The Second World War by John Keegan Page A

north from Oslo up the great valleys of the Gudbrandsdal and the Osterdal. The Germans defeated the leading British brigade in the Gudbrandsdal on 23 April and compelled it to withdraw by sea from Andalsnes, then made contact with their own landing party at Trondheim and forced the evacuation of the rest of the Allied troops through Namsos on 3 May.
    In the north the fortunes of war swung the other way. The German navy suffered a serious defeat in the two battles of Narvik, fought on 10 and 13 April between a superior British force and the destroyers transporting General Eduard Dietl’s mountain troops. Ten of the destroyers, with a high proportion of Dietl’s force, were sunk in the Narvik fiords. Dietl escaped ashore with only 2000 mountain infantry and 2600 sailors with whom to oppose 24,500 Allied troops, including the resolute Norwegian 6th Division. He found himself besieged in Narvik from 14 April onwards and was eventually forced to break out and retreat to the Swedish border, which he reached at the end of May. The collapse of the Allied front in France, however, then brought the campaign to an end, since both the French and the British ordered their troops home through Narvik to replace the losses suffered in the
Blitzkrieg
battles with the Wehrmacht which began on 10 May.
    Dietl, though in many respects the least successful of the German generals of 1939-40, was to become Hitler’s favourite; his death in an aeroplane crash in June 1944 was regarded by the Führer as a wounding personal tragedy. By then he had come to regard Dietl as irreplaceable and he attempted to conceal the news of his death from the Finns, among whom Dietl had established a towering reputation during the Finnish ‘Continuation War’ of 1941-4, lest it discourage them further at a time when defeat by the Russians again stared them in the face. Hitler liked Dietl because he argued with him in an explosive, soldierly way that perhaps reminded the Führer of his own army service. He liked him even more because at Narvik he had rescued him from humiliation. So alarmed had Hitler been by the miscarriage of the landing that he had been on the point of ordering Dietl to escape into Sweden and intern his soldiers rather than risk having to surrender them to the British. He had eventually been dissuaded from sending the signal, and in any case Dietl’s dogged conduct of the siege and retreat made it unnecessary. Dietl was the model of what Hitler wished every German soldier to be, the type he had looked forward to recruiting and training in thousands from the moment he embarked on the creation of the Wehrmacht. The proof of his quality was his snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat in the mountains of north Norway in June 1940, and so sustaining unblemished the record of German military success since the beginning of the war. To the campaign simultaneously unfolding in the west, however, not even a Dietl could have added a jot to the dimensions of German victory. There
Blitzkrieg
seemed a magic which had taken possession of the army itself.

PART I
THE WAR IN
THE WEST
1940-1943
     



THREE
     

The Triumph of
Blitzkrieg
     
    Blitzkrieg
– ‘Lightning War’ – is a German word but not known to the German army before 1939. A coining of Western newspapermen, it had been used to convey to their readers something of the speed and destructiveness of German ground-air operations in the three-week campaign against the ill-equipped and outnumbered Polish army. However, as the German generals themselves readily conceded, the Polish campaign had not been a fair test of the army’s capabilities. Despite allegations by some of them that the Wehrmacht had not shown itself the equal of the old imperial army – allegations which drove Hitler to a frenzy of rage against General Walther von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery on 5 November – the plodding Polish infantry divisions had offered no match to the