Monday, October 14, 2013

Britain At War 04/2011

The Victorian historian Sir Charles Oman once wrote that "war is indivisible". It is never possible in wartime to completely separate one set of events from another, they are all inextricably linked. This is made clear in the acquisition by Jersey's Channel Islands Military Museum of a "Death Card" of a German soldier who was killed in 1944. As we reveal on page 85, in investigating the background to this memorial card it transpires that he was a member of a gun battery7 on Jersey which engaged the Royal Navy's fleet destroyer ILMS Onslaught. This ship in turn had attacked a German convoy which had tried to slip across the sea from Guernsey - a small flotilla which was transporting, amongst the varied cargo and passengers, a group of personnel from the Organisation Todt, which drew much of its workforce from across German-occupied Europe as far as Russia. Just to add to the intertwining of events, five days earlier the German convoy had been attacked by ships of the United States Navy and the guns on Jersey had opened fire.

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