So it’s definitely become apparent to me that this will become a Long-Haul project – not only because I’ve never written anything longer than a vignette before, but also because my writing time is so sparse as to be ridiculous at the moment. However, thanks to the generous advice of
@David Flin, I’ve begun by outlining the chapters of Operation Doomsday, and also starting to put together a research booklist that I’ll be purchasing or grabbing from libraries (If anyone has any books on Norway during the Second World War, or anything else relevant to this, I can look at swapping with some of my own collection fyi)
(and thank-you to everyone for their suggestions, especially
@Meadow as I had been looking for well-known Norwegian resistance leaders to feature in the story)
Lt. Col. Terence Otway’s formal history of British airborne forces during the conflict has been invaluable in getting down the history of the OTL Operation Doomsday; it’s a very dry account, re-published in 1990 by the Imperial War Museum as a facsimile (back when it was a proper museum, but I digress) but it has all the technical details I need for the opening of the book.
At the moment my main difficulty, history-wise, is ensuring that Norway becomes a last-ditch redoubt rather than the OTL case of ‘Little resistance, the SS commanders shot themselves/blew themselves up, the Wehrmacht were happy to go into POW camps’. That’s why I’m adding a chapter at the start as a Prologue sequence set in the Fuhrerbunker on the 30th April 1945.
However, where one difficulty appears, another one disappears, as OTL made it incredibly easy for 1st Airborne Division to be sent onto the back foot by any form of resistance.
To say that Doomsday was a hasty, near-ramshackle affair would be a polite way of putting it. German representatives were transported from Norway to England on the day of the surrender taken by Monty at Luneberg Heath – apparently as hostages/guarantors of some kind. Meanwhile, the division would go over to Norway in four separate waves. The first would be ‘Heralds’, small parties of pathfinders that would secure the Oslo and Stavanger airfields for the first two waves, set up radio beacons and work perimeter security. Then the first wave would go in – an infantry brigade to Oslo, and an Artillery brigade to Stavanger. The second wave would be additional divisional troops the next day, and the third wave would be an SAS Brigade the day after.
So the division is already being sent over piecemeal and split into two locations when landing. The night of the operation becomes near-farcical in what happens. The Heralds go over as planned, but absolutely nothing is heard from then for more than twelve hours. No radio contact, no messages at all. As the first wave has been loaded up anyway onto Dakotas, there’s apparently a general shrugging of shoulders and they’re sent in – blind, without even any radio beacons for guidance. Barely half of the transports make it to Oslo and Stavanger early that morning – several unfortunately crash into a mountain, many others get lost in thick fog and clouds and land in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and – in an incredibly impressive feat of navigation that surely even
@Mumby would quail at – in Switzerland.
Those that do manage to land unload as quickly as possible end up occupying their assigned airports – but whereas the plan was to march two companies in and around Oslo to show the Norwegians that they’d arrive, and impress on the Germans that the Red Devils had arrived, they in fact only managed to gather together two squads, and therefore had to resort to the age-old trick of marching them through repeatedly with changes of headgear and weapons.
So honestly, the odd Wehrmacht company deciding to get frisky would have been a challenge, let alone what I’m planning to unleash in the novel.
