GANEFO 1963, the Newly Emerging and Transient Alternative ‘Olympics’

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
International Relations, Politics, Regional History, Regional politics, Sports history

Currently we are watching, from a distance on television, the Olympics from Tokyo. This is the second time Tokyo has held the Olympic Games, although it is the third time that city has been awarded the Games{a}. The previous time Tokyo hosted the Olympics, 1964, Indonesia, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China, all boycotted the world’s premier sporting event{b}. This disharmonious development within the Olympic community had its origin in the 1962 Asian Games, host Indonesia refused entry to Taiwan (in deference to mainland China) and Israel (to appease Muslim Arab states).

GANEFO opening ceremony, 1963 (Photo from Amanda Shuman’s collection, published in Journal of Sport History) ⇩

Mixing sport and politics
The IOC criticised Indonesia for politicising the 1962 Asian Games, but it’s president, Sukarno, far from contrite, was emboldened to go further in his defiance of the IOC. Sukarno, determined that Indonesia plays a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement, enlisted sport in the task of furthering “the politics of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism”. Sukarno set up GANEFO or the Games of the New Emerging Forces…an alternative Olympics-style event held in 1963 in Djakarta, complete with opening ceremony, giant torch, etc. Like his PRC counterpart Mao Zedong, Sukarno deliberately used sports “to display international prowess” which in turn was meant “to enhance global stature”{c}(Webster, David. “Sports as Third World Nationalism: The Games of the New Emerging Forces and Indonesia’s Systemic Challenge under Sukarno.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations 23, no. 4 (2016): 395-406. Accessed August 1, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26549192). GANEFO represented “a Sino-Indonesian-sponsored challenge to the International Olympic Committee’s dominance in sport that also attempted to solidify China’s geopolitical position as a Third World leader“, Shuman, Amanda. “Elite Competitive Sport in the People’s Republic of China 1958–1966: The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).” Journal of Sport History 40, no. 2 (2013): 258-283. muse.jhu.edu/article/525098.

Pres. Sukarno (Image: globalsecurity.org)

The IOC was hostile to what it viewed as a challenge to its rules and authority, Djakarta’s breach of the Olympic ideal that sport and politics should remain separate. Sukarno responded by calling out the IOC for hypocrisy, pointing out that the IOC by ejecting the Asian communist countries of PR China and North Korea from the Olympics fold, itself was playing politics. In the prevailing Cold War climate Sukarno characterised Brundage’s organisation as “a tool of imperialists and colonialists”. Predictably, the US and the Western media labelled GANEFO as a ‘Red’ event, citing Sukarno’s links to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and communist China’s weighty involvement in the games as well as the USSR and Eastern Bloc’s participation (‘A Third World Olympics: Sport, Politics and the Developing World in the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), Russell Field, Verso, 09-Aug-2016, www.versobooks.com).

⇩ “Onward, no retreat”, GANEFO motto

The establishment strikes back
In IOC chief Avery Brundage’s mind it was more than just a case of defending the ‘official’ games as the IOC’s proprietorial brand, his purpose in trying to deflect the challenge from emerging Third World leaders like Sukarno has been seen as an attempt to “buttress the Olympic movement as a First World institution in a rapidly decolonising world” (Field). The IOC’s retaliatory response was quick: the Indonesian Olympic Committee was turfed from the Games (communist China had already withdrawn from the IOC). Later, in 1964, the IOC readmitted Indonesia for Tokyo but decreed that individual athletes who participated in GANEFO 1963 were barred from selection for Tokyo. Sukarno rejected these conditions, demanding that “all or none” of the country’s athletes be eligible for the 1964 Games. Consequently, with the IOC and Indonesia at loggerheads, Djakarta unilaterally withdrew from Tokyo in protest (‘GANEFO I: Sports and Politics in Djakarta’, Ewa T. Pauker, Rand Paper, July 1964, www.rand.org).

Who went to GANEFO 63 and who ‘won’?
Around 2,700 athletes participated representing about 50 countries – mostly from Asia but many from Africa and the Middle East (including a team representing “Arab Palestine”, whereas Israel was again excluded); the communist eastern bloc states; South America; and curiously for an event comprising “New Emerging Powers” there were contingents from France, Italy, Finland and Netherlands (the presence of Dutch athletes in Djakarta from the ex-colonial power in the East Indies seemed baffling!). China had the biggest team and easily won the ‘unofficial’ gold medal count with 68. ⇧ Olympic stadium, Djakarta (antaranews.com)

Almost all of the delegations of attending athletes were not sanctioned by their countries’ Olympics committees for fear of reprisal from the IOC. Accordingly, most of the athletes participating were “not of Olympic calibre”. It was especially tricky for the vacillating Méxicans whose participation it was feared might jeopardise México City’s bid for the 1968 Olympics. As soon as México City got the nod from the IOC, a Méxican team was hastily cobbled together to attend{d}.

