Winston’s War (56 page)

Trouble was, the German High Command had reached exactly the same conclusion.

Edward Halifax was a man steeped in the traditions of public service. He enjoyed the authority of ministerial office but he also firmly believed that it was accompanied by obligations. One of those obligations was to bring to his work a set of strong moral values, and to that end he had already visited his local parish church in South Audley Street that morning to pray quietly in the corner pew that had been reserved for him. Another obligation was to ensure that his appearance always lent authority to his work, and today he expected to need every inch of that authority since many ambassadors would be knocking at his door and some even pounding on it. The Norwegian Ambassador, Colban, would undoubtedly be the first to arrive, bearing yet another note of protest. The Norwegian was a perfectly amiable man but today he would be grim-faced and stripped of his customary light humor. Behind him the Italians, Danes, and Swedes would form an anxious queue. It was certain to be a difficult day, so in order to prepare himself for it, the Foreign Secretary had summoned not only God but also Mac. While Halifax sat at one of the huge windows overlooking the park and read through a formidable pile of notes and telegrams, the barber trimmed his hair.

So it was that Mac was in place to watch as the duty clerk stumbled and stuttered his way across the room. The Foreign
Secretary's office was so vast that Mac had time to study the flush on the clerk's cheek, the despairing look in his eye, and the inane droop of his lower lip that seemed to prevent him from uttering a single comprehensible word. A sheet of paper was trembling in his hand, which was thrust out in front of him, like a blind man groping towards a new obstruction.

There is a majesty about the office of the British Foreign Secretary. It is by far the most splendid and awe-inspiring of any Ministerial office in Whitehall, larger than the Cabinet Room itself. In such a venerable place, normal men seem scarcely to matter, and someone like Mac to matter not at all. So Halifax did not dismiss him as he read this latest note, and seemed barely to remember that Mac was present.

Instead, as he read, he muttered to no one in particular—perhaps to himself, or to his God—a long list of names. Oslo. Narvik. Trondheim. Bergen. And as he read, from over his shoulder Mac could see that Halifax's hand had begun to tremble, too. His voice was barely audible, strained with anxiety, but Mac was close enough to hear the Foreign Secretary's words with total clarity.

“Dear God. They've got there first. The Germans have invaded Norway,” he whispered. “Now we can never win.”

It wasn't all going the Germans' way.

They had achieved complete surprise, smuggling units of the Wehrmacht into Norwegian waters hidden beneath the hatches of apparently empty ore ships, while the Luftwaffe controlled the skies, but the German Navy encountered unexpected obstacles. An armada of Kriegsmarine ships appeared shortly before midnight sailing up the Oslo fjord. The entrance to the Norwegian capital was guarded by a single fortress armed with nothing more than two obsolete guns that were as old as time and—in honor of their almost biblical origins—had been christened “Moses” and “Aaron.” The commander of the fortress
was understandably cautious—the guns took forever to reload, and in any event his searchlights were out of action so he could barely see the invasion force. He decided to gamble. He would hold his fire until the largest ship, the
Blücher
, one of the newest and most powerful vessels in the German Navy, was only a few hundred yards away. It was a gamble that was to pay spectacular rewards. The shell fired by “Aaron” hit the ship just below the bridge, wrecking its anti-aircraft control center, while the shell from “Moses” hit a starboard storeroom and ignited the aviation fuel, setting the
Blücher
alight like a Roman candle and making it a target almost impossible to miss. Soon the ship's engine room was flooded, her magazines had begun to explode, and she was sinking. The
Blücher
was carrying the entire command staff designated by the Germans to take over the administration of Oslo and a thousand of them were killed as the ship disappeared beneath the dark waters of the fjord, delaying by several hours the German occupation of the Norwegian capital. When at last they entered Oslo, led by a marching band, they discovered that the King and most of the leading members of the Government had taken advantage of the delay and fled.

So it wasn't all going the Germans' way. But most of it was.

It was morning yet they sat in the dark, the three of them, around a sulking coal fire, the blackout curtains still not drawn back, as though they wanted to believe this day had never arrived.

“How could it happen? How could it have happened?”

“Coincidence, Neville?”

