The King and the Christmas Tree Read online

  To the onlie begetter, M. (again)

  Contents

  King Haakon’s Journey from Norway to Britain: A Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgements

  1

  E

  VERY YEAR, IN THE MIDDLE of London, a huge Norway spruce, twenty metres and more in height, is erected in Trafalgar Square. Many who see it must take it for granted. It is Christmas time, so let’s put up a tree. You see the trees everywhere, all over the world, even in countries which are not avowedly Christian. After all, a tree is wonderfully neutral, no? Unlike a manger and a crib, where the infant Jesus lies in the straw watched over by the Virgin and worshipped by angels, it conveys no potentially divisive religious message. A tree is a tree, and in so far as it brings people a message, it is surely a comforting, pagan sort of message, suggesting the abiding, evergreen life of Nature, even during the iciest, darkest months of the year. So, our hearts warm to the sight of a Christmas tree with its lights, whether we are seeing such an emblem in Berlin or New York, in Melbourne or in Stockholm, in Tokyo or Harare.

  The London tree, however, tells us a particular story. It is the story, really, of a king, a very remarkable king, and of his people, the brave, indomitable people of Norway. The Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square is not just any old tree, such as you might see decorating a shopping mall or a civic space, any old where.

  At the base of the tree stands a plaque, bearing the words:

  This tree is given by the city of Oslo as a token of Norwegian gratitude to the people of London for their assistance during the years 1940–45.

  A tree has been given annually since 1942.

  Though it comes and goes each year, and is to that extent as ephemeral as the seasons, the Norwegian Christmas tree could claim to be among the most remarkable memorials contained in that square, which is so packed with links to history.

  Trafalgar Square is a spot to which most visitors to London will gravitate at the heart of this capital city, and they will see that it is filled with monuments denoting our country’s past. Standing at its northern side, on the steps of the National Gallery, you look down towards Nelson’s Column, beyond, the wide thoroughfare of Whitehall, leading towards the Houses of Parliament. Your eye will take in many reminders of British history; you will see King Charles I, sitting on his horse and gazing down to Banqueting House where, on a cold January day in 1649, on a hastily erected scaffold, he was beheaded; in the centre you will see the gigantic Nelson’s Column, erected to commemorate the brilliant naval hero who, in 1805, defeated the French Navy at Trafalgar (hence the name of the square) and ultimately prevented the all-out conquest of Europe by Napoleon. At the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson was picked off by a French sniper and died, leaving a navy, and a nation, both grief-stricken and proud.

  ‘Trafalgar Square is a spot to which most visitors to London will gravitate at the heart of this capital city.’

  As your eye moves across the square, you will also see, in statues and busts, figures who are perhaps less familiar, such as Havelock and Napier, heroes in their day, as soldiers who solidified the British hold on India and fortified the creation of the Raj.

  History is not a neutral story. The monuments erected to commemorate the men and women of previous centuries are often uncomfortable reminders that, in the past, people had different perspectives, different scales of value altogether. When they erected the statue of Charles I, it was to show what they thought about him but also what they thought of those who had beheaded him. And that debate – between those who think monarchy is a good system and those who would prefer Britain to be a republic – never entirely went away.

  The Victorians who erected statues to Napier and Havelock felt absolute confidence that the British brought benefits to India, with the East India Company and, subsequently, the Raj. In today’s world, that breezy imperialism is, to put it mildly, frowned upon. No one who reads of Havelock’s or Napier’s wars against the people of India can view their statues without feeling a little queasy.

  Even the great Lord Nelson, on top of his column, halfway to heaven, is not so heroic to everyone’s scale of value. Superb naval commander he may have been. Clever, charming lover of Lady Hamilton. But tainted now, as historians would wish to remind us, by having defended Jamaica against French incursions. ‘I have ever been and shall die a firm friend to our present colonial system,’ he wrote at the time, apparently condoning the use of enslaved people in the sugar plantations. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ as a famous novelist once began his best novel by saying. It is, we can readily admit, not merely another country, it is a bloody, cruel country.

