DNA evidence has finally confirmed that a Royal Australian Navy sailor whose body was found in a life raft near Christmas Island in February 1942 came from the light cruiser HMAS Sydney (II), which vanished with all its 645 crew after a battle with a disguised German raider off Western Australia.

The Sydney was the pride of the Australian fleet and regarded as invincible after defeating two Italian warships in the Mediterranean. It was on a routine voyage home to Fremantle after escorting a troop ship to Singapore when it came upon the German auxiliary cruiser HSK Kormoran, a merchant ship heavily armed with concealed guns and carrying a cargo of mines to be laid around the Australian coast.

The battle which destroyed both ships raged 120 nautical miles off Steep Point on the evening of 19 November 1941. More than 300 Germans survived and spent the rest of the war in Australian prisoner-of-war camps.

The decomposing body of the sailor now identified as Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark was found on the raft, known as a Carley Float, 11 weeks after the battle. He was buried in an unmarked grave on Christmas Island just before Japanese forces occupied the island. The remains of the rangy 21-year-old from Brisbane were exhumed in 2006, and then began the protracted search for his identity. His niece, Leigh Lehane, was born in July 1941, a month before Clark joined the Sydney, and he’s understood to have visited her on a final trip to Brisbane. ‘He came and held me as a little baby,’ Lehane told researchers. ‘That’s a very pleasurable thought because I don’t think anyone is alive now who knew Tom sort of eye to eye.’

That mystery has been solved, but the question that’s unlikely to ever be answered adequately is why the Sydney closed to within 1,000 metres of the Kormoran. An inquiry later noted that was virtually point-blank range for naval guns.

The lack of Australian survivors triggered years of dark conjecture about the fate of the Sydney and its crew, including claims that the warship was destroyed by a Japanese submarine and that Australians were murdered in their lifeboats. Over decades, these claims have all been debunked, but the absence of an explanation for why the Sydney was lost with all hands remained deeply disturbing for families and friends who were without a focus for their remembrance.

The wrecks were found on the seabed in 2008 and former judge Terence Cole was commissioned to carry out a major inquiry into the Sydney’s loss, drawing on what could be gleaned from the location and condition of the sunken vessels.

Cole largely accepted the German accounts of the battle and rejected the multiple claims of foul play. He blamed the cruiser’s captain, Joseph Burnett, for its loss, but he noted that Burnett was considered an exceptional officer facing huge pressures and declined to make a finding that he was negligent.

The graphic testimony Cole heard from German survivors and the extraordinary pictures of the two wrecked ships on the ocean floor revealed the appalling last moments of the Sydney and its crew.

The Kormoran’s survivors described how the Sydney was spotted at about 4 pm and some of the crew thought it was a sailing vessel because of its high masts. They quickly realised it was a cruiser and were ordered to battle stations.

Elderly but with clear memories of the battle, the Germans described their fear as the Sydney approached looking ‘powerful and beautiful’ in the early evening light. Former officer Heinz Messerschmidt said the Kormoran’s captain, Theodore Detmers, recognised that the raider would one day meet a ship from what he called ‘the grey funnel line’. Detmers and his officers trained the gun crews constantly so that it would take just six seconds for them to de-camouflage and open fire.

Messerschmidt said the crew had ‘scrounged’ from the German army two 37-millimetre, quick-firing anti-aircraft guns that were placed on either side of the raider’s bridge. These became a key to the rapid German victory.

The Germans were under instructions to stay clear of allied warships where possible but, if battle could not be avoided, ‘every attempt to destroy the enemy by means of camouflage, by unexpected and ruthless use of all weapons should be made’.

The Kormoran’s gunners trained twice a week to load and fire their weapons quickly and accurately. Detmers told each gunner where to aim if the raider ever met a warship. The hours invested each Thursday and Friday proved devastatingly effective when the Kormoran finally engaged the Sydney.

For more than an hour, the Sydney tried to communicate with the Kormoran using flag signals and a signalling lamp. The Germans sent vague and confusing replies. Detmers turned his ship into the sun to make it even harder for the Australians to read his signals.

The Germans described how, soon after 5 pm, the cruiser closed in with its guns and torpedo tubes pointed at the raider. ‘The situation was becoming very tense,’ Messerschmidt said. ‘I knew that one shot from the cruiser into the mine deck would kill us all.’