Beyond GANEFO
Sukarno saw the realisation of GANEFO and the forging of close ties between Third World countries in sporting and cultural endeavours, as a pathway to something bigger than sport, an institution that might challenge the existing international order. GANEFO was meant to foreshadow the creation of CONEFO (Confederation of the New Emerging Forces), a new world body which would appeal to left-nationalist and neutralist states emerging out of colonialism. CONEFO Sukarno hoped might come to stand as an alternative, Third World-focused United Nations (Webster){e}.

Chinese ‘MO’
China played a key supporting role in getting GANEFO up in 1963. It was the principal financial backer for the event and the Djakarta games got great coverage from the Chinese state media. Like Indonesia, PRC saw good propaganda value in the games, its participation in ‘goodwill’ games purported to foster solidarity and understanding between Third World countries across the globe was intended to show it in a good light vis-á-vis the Capitalist West. Beijing was eyeing off the prospect of becoming rivals with both Washington and Moscow, it was looking for avenues to exert influence with Indonesia and the Afro-Asian world and the GANEFO opportunity nicely suited its purposes (Pauker).

 End-note: GANEFO 66 and finis
The GANEFO games were intended to be an ongoing affair but the impetus could not be maintained. A second GANEFO games had been scheduled to be held in Cairo in 1967 but were subsequently cancelled due to rising Middle East tensions. Instead, the follow-up games (“Asian GANEFO”) took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1966, which tried with less success to replicate the original sporting event in Djakarta. Subsequently GANEFO quickly faded away. The main factors for the GANEFO games’ demise were the overthrow of its driving force President Sukarno and the steep costs of hosting the event (Russell).

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{a} Tokyo was awarded the 1940 Olympics but was stripped of its hosting rights after Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria

{b} in addition South Africa was banned from competing due to its racialist Apartheid policy

{c} now even more important to China as their stand-out performance in the current Games in Tokyo indicates

{d} many of the European participants were from leftist student organisations and workers’ sporting clubs. Military personnel were a component of several nation‘s teams

{e} in 1965 Sukarno pulled Indonesia out of the UN

Lake Rotomahana, New Zealand: Once were Travertine Terraces

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Coastal geology & environment, Environmental, Geography, Natural Environment, Regional History, Science and society

There’s only a handful of natural travertine rock formations𝔞 in the entire world, but after 1886 there was was one less. In that year in New Zealand’s Rotorua/Bay of Plenty area, the terraced hot springs wonderland known to Pākehā New Zealanders as the “Pink and White Terraces”𝔟 (Ōtukapuarangi and Te Tarata) were obliterated from sight in a massive eruption from nearby Mt Tarawera (Māori: “burnt spear/peaks”)𝔠.

🌋 Charles Blomfield’s painting of the volcanic occurrence

Fallout from the volcano’s eruption blanketed some 15,000 sq kms of countryside with ash in the air travelling as far away as Christchurch, over 800 km to the south. The explosion of volcanic craters reduced Lake Rotomahana (“warm lake”) to mud and ash. The deafening noise and lightning of the dome volcano exploding caused some in Auckland to think that Russian warships were attacking the city [‘The Night Tarawera awoke’, New Zealand Geo, www.nzgeo.com]. The human casualties were almost all Māori, about 120 people died, as well as 10 Māori settlements destroyed or buried.

Blomfield’s painting of Te Tarata

19th century tourist attraction
Nature’s violent removal of the Rotomahana travertines brought an abrupt end to a lucrative little 19th century tourism earner for the local region. Artist Charles Blomfield who painted the two terraces on multiple occasions was an eye witness to the tourist boom, observing groups of “moneyed people” bathing in the hot springs𝔡 while their lunches of potatoes and koura were cooking in the boiling pools (NZ Geo)𝔢. Village residents benefitted—some Māori guides netted incomes of up to £4,000 a year—but the First Nation community also copped the downside from the economic boost, rising illness and rampant alcoholism [‘Tarawera Te Maunga Tapu’, Rotorua Museum, www.rotoruamuseum.co.nz].

Lost and found?
For 120 years New Zealanders thought that all trace of the iconic terraces—the two largest known formations of silica sinter on earth—had vanished. Scientific curiosity in recent decades has speculated whether the terraces has been destroyed altogether or perhaps permanently entombed. Recently, Geologists, drawing on Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s 1859 topographic and geological survey of Lake Rotomahana as a primary source, believe they have found traces of the lost White Terraces in the naturally-restored, crater-enlarged lake [‘A natural wonder lost to a volcano has been rediscovered’, Robin Wylie, BBC, 28-Apr -2016, www.bbc.com]. The terraces are thought submerged under sediment and 50-60 m of lake water.