  One of the cruel leisure activities of Londoners in the past was to visit the Bethlem Hospital – Bedlam – and to mock the mentally afflicted patients, prodding through the bars and laughing at their apparent absurdity. Present-day visitors to the past sometimes seem like that, so confident of their own superiority to the benighted people who fought wars, built empires and believed in outworn creeds. Occasionally, however, when we return to that foreign country, the Past, we are confronted with a story which stirs uncomplicated admiration, which flutters our hearts, which makes us feel that, wicked and muddled and misguided as the human race has so often been, just occasionally there has arisen a person of courage, integrity, decency, at a period in history when these qualities were under threat. By his refusal to surrender those values to an unspeakable evil, by his love of his country, of which he was the King in exile, King Haakon VII of Norway was such a man.

  * * *

  Every year on 30 January, royalists come to lay wreaths at the statue of King Charles I at the bottom of Trafalgar Square. But for every royalist who does so, there is probably a republican who thinks, had they been alive in the seventeenth century, they would have fought in the Civil Wars for what was called the Good Old Cause. And there must also be many modern democrats who think, whether or not they support a monarchy, they would not want the sort of absolutist monarchy which Charles tried to impose by force, taking up arms against his own people.

  A month before the royalists gather to commemorate the Royal Martyr (as they see him), the Norwegian Christmas tree tells another story, this time of a very different king, and of a very different time. It is a story which, of all stories in modern times, is the most likely to make even the most secular-minded, republican democrat see the point of monarchy. Even for those who might consider this sentimental, the tree reminds us of the political and social values that were being defended, with such amazing valour and determination, when the first tree was erected in 1942. That tree, and every tree since, has spoken of what the friendship stood for, between Norway – invaded but refusing to accept conquest – and Britain – resisting, not the German-speaking people, who probably invented the idea of Christmas trees, but the dark powers of the Third Reich. The hundreds of white lights that decorate the tree are beacons of an imperishable light, memorials of a remarkable story. The story reminds us how much difference can be made to history by just one individual possessing the rare gift of moral courage.

  2

  D

  URING THE NIGHT OF 8–9 April 1940, sirens sounded in Oslo, the capital of that neutral country, Norway. Many of those who heard the sirens wailing believed it was simply a practice alarm. The morning newspapers brought a different story.

  The news was that under cover of darkness, shortly before 11.30 p.m., German warships had passed the Oslofjord. The Norwegian coastal batteries had opened fire on them, but this had no
t prevented the enemy advance. The socialist Prime Minister, Johann Nygaardsvold, a former lumberjack, was faced with division in his own Cabinet about what to do. The Minister of Supply, Trygve Lie, suggested that Norway immediately apply to Britain for help, whereas the Foreign Minister, Halvdan Koht, refused to do this. His logic was that the Norwegians had already refused, when Britain declared war on Germany, an offer of British help should Norway be invaded. Koht did, however, telephone the British Minister to Norway, Sir Cecil Dormer, who was fast asleep. When Dormer awoke, Koht exclaimed, ‘Well, now we are at war!’

  The Prime Minister held an emergency meeting at 1.30 a.m. at the Foreign Office. He told the Cabinet that four large naval units were sailing up the fjord, five large ships were approaching Bergen, and another was en route to Stavanger. All these ships were German. The tension in the Cabinet room was powerful. They could only see one another’s faces in a glow of candlelight. It was essential to maintain morale, yet at the same time to be realistic. Nygaardsvold insisted that the city’s defences were sufficient to withstand an invasion, but he must have known that this was, at best, a highly optimistic verdict.

  At 4 a.m., Dr Curt Bräuer, the German Minister in Oslo, arrived at the Foreign Office with an ultimatum he had been sent from Berlin: nineteen closely typewritten pages of promises, threats and admonitions. It demanded that Norway should be placed under the military control of Nazi Germany. The defiant response given by Koht on behalf of the Prime Minister was to the point: ‘Der Kampf ist schon im Gang’ – ‘The fight is already under way.’