The Germans signalled that they were the Dutch freighter Straat Malakka. Burnett then asked them to send their secret recognition sign. ‘We were terrified,’ Messerschmidt said.

Detmers told his crew he didn’t know the sign and they’d have to fight.

By then, said Cole, Burnett must have known that the ship he was confronting was no innocent merchantman. But it was too late and moments later he was dead. Detmers ordered the Dutch flag to be struck and the German battle ensign hoisted. Cole said that took between 8 and 15 seconds. The battle flag would have been clearly visible as it rose. ‘The German war ensign was flown before the first shot was fired,’ Cole concluded.

On the Kormoran, Detmers said: ‘It’s now or never!’ and then gave the order to lower the large, hinged flaps hiding his guns and open fire.

Cole said it appeared that the Kormoran fired first but the Sydney fired back almost simultaneously.

The 37-millimetre gun crews had been trained to concentrate on the bridge of an enemy vessel, Messerschmidt said. ‘At short range such guns are horribly effective. I could see shells with a covering arc of fire hitting and wiping out the many men on the bridge.’

As Detmers had so carefully planned, salvos from the Kormoran’s big guns hit the Sydney’s bridge, the gunnery control tower, the engine room, and the Sydney’s Walrus aircraft, which blew up and started a huge fire.

Cole said it was likely that Burnett and most of his officers were killed as the battle began and about 70% of the crew probably died within minutes.

Messerschmidt said it was ‘horrible to see it unfold’ as the unprepared (according to German accounts) Australian crew made desperate attempts to fight back. ‘I saw men running to Sydney’s torpedo tubes being shot down.’

Then the Kormoran fired a torpedo that hit the Sydney about 20 metres back from the bow. The Sydney scored three or four hits on the Kormoran, which stopped the raider. The cruiser turned and fired two torpedoes, which missed the Kormoran.

The Sydney’s guns were each taken out with precise and deadly shots from the highly trained German gunners. Those holes are clearly visible still in photos from the sea floor. Soon, only one of the cruiser’s four twin turrets was firing. Then it was hit and its crew killed, and the Sydney eventually turned away and headed slowly for the horizon, heavily ablaze.

Messerschmidt said the ship appeared as a fire shower—‘like the sun setting’. It seems the cruiser exploded and sank at around midnight.

Cole concluded that during the short, brutal battle the Sydney was hit at least 87 times by heavy shells from the German raider and with hundreds of lighter explosive rounds.

The raider, too, was fatally damaged, and Messerschmidt said he set timed explosive charges that blew it up after its survivors took to their lifeboats. He said he never saw any Australian survivors in the water. ‘Both us and the Australian men on Sydney were all caught up in a cruel war,’ he said. ‘We fought hard and with decency within the rules of war.’

Cole said it was likely that most of the Sydney’s crew were killed in the fighting and those who had survived the firing would have gone down with the ship when it sank some hours after the battle. Hence, the absence of survivors.

‘Those remaining were likely to have been in the aft section of the ship, seeking to control fires, attend to the wounded, and perhaps engaged in damage control,’ Cole said. ‘Most were probably suffering from severe injuries, burns, and smoke and toxic gas inhalation.’ They were in a ship that was rolling severely. Means of escape were limited by internal damage.

The ship sank suddenly, Cole said, and the prospect of crew members surviving was remote.

Somehow, Able Seaman Clark ended up in the life raft with a severe head wound. He may have fallen into the raft or been placed there by shipmates. When the raft was found, it contained what has variously been described as a single shoe or a pair of boots that would not have fitted the sailor, raising the possibility that at least one other man survived for a time.

After Clark’s body was exhumed in 2006, an Australian officer said its skull had what appeared to be a small-calibre pistol bullet inside it. That was incorrect. It turned out to be shrapnel matching the steel used in German naval shells in World War II.

Cole said Burnett had seen intelligence reports that a disguised German vessel might be in the area, and he had told his crew in October that ‘there is an enemy raider out there’. That made almost inexplicable Burnett’s decision to place his ship in a position of great vulnerability, he said.

Cole also said Burnett had been sent lists of all merchant ships around the coast and he should have realised quickly that the Kormoran’s claim to be Dutch was false.

But historian Tom Frame, author of HMAS Sydney: loss and controversy, thinks the verdict against Burnett is mistaken. Frame believes that Burnett was somehow convinced that he’d come across a lightly armed German supply ship that was planning to meet the Kormoran and not the heavily armed raider itself.

