Norway 1940 - Franois Kersaudy

No episode in the British conduct of the Second World War is more shameful than the story told here. The courage and steadfastness of the soldiers and sailors and their commanders is in striking contrast to the baseness, the cowardice, the sheer incompetence of the government that put them in impossible situations and, having put them there, dithered and vacillated.;Not, as the author makes clear, that the French government of Daladier and of Reynaud were any better. On both sides of the Channel the national leaders, Churchill excepted, were engrossed in playing politics at a time of deadly danger. All too soon France paid a terrible price. How near England came to that this book most clearly shows. And it also shows to what depths of dishonour England descended in deceiving their Norwegian ally.;It is hard to say whether this part of the story should be classified as tragedy or farce. A septuagenarian commander-in-chief pursuing his own headquarters by catching a tram, a coastal defence battery, unused for a century, which by a lucky shot sinks a German cruiser with the top Gestapo men on board, mobilization orders sent out by post when the Germans already had the country by the throat - all this would seem incredible in an Offenbach operetta, but it is all true, and, like the rest of the book, documented up to the hilt by a mastery of the archives of every country involved.;Not the least interesting aspect of the matter is the German one. Hitler's hysterical obsession with Norway all but led him to throw away the winnings of his spectacular gamble and, fortunately for the allies, remained an important factor in his subsequent strategic misjudgements.;Other work by the author includes "Churchill and De Gaulle".