Yeats said: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, and that summarizes Hitler's Pre-Emptive War: The Battle for Norway, 1940 in a sentence. The Norwegians, British, French and Poles who fought in Norway were cautious when it was necessary to be daring, and overconfident when prudence was required, while the Germans were bold and imaginative (even Churchill commented later “In this Norwegian encounter, our finest troops, the Scots and Irish Guards, were baffled by the vigour, enterprise and training of Hitler’s young men”).

I knew little about the Norwegian campaign before reading this book; it always came across as sort of a sideshow between the invasion of Poland and the collapse of France. However, both sides had an interest in Norway from the start. The Allies focused on the Swedish iron mines at Gällivare and Kiruna, connected to Swedish ports (which iced over in the winter) and to the Norwegian port of Narvik (which was ice-free year-round) by railway. Before the war a German diplomat had claimed Germany couldn’t wage war for more than a year if it lost the use of these mines, and the Allies apparently took this at face value and saw cutting off Swedish iron as a virtually bloodless way to end the war.

A number of schemes were proposed; these included sending a fleet into the Baltic, invasion of Norway and perhaps Sweden (with the possibility of continuing across Sweden to aid the Finns), and mining Norwegian territorial waters. It’s astonishing in hindsight – that the Allies would consider going to war with Scandinavia and even the Soviet Union at the same time they were fighting Germany – but as the saying goes it seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had made USSR more or less a German ally, and Norwegian and Swedish military power was dismissed as negligible. The Norwegians had spent the 1930s under a pacifist defense minister; draftees only served for 72 days, and the Norwegian army had no tanks, no antitank guns, and only nine obsolete biplane fighter aircraft. In fact, the British did mine Norwegian territorial water over Norwegian protests, and were preparing an invasion – troops were already embarked and were scheduled to leave Scottish ports on April 8, the day the Germans landed. The tensions between Norway and both the Allies and Germans were such that when King Haakon was awakened and told Norway was at war, he asked “With whom?”

The Germans were actually not all that interested in Narvik; the supposed iron ore critical bottleneck, while significant, was not as important to German industry as the Allies supposed. On the other hand, an Allied capture of Norway would provide naval and air bases that would seriously affect German naval operations in the North Sea. Thus the Germans prepared an invasion of their own. The result indicated the truth of the old military maxim – don’t base plans on what you imagine an enemy’s intentions are, instead base them on the enemy’s capabilities. The Allies dismissed the possibility of a German invasion in the face of overwhelming Royal Navy superiority, but the Germans went ahead and did it anyway, in a combined naval-airborne operation. The Allied reaction – with the Allies now including Norway – was confused and incompetent. The Norwegians mobilized their Army – by sending mail. The British shipped soldiers to Norway, but the ships were not “combat loaded” and troops found themselves having to unload copious amounts of administrative impedimenta – office furniture, for example – before they could get to guns and ammunition deep in the hold.

The Germans were organized and aggressive. Norwegian defensive positions were skillfully outflanked at first; then the Germans discovered the Norwegians had no effective antitank weapons and simply overwhelmed the defenders with armor. An enormous Norwegian supply depot near Narvik was only defended by 17 soldiers who were debating whether or not to issue live ammunition when the Germans arrived and rendered the question irrelevant; the captured supplies were a critical factor in the German defense of Narvik against the Allied counterattack.

It didn’t go all Germany’s way; an attempt to capture the Norwegian royal family was thwarted by a local commander organizing a shooting club for defense; the destroyers that had transported troops to Narvik were trapped and destroyed by the Royal Navy before they could refuel and withdraw; the magnetic detonators on U-boat torpedoes didn’t work in the high latitudes and thwarted several attacks on Royal Navy vessels; and a paratroop drop intended to cut off Allied retreat was instead cut off and eliminated itself.

Relations among the Allies were disastrous. As the Germans advanced, British troops withdrew and evacuated by sea, often without telling the Norwegians in advance and leaving them with open flanks. During the campaign, the Allies became convinced (possibly influenced by the example of Vidkun Quisling) that the Norwegian forces were riddled with traitors; this contributed to their reluctance to share plans with the Norwegians. Although Quisling did meet with Hitler before the campaign, Lunde can’t find any evidence that any military information was divulged; instead Quisling briefed Hitler on Norwegian politics (as he saw them). Lunde can’t find any evidence of any other treason. The British, Poles, French and Norwegians at Narvik could never organize simultaneous attacks, allowing the Germans to shift troops from one threatened point to another. The campaign ended with Narvik captured by the Allies and the remaining Germans pocketed and on the verge of surrender or internment in Sweden when events in France resulted in another evacuation by sea, again to the outrage of the Norwegians.

There are all sorts of “what ifs?” for alternate historians to speculate on. Although the campaign was a stunning German success, it almost might have been better if they had allowed the Allies to go through with their original plans and drive Scandinavia into the Axis. OTOH if the Allies had been more attentive to warnings that the Germans were planning something they might have been able to destroy almost the entire German surface fleet (as it was, the Germans lost a heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, ten destroyers, six submarines, and seventeen light naval units). Lunde suggests that the campaign affected Hitler; it was conducted over the objections of his military advisers and the success may have contributed to his self-image as a military genius. As it was, for the duration of the war the Germans devoted more attention to Norway than it deserved, leaving substantial units there until VE day.

Author Henrik Lunde is a Norwegian who emigrated to the US after WWII and joined the US Army, eventually retiring as a colonel. I have to say his writing is fairly pedestrian; he’s not Stephen Ambrose or Cornelius Ryan. In particular, action reports are very terse; only officers are mentioned by name and the enlisted are just KIA and WIA statistics; there’s virtually no mention of Norwegian civilians and how they reacted. And Lunde’s maps are horrible. They appear in endpapers, instead of in the text where you need them to follow complicated action descriptions; no two have the same scale or use the same symbols or typefaces; and the ones that show smaller areas don’t show where they fit into Norway as a whole. The index seems sparse; I was unable to find some references I was looking for and had to leaf through the text for them. Still, this is an account of a campaign that doesn’t get covered very much and is interesting and valuable for that. ( )

Hitler’s Pre-emptive War, by Henrik O. Lunde, is an in-depth study of the German attack on Norway during the Second World War. If I were to title this review, it would be called ‘Who Knew?’. As a military historian, I’ve read and studied so many aspects of this global conflict, and yet, so many of the details in Lunde’s book are completely new to me.

He has obviously spent a great deal of time researching this subject, and all aspects of these opening moves by Germany and the British are well covered. We see how there were so many opportunities for the Allies to turn the tide of battle, and the war, during the battle for Norway, but the British seemed to be living in a world of denial, and in these pre-Churchill days, a leadership vacuum.

The military historian will be glued to the pages as they follow the day to day actions carefully described by the author. Like me, I’m sure there will be moments of frustration as they realize how close this invasion by Germany, nearly resulted in disaster—and Second World War defeat.

Hitler’s Pre-emptive War is probably one of the most accurately researched book I’ve ever read. I can describe it in one word—fascinating.

Review by Daniel L. Little – June 13, 2017 ( )

The battle for Norway often falls in the shadow of the larger histories of WW2. The European, Pacific, and African fronts all conspire to grab the shelf space in libraries.

This book sets out to shine some light on this forgotten area of the war. It does it's job in a very detailed, tight, and readable fashion.

The opening pages read like the best drama as the opposing players in the world manuver forces to lay claim to in the case of Germany, or prevent- as Britain tries- Norway's resources from being used by Hitler.

This book is both diplomacy, fast action, and intense drama. The Naval actions are especially interesting and tightly paced. ( )