He thinks Burnett was about to send a boarding party to capture the German vessel, while hoping to rescue any allied merchant seamen who might have been prisoners aboard it. Then he could lie in wait for the Kormoran and destroy it. Earlier in the war the Kormoran did have captured Allied sailors on board, making Burnett’s caution entirely justified.

The only reason for coming near to a ship is that you intend to board it and you do that because you think it’s safe or pruden, Frame says. Burnett was a competent officer who wasn’t foolhardy. ‘What made him think it was safe, we will never know.’

The raider was very effectively disguised, and when he became suspicious Burnett’s only options were to board it or to stand off 12 kilometres away and use the greater range of the Sydney’s guns to sink it. But if the German vessel carried prisoners, they would have been killed as well.

Burnett was in a very difficult situation and had to take some risks, Frame says.

He knew there was a raider in the area, and where there was a raider there would likely be a supply ship. There was a gamble in the action he took. He was up against a very fine raider captain and he came off second best.

Frame doesn’t believe the Kormoran surrendered to the Sydney, but it probably gave the Australians the impression it wouldn’t resist boarding. ‘I think Burnett thought he’d caught Kormoran’s supply ship and he could wait in the area and dispose of Kormoran as well,’ Frame says.

Burnett closed in and lost his tactical advantage. ‘He was certainly not incompetent and he was not reckless.’

There is only one hill of any consequence in the city of Volgograd (Stalingrad). It is Mamayev Kurgan, which became a critical point of battle for both the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army during the titanic struggle for the city in late 1942 to early 1943.

Today at Mamayev, the heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad from the Red Army are commemorated. The memorial is dominated by a colossal statue of a woman wielding an enormous sword; it’s titled ‘The Motherland Calls’. Around the base carved in Cyrillic script, accompanying a mosaic of the defeated German 6th Army going into captivity, are the chilling words (as translated for me): ‘They wanted to see the Volga, so we gave them the opportunity.’ But it is the faces of the Soviet soldiers which are even more remarkable. Overwhelmingly, they are Red Army troops from the Asian republics of the USSR: from Kazakhstan to Tajikistan, right across to Mongolia and Siberia. The Motherland had called, then drafted, and the Asian citizens had responded along with their Western Soviet counterparts.

This symbolises one of the astonishing realities of the Great Patriotic War, as Joseph Stalin characterised the Soviet response to the Nazi invasion of 22 June 1941. There was a total mobilisation of everyone and every institution in the Soviet Union, from the party and the government through the Orthodox Church and every element of industrial life to the peoples themselves.

There’s no doubt that the Russian front was the decisive battleground of the war against Nazi Germany. It’s estimated that some 90% of Wehrmacht casualties were suffered in the East. Now, Sean McMeekin has given us Stalin’s war: a new history of World War II, which places the USSR in the centerground globally of the war against the Axis, including Japan. At the core of this interpretation of the Soviet contribution to victory in the Second World War is the Vozhd (boss), Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.

McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College in New York State. He is an acclaimed author of histories of the Russian Revolution and of the Ottoman Empire. He has written an exhaustive history of Stalin’s role in the Soviet victory over the Axis, but also of the diplomatic offensive which Stalin undertook to stay out of the war with both Germany and Japan from the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 to the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941. In so doing, he sheds new light on Soviet foreign and defence policy as war erupted in Asia from 1931, with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, through to the aggressive designs crystallising in Nazi Germany during a period of Western appeasement in the late 1930s.

McMeekin has dug deeply and revealingly into archives throughout Europe and Russia and in the United States. He has been rewarded by discovering material which causes both pre-war and Second World War confrontations to be subject to reinterpretation.

He places Soviet diplomacy in a continuum under Stalin, from his earliest Leninist views of ensuring that the USSR stayed out of capitalist wars through to securing the borders of the young Soviet state.

But Stalin was ruthless well beyond statesmanship. McMeekin characterises the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as a ‘gangster pact’ which allowed the destruction of Poland by opening the Polish state to Nazi invasion and Soviet conquest. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania also fell under Soviet domination. The war in Finland, also characterised as a gangster pact by McMeekin, developed very differently. The Red Army, bled of its leadership cadres through purges, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, suffered grievous losses against the extraordinarily courageous but hopelessly outnumbered Finnish armed forces.

