The Scandinavian Flank as History: 1939-1940

E.T. Sharp specialized in military history and disarmament and lived in Toronto.

This book represents an attempt to relate the experiences of the Scandinavian countries in World War II to the wider events of the war and to current strategy. The book is divided into three distinct sections. The first and last section of this book are the work of Nils Ørvik, a political scientist and strategic studies specialist at Queen’s University. He is interested in the strategic choices available to the Norwegian leadership during the war and in the lessons that the modern Norwegian government can learn from their history. He at-tempts to put Norway’s war effort in its strategic and historical context. He shows how lack of realism and the total absence of Norwegian military capacity made her attempts to remain neutral entirely dependent on the goodwill of her three combatant neighbours, a goodwill conspicuously lacking in all three cases. This section of the book is not concerned with detailed description or analysis but with broader concepts and conclusions. The middle third of the book, written by James Bayer, who is currently on staff at the University of Victoria, consists of an enormously detailed description of British plans to draw Scandinavia into the war, both in order to send military aid to the Finns and to cut off the flow of essential war material, particularly iron ore, through Norwegian territorial waters. Bayer’s section deals extensively with British war cabinet documents from the British Public Record Office to the extent that the narrative is almost as disjointed as 1939 British strategic planning was. The differences between these sections, one third of the book detailed and heavily documented, the rest based on secondary material and to a certain degree theoretical, is the book’s greatest flaw. The two sections by Ørvik are not in any way enriched by Bayer’s work, which should have been published separately.