Overview

After Hitler conquered Poland, and while he was still fine-tuning his plans against France, the British began to exert control of the coastline of neutral Norway, an action that threatened to cut off Germany's iron-ore conduit to Sweden and outflank from the start its hegemony on the Continent. The Germans quickly responded with a dizzying series of assaults, using every tool of modern warfare developed in the previous generation. Airlifted infantry, mountain troops and paratroopers were dispatched to the Scandinavian nation, seizing Norwegian strong points while forestalling larger but more cumbersome Allied units. The German Navy also set sail, taking a brutal beating at the hands of Britannia, while ensuring with its sacrifice that the key harbours could be held open for resupply. As dive bombers soared overhead, small but elite German units traversed forbidding terrain to ambush Allied units trying to forge inland. At Narvik, some 6,000 German troops battled 20,000 French and British, unit the Allies were finally forced to withdraw by the great disaster in France, which had by then gotten underway. As a veritable coda to the campaign, the aircraft carrier Glorious, while trying to sail back to Britain, was hammered under the waves by the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst. The air, airborne, sea, amphibious, infantry, armour and commando aspects of this brief but violent campaign are covered here in meticulous detail. AUTHOR: Henrik Lunde, a native Norwegian and former U.S. Special Operations colonel, has written perhaps the most objective account to date of a campaign in which 20th-century military innovation found its first fertile ground. 16 pages of illustrations

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9781932033922

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Lunde cuts a path to clarity... he masterfully illumines the significance of smaller, tactical events against larger, strategic outcomes... Unlike some studies of this contentious campaign, Lunde's absorbing, annotated account relentlessly mines and matches multiple international sources... Read this able account - and luxuriate in lessons learned. Robustly recommended. - David L. Veres, Cybermodeler.com, November 2013.

“Lunde cuts a path to clarity... he masterfully illumines the significance of smaller, tactical events against larger, strategic outcomes... Unlike some studies of this contentious campaign, Lunde's absorbing, annotated account relentlessly mines and matches multiple international sources... Read this able account – and luxuriate in lessons learned. Robustly recommended.” * Cybermodeler.com * this account is crammed with detail about the campaign, the politics and the chaos... there is a great deal to offer. * The Pathfinder Magazine *

Author Information

HENRIK O. LUNDE, born in Norway, moved to America as a child and thence rose in the U.S. Army to become a Colonel in Special Forces. Highly decorated for bravery in Vietnam, he proceeded to gain advance degrees and assume strategic posts, his last being in the Plans and Policy Branch of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe. After retirement from the Army he turned to writing, with a focus on his native North, and given his combination of personal tactical knowledge plus objective strategic grasp has authored several groundbreaking works. These include Hitler’s Pre-Emptive War, about Norway 1940, Finland’s War of Choice, and Hitler’s Wave-Breaking Concept, which analyzes the controversial retreat of Germany’s Army Group North from the Leningrad front in WWII. In A Warrior Dynasty he re-examines the potential of pure military skill in global affairs. His next, long-awaited work, will examine how America itself has fared in this regard during the last 50 years.

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