Channel Island Occupation Review No. 48 (2020)

Description

With the passing of the years, the importance of recording the memories of those who lived through the dark years of the WWII Occupation becomes ever more pressing and, in this CIOS Review, there are 16 pieces from various contributors some of which are briefly described below:

‘Liberation 1945: as it happened’ by Eric Blakeley, Simon Hamon, Damien Horn and Mark Lamerton. This is the story behind a unique historical project, an assessment of how successful it was and some ‘tweaks’ that could be done to improve it should it ever be re-run. This review looks at how Liberation Day didn’t become an annual holiday until the 1980s and includes many photos and clips of how the meaning of that Liberation is expressed today.

‘Christmas Cracker’ by Simon Hamon. On Monday 30 December 1940 an Arado AR196 made an emergency landing in Alderney’s Braye Beach due to bad weather.  This plane was a German low-wing monoplane normally deployed as a shipboard reconnaissance aircraft or floatplane.  

‘The German Pathfinders’ by John Goodwin.  19^th November 1940 a Pathfinder raid on Birmingham lost one of their planes enroute – A Guernsey wartime diarist, Leslie Gardner,  wrote “At 19:40 a German plane was flying east over the island [Guernsey] when its engines suddenly appeared to rev up and then it went into a terrific dive with engines roaring and two flashes came from it. Then it crashed into the sea in flames.” …