Kindle Notes & Highlights
Where German preparations for ‘Weserübung’ were conducted in conditions of pain-of-death secrecy, with single-minded focus, British plans were characterised by stalls, hiccups and shilly-shallying; or as Churchill put it, ‘vain boggling, hesitation, changes of policy, arguments between good and worthy people
By way of illustrating the point that ‘bright ideas in the middle of the night are not always very bright in the morning’, Churchill once told Major General Kennedy, Chief of Staff of the original operation to capture Narvik, of a dream in which a philosopher saw the secret of the universe revealed.63 He wrote it down on a piece of paper, and when he woke in the morning found that he had written: ‘A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole.’ Churchill’s idea for seizing Trondheim carried the same whiff.
