Northern exposure | 6 July 2017

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘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’.

A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command. ‘Campaigns that end in ignominious failure and have few redeeming features tend to be forgotten quite quickly’ writes the author of this concise, penetrating study of a supreme example of such a campaign. Certainly Norway was quickly forgotten — not surprisingly, given what followed in the summer of 1940 — but it did have a profound effect on the way we organised ourselves for the rest of the war.

In one respect, Norway stands in that finest, and continuing, tradition of British arms: never getting off to a good start. But untraditionally, we never turned the campaign round, and although there were plans to open a front in Norway during the invasion of occupied Europe in 1944, they were never put into action.

The Norwegian campaign, though hastily improvised, was meant to play to Britain’s maritime strength. In this there were strong echoes of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, not least in that Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty during both. Unlike the Dardanelles, however, the strategic prize — cutting off the supply of Swedish iron ore shipped through Narvik, which the Ministry of Economic Warfare believed could fatally weaken the German war effort in months — was dubious.