A peace with Finland saved Moscow’s face, but the lessons were obvious. Despite Stalin’s massive military build-up, especially and foolishly along the USSR’s European borders, the Red Army was in no shape to fight the Axis. But McMeekin’s labours in the archives have yielded significant intellectual fruit. He argues convincingly that the success of the détente with Hitler’s Germany was already passing by May 1941. Stalin was moving to an offensive military prospect.

At a ceremony at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow that month, before 2,000 military and governmental personnel, Stalin denounced the academy’s director, Lieutenant General M.S. Khozin, who had complimented the dictator on his ‘peace policy’ (meaning the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact).

‘Before he could finish his platitudes, Stalin leapt to his feet, cut off the poor Lieutenant General, and reproached him for pushing “an out-of-date policy” … The Red Army, Stalin told his future commanders, “must get used to the idea that the era of the peace policy is at an end and that the era of the widening of the socialist front by force has begun”.’

Stalin’s diplomacy with Japan, however, yielded great benefit for the Vozhd. A quiet Far Eastern border meant the Red Army had one primary enemy, in Berlin. And when Moscow was threatened by the Germans in December 1941, General Georgy Zhukov was able to bring 30 Siberian divisions to the defence of the capital. In this critical encounter and in other battles on the Eastern Front, McMeekin emphasises the contribution of lend-lease aid from Western allies but is critical of both London and Washington for not demanding more of Stalin in return for the sustained wave of military assistance—everything from tanks and trucks to ammunition and artillery.

Franklin Roosevelt and his emissary Harry Hopkins come in for particular criticism. But the author overlooks the reality that in 1941–42, Britain and America were desperate to keep the Soviet Union fighting. Another treaty between Stalin and Hitler would have released 150 Axis divisions for action in the West. The stakes were too high to demand anything of Moscow in those early years of the war.

The decision taken by Washington and London to defeat Adolf Hitler first was also correct, despite McMeekin’s unease. Nazi Germany was a far greater threat than Imperial Japan.

However, when Stalin kept his promise to the West to enter the Asia–Pacific War in August 1945, the consequences could not have been foreseen. The Red Army smashed the Japanese Kwantung Army in a matter of days and drove into the north of the Korean peninsula. The immense amount of Japanese war booty passed largely to Mao Zedong’s communist Eighth Route Army. In 1949, the People’s Republic of China was born.

This book is indeed a new history of World War II and is told in a persuasive narrative that builds in authority as the war progresses. Stalin as war lord was every bit as cruel and indifferent to suffering as ever. He proved that with his treatment of Soviet POWs, including in his own family. But there is no question that along with Winston Churchill and Roosevelt, and with Australia’s John Curtin, he was a leader whose strengths and capacities emerged as ultimately formidable during the Second World War.

This book offers an original approach and McMeekin succeeds in his goal. Tellingly, and justifiably, Stalin’s war is dedicated to the victims.

In his provocative new book, How to defend Australia, Hugh White suggests a strategy of ‘sea denial’ for Australia’s defence. To protect a large island from threats posed by geographically distant potential enemies, this makes a lot of sense. Specifically, White argues that Australia can adopt sea denial without seeking ‘sea control’. That, together with his contention that ‘the contest between a force trying to control the sea and an adversary trying to deny it is very unequal’, underpins much of his book. He believes this means that sea denial will be a comparatively cheap and achievable policy for a middle power in a region dominated by rising great powers.

But White has conflated two very different strategies of sea denial, suggesting the benefits of one can be achieved at the costs of the other. By examining the strategy White is actually proposing, it’s also possible to understand the truly radical nature of the methods he believes can be used to achieve it. He may be correct, but the proposal relies on modern technology fundamentally altering existing strategic principles—and it’s not certain that’s the case.

What is sea control?

The phrase ‘sea control’ is frequently used by those discussing maritime strategy but, like its cousin ‘command of the sea’, it’s meaning is very difficult to pin down. Essentially, sea control is ‘the ability to use the sea in reasonable safety’.

Sea control is rarely, if ever, absolute, and is heavily bounded by time and space. This matters less than is commonly supposed. What’s the benefit of controlling an empty bit of ocean? What you really need is enough control to achieve your ends. A classic example is Operation Pedestal, a famous Malta convoy in World War II. The British never achieved absolute sea control, or anything approaching it. They did, however, have sufficient control over the specific area of sea for the time that the convoy was passing through (just).

