"I admit quite frankly that I, in all probability along with all of us, thought that the descent would be made upon the southern and not western ports of Norway.
"If you are going to criticize the Government, you must at least consider the circumstances in which it was asked to help.
"We asked why our intelligence was not ablaze to tell us exactly what were the plans of the Germans, or exactly what was the position in Norway.
"It is not as easy to get details about German plans, as perhaps it is to get information here. The Norwegian Government itself was ignorant of German plans, and Norway was faced on the morning of April 9 with the situation, that before she had even asked for our help, every port, every aerodrome and every arsenal in that country, had already surrendered, "We were not blind to the difficulty of landing at places, and we were not blind to difficulty in the air, when no aerodromes were available to us.
"Politically, it is said that because of our landing in Norway, we have lost prestige throughout the world, but we would have lost it as much, or even more, i? we had never even tried," he concluded.—Reuter,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.