ACROSS THE CHANNEL, Premier Reynaud was exasperated with General Gamelin. All he had heard since the first days of the Norway crisis were excuses for not anticipating the German move on Norway, for not having troops in position to deploy, and for delays in attacking German positions. Gamelin laid all blame on the British for the failure of the operations. Reynaud told his aides, “I have had enough. I would be a criminal if I left at the head of the French army that nerveless man, that philosopher!”
On May 9, he summoned his cabinet to make his case to sack Gamelin, telling them that if Gamelin was left in charge, the French were “certain to lose the war.” His cabinet, however, did not share his concern. Daladier spoke in defense of Gamelin and vigorously opposed his firing. Crestfallen, Reynaud said, “As I cannot make my point of view prevail, I am no longer Head of the Government.” He then asked the group to keep his resignation secret until a new government could be formed.
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