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The French Alpine troops at Namsos embarked first, under General Sylvestre Gérard Audet, who was wounded in the head by bomb splinters. Then went the British, throwing their arms and stores away, their retreat "covered" by Norwegians, whose Colonel Ole Getz complained bitterly, and surrendered to the Germans, when he found that the Allies had left him to fight with an open flank and rear. (The British said Colonel Getz's superior, General Otto Ruge, understood their plan, went with them.) Furiously pursuing German airmen raked and bombarded the launches loading on Namsos' concatenated waterfront. They dumped rack after rack of bombs at transports and warships steaming away from shore. How many boatloads sank in the inferno the Nazis poured on them may not be known until the post-war opening of archives. At Gallipoli the British suffered 50,000 casualties out of 120,000 troops landed. The N. W. E. F. affair, a pint-sized Gallipoli, will probably lag far behind that proportion of losses. The rating of those who ordered it, and then countermanded it, will be even lower. The Germans saluted its departure with a furious effort to sink a battleship from the air, a loud but hollow claim of having done so (see p. 29).
All Quiet. Relative silence now fell over lower Norway, with only a few guerrilla bands of stubborn natives fighting on in mountain pockets. Even the 160 men and 15 officers in thick-walled Hegra Fortress outside Trondheim, though unbeaten, finally surrendered. In 23 days a husky nation of 3,000,000 people, living in mountainous, snow-covered country well suited to defense, and with some 35,000 supposedly modern soldiers sent to help them, had been conquered by an army of perhaps 85,000 skilled, swift-moving, hard-hitting fighters, and some 500 indefatigable warplanes. As a military feat of sheer nerve, though not of power, this conquest outclassed the 18-day subjugation of flat Poland's 34,000,000 people by 1,000,000 Germans and as many more Russians. Even after discounting Norse innocence, lack of equipment, treachery within, discounting also British amateurishness and unpreparedness, the German campaign was a masterpiece of organization as well as cunning surprise. Military men in other countries snapped mental salutes to its organizer and leader. Yet the U. S. Army, for one, searched its Intelligence dossiers in vain to find out something about him.
Two days before the Nazi flag rose over Åndalsnes, when the Nazi power columns driving from the south made contact with their cut-off comrades near Trondheim, Adolf Hitler knew his Norwegian gamble was won. He addressed a special order-of-the-day to his "Soldiers of the Norwegian scene of war."
". . . An achievement reflecting the highest honor on the daring of the young German armed forces. . . .
"You have fulfilled the tremendous task which I, in faith in you and your powers, was forced to set for you.
"The nation through me expresses thanks. As an external sign of recognition and of this gratitude, I decorate the Commander in Chief in Norway, General von Falkenhorst, with the Chevalier's Cross of the Iron Cross. . . .
"Long live the Great Germany!"