  By 5 a.m., the Prime Minister decided the moment had come to telephone the King and to bring him up to date with the situation. When King Haakon VII picked up the receiver, his Prime Minister said, ‘Majesty, we are at war.’

  The King’s rather surprising response was, ‘Against whom?’

  * * *

  It was his only moment of vagueness in the entire war. Like everyone else in Scandinavia, King Haakon VII was keenly aware of the importance of Norway, Sweden and Denmark to Germany, both as a route into the Atlantic, avoiding British waters, and as a source of the vital iron ore without which the Third Reich would be unable to manufacture arms.

  During the First World War, neutral Sweden’s iron ore had been vital to the German armaments manufacturers, and the ore had passed through the Norwegian port of Narvik. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was determined that Nazi Germany should not have so easy a supply of iron ore this time. ‘If Germany can be cut from all Swedish ore supplies from now onwards till the end of 1940,’ he wrote, ‘a blow will have been struck at her war-making capacity equal to a first-class victory in the field or from the air.’

  By the autumn of 1939, German supplies of iron ore had run very low, and the country needed to import 750,000 tons of ore per month in the first months of the war or ‘risk a major industrial breakdown’. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder tried to make this plain to Hitler and to emphasise the need to act fast, possibly to occupy the Norwegian coast, which at that date – prior to their invasion of France – was the only outlet open to the Atlantic for the Germans. German Intelligence was aware of the British desire to repeat what it had done in the First World War and lay mines in Norwegian territorial waters, to force German vessels out of the Norwegian waters south of the port of Narvik, known as the ‘Inner Leads’, and into international waters where they could be a prey to the battleships of the Royal Navy.

  The mining of neutral Norwegian sovereign waters by the British was fiercely resented by many Norwegians, and not just supporters of the Norwegian Nazi Party, Nasjonal Samling, led by a former army officer called Vidkun Quisling. Quisling was not slow to remind his friends in Germany of British designs on Norwegian coastal waters, adding for good measure that the President of the Norwegian Parliament, Carl Hambro, was Jewish (in fact, although his roots were Jewish, he was a practising Christian). December 1939 found Quisling in Berlin, explaining these things, first to Admiral Raeder and then to Hitler himself.

  The entire situation in Scandinavia had altered in December 1939, when Finland, which had won its independence from Russia only after the First World War, was invaded by the Red Army. (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia at this juncture, having signed their notorious non-aggression pact in August 1939, were allies.)

  Neville Chamberlain persuaded his French allies that three or four regular Allied divisions should stand by to be sent to Scandinavia. Finland had appealed to the world for assistance against the Red Menace. Once the British gained a foothold in these northern territories, it would not be difficult – that was the thinking – to persuade Norway and Sweden to cease their neutrality and join in an alliance against Hitler.

  Winston Churchill, at the Admiralty, saw Finland as a vital friend in the essential task of cutting off the iron ore supplies to Germany. Already he had a cavalier attitude, deeply resented by the Norwegians who were at that stage neutral, of sailing British ships into Norwegian waters. The Norwegian Cabinet rejected Churchill’s suggestion that British forces should be sent to the ports of Stavanger, Trondheim and Bergen, in case Germany invaded Southern Norway. The Finns, who had by now already been invaded by the Russians, took a different attitude and were looking forward to the arrival of a British expeditionary force of 20,000, promised for April 1940. The Finnish Commander-in-Chief, however, Marshal Mannerheim, did not believe it would be possible to hold out for as long as that, and by February, they had begun ceasefire negotiations with the Soviets. The sheer power, and force, and numbers, and skill of the Red Army were, in this situation, invincible. The Finns, meanwhile, sent messages to London that at least 50,000 British troops were needed, and not in April, but immediately, if they were to avoid being overwhelmed by the Soviets. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, informed them that this was simply impracticable.

