SORRY - SOLD OUT
Two invasions in 1941, that of Crete, successfully carried out by the Germans, and of Hong Kong, captured by the Japanese, are featured in this volume (issues 45-48). The essential timelessness of Crete as the scene of the last large-scale German airborne operation could only enhance an intrepid exploration of the coverage of the battle fought for the island. At Hong Kong, though, post-war development could hardly have created a starker contrast. On the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, the various elements of Germany's surrender — in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Channel Islands — are reviewed, as well as the last act in Berlin itself, where the final curtain on the tragedy that engulfed a continent came down almost on a note of farce. The making of the film The Heroes of Telemark provides a foil against which is set a re-enactment by Royal Marine commandos of the actual operation mounted in 1942 to destroy Germany's heavy water plant in Norway, and so stop the Nazis from building an atomic bomb before the Allies did. Other articles cover the killing of a young WAAF in London — the name of her hanged murderer being commemorated on no less than the memorial to Britain's war dead for whom 'the fortune of war denied a known and honoured grave'; the recovery of a Sherman tank lost of the English coast during training exercises for D-Day; a meeting between two former adversaries on the spot where one of the pilots was shot down and afterwards fêted by the other — their historic reunion made possible by research into a scribbled note included on a roll of archive film; and the story of the last battle of Germany's tank ace, Michael Wittmann, in Normandy; plus a variety of topics of 'then and now' interest.
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