Herm

Discussion in 'United Kingdom' started by Ramiles, Jan 25, 2022.

  1. Ramiles

    Ramiles Researching 9th Lancers, 24th L and SRY

    Herm

    https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herm

    Herm's War - Herm Island’s Occupation Years - guernseydonkey.com

    With...

    "1945 : Liberation
    On May 9 1945 the liberating forces arrived in the Little Russell and the surrender of Guernsey was signed on HMS Bulldog.
    On Herm, Mrs. Le Page found a small Union Jack and made her way to the harbour. There a young German soldier approached, saluted, took the flag and climbed to the top of the railway crane where he attached the flag. Not a word was spoken – none were necessary. It was the end of the occupation of Herm."


    https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Huckaback

    https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Anthony_Porteous

    Patrick Anthony Porteous - All The Victoria Crosses of World War Two

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    Edit -

    Old (postcard) views of the island - Herm postcards page
     
    Last edited: Jan 25, 2022
    Chris C likes this.
  2. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    What is the connection between Herm and Major Porteous?
     
  3. Ramiles

    Ramiles Researching 9th Lancers, 24th L and SRY

    1943 : War Arrives with Operation ‘Huckaback’
    In February 1943 a party of 7 British Commandos and Royal Marines under the command of Captain Patrick Porteous, VC raided Herm.
    They paddled ashore in a 14ft dory. Their objectives were to discover whether Shell Beach was mined, to locate the watch tower and to capture a guard (there wasn’t one!) and to confuse the Germans by distributing aircraft leaflets.
    The party also checked out the Manor House. Finding the cottages and house empty they stole away again back into the night.
     
    Chris C likes this.
  4. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    Oh, sorry, I missed that he commanded the raid!
     
    Ramiles likes this.
  5. Ramiles

    Ramiles Researching 9th Lancers, 24th L and SRY

    Apologies anyhow, I got distracted - re-reading the Sword of Honour Trilogy - but was going to go back at some point and re-edit things to put them a little more orderly/clearly ;-)

    ‘Conducting his own Campaigns’: Evelyn Waugh and Propaganda

    "Through the comparable subplot in Officers and Gentlemen, depicting the staging of a military operation for the purposes of propaganda, Waugh implies that British wartime Special Forces were established in part for PR reasons and had become dependent on sympathetic press coverage. When the fictional Hazardous Offensive Operations agency (HOO)—a ‘bizarre product of total war’ staffed by ‘experts, charlatans, plain lunatics, and every unemployed member of the British Communist Party’—is threatened with closure, its planners decide to launch a PR offensive.45 Operation ‘Popgun’ is mounted solely in an attempt to maintain HOO as a going concern by securing public credibility (‘We must mount an operation at once and call in the press’ (SOH 285)). The bathetically named Popgun is an unambitious plan to mount a commando raid on an uninhabited island near Jersey, with the aim of destroying a German radar station. Due to fog, however, the eight-man landing party end up in France, where Ian Kilbannock and Trimmer are shot at by a farmer who mistakes them for trespassers and end up achieving nothing, although sappers who have ventured further inland make an opportunistic raid and blow up a section of railway track. Back in London, Kilbannock, a former journalist, produces an official citation crediting Trimmer for the leadership of a successful sabotage mission, and hailing his ‘exemplary coolness’ in carrying this out (SOH 311). Sticking scrupulously to the facts, this short paragraph allows readers to observe the means by which a farcical episode is converted into a public relations triumph; it also illustrates James Purdon’s observation in Modernist Informatics (2016) that wartime readers ‘Confronted with a constant stream of wartime propaganda’ were compelled to read ‘between the lines’ as a means of interpreting official reports.46 A further transformation may be noted when Kilbannock suggests to his superior that ‘a little colour’ will need to be added for the press release; in the next scene, Crouchback’s father—making no attempt to read between the lines—is heartened and stimulated by reading newspaper accounts of the raid, which describe the former hairdresser Trimmer’s leading role in ‘one of the most daring exploits in military history’ (SOH 312). The weary and cynical Ivor Claire, by contrast, dismisses news of the raid as ‘Some nonsense of Brendan’s, obviously’ (SOH 313), expressing a corrosive assumption that the operation was directed by the then Minister for Information (who had been responsible, of course, for boosting Waugh’s Bardia article)."

    Just another rabbit hole etc ;-)
     
  6. Ramiles

    Ramiles Researching 9th Lancers, 24th L and SRY

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