Whatever one thought of Hitler, in newsreels he looked dynamic, vigorous, youthful, in command; Chamberlain looked like an old man with an umbrella and a funny Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down above his wing-tip collar when he spoke.

Except for Churchill, who became head of the Military Coordination Committee as well as first lord of the Admiralty, the prime minister’s new cabinet looked like his old cabinet. The only tangible difference was that almost everyone now occupied a different office. On April 4 the Times usually a reliable champion of Chamberlain, described the cabinet changes as depressing and unimaginative. “So toughly has the game been played that in no fewer than three separate cases ministers have simply exchanged offices.” The Manchester Guardian, less friendly to the prime minister, likened the cabinet reshuffle to “a sort of musical chairs of the old stuff”; another opposition paper called the changes “proof that it is almost impossible for the PM to part with his best and oldest friends.” Unfazed by the criticism, Chamberlain defended his war leadership that same day in a rousing lunchtime speech to a Conservative Party conclave at Westminster Hall, a brooding medieval structure whose history of regicide might have given pause to a politician less confident than Chamberlain on a day when half the papers in the country were calling for his head. The prime minister began:

When the war broke out, German preparations were far ahead of our own and it was natural then to expect that the enemy would take advantage of his natural superiority. . . . Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made. Whatever may be the reason . . . one thing is certain: [Hitler] missed the bus.

A few days later, Chamberlain wrote to his sister Hilda, “My speech to the Party . . . was very warmly received and the informality and jauntiness” of “ ‘[Hitler] missed the bus’ seems to have given peculiar satisfaction.” Not to everyone. Before Chamberlain spoke, Dick Law, a Conservative MP and member of the Vigilantes, gave a “biting little speech” opposing a resolution endorsing the prime minister’s war leadership. Law finished, expecting to be torn “limb from limb.” Instead, dozens of the party faithful—men and women who had stood by Chamberlain through Munich and Poland; who had defended him against charges of smugness, lethargy, cronyism, and complacency—leaped to their feet, applauding. “Why, this resolution is going to fail!” exclaimed a Chamberlain loyalist. On an appeal to party loyalty, an amended version of the motion did eventually pass; nonetheless, the incident placed a new thought in the public mind: perhaps it was not Hitler but Chamberlain who had “missed the bus.”

Until 1904 Scapa Flow, a thinly inhabited Scottish waterworld of low horizons, cold islands, and deep drafts, dwelled in the eternity of geological time. Then the Royal Navy arrived, military time replaced geological time, and the British Home Fleet replaced the local fishing fleet. Piers, workhouses, minefields, artillery emplacements, brothels, and pubs arose; a war came and went; and a generation of young naval officers returned to Scapa Flow, proud of their service at Jutland, the climactic Anglo-German sea battle of the Great War, and certain that nothing like it would ever be seen again. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the prospect that airpower would render sea power obsolete darkened the days of the senior naval officers at Scapa Flow, and that darkness persisted down to the afternoon of April 7, 1940, when news arrived that large elements of the German fleet had put to sea.

Despite the recent intelligence reports, the German action came as a surprise. On April 3, Churchill, who as first lord of the Admiralty was privy to the latest naval intelligence, had told the cabinet that he “personally doubted whether the Germans would land a force in Scandinavia.” Two days later Chamberlain also dismissed rumors of a German action in Norway. Berlin would issue furious protests when the Royal Navy began the mining of Norwegian waters, he said, but the German government would “take no retaliatory action.”

Forty-eight hours later, a Coastal Command pilot sighted a German task force of eight destroyers and a cruiser heading northward in a heavy sea. A few hours later there was another sighting—three German destroyers also heading north. Then, at one thirty on the afternoon of the seventh, came a third sighting. An RAF pilot counted fourteen destroyers, three cruisers, and one other vessel, possibly a transport; this force was also sailing north. At eight thirty that evening the Home Fleet, which had been on alert since early afternoon, raised anchor and sailed out into the April night. The Second Cruiser Squadron, at Rosyth (another Scottish port), set sail an hour and a half later, leaving behind several battalions of angry British soldiers. The squadron had been preparing to ferry the troops to Norway when news arrived that the German Navy was at sea. Roused from their bunks, the troops had been ordered off the cruisers without explanation, without new orders, and without their equipment. At about the same time, the naval units accompanying British troop ships across the North Sea to Norway peeled away from the convoys and disappeared into the darkness.

The German naval movements were a feint designed to draw the Home Fleet away from the Norwegian coast by the prospect of a historic sea battle along the lines of Jutland. As the British Home Fleet took up battle positions on the night of April 7–8, German warships and merchantmen, holds crowded with troops and engines of war, were taking up attack positions along the unguarded Norwegian coast. “Up the other side of the channel steering came merchant ship after merchant ship. . . . Great tempting tankers, heavy laden ships . . . the German invasion of Norway going north.” So wrote a British submarine captain who was under orders not to attack northbound merchantmen.