🔻 1860 lithograph of Hochstetter talking to the Māori rangatira of the White Terraces

New Zealand’s miniature ‘Pompeii’
Right in the firing line of Mt Tarawera when it exploded in 1886 was the tiny village of Te Wairoa and its inhabitants the Tuhourangi people. Engulfed and obliterated by the eruption, it became known as the “Buried Village” of Te Wairoa. These days it has brought back tourism to the area. The excavated village is New Zealand’s most popular archaeological site.

(Source: Flickr.com)

Postscript: the Rotomahana travertines are destroyed but is at least one terraced hydro-thermal springs in the North Island remains. Wairakei Terraces, situated 90 km south of Tarawera in Taupō, is a smaller version of the Pink and White Terraces. This commercial operation is a combination of the synthetic (man-made geyser) and the natural (pink, blue and white silica steps).

🔻Pamukkale, Turkey

🌋 one of the most outstanding examples of travertine formations on the planet is the “Cotton Castle” of Pamukkale in eastern Turkey, with its glistening white-terraced geo-thermal springs sharing the site with the ruins of a Greco-Roman city Hierapolis, making it a world-class tourist magnet. Other extant travertines include Badab-e-Surt in Iran, Mammoth Hot Springs in Wyoming, USA, and Egerszalok in Hungary.

Pink Terraces (Photo: Charles Spencer/ Te Papa)

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𝔞 travertines are formations of terrestrial limestone and calcium carbonate deposits around mineral (especially hot) springs, which are often terraced  

𝔟 their names in the Māori tongue translate respectively as “fountain of the clouded sky” and “tattooed rock”

𝔠 nicknamed Te Maunga Tapu (“the sacred mountain”), the volcano lies within a caldera (collapse crater) area

𝔡 the actual numbers of Europeans who visited New Zealand’s version of the “8th Wonder of the World” was not as high as might be thought, owing to the terraces not being easily accessible – from the closest settlement Rotorua it was a trek over hills by horse or buggy followed by a canoe trip and the last section on foot [New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces’, (Tourism NSW), www.media.newzealand.com]

𝔢 English novelist Anthony Trollope was one of the European ‘celebs’ who fronted up to bathe in the pools and sleep in a whare (Māori hut) next to the terraces (NZ Geo). Trollope found nothing like its waters in the world – “you strike your chest against it, it is soft to the touch, you press yourself against it and it is smooth” [Australia and New Zealand, (Vol.II, 1873]

 

City Lights Bookshop: Shakespeare and Company’s “Symbiotic Sister”

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.

(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.

A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.

(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).

(Image: citylights.com)

Maverick bookseller 
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.

🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights

Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.

The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).

🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s

Political poetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.

Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model? 
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).

Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)

Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!

City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.

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🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach

🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”

🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch

🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry

🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left

🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books

English Channel Islands under the Swastika, 1940–1945

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

In the wake of the catastrophic Allied defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, Britain made the decision not to defend the strategically-unadvantageous but sovereign Channel Islands lying just eight miles from the French coastline, giving up the oldest possession of the Crown “without firing a single shot” (Hazel R. Knowles Smith, The changing face of the Channel Islands Occupation, 2007)⚀. The islands were demilitarised, giving the German Wehrmacht a saloon passage into them in June 1940. There was no resistance to the German invasion…in addition to the British government withdrawing all troops, the locals were instructed not to resist the German invaders. Unfortunately no one told Berlin about the demilitarisation and German bombers raided Guernsey and Jersey, resulting in the death of 44 civilians✦.

Resistance by the islanders was pretty much out of the question due to geography as well as the numerical strength of the German military commitment (some 21,000 troops and a ratio of two Germans to one civilian in some areas). The islands’ terrain, being very small, flat and easy to search, made it “very difficult for a potential resistance to hide and organise” [‘Life under Nazi rule: the occupation of the Channel Islands’, (Rachel Dinning), History Extra, 25-Nov-2020, www.historyextra.com].