  Frightened of the possibility of the British gaining a foothold in Scandinavia, the Germans had acted with ruthless efficiency. Denmark had submitted to German invasion, surrendering in just six hours after German troops crossed their borders at 4.15 a.m. on 9 April 1940, and accepting the establishment of pro-Nazi rule with scarcely a shot being fired. Sweden remained doggedly neutral. How would Norway respond? How strong was support for Quisling and his views? One of Norway’s foremost novelists, Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920, was a Nazi sympathiser, and Heinrich Himmler was proud to welcome Norwegians, fellow Aryan brothers-in-arms as he called them – including Hamsun’s son – into his Waffen-SS, years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

  * * *

  Even Norwegians with no Nazi sympathies were desperately anxious to avoid their country being drawn into the war. In February 1940, a British Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Cossack, pursued the German tanker Altmark up the ice-clogged Jøssingfjord, a narrow fjord near Stavanger, boarded her, and released 299 British prisoners of war, merchant seamen captured when their vessels had been torpedoed in the Atlantic, whom Norwegian inspectors had failed to discover. The incident led to a furious diplomatic incident, and the Norwegian Minister in London protested against ‘the grossest violation of neutrality’ since the beginning of the war.

  Certainly the Altmark episode, which threw Hitler into one of his frequent rages, only confirmed the German sense that, unless they acted fast, Britain would establish a stronghold along the Norwegian coast, and the two outlets vital to the Third Reich – access to the Atlantic waters and freedom to transport Swedish iron ore to Germany – would be lost.

  Plans for what was called the Weser Exercise – Weserübung – were put into operation immediately. This would involve the occupation and conquest of Denmark, which, as already noted, occurred with alarming speed, and the occupation of the key Norwegian ports, especially Narvik, and the subjugation of both governments. General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, a skilled corps commander who had served with distinction in Finland at the end of the previous war and in the invasion of Poland the previous autumn, was put in charge of Weser
übung.

  General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht – Germany’s armed forces – noted in his diary that Falkenhorst accepted ‘with enthusiasm’. For some reason, at the end of the war when he was on trial for war crimes, Falkenhorst recalled being forced into the role with extreme reluctance. The plan, which had been completed by March 1940, was for the simultaneous invasion of Denmark and Norway, with landing forces of between 1,000 and 2,000 men arriving at the Norwegian ports of Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen and Oslo, and with torpedo boats and minesweepers accompanying the destroyers and battleships that would transport these troops.

  Too late to have much effect, Churchill had received the Cabinet’s permission in London to proceed with laying mines in the Norwegian Leads. (This was Operation Wilfred – a name chosen because it sounded harmless, presumably after the supposedly loveable North Country humourist Wilfred Pickles, who had become popular on British radio with such catchphrases as ‘What’s on the table, Mabel?’) Chamberlain issued orders for the mining of the waters around Narvik and dispatched the battle cruiser Renown, the cruiser Birmingham and eight flanking destroyers to protect four mine-laying destroyers. Troops for the follow-up invasion of Norwegian ports were put on standby. Cock-a-hoop, the British Prime Minister announced, ‘After seven months of war I feel ten times as confident of victory as I did at the beginning. One thing is certain. Hitler has missed the bus.’

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even as Chamberlain spoke, the Germans had deployed 1,000 planes, 500 transports, 300 bombers and 200 dive bombers – fighters and reconnaissance aircraft. These sailed for Narvik on 3 April. They hoped for a repetition of the Danish experience, when no resistance had been offered to their arrival. The German ships entering Norwegian ports were disguised as British vessels, and any messages sent from Norway to such craft in Morse code was answered in English. The arrival of an absolutely overwhelming, well-disciplined and brilliantly conceived invasion force had taken the Norwegians and British by surprise, and German superiority – in manpower, in firepower and, alas, in skill – meant that the Norwegians did not stand a chance. The Norwegian Army possessed not one officer who had ever known combat in the field. For over 150 years, Norway had been at peace with the world.