In the Far North, one German battle group bore down on Narvik, the port through which Swedish iron ore was shipped to Germany; farther south, another force approached Trondheim, a central Norwegian town with a good port and a historic past as the capital of medieval Norway. Below Trondheim, where the weather was treacherous, a third German battle group pitched and rolled in the sea off Stavanger, the site of a strategically important air base. Other German units steamed eastward toward Oslo in force-11 gale winds that reconfigured the sea into canyons of whistling black water.

The Admiralty’s first indication that the German fleet was not where it imagined it was came the following morning, April 8, when the Glowworm, a British ship attached to the mine-laying operation, encountered the Bernard von Arnim, a German destroyer, off the Norwegian coast. During the running gun battle that ensued, the German ship lost its equilibrium in the pitching sea; its bow heaved, its forecastle (upper deck) snapped off, its hold flooded, and two deckhands were swept away. The Glowworm, smaller and more nimble in the heavy seas, was closing in on the destroyer when the Hipper, a large German cruiser, emerged from a snow squall and blew off the Glowworm’s bridge. The British ship fired several torpedoes and made smoke to cover its retreat. Just before the Hipper’s guns caught it emerging from the far side of the smoke screen, the Glowworm made a final transmission to the Admiralty—“Germans at sea”—and then turned into the wind, rammed the Hipper, and blew up. A moment later, the morning sea held more sorrows than the hills of Jerusalem.

In London that morning General Hasting Ismay, secretary to the Imperial Defense Committee, awoke to the sound of a ringing telephone. The duty officer at the War Office was on the line; his words were so garbled that at first Ismay thought his caller had forgotten to put his dentures in. Ismay instructed the officer to do so and then to repeat the message. The caller steadied himself and reported that, overnight, the Germans had seized the main Norwegian ports and Denmark. Hanging up, Ismay realized that until this moment he had never fully grasped “the devastating and demoralizing effect of surprise.”

The next morning, April 9, the intelligence services reported that, overnight, the Germans had occupied three important Norwegian population centers—Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim—and were about to occupy Stavanger and Narvik. A cable from Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador in Paris, further deepened the gloom in Downing Street and Whitehall. The cable concerned Daladier and Reynaud, who were scheduled to visit London later in the day. Campbell warned that due to “acute differences . . . on private and personal matters . . . [Daladier] was now determined to embarrass Reynaud in every possible way.” Spears, always au courant with Parisian gossip, identified the source of the discord thusly: “The Marquise backs the one and the Comtesse backing the other [and both women] having a grand old time, all claws and no holds barred.”

Campbell’s warning proved to be a false alarm. When the Allied Supreme Council convened at four on the afternoon of the ninth, Reynaud and Daladier, conscious of the gravity of the hour, were models of professionalism and seriousness. The French offered an alpine division to assist in the reconquest of the occupied Norwegian ports and agreed that Narvik, the bright, shiny object in British military thinking since the start of the war, should be a priority target. There was also a long discussion about the significance of the German action. Was Norway a one-off or the beginning of the long-anticipated German offensive in the West? On the streets of Brussels, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, that question was also a topic of lively and nervous debate on this early spring afternoon. “Will it be Holland and Belgium [next] or the Maginot Line, or a great air attack on this country—or altogether?” wondered the young Downing Street aide John Colville. The council concluded that the threat of a general offensive was grave enough to press neutral Belgium for permission to set up Allied defensive positions along its border.

“These will be fateful days, these next few,” General Ironside wrote in his diary that night.

The politicians, though slower than soldiers to grasp the dimensions of the German success, had awakened to it by the next morning, April 10. “The Germans have seized the [Norwegian] ports . . . and to dislodge them [would] be a difficult operation,” Chamberlain said at the morning cabinet meeting. The announcement would have greatly surprised readers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. The morning papers were reporting that Trondheim, Oslo, and Bergen had already been recaptured. “England’s waking up” and “We’ve started on them now,” people told one another on the bus to work; miniature Union Jacks appeared in shop windows; “Rule Britannia” echoed through lunchtime pubs. On the eleventh, when Churchill rose from his seat to brief the House of Commons on Norway, there was a noticeable tingle of expectation in the chamber. Ah, thought Harold Nicolson, an MP at the Ministry of Information, “tales of victory and triumph” from a master orator. What a pleasant prospect!

That happy thought did not survive Churchill’s first few sentences.