The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation PDF Download

Author: Hazel Knowles Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230627595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This independent study has already attracted controversy. Containing much fresh evidence, it vividly portrays the Islanders' day-to-day Occupation experiences, whilst exploring - and often refuting - what are today becoming received ideas of a mostly 'shameful' wartime past.

Author: Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628950080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Captured by German forces shortly after Dunkirk, and not relinquished until May of 1945, nearly a year after the Normandy invasion, the British Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, and Herm) were characterized during their occupation by severe deprivation and powerlessness. The Islanders, with few resources to stage an armed resistance, constructed a rhetorical resistance based upon the manipulation of discourse, construction of new symbols, and defiance of German restrictions on information. Though much of modern history has focused on the possibility that Islanders may have collaborated with the Germans, this eye-opening history turns to secret war diaries kept in Guernsey. A close reading of these private accounts, written at great risk to the diarists, allows those who actually experienced the Occupation to reclaim their voice and reveals new understandings of Island resistance. What emerges is a stirring account of the unquenchable spirit and deft improvisation of otherwise ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Under the most dangerous of conditions, Guernsey civilians used imaginative methods in reacting to their position as a subjugated population, devising a covert resistance of nuance and sustainability. Violence, this book and the people of Guernsey demonstrate, is not at all the only means with which to confront evil.

Author: Roy McLoughlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780952565901
Category : Channel Islands
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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"This book shows that Islanders learned how to contend with Nazi regulations, how to survive and how to trust those Germans whose human side was often in contrast to the brutality of Hitler's regime." -- back cover.

Author: Gilly Carr
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472512960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
The Nazi occupation of Europe of World War Two is acknowledged as a defining juncture and an important identity-building experience throughout contemporary Europe. Resistance is what 'saves' European societies from an otherwise chequered record of collaboration on the part of their economic, political, cultural and religious elites. Opposition took pride of place as a legitimizing device in the post-war order and has since become an indelible part of the collective consciousness. Yet there is one exception to this trend among previously occupied territories: the British Channel Islands. Collective identity construction in the islands still relies on the notion of 'orderly and correct relations' with the Germans, while talk of 'resistance' earns raised eyebrows. The general attitude to the many witnesses of conscience who existed in the islands remains ambiguous. This book conversely and expertly argues that there was in fact resistance against the Germans in the Channel Islands and is the first text to fully explore the complex relationship that existed between the Germans and the people of the only part of the British Isles to experience occupation.

Author: Alice Evans
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750981695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
The diaries kept by Violet Carey during the occupation of Guernsey show precisely how the German invasion affected the lifestyle of an upper middle class woman. Whilst never indulging in self-pity, she captures the misery caused by imprisonment and the lethargy and depression that many, including herself, suffered, a feeling intensified by fear of the unknown and the sense of isolation from England and from relatives and the rest of the war. In her remarkably down to earth style, the diarist provides an honest account of events and does not attempt to disguise incidents of scandal or misconduct on the part of her countrymen, or of humanity on the part of the Germans. More lighthearted entries illustrate the delight that she and many of her friends took in defying the invader simply by sticking to firmly held principles. The diaries depict both the hardships imposed upon the native population by the occupying forces and the ways in which Guernsey people reacted towards the enemy. What comes through most vividly is a valiant acceptance on the part of the islanders of their circumstances, together with optimism that all would turn out well. Hope is never entirely lost, even after life becomes simply a matter of survival. The diaries also indicate the pressures experienced by the island's leaders as the writer is related to Bailiff Victor Carey and husband is Jurat of the Royal Court. Following the island's liberation it was claimed that tales of their heroic endurance and indefatigable humour were covering up a deeper scandal. An introductory section examines the language and content of the diaries and shows how, as the occupation lengthened and shortages became more acute, the veneer of civilisation could be stripped away and the privileges afforded by wealth, education and class rendered irrelevant.

Author: Daniel Travers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350006963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jodie Matthews
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443835439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Islands and archipelagos hold great imaginative power, and they have long been a subject of study for cartographers and geographers, for anthropologists and historians of colonisation. But what does it mean to be an islander? Can one feel both British and Manx, for example? What are British tourists looking for when they go to former island colonies? How do past relationships with Britain affect islands today? This collection takes a variety of perspectives to provide answers to such questions, examining war, empire, tourism, immigration, language, literature, and everyday life on and in islands, and the question of travel to and from them. Britishness is highlighted as a global island phenomenon, providing an insight into the history, culture and politics of identities from Jersey to Jamaica. Islands and Britishness not only brings together various contemporary strands in Island Studies, but uniquely focuses on the relationship – historical, cultural and economic – between particular islands and Britain, and, crucially, how this relationship frames national identity both on the island and in Britain itself. The collection examines interactions between Britishness and indigenous or earlier invasive/settler cultures, as well as the internal differences within the concept of ‘Britishness’ (Britain/Scotland/Shetland, for instance). It considers the relationship played out on the island between Britishness and the other nationalities with which the islands share an affinity, and questions received wisdoms about national identity on the islands by considering intersecting discourses such as class and gender. The collection offers a global perspective on the divisions within a notion of Britishness and the identities against which Britishness has been constructed.

Author: Richard H. Weisberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199334994
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Flexibility is usually seen as a virtue in today's world. Even the dictionary seems to dislike those who stick too hard to their own positions. The thesaurus links "intransigence" to a whole host of words signifying a distaste for loyalty to fixed positions: intractable, stubborn, Pharisaic, close-minded, and stiff-necked, to name a few. In this short and provocative book, constitutional law professor Richard H. Weisberg asks us to reexamine our collective cultural bias toward flexibility, open-mindedness, and compromise. He argues that flexibility has not fared well over the course of history. Indeed, emergencies both real and imagined have led people to betray their soundest traditions. Weisberg explores the rise of flexibility, which he traces not only to the Enlightenment but further back to early Christian reinterpretation of Jewish sacred texts. He illustrates his argument with historical examples from Vichy France and the occupation of the British Channel Islands during World War II as well as post-9/11 betrayals of sound American traditions against torture, eavesdropping, unlimited detention, and drone killings. Despite the damage wrought by Western society's incautious embrace of flexibility over the past two millennia, Weisberg does not make the case for unthinking rigidity. Rather, he argues that a willingness to embrace intransigence allows us to recognize that we have beliefs worth holding on to -- without compromise.

Author: Barry Turner
Publisher: Aurum
ISBN: 1845137248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The Channel Islands were what could have happened to all of us: a test-run of German occupation. That was certainly Hitler’s plan. Once Britain had demilitarised the idyllic, unspoilt holiday islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark in 1940 their fate was sealed: in July the Germans invaded. The following five years in their history offer an intriguing, and often uncomfortable, virtual history of how Britain might have looked under Nazi rule – and how British people, more to the point, might have responded to it, whether through submission, courageous resistance or even collaboration. Barry Turner’s is the first history of the Occupation since Madeleine Bunting’s acclaimed but controversial A Model Occupation in 1995. It is an extremely readable and above all fair-minded account, rich in personal testimonies, showing the extreme privations suffered by the Channel Islanders, so utterly cut adrift by Britain – even if for defensible reasons of wartime expediency –, and above all the huge moral and civic task required of their pre-war governing class, several of whom could hardly have been expected to rise to the occasion. It also draws on newly released documents in the Public Record Office to reveal the messy confusion of Britain’s postwar attitude to the Channel Islands, a source of enduring resentment there.

Author: Catherine Gallagher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651241X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism. Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if...?”