Sea denial is related to sea control, but it’s not a direct mirror. White is correct in pointing out that a power exercising sea control will generally be able to deny use of the sea as well. However, the shifting and relative nature of these concepts makes this less clear-cut than is generally imagined. Looking at the two different types of sea denial which White conflates will demonstrate this more clearly.

Limited sea denial

The first type of sea denial is what I’ll call ‘limited sea denial’. It’s the form most commonly associated with the term, and classic examples include French guerre de course (commerce raiding) in the 18th century, and German U-boat warfare, which White uses in his analysis.

The term sea denial in this context is a misnomer. This strategy does not intend to deny the enemy use of the sea at all. Instead, it seeks to increase the cost of their use of the sea to limit the benefits they can gain from it. It can do so through numerous channels, most notably by destroying trade, which impacts the domestic economy and war effort, or by interrupting supply to military forces overseas.

France and Germany adopted this strategy because they couldn’t challenge British sea control directly. They accepted that the results would be limited. Even at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic in March 1943, the Germans were sinking less than 3% of merchant ships convoyed. White is perhaps correct in concluding that this form of sea denial has become ‘relatively easy’, but that should provide little comfort for those relying on it for territorial defence.

This strategy was available to weaker maritime powers such as France and Germany because of the methods used to carry it out. As Admiral Stansfield Turner remarked, ‘Sea denial [or at least limited sea denial] is essentially guerrilla warfare at sea. The denying commander strikes at a time and place of his choosing to achieve maximum surprise; he does not have to stand his ground toe to toe with the enemy, but instead hits and runs.’

This strategy doesn’t rely on the denying force having any serious degree of sea control. Instead, they can use comparatively limited forces to achieve results by exploiting areas where their enemy’s sea control is weakest, and avoiding areas where it is strong. This is seen in the U-boat campaigns, with their relatively high levels of success against independently sailing merchantmen, and low success against heavily defended convoys.

Limited sea denial operations are unequal in nature. Defence of trade, in particular, is challenging because the power seeking to use the sea has to have sufficient control across a huge geographic area and for long periods of time. The problem for White’s argument is that this type of sea denial bears little resemblance to the type he’s actually talking about.

Defensive sea denial

White is generally describing a concept I’ll refer to as ‘defensive sea denial’, which entails trying to use the sea as a barrier to enemy aggression. In contrast to limited sea denial, defensive sea denial requires a very high level of sea control. For the strategy to work, the denying force needs to be stronger than its enemy everywhere (within the region of operations) all of the time. It’s no good being able to defend half of your coastline, or to do so whenever your forces are deployable.

In marked contrast to limited sea denial, to achieve defensive sea denial you must be able to destroy your enemy’s strongest forces. White is correct in suggesting that sea denial in this context is tactically and operationally offensive, and therefore potentially benefits from any implicit advantages of that posture.

However, the nature of defensive sea denial negates most of these advantages. There’s very limited scope for the denying commander to pick the target, time or place—or to decline combat. By contrast, the commander of an invasion flotilla would know exactly the geographic space they needed to command, and the time they needed to command it for, allowing them to marshal their forces accordingly. For these reasons, defensive sea denial displays little of the relative advantage over sea control that White’s thesis relies upon.

Defensive sea denial is a very common strategy and an implicit part of the strategies of maritime states such as Britain or Japan. We don’t generally recognise this, because it is subsumed into their wider strategy for more general sea control and is carried out by those forces. Large continental powers, such as the Soviet Union and China, have used it to defend their coastlines and to support their powerful land forces.

The defensive sea denial required by maritime states generally needs to be both more absolute and more immediate than that of continental powers. If, as was historically the case with Britain, sea denial is the primary line of the state’s defence, then the strategy needs to be successful, and to work fast, to prevent enemy forces from landing in any serious number.

By contrast, continental powers can rely more on their land forces to continue to contest any attack, meaning sea denial can be less absolute and can continue for as long as the invading force requires support from the sea. The position of Australia, as outlined by White, is far more analogous to that of the maritime states. If sea denial is to be Australia’s premier self-defence strategy, it will need to work, and do so quickly.

The problem is that defensive sea denial has historically been considered difficult. The issues were explored at length in the British debates about invasion in the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. These reinforce how difficult achieving a high level of sea denial can be, even for a power exercising general sea control.

The British constantly struggled with how they’d combat a sudden invasion attempt that would allow France, or later Germany, to concentrate its naval forces sufficiently to gain enough temporary sea control over sections of the English Channel or North Sea. This took its most concrete form on the outbreak of World War I, when even the vast power of the Grand Fleet didn’t provide sufficient security for Britain to deploy immediately all six of its regular army divisions to France.

