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This book will use combatants’ testimony to tell the story of Britain’s response to Hitler’s seizure of Norway in 1940. The largest seaborne invasion in history quickly succeeded despite the presence of superior British naval forces. But it did not go unchallenged and within days the first British troops had been landed. The book will focus on the British landings and the major naval actions that opened and closed the campaign. With the exception of the eventual capture of Narvik, the expeditionary forces were unsuccessful.
The book will provide a fast moving narrative history of the campaign using a wider range of unpublished sources than any previous study. This material is largely unused and will record the experiences of individuals and produce new evidence of what it was like to fight in the campaign. In particular, these events will be seen through the experiences of twelve British participants. Such evidence will be used to explain what went wrong. The British response to the invasion did not match Churchillian rhetoric and ended in humiliating failure. Churchill was responsible for serious strategic errors but managed to avoid public blame, succeeding Chamberlain as prime minister.
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