some delay, to the Foreign Office. The whole of Horse Guards was completely empty of people and I, when I got there, there was no furniture so I had to sit on the floor, and an air-raid warden said there would be no gas attack. But of course there wasn't really any war for some time, quite apart from there being no petrol.
JOHN COLVILLE
In the late winter of 1939 and the early part of 1940 the situation was a curious one. The great powers had declared war and absolutely nothing was happening, everybody was sitting biting their fingernails and expecting the bombs to fall. In this period storms brewed in teacups, storms which would certainly never have occurred at all if there'd been fighting taking place. And one of them was very much connected with the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, a remarkable man, extremely intelligent, ambitious, but unfortunately he had several defects. He was very publicity conscious and in those days that was looked upon with some suspicion by a great many people. His genuine desire was to make the Army a popular force; he wanted to get recruits and he thought by improving conditions of the ordinary soldiers, building new barracks, improving the food and by being photographed a lot with the troops he could help to improve the image of the Army. Secondly he had such a quick mind that he found it hard to tolerate those whose minds were moved slowly; he had a way of being brisk and sometimes bad-mannered with senior officers and civil servants. It was well known he was relying almost entirely for all his decisions on the advice of military theorist Captain Basil Liddell Hart. Captain Liddell Hart was a very remarkable and praiseworthy character – but he was the military correspondent of The Times newspaper and the generals found it hard to tolerate that a newspaper correspondent was running the War Office.
DR SAMUELSON
The USeconomy was converting to wartime before Pearl Harbor. Just as in World War One, when the belligerents in Europe sent us orders and that activated our economy, that was already happening from 1939. In the United States this happened through ordinary commercial channels but we were also sympathetic to the Allied side and were already beginning to give aid.
JOHN COLVILLE
Thecampaigns in Norway, British mining of Norwegian waters followed immediately by German invasion in April and Allied counter-attacks in May 1940, were acceptable to Chamberlain because it kept the war distant. It meant it would be localised and perhaps a miracle would happen, perhaps Hitler would the or be assassinated and the whole thing would end with the minimum of bloodshed.
RAB BUTLER
The idea was to save the iron deposits from the Germans and make an expedition to Norway which would also distract Germany from the overrunning of France. But the danger of it was first Norwegian neutrality and secondly we weren't fully prepared for it, and it was in fact a complete failure. It was a providential thing that Churchill, although having had a great part in it, was not blamed for it in the House of Commons. Chamberlain got the blame – and he was Prime Minister and he had approved the policy – but it meant that Churchill was then free in 1940, in May, to take over and become the great war leader that he was.
MAJOR MARTIN LINDSAY
Norway Expeditionary Force
I'm not suggesting it altered the course of history but I went straight up to see Labour leader Clement Attlee on the morning of the first day of thedebate and I gave him a memorandum about the appalling improvisation and deficiencies in Norway because I was quite convinced that we should lose the war if we went on like that. He gave it to deputy Labour leader Herbert Morrison to help him open for the Opposition that afternoon.
ROBERT BOOTHBY
The Norway debate 7th–8th May 1940 was the only decisive debate I ever attended during my thirty-four years as a member of the House of Commons, because it was the only division which brought
Augusten Burroughs
Alan Russell
John le Carré
Lee Nichols
Kate Forsyth
Gael Baudino
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Ruth Clemens
Charlaine Harris
Lana Axe