“With all my heart I want to believe—”

“Head, Neville, head—not heart,” Wilson argued. “Not at a moment like this. Does your head let you believe that it was coincidence which made the Germans invade on the very day we planned to send our own forces in?”

“I cannot,” he whispered, staring into the coals.

“Then the bloody Germans knew!” Ball shouted, pounding the arms of his chair.

“But…”

“Someone told them, Neville. Someone who knew and who let it slip. Or who simply handed everything over.”

“Negligence.”

“Treachery! Unless you've got a better name for it.”

“My God, has it come to that?”

“Neville, it always comes to that. Someone driven by malice or ego. Who puts himself above everyone else. Who'll switch sides for personal advantage.”

“But who?” A lengthy silence while they shared their souls and the wispy smoke.

“I do not believe—I will not believe,” Chamberlain insisted, “that Winston could do such a thing. Not with the Germans.”

“He's changed parties often enough.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Then someone close to him. You know Winston can never keep his mouth shut. He'd sooner brag than breathe.”

“And he's been acting very strangely recently, Neville.”

“Has he, Joe?”

“Asked Bob Boothby to go to the continent, apparently with some mad-cap plan to buy rifles.”

“Rifles? From whom?”

“There's the rub. From the Germans.”

“You can't be serious.”

“Winston is. In most deadly earnest, apparently.”

“From the Germans? This is madness.”

“Or much, much worse.”

“I shall confront him.”

“Patience, Neville. Better to watch him for a while.”

“That's best, Neville. Watch him. See where he leads us. Find the others…”

Chamberlain sighed as though he were giving up a small fragment of his innocence. “Very well. Tap his phone, Joe, if necessary—tap all their phones.”

“Already have.”

“Oh, Winston…But why?”

“How many reasons do you want? Malice. Ego. Hard cash, even.”

“For money? You think he'd sell us for money?”

“As you never cease to remind us, Neville; there are some who will try to profit from anything, even war.”

“And remember the loan, Neville? He repaid it all. More than a mere trifle. Come to think of it, we never did find out where he got it from.”

“Then we shall. We must!”

“It was enough to save Chartwell.”

“And enough, perhaps, to sink a Churchill.” Chamberlain's hands were clenched into tight fists of frustration. “I want to know what's going on—I must know.”

“And so you shall. But there's more, Neville,” Wilson interjected. “If the Germans have been told—whoever has told them—we have to assume they know everything. Know where—and when—we plan to strike.”

“They'll be waiting for us, all prepared.”

“It'll be a bloody disaster, Neville, Gallipoli all over again.”

“Then, by God, we must change our plan of campaign. Something they're not expecting.”

“Something their informant is not expecting.”

“That Winston is not expecting.”

“Or else…” The damp coals spat, a spark flying onto the hearth tiles where it struggled for life and slowly starved. Chamberlain tried to rub the ache from his eyes.

“Winston pushed me into this adventure in Norway. I always considered the risks were too great, everyone knows that. If it all goes wrong—”

“It is,” Ball interrupted, “it's already going wrong.”

“
If
things turn out badly,” Chamberlain continued doggedly, “there is something we must never forget, or allow anyone else to forget about this chaos in Norway.”

“Yes, Neville?”

“This was Winston's war.”

The 146th hadn't seen or sniffed an enemy, but already it was in turmoil. They'd lost half their supplies and with them much of that veneer of organization which separates an army from the rabble. They'd also lost Jerry's long-range radio equipment. By the time they eventually sailed two days later, very few of the lost supplies had been replaced. Jerry asked the quartermaster about new radio equipment. The quartermaster had stared back with raw-red eyes. “I'll do my best,” he replied stiffly, his lower lip bitten deep with frustration.

Doing their best. Somehow, it didn't feel like it.

They knew now that their destination was Norway—Narvik, they were told, the iron-ore port in the distant north. And they were well underway when new orders arrived for Jerry and the 146th. A different objective—change of mind at the top—the very top, lads. They were being diverted to a place called Namsos in central Norway, in order that the 146th could lead an attack on the old capital city of Trondheim further south. They were informed this was part of a bold new plan to outwit and outflank the enemy. It met with immediate success in the case of the 146th's commanding officer, who remained stuck on one of the ships still bound for Narvik. Much of what remained of their equipment went with him.

