Northern exposure | 6 July 2017

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’.

A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command. ‘Campaigns that end in ignominious failure and have few redeeming features tend to be forgotten quite quickly’ writes the author of this concise, penetrating study of a supreme example of such a campaign. Certainly Norway was quickly forgotten — not surprisingly, given what followed in the summer of 1940 — but it did have a profound effect on the way we organised ourselves for the rest of the war.