The Foreign Service Journal, December 2003

66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 3 or many in Europe, the eight quiet winter months following Britain’s and France’s declaration of war against Germany may have seemed like a “phony war.” But there was nothing phony about it in Northern Europe. At the end of November 1939, less than three months after the German invasion of Poland, Stalin invaded Finland. The ensuing 90-day Winter War was a debacle for the invading Soviet columns, as their armor bogged down in the snow and ice of Finland’s deep sub-Arctic forests and the Red Army’s ill-prepared troops died or were killed by the hundreds of thousands. Khrushchev numbered Soviet casu- alties at a million. Eventually, the two sides agreed to a cease-fire, in March 1940. But that was just the beginning of World War II in the north as the fighting moved from Finland’s eastern borders to the other edge of Scandinavia. Two weeks before the Finnish-Soviet truce took force at noon on March 13, 1940, Hitler began preparations for the invasion of Norway. On April 5, a German armada carrying 10,000 men quietly moved out of Germany’s north- ern ports to conquer Finland’s neighbor. That same day, officials from the Norwegian Foreign Office received an engraved invitation from the German lega- tion to see a “peace film.” The invitation read, “full dress and orders to be worn.” Most of the ministry’s bureau chiefs attend- ed in white tie attire, curious to see what the Germans had to show. Instead of a peace film, however, they watched a terrifying documentary on the bombing of Warsaw. Shocked, the audience listened while the German minister (chief of mission) explained that the film was intended to illustrate what might happen to any country resisting Nazi attempts “to defend Germany from England.” Four days later, on April 9, 1940, German troops simul- taneously took Denmark and seized the Norwegian centers of Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. That night, both the French and British ministers called the U.S. chief of mission in Oslo, Florence Harriman, urgently requesting her to take responsibility for their facilities as they rushed to escape. The 69-year-old Florence Jaffray Harriman had been head of the American Mission to Norway since 1937. She was only the second woman in American diplomatic history to be appointed to ministerial rank, after Ruth Bryan Rohde. “Daisy,” as Florence Harriman was known to her friends, was the widow of New York banker J. Borden Harriman and had been active in Democratic Party politics since the pres- idency of Woodrow Wilson. Being a “woman diplomat,” as Newsweek titled its June 2, 1941, profile of her, was still very much a novelty, but it was hardly intimidating to Harriman. When Norwegian Queen Maud asked her, “How does it feel to be a minister, when you are a woman?” Florence Harriman responded, “Very nice, indeed, when I remember that I am a minister.” Characteristically, Harriman responded swiftly to the crisis. When her attempts to get through to Washington were blocked by local telephone operators who spoke with “more German than Norwegian accents,” as she put it, she agreed to the requests on her own authority. Overnight, embassy families began to congregate at her residence. Harriman “T HE F IRST A MERICAN O FFICIAL K ILLED IN T HIS W AR ” A RMY C APTAIN R OBERT M. L OSEY , A MERICA ’ S FIRST MILITARY CASUALTY IN W ORLD W AR II, WOULD NOT BE ITS LAST . B Y J. M ICHAEL C LEVERLEY F Captain Losey and Amb. Harriman the day before he was killed.