“I want a small force of good troops, well led, to follow up the naval attack. I also want landings north and south of Trondheim . . . to cooperate with the assault when it comes off.” Ironside again pointed out that diverting troops to Trondheim would cause insurmountable logistical difficulties; Churchill again insisted that Trondheim was the priority now. The argument went back and forth for several minutes; finally, a resigned Ironside asked Churchill if he was acting in his capacity as first lord of the Admiralty or as the chairman of the Military Coordination Committee. Churchill said in his capacity as chairman of the MCC, which had authority over all three fighting services. Absolved of responsibility for an order he believed foolhardy, Ironside agreed to release the troops.

Almost immediately, the British Chiefs of Staff began to have second thoughts about Trondheim. To reach the town, the invasion fleet would have to force a heavily defended fifty-five-mile fjord. The more the chiefs studied the operation, the more the word “Gallipoli” came to mind. That was the last time the Royal Navy attempted to force a heavily defended, enclosed body of water, and the effort had cost three battleships. The chiefs were also worried about Narvik again. While British troops sat offshore, waiting for the snow to melt on the landing beaches, the Germans had reinforced the town. On April 16 an attack on Narvik looked a good deal more formidable than it had on the fourteenth.

On April 17 the naval assault on Trondheim was scheduled for the twenty-second; on the eighteenth it was rescheduled for the twenty-fourth; and on the nineteenth it was canceled for good, in favor of a land operation. A British force moving south from the fishing village of Namsos, and a second force moving north from the town of Åndalsnes, would attack Trondheim from the landward side. For experienced troops, traversing a hundred-plus miles of snow-covered road in subzero temperatures against heavy opposition on the ground and in the air would be a remarkable feat of arms. For the inexperienced troops of the 146th and 148th Brigades, it would require something akin to a miracle. The 146th and 148th were territorial units made up of citizen soldiers, much like American National Guardsmen. Ten months earlier, most of the men had been ironmongers, farmhands, factory workers, insurance clerks, teachers, and bus drivers. Young men, they knew the names of all the popular bandleaders of the day, but the British army had not yet had time to teach them how to be proper soldiers and did not have enough machine guns and motors to arm them properly.

The Germans that the territorials encountered on the roads to Trondheim were everything they were not. Blocked, the Germans would flank, climb to higher ground, infiltrate, find ways to go around—all to keep up the offensive momentum. Physically and mentally unprepared for war, the territorials were overwhelmed and outmatched. Dazed, they fell back, regrouped, feel back again; on retreats, the men cursed the snow and the meteorologists in Britain who’d said it would be melted by April. They cursed the cruiser that had sailed out of Rosyth with their equipment; they cursed the RAF for surrendering the Norwegian sky to the Luftwaffe. No matter how deep a hole a man dug, the bombs and machine guns of the Stukas and Heinkels always found him. Morale fell; positions were abandoned with little or no resistance; units fragmented, and the newspapers filled with harrowing accounts of the British death march to Trondheim. After one battle, a young lieutenant pulled an American newspaper correspondent aside and said, with some urgency, “Get the word out to the people at home. [Tell them] we’ve got no proper clothes, we’ve got no white capes. . . . For God’s sake, tell them we have no airplanes and antiaircraft guns. Tell them everything I’ve said.” In early May, the remnants of the 146th and 148th Brigades were evacuated back to Britain.

The Narvik operation also had an inglorious end. For weeks after arriving off the coast of Narvik, General Mackesy and Lord Cork sat in a ship, arguing about what to do next. Lord Cork favored an immediate assault on the town beaches; General Mackesy, the ground commander, did not.