The German Invasion of Norway – April 1940 By Geirr H. Haarr (416 pages, photos, maps) Reviewer:  Terry Miller Overall Rating: Four Stars: Highly recommended. An excellent book. We in the United States tend to think of World War II as beginning on December 7, 1941 but by then it had been raging in Europe for more than two years. One of the facets of the war we hear little about is the German invasion of Norway in April of 1940. Geirr H. Haarr offers an excellent way to educate us Americans in this book. He fully develops the history of Norwegian neutrality for the reader, giving both the physical and political reasons behind the policy and he shows how both the British and the Germans needed to have Norway on their respective sides all because of the German need for Swedish iron ore which was best accessed across Norway to the North Sea. The German war machine had to have more and more iron for steel and the British had an equal need to deny their enemy that access. As Haarr clearly demonstrates, a violation of that neutrality was inevitable yet the Norwegian government, like most western countries, was still struggling with the effects of the worldwide depression and were spending nearly nothing on national defense. We are shown the reasoning that Hitler and the Wehrmacht decided to invade on the pretext of helping Norway resist a British invasion. Norwegian leaders never accepted the premise and resisted as best they could but with undermanned defenses and ancient ships and weapons often the best they could do was to threaten the invaders and then withdraw. Haarr shows us in location by location how the Germans entered Norwegian port cities and how the poorly equipped and ill-trained defenses offered only feeble resistance, hoping that the British might come to their aid much as the Germans had been claiming to do. He discusses the infamous traitor Quisling who appointed himself the head of the Norwegian government only to be ignored by his German masters and how the notoriously bad weather worked in Germany’s favor to hamper the British fleet. The German Invasion of Norway is an excellent book, heavily researched and well written with many photos of the players involved. I can fault the book only in one area and that is a lack of maps. The descriptions lend themselves to map reference but you’ll have to provide your own because the included maps often fail to show the town names cited in the text. But if that is its only failing, the book is otherwise an excellent reference and fills in the gaps in our knowledge of this aspect of the war. Haarr’s ability with the text makes it an easy read. I consider it a valuable asset in any military historian’s library and a necessity on the shelves of a WWII historian.