No one seemed to know precisely where Namsos was, or what they were supposed to do once they got there. They hadn't a single map of the town. Still, they would Do Their Best. And it had to be better than Narvik, didn't it?

Yet, in the midst of the chaos that accompanies war, some were able to find contentment. Bracken sat opposite Anna and rejoiced in the attention he was being shown—by the waiters, by other diners at the Ritz, but most of all by Anna. Her appearance was stunning and her apology had been generous—and he, too, acknowledged that he might have been considerably more sensitive about the matter of that night by the lake. Carried away with the moment, with the passion of the events of war all around them, he explained. She had reminded him that she was Irish Catholic—enough said, he muttered to himself—and she implored him to be patient, backing her plea with an army of supporters from the Virgin Mary to the memory of her own poor mother. Anyway, she admonished through lips which puckered and moved him all the way to his roots, Uncle Joe says he'll break your legs if you get out of hand… So they had sat very publicly and she had shone as bright as any chandelier while those around looked on in admiration and more than a little envy. He could see them whispering. Most of the other diners already knew who he was, and the rest would undoubtedly be told by the end of the evening.

She understood these things. Unlike so many other women, this one seemed truly to have come to terms with the stresses that stretched him to his limits and occasionally, like the other night, took him beyond. Living in the eye of the storm, bearing the weight of a man such as Churchill, guiding him, supporting him, sometimes scolding him, and being at his side when things went wrong—like now. Winston had thought the Norwegian adventure would be spectacular, that it would end this wretched phase of Phoney War, but instead it was all falling apart and the others were doubting him, overruling him, changing the plans. Narvik fjord was occupied—not through any fault of Winston's but because of the prevarication of others. Yet, incredibly, they tried to blame him. One Cabinet colleague had even dismissed Churchill's plans for a full frontal assault down the fjord as
being like another Charge of the Light Brigade.

She held his hand, and told him she understood. Then she kissed him and told him she would always understand.

Namsos, when they arrived, appeared like a small brown smudge against the snow-swept highlands lying beyond. Lumps of floating ice bounced off the hulls of the ships as they approached and a steady wind threw sharp crystals of ice in their faces. No one on board knew much about this spot other than it was already freezing their lungs. Back in London the planning staff of the War Office had sent out to the Norwegian tourist office for brochures and photographs of as many parts of the Norwegian coast as possible, but none of them featured Namsos. No one in their right mind would normally want to visit. It was a town of fewer than four thousand souls, built almost entirely of wood, whose main occupations were timber and fishing. The fish in particular left their mark. The town stank.

“You'll like it more than Narvik,” the quartermaster had told Jerry. “Narvik's up in the bloody Arctic Circle. This place'll be warmer.” But warmth along the Norwegian coast in April is a relative concept, and as dawn arrived the early sun brought precious little relief from the cold, only a glare that scattered off the frozen snow and blinded them. Perhaps that's why they missed the first air raid until the planes were almost upon them. A brief and indecisive confrontation took place before the Heinkels of the Luftwaffe left.

“Ran off before the RAF arrived, I suppose,” Jerry observed. “Shouldn't expect too much from our boys in blue,” the quartermaster muttered. “Too far from home. Think we're going to have to handle this one on our own.” So there was no air cover, which might have been tolerable, except for the fact that there were also no anti-aircraft guns. So
they were forced to disembark at night, which at this time of year lasted barely four hours. A race against time.

They landed at various points along the coast, at night and in the middle of a snowstorm. Some of the supplies made it ashore safely, but some simply fell into the sea, and they had to leave much of the heavy equipment in the holds of the transport ships. It came as almost comic relief when the French Chasseurs Alpins disembarked at Namsos in the wake of the 146th. They were specially trained mountain troops, snow men, but this was an academic point since the straps for their skis had been left behind in Scotland along with their mules and all their vehicles. Their commander purloined a British jeep and set off to find his British counterpart to sort things out, but had traveled less than a hundred feet before he was involved in a head-on collision. The British and French drive on different sides of the road, even in war.