Concerns about a German invasion continued throughout the war, and the inability of the Royal Navy to prevent raids on coastal communities caused huge frustration within the service and beyond. The inability of a force as powerful as the Royal Navy to exert defensive sea denial during World War I underscores how difficult it is to guarantee being strong enough everywhere, all of the time.

Sea denial without sea control?

White argues that a sea denial strategy can be achieved without the need for sea control, and at a fraction of the cost. There are two broad ways in which this can be done. The first is through the use of asymmetric forces, usually some form of flotilla. Arguments of this type have been around for centuries and include elements of the French Jeune École, the Soviet New School of the 1930s, and Chinese strategies of the early communist era.

Certain points are common to most of these strategies. First, they’ve been adopted by states that are primarily land powers seeking to protect their coastlines. That meant that they didn’t need to offer the same level of ‘absoluteness’ required by a maritime power.

Second, they’ve sought to use numbers to counteract the relative weakness of individual units. Individual units of the flotilla couldn’t have competed against major enemy combatants, but together they offered the potential to overwhelm them.

Third, they’ve challenged across multiple domains (this will become more relevant later).

Finally, and perhaps crucially, they’ve been acknowledged as being limited in their effectiveness. They were adopted by land powers facing maritime rivals, and even China and the Soviet Union rapidly moved away from them towards more conventional maritime strategies.

It’s also worth pointing out that for these strategies to be effective as defensive sea denial, they still require a considerable level of sea control. An effective flotilla may not have been able to exercise sea control on the open ocean, but it would have done so in littoral waters.

Control of one domain or three (or five)?

The other way in which sea denial can be carried out without sea control is far more radical and is the one White seems to be proposing. This approach exploits a crucial variation between all types of sea denial and sea control, namely that sea denial can theoretically be achieved through superiority in one domain only.

To use the sea, it’s necessary to have sufficient command of three, or perhaps now five, domains for the specific time and space. By contrast, if the denying power were able to establish a high level of command of one domain, say the subsurface domain, it could, theoretically, successfully deny the attacking power the use of the sea. This scenario could result in mutual sea denial.

Probably the closest historic example we have of this took place for periods in the Mediterranean in World War II. German and Italian airpower was matched by British strength in the other two domains, making it difficult for either side to effectively use the sea.

But dominating a single domain is difficult. Forces operating in the different domains are invariably self-supporting, and it’s extremely challenging to have a very high level of command of any one domain without being able to contest the others.

Germany’s experience in World War II demonstrates this clearly. Some of its most successful operations involved a combination of surface, subsurface and air forces. The most obvious example was the destruction of convoy PQ17 when the threat of a German surface raider forced the convoy to scatter, limiting Britain’s ability to provide sufficient command of the other domains. The results were devastating.

More generally, Germany’s inability to even contest the surface and air domains in the Atlantic made anti-submarine warfare far easier for the Allies. The reality of the requirement to at least contest other domains to establish dominance in one also underpinned the Soviet bastion strategy, which is arguably now being replicated by the Chinese.

White’s conflation of two very different types of sea denial raises questions over his analysis of the relative ease, and cost, of such a strategy. That suggests there’s scope for further debate over its relative primacy in the wider national strategy.

The same could be said for White’s conclusions about the methods to be used to achieve sea denial. The novelty of the concept of providing sea denial by dominating only one domain is worth highlighting and raises questions about its initial feasibility and the advisability of relying upon it.

Ultimately the answer to this, in large part, rests on the assessment of the capabilities of modern technology. However, given the scale of the uncertainty over such capabilities, and the importance of the task, it’s not clear that it’s appropriate to rely so heavily upon such an approach.

 

The dramatic Allied failure in the Norway campaign of April 1940 destroyed Neville Chamberlain as British PM and, ironically, elevated the fiasco’s architect, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Spencer Churchill, to wartime leadership.

These two excellent books, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six minutes in May: how Churchill unexpectedly became prime minister (Harvill Secker, 2017) and John Kiszely’s Anatomy of a campaign: the British fiasco in Norway, 1940 (Cambridge, 2017), deal exhaustively with the Norwegian campaign and its consequences. Shakespeare masters the politics of the Chamberlain government and the House of Commons while Kiszely draws comprehensive lessons about strategic and military blunders that led to a serious Allied reversal, almost immediately eclipsed by a greater defeat in France and the Low Countries the following month.

