Word: narvik
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...days must have dragged for King Haakon. Nights were now only twilight and almost every day fresh blankets of spring snow fell to impede the progress of Allied and Norse troops seeking to wrest Narvik from the stubborn clutch of some 3,500 Austrian ski troops under General Eduard ("The Bull") Dietl, entrenched on towering Rombak Heights southeast of the town. Through the snow swirls, shielded more than blinded, came steady streams of Nazi planes to drop food, munitions, more men to the beleaguered invaders. They revived and reinforced a second Nazi contingent on the north side of Rombak Fjord...
Adolf Hitler deemed Narvik important enough, as the main outlet for Swedish iron ore, to spend one-third of his destroyers trying to secure it. From conquered southern Norway his ground troops now pushed northward towards the battered iron port. Nazi parachute troops appeared at Mo, more than halfway up the coast highway from Namsos to Bodo, beyond which 47 miles of road end in trackless mountains stretching another 87 crow-line miles to Narvik. They were hurried ahead to cut off a Norse contingent and some 300 remnant British who, retreating north from Namsos, delayed the Nazi column...
...British soldiers, but French Chasseurs Alpins ("Blue Devils"), gave Haakon continued hope for Narvik. Also on hand was a contingent of Poles. The French cruiser-minelayer Emile Berlin escorted them north and got bombed a bit doing...
...tough little Frenchmen were landed south as well as north of Narvik. Dragging their mountain artillery through profound snowdrifts, up incredible declivities, they slowly encircled Rombak Heights, moving patiently from crag to crag to blast German machine-gun nests on crags opposite...
Their plan was, with the Norse troops working on lower levels, to complete a ring around Narvik, then press westward until they drove the Nazis down from the heights to the fjord, where the warships could polish them...