The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

Not even on the seventh, when several large German war vessels were sighted proceeding up the Norwegian coast and reports arrived of British planes strafing a German battle fleet off the mouth of the Skagerrak, not even on April 8, when the British Admiralty informed the Legation of Norway in London that a strong German naval force had been discovered approaching Narvik and the newspapers in Oslo were reporting that German soldiers rescued from the transport Rio de Janeiro, torpedoed that day off the Norwegian coast at Lillesand by a Polish submarine, had declared they were en route to Bergen to help defend it against the British—not even then did the Norwegian government consider it necessary to take such obvious steps as mobilizing the Army, fully manning the forts guarding the harbors, blocking the airfield runways, or, most important of all, mining the easily mined narrow water approaches to the capital and the main cities.