(See Cover]
The Nazi war flag (black swastika on a white bull's-eye in a quartered red field with Iron Cross) fluttered up triumphantly one spring afternoon last week over the ruins of Åndalsnes, at the head of Romsdal Fjord in western Norway. It was 15 o'clock (3 p.m.) by German Army watches and just two weeks since British battalions landed there for the purpose, the whole world believed, of pushing the German invaders out of Norway. Instead, all the pushing—and a lot of punching, hammering, rushing and blasting—had been done by the Germans. It was the British who went out backwards, faster than they had come in.
There was little left of what had been a tidy fishing village. All around the fjord's beachhead, where quays, warehouses, railroad station, freight sidings used to be, now lay a charred, twisted, upheaved destruction left by repeated showers of high explosive and incendiary bombs. As the German advance force ran up their flag and piled up stacks of abandoned Allied equipment, Nazi warplanes still winged high over, out to sea, looking for the fugitive enemy to punish him some more. He had escaped in his boats by night, after pretending by day to deploy for rallies and counterattacks. This maneuver was directed by the British Army's redheaded commander, Major General Bernard Paget, 51, son of the late Bishop of Oxford. That same spring afternoon in London, Prime Minister Chamberlain, breaking the news to Parliament that Britain's arms south of Trondheim were completely outclassed, said in a pathetic attempt at enthusiasm that the Åndalsnes reembarkation was carried out "without losing a single man." If it was so carried out it was technical operation that military men will admire, but that did not alter the fact that the expedition had come a shocking cropper.
All Out. Next day the world learned that the evacuation of Åndalsnes was only the curtain raiser for the abandonment by all Allied forces of three-fifths of the land and six-sevenths of the people they had only a fortnight before gone to save. What Mr. Chamberlain did not say was that from the Allies' other main beachhead, Namsos, north of Trondheim, the balance of the Northwestern Expeditionary Force fled Norway that same day and night. The Allies had intended to pinch Trondheim from north and south. With the south prong of the pincers demolished, to press with the north prong would have been only a waste of men and munitions.