The incredible true story of what really happened in the Channel Islands during the Second World War. The Channel lslands were occupied on 30 June 1940 when four German planes landed at Guernsey Airport. They were the only part of Britain to be occupied during the Second World War. The islands had been officially demilitarised on 19 June, but the War Office in London overlooked the necessity to inform the Germans. This led to a German air attack on 28 June, which resulted in thirty-eight civilian deaths. Hitler was extremely proud of the conquest of the Channel lslands, and saw it as a stepping-stone to the full invasion of the rest of Britain. The occupying forces were instructed to behave correctly. This would show the rest of Britain that there was nothing to be feared from life under the Third Reich. This book looks at the German Occupation, the unsavoury events that occurred on the Islands, and why at the end of the war a cover-up of these events was instigated by the British Government.
Every large nation in the world was directly or indirectly affected by the impact of war during the course of the twentieth century, and while the historical narratives of war of these nations are well known, far less is understood about how small islands coped. These islands – often not nations in their own right but small outposts of other kingdoms, countries, and nations – have been relegated to mere footnotes in history and heritage studies as interesting case studies or unimportant curiosities. Yet for many of these small islands, war had an enduring impact on their history, memory, intangible heritage and future cultural practices, leaving a legacy that demanded some form of local response. This is the first comprehensive volume dedicated to what the memories, legacies and heritage of war in small islands can teach those who live outside them, through closely related historical and contemporary case studies covering 20th and 21st century conflict across the globe. The volume investigates a number of important questions: Why and how is war memory so enduring in small islands? Do factors such as population size, island size, isolation or geography have any impact? Do close ties of kinship and group identity enable collective memories to shape identity and its resulting war-related heritage? This book contributes to heritage and memory studies and to conflict and historical archaeology by providing a globally wide-ranging comparative assessment of small islands and their experiences of war. Heritage of War in Small Island Territories is of relevance to students, researchers, heritage and tourism professionals, local governments, and NGOs.
Discusses the Allied invasion of Normandy, with extensive details about the planning stage, called Operation Overlord, as well as the fighting on Utah and Omaha Beaches.
Designed to fill an overlooked gap, this book, originally published in 1972, provides a single unified introduction to bibliographical sources of British military history. Moreover it includes guidance in a number of fields in which no similar source is available at all, giving information on how to obtain acess to special collections and private archives, and links military history, especially during peacetime, with the development of science and technology.
What is often held to be Britain's 'finest hour' – the Second World War – was not experienced so uniformly across the British Isles. On the margins, the war was endured in profoundly different ways. While D-Day or Dunkirk is embedded in British collective memory, how many Britons can recall that Finns were interned on the Isle of Man, that enemy soldiers developed British infrastructure in Orkney, or that British subjects were sent to concentration camps from Guernsey? Such experiences, tangential to the dominant British war narrative, are commemorated elsewhere in the 'other British Isles'. In this remarkable contribution to British Island Studies, Daniel Travers pursues these histories and their commemoration across numerous local sites of memory: museums, heritage sites and public spaces. He examines the way these island identities assert their own distinctiveness over the British wartime story, and ultimately the way they fit into the ongoing discourse about how the memory of the Second World War has been constructed since 1945.
This book offers a chronology, subheadings, and terms to provide the reader a pedagogical framework for understanding the central themes and events in the American military experience and their relation to American history. It serves as a foundation for undergraduate courses in military history.