Strategy, Tactics & Military Science

On 1 July 1940 the Germans occupied Jersey and remained until the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. On Jersey, agriculture was the only economic activity left after the Germans arrived on the Island. It became the basis of Island life and, as the war wore on, the isolated Jersey became increasingly dependent on agriculture for its survival, particularly during near starvation in the winter of 1944. In this book local historian Andrew Gilson examines the relationship between the German Military Government and the civilian government and civil service on Jersey, and how they had to work together to ensure the Island’s survival through its farming industry. Based on hundreds of original documents from Jersey, including those held by the Royal Jersey Agricultural & Horticultural Society, other Channel Islands, Germany, France, Austria and elsewhere in Europe, the author reveals the complex relationship between the German occupiers, civilian authorities and the farming community. Accusations of collaboration and stories of sabotage, German exports of produce, the development of tobacco as a cash economy, the exploitation of Jersey cattle by Nazi scientists to create a new ‘superbreed’, German requisition of foodstuffs and the black market all played their part in this fascinating story. This groundbreaking and original study of the German occupation of Jersey will be of interest to all those wishing to know more about the history of Jersey as well as to military historians.

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A BRACING ACCOUNT OF A WAR THAT IS EITHER MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, OR WILLFULLY IGNORED

For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953. But for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long struggle that still haunts contemporary events. With access to new evidence and secret materials from both here and abroad, including an archive of captured North Korean documents, Bruce Cumings reveals the war as it was actually fought. He describes its origin as a civil war, preordained long before the first shots were fired in June 1950 by lingering fury over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Cumings then shares the neglected history of America’s post-World War II occupation of Korea, reveals untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, and tells of the United States officially entering the action on the side of the South, exposing as never before the appalling massacres and atrocities committed on all sides.

Elegantly written and blisteringly honest, The Korean War is, like the war it illuminates, brief, devastating, and essential.

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