Hitler’s Pre-Emptive War: The Battle for Norway, 1940

If any single individual was responsible for the German invasion of Norway then it was Winston Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty he chafed at the inactivity of the Phoney War, and he considered Norway as a potential battleground. Germany relied on exports of Swedish iron ore, which during winter were shipped to Germany via the ice-free Norwegian port of Narvik. Despite claims to the contrary, the Norwegian operation was not essential to the German war effort, but Churchill saw intervention as way of extending the scope of the war, in the belief that the Royal Navy could inflict a powerful blow on its German equivalent in Northern waters and bring Scandinavia within the Allied orbit. As events were to reveal, this proved wishful thinking of the most dangerous kind.