For the most part, I thought this book was a series of never-ending excuses for the poor British government decisions and military performance from the start of WW II in September of 1939 to the German attack on France in May of 1940. The one new subject, I thought, were the discussions on the political relationship in the War Cabinet between Chamberlain and Churchill. It was more harmonious than many people realize.
Throughout the book, I think a reader must be struck by the timid, pusillanimous, and generally indecisiveness of the British political leadership in the War Cabinet. They simply did not know how to fight a war. They appear to have spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to avoid fighting the Germans or doing something that might antagonize them into attacking France. They discussed how to get Sweden and Norway to go to war against Germany, how to send military aid to Finland without going to war against the Soviet Union, sending a British fleet into the Baltic Sea without a base to support it, invading Norway to stop the shipping of iron ore from Narvik to Germany, and even seizing Narvik and then invading Sweden to seize the iron ore mines at Gallivare. I felt there was a considerable amount of unreality about it all.
There are additional examples of unreality. Churchill appointed Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) as his “scientific advisor.” In my opinion, Lindemann was a complete fraud. He was wrong about every major issue on which he provided an assessment or opinion. As described in this book during the 1939 – 1940 time period here, he was wrong about German U-boat production and U-boat losses; he was wrong about the effectiveness of the British ASDIC (Sonar to Americans) and Royal Navy anti-submarine tactics; and he was wrong about the supposed effectiveness of RAF bombing on German industry in the Ruhr. This latter subject, admittedly, was a defect in the entire War Cabinet and in Bomber Command. They actually believed that a force of 300 twin-engine bombers attacking German war industry in the Ruhr would affect German army assaults in France and the Low Countries. In fact, at the time 90% of RAF pilots could not even find the cities they were supposed to bomb, let alone find individual factories within the cities. Later in the “Battle of Britain” Lindemann was wrong about the Luftwaffe radio navigation system. In 1942 – 1944 he wrong about the German V-2 rocket. He insisted that the aerial photos of the rockets on their transport wagons were barrage balloons.
There is considerable discussion about the Norwegian campaign of April - June 1940 after the Germans invaded Norway. This was where I felt that the excuses for misjudgment and the justifications for poor decisions really become obvious. The war had started in September of 1939. The British government had considered many schemes concerning Norway in general and Narvik in particular. Yet when the Germans attacked in April of 1940 (seven months after the war began), Chamberlain, Churchill, the War Cabinet in general and the army and navy seem to have had no definite plans at all for responding. It was all mass improvisation. The members of the War Cabinet apparently spent their time making decisions on military deployments and the minutia of war that should have been made by a “Norwegian Theater Commander” and his staff but of course such an entity did not exist.
In my opinion, an excellent book on the British campaign regarding Norway in 1940 is “Anatomy of a Campaign: The British Fiasco in Norway, 1940” by Kiszely (2017). This is the best book I have ever read on the British strategic level decision-making processes and personalities regarding the Norwegian campaign of April – June of 1940. It isn’t merely a recital of all the poor decisions made and who made them. It goes into discussions and analyses of the inappropriate decision making committees and overall decision-making structure and explains why it was almost inevitable that poor decisions would result from the system in place: “The decisions were inadequate in almost every conceivable way. The inability to address questions of strategic priority or decide where the main effort should lie, the vacillation, the avoidance of uncomfortable decisions —all had been demonstrated to the fore. The committee structure was overly bureaucratic and ponderous, occupying too much time of ministers and advisors. In the month of April [1940] alone, the War Cabinet met thirty-one times, the Military Coordinating Committee twenty-one times, and the Chiefs of Staff Committee forty-two times; for the Chiefs [of Staff] a staggering total of ninety four meetings.”
“Churchill showed, throughout the campaign from its earliest inception, an ignorance of, and disdain for, logistics worthy of the cavalry subaltern he once had been… He was largely responsible for some of the worst strategic blunders of the campaign. The Norwegian campaign was not his finest hour. The War Cabinet developed a habit of mind which was not only dangerous but also infectious to those around them – that of wishful thinking.”
As a French general commented “…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.”
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