<p><span>After Hitler conquered Poland in 1939 and while still fine-tuning his forthcoming plans against France, the British began to exert control of the coastline of neutral Norway, an action that threatened to cut off Germany’s iron-ore conduit to Sweden and outflank from the start its hegemony on the Continent.&nbsp;</span></p><p><span>The Germans responded with a dizzying series of assaults, using every tool of modern warfare developed in the previous generation.&nbsp;</span></p><p><span>Airlifted infantry, specialist mountain troops and paratroopers were all dispatched to the north, seizing Norwegian strongpoints while forestalling larger but more cumbersome Allied responses.</span></p><p><span>The German navy also set sail, taking a brutal beating at the hands of its oldest of Foes, while ensuring with its sacrifice that key harbors could be held open for resupply.&nbsp;</span></p><p><span>As Luftwaffe dive-bombers soared overhead, small but elite German units traversed forbidding terrain to ambush Allied units trying to forge inland.&nbsp;</span></p><p><span>At Narvik, some 6,000 German troops battled 20,000 French and British, until the Allies were finally forced to withdraw by the great disaster now developing in France, which had by then gotten underway.</span><br><br><span>Henrik Lunde, a native Norwegian and former U.S. Special Operations colonel, has written the most objective account to date of a campaign in which 20th-century military innovation found its first fertile playing field.</span><br></p><p><span>16 B/W Photo Pages &amp; Maps.</span></p><p><span>Henrik Lunde, US Army (ret.) was born in Norway and came to the United States as a child following World War II.&nbsp;</span></p><p><span>After graduating from the University of California he accepted a US Army commission, and in addition to earning a degree in international relations from the University of Syracuse, he is a graduate of the Army’s Airborne, Ranger, and Pathfinder courses as well as the Command and General Staff College and the US Army War College. Much of Colonel Lunde’s troop assignments were in airborne divisions or in Special Forces.&nbsp;</span></p><p><span>Highly decorated on the battlefield, he served three combat tours in Vietnam, and afterward in the Plans and Policy Branch of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. His last Army assignment was Director of National and International Security Studies at the US Army War College.</span></p></br></br></br>