As bookends to an almost forgotten campaign, these two accounts are complementary in their analysis of the Norwegian battle and its aftermath, with surprising conclusions drawn. The contrast between the sputtering uncertainty of the British effort and the ruthless application of military might by the Germans under the Fuhrer’s personal watch couldn’t be clearer.

This contrast is best illustrated by Admiral Erich Raeder’s brilliant plan—code-named Weserberung—and the Wehrmacht’s commitment and speed in the campaign, with both the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine playing critical supporting roles.

Strategically, the Nazis understood the value of intervening in Norway, from guaranteeing Swedish iron ore for their war economy to the provision of air and naval bases.

The British also understood the strategic value involved, but their planning and their execution fell well short. Their command structure can be politely described as cumbersome and disjointed, with each of the services pursuing their own goals. The resulting confusion, with decisions from the battlefield sometimes being referred to Whitehall, compounded original errors made in deploying the expeditionary force—made up of undertrained Territorials and supported by RAF squadrons of often obsolescent aircraft.

While both sides planned Norwegian operations, the British interception in neutral Norway’s waters of the German freighter Altmark carrying Allied POWs was the trigger for the German invasion. It drove Adolf Hitler into a fury, causing German strategy to crystallise.

Kiszely writes:

The Altmark incident on 16 February had a major impact on the place of Weserübung in German strategy. It convinced Hitler that Norway could not enforce its neutrality and that the British would no longer respect that neutrality. It also ‘provided a further spur’ to the operation by confirming intelligence reports that the Allies were, themselves, planning an operation in Norway.

On 9 April 1940, the Germans invaded by sea and air, with the Luftwaffe furnishing an incredible 500 transport aircraft for the Wehrmacht’s deployment. Denmark was occupied also, to ensure close support for the air campaign.

The British response is given this scathing assessment by Shakespeare:

For the British, the military expedition sent to Norway in response to the German invasion was a spectacular cock-up, with no one quite sure who was in charge in London, and on-the-spot generals and admirals fighting each other in the blizzards of Narvik. Seven months in the preparation, the eight week campaign became a by-word for bungling; a tragedy of bad organisation, missed opportunity and divided command, with interferences by the Admiralty, and with Churchill going behind the backs of the Chiefs of Staff and the War Office, even his own admirals, and in spite of his loyalty to Chamberlain, still playing his own game.

To their credit, the French Army committed the specialist Chasseurs Alpins, but the Luftwaffe’s dominance, reinforced by a lack of Allied anti-aircraft guns, saw the French suffer a similar fate to their British colleagues.

Defeat and withdrawal were the ultimate consequences of an Allied campaign so poorly crafted that the British troops were not even issued winter camouflage gear!

In the House of Commons, where wartime Britain maintained its rigorous parliamentary scrutiny of the war, the Norway debate followed. Officers were released from active service to participate, so the Commons was marked by the presence of uniforms. Among these MPs were the young John Profumo and Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, whose devastating critique of the Chamberlain government’s mismanagement of the Norway campaign was a powerful indictment: ‘It is a shocking story of ineptitude, which I assure the House ought never to have been allowed to happen.’

Telling words, as were those of Lloyd George. But the real damage was done by Tory MP Leo Amery, who concluded his blistering address by echoing Oliver Cromwell’s declaration to the Long Parliament:

You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

In the name of God, go.

Chamberlain fell; Churchill became PM, with Clem Attlee as his deputy in a government of national unity. The resilient wartime framework emerged from the Norwegian collapse.

Shakespeare, whose uncle Geoffrey was a leading Conservative of the time, recreates the atmosphere of the musty Commons and Whitehall labyrinth; the manoeuvring; the ambitions and the treachery. These chapters are witness to a keen eye and astute judgement on the part of the author.

John Kiszely, whose four-decade career in the British Army saw him rise to the rank of lieutenant general, has written an engrossing account of cascading military failure. His research is meticulous; his conclusions carefully drawn and convincingly argued. It is superb battlefield history.

As for the German lessons of Norway? The Fuhrer’s putative military ‘genius’ was confirmed, and was reaffirmed as the Blitzkrieg swept to the Channel coast in the following weeks. This much touted ‘genius’, of course, would lead ultimately to another wintry landscape, at Stalingrad.