Hitler's Pre-emptive War

The Battle for Norway, 1940

Henrik O. Lunde

• Publisher: Casemate
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781612000459
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

An "excellent" history of the often overlooked WWII campaign in which Hitler secured a vital resource lifeline for the Third Reich ( Library Journal ). After Hitler conquered Poland and was still fine-tuning his plans against France, the British began to exert control over the coastline of neutral Norway, an action that threatened to cut off Germany's iron-ore conduit to Sweden and outflank from the start its hegemony on the Continent. The Germans responded with a dizzying series of assaults, using every tool of modern warfare developed in the previous generation. Airlifted infantry, mountain troops, and paratroopers were dispatched to the north, seizing Norwegian strongpoints while forestalling larger but more cumbersome Allied units. The German navy also set sail, taking a brutal beating at the hands of Britannia, but ensuring with its sacrifice that key harbors would be held open for resupply. As dive-bombers soared overhead, small but elite German units traversed forbidding terrain to ambush Allied units trying to forge inland. At Narvik, some six thousand German troops battled twenty thousand French and British until the Allies were finally forced to withdraw by the great disaster in France, which had then gotten underway. Henrik Lunde, a native Norwegian and former US Special Operations colonel, has written the most objective account to date of a campaign in which twentieth-century military innovation found its first fertile playing field.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Allied Plans–Flawed, Inadequate, and Hesitant
• 2. German Plans—Bold, Imaginative, and Reckless
• 3. Ignored Warnings—Ships Passing in the Night
• 4. Narvik Area Defenses
• 5. The German Attack on Narvik
• 6. Destroyer Battle
• 7. Confusion and Disarray
• 8. Beachhead Consolidation and Second Naval Battle
• 9. The Narvik Front, April 13–26
• 10. Campaigns in the South
• 11. The Norwegian-French Offensive, April 29–May 12
• 12. 2nd Mountain Division to the Rescue
• 13. The Bjerkvik Landing and the Mountain Offensive
• 14. The Loss of Nordland Province
• 15. The Week that Lost the Campaign—Strained Relations
• 16. Time Runs Out
• 17. Evacuation, Armistice, and Disaster
• Epilogue
• Maps
• Command Structures
• Operational Code Names
• Bibliography
• Notes