The beaches were still covered by three- and four-foot snowdrifts, and behind the snowdrifts were German machine guns. Cork proposed a naval bombardment to soften up the beaches; citing the risk of heavy civilian casualties, Mackesy said no. In early May the two men were still arguing when General Claude Auchinleck arrived and relieved Mackesy. Under Auchinleck, landings were made at sites around Narvik but not on the town beaches. On May 28 a combined French, Norwegian, and Polish force would capture Narvik, but by that time Norway was about to surrender and the British Expeditionary Force was trapped in a pocket around Dunkirk. Narvik was abandoned almost immediately. To the thousands of British troops who were evacuated back to England, Narvik would forever remain a silhouette on a hostile shore, glimpsed from the portal of a distant ship.

It is difficult to overestimate the impact the Norwegian campaign had on public opinion in Britain and France. Describing her village’s reaction to Chamberlain’s May 2 announcement that the assault on Trondheim had been abandoned, Margery Allingham wrote: “We had always thought of Mr. Chamberlain as a wonderful vain old man who had nothing particular up his sleeve. . . . Instead [it turned out] the old blighter was mucking about. The effect of this discovery . . . was like suddenly discovering the man driving the Charabanc [bus] in which you were careening down an S-bend mountain road with a wall on one side and a chasm on the other, was slightly tight. Was he about to drive the bus right off the cliff? I have never been more abjectly frightened in my life.” Elsewhere in Britain, reaction to Chamberlain’s announcement was equally sharp.

In an analysis of Norway’s impact on civilian morale, Mass Observation wrote:

For the first time there is a real clear doubt about whether we have not underestimated [Hitler] and overestimated ourselves . . . if this skepticism continues and expands as it is now, a really difficult problem for leadership will be produced. Apathy would be increased. Apathy toward revolution, apathy toward aggression. A general feeling that the whole thing is a waste of time and that the whole effort is not worthwhile.

In France, public reaction to Norway went through three stages. In mid-April, when Clare Boothe arrived in Paris, almost none of her French friends had a good word to say about the Anglais. The British were the senior partners in the Norwegian campaign, but the Parisians Boothe spoke to complained that they were not acting that way. “Where [was British] intelligence when the Germans were planning [the invasion]? Where was the [Royal] Navy? Where was the British Expeditionary Force?” Then, one morning, French radio announced the British assault on Trondheim, and Union Jacks sprouted up across the capital like some wild new jungle growth. They hung from balconies, windows, storefronts, and flagpoles. In the streets, French soldiers who had previously refused to salute British officers started saluting them smartly. “At last we are real allies,” a French captain said. “Not since the affair of Joan of Arc have the English and French so well understood each other.”

“Oh, isn’t it wonderful!” Boothe said to Colonel Horace Fuller, whom she met during a visit to the American embassy in Paris in late April.

“What? What’s wonderful?” asked Fuller, who was the military attaché at the embassy.

“Norway!”

“Oh, sure,” Fuller replied. “Hitler missed the bus, all right, but he caught the transport plane instead.”

Then Fuller took Boothe into his office, unfolded a map of Norway on his desk, and explained “what it meant to force an enemy-held fjord in ships, how much tonnage and how many men it would take and how many guns. Norway . . . was the kind of country which if you got there first and with the most, you could not be got out in a day or a year or perhaps ever,” Fuller said. “And Hitler got there first.”

The cancellation of the Trondheim operation initiated the third stage of French feeling about Norway, a French officer who served in the campaign summed up the change in a coy little parable about the Zulus. The British, he said, had planned Norway as if it were “an expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily, we and the British [turned out to be] the Zulus, armed with bows and arrows against the onslaught of modern scientific war.”

In The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war memoirs, Churchill was frank about his good fortune in escaping political ruin after Norway. “Considering the prominent part I played in these events . . .