🔺 (Photo: World Travel Guide)

A so-called “Model occupation?”
Compared to the harshness of the Nazis’ subjection of Eastern European peoples, the occupying German military exerted a softer, lighter touch in its handling of the residents of the Channel Islands. The occupation has been described as “a gentler and kinder one with a correspondingly civil ladies and gentlemen’s resistance” MCGETCHIN, D. (2017). Journal of World History, 28(1), 154-161. Retrieved July 3, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44631517]. Even the attorney general of Guernsey depicted it as a “model occupation”. Hitler clearly saw an opportunity for an exercise in public relations (Dinning). The greater lenience given to the islands’ Britons also can probably be attributed to the Nazis’ perception of the occupied people as “racially elevated”, similar to how the Germans treated the Danes and Dutch, in contrast to the much harsher treatment meted out during the war to Russians and Poles for example (McGetchin).

While relations for the most part were cordial with the majority of islanders accordingly willing to peacefully co-exist with the German presence, the “softer approach” of the Germans shouldn’t be overstated—islanders were not free to speak their minds, they were subjected to curfews, 2% of the population were convicted and some imprisoned, two persons were executed, over 2,000 were deported including some Jews—certainly not a Sunday school picnic and things got tougher over time as the inhabitants faced critical food shortages which progressed into the very real reality of starvation.

🔺 Seigneur of Sark (Dame Sibyl Hathaway) visited by Wehrmacht officers at her fiefdom (Source: Twitter)

Pockets of non-militarised resistance
A lack of overt resistance didn’t mean there was no resistance at all. Among the islanders there was episodes of defiance of a non-violent kind – Britain’s BBC encouraged people to chalk the ‘V’ (for Victory) sign on buildings, ‘V’ jewellery was made, some civilians and local policemen as well raided German stores and supplies, others engaged in intelligence gathering, arson and graffiti-writing (Dinning). Act of sabotage on a small scale occurred and many islanders fed and even hid especially Russian POWs in their properties. On the other side of the coin there were varying forms of collaboration with the invaders, including paid informants who turned in their own people to the Nazis. The most vilified collaborators were women—derisively labelled ‘Jerrybags’ by townsfolk—who had sexual liaisons with the soldiers stationed on the islands (‘Defending Jerrybags’, (Colin Smith), Prospect, 20-Apr-1997, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk).

🔺 ‘V’ sign on Robin Hood pub, St Helier  (www.jerseyeveningpost.com)

A Nazi island fortress
With the British civilian inhabitants largely under wraps, the Nazi Führer embarked on his plans to “battle-proof” the Channel Islands. The Nazis transported massive amounts of steel and concrete for the grandiose-scale building scheme, tower forts, 45m-high gun stations, casements, anti-tank walls, air-raid shelters, bunkers and tunnels§. Beaches were mined and barbed wire laid around the coastlines. Hitler has plans for the heavily fortified islands in the post-war Third Reich as well, to serve as a haven for Axis soldiers [‘Did you know about Hitler’s insane “war-proof” islands?’, (Jeremy Caspar), SBS, 17-Mar-2017, www.sbs.com.au]. The value of the Channels’ coastal defence network to Hitler as propaganda against enemy Britain accounts for Berlin’s out of proportion material commitment to the Channels, constituting 10% of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall resources⋔ (‘Occupation of the Channel Islands by Nazi Germany’, New World Encyclopedia).

Forced labourers building island fortifications 🔻

(Photo: Priaulx Library & Occupation Archives)

The fortresses were built by Organisation Todt (OT – the Nazi civil and military engineering group) employing forced labour mainly from Eastern Europe (French and Spanish prisoners were also forced into service on the mega-building project). The effectively enslaved workers (Ostarbeiter) were treated appallingly badly (with a resulting large loss of life) by the Wehrmacht soldiers who looked on them as Untermenschen (“sub-human”) (Dinning)✪. The Nazis built four labour camps on Alderney Island, two for ‘volunteer’ labourers (Hilfswillige) and the other two were concentration camps.

(Source: tvtime.com)

Hitler’s fortresses, or the remnants of them, remain highly visible to this day – especially on Alderney the most northern of the Channel Islands. Alderney was the most heavily fortified of the islands (nicknamed “Adolf Island”), after virtually all of its inhabitants were evacuated [‘The Nazi Occupation of the Islands of Guernsey‘, (Stephanie Gordon), Historic UK (nd), www.historic-uk.com].

Footnote: How did the Channel Islands first become English?
Traditionally belonging to the Duchy of Normandy, the collection of small islands became English when Norman noble William the Conqueror was victorious at Hastings and succeeded to the English throne in 1066.

Postscript: the return of evacuees to the Channel Islands from mainland Britain after liberation in 1945 led to a difficult period of reintegration for all. A schism within the communities developed and sustained for a long time, some of those who stayed thought the evacuees cowardly for leaving, whereas the latter retorted that it was they who had gone through the real war facing the Blitz while the “safe-at-home” ‘stayers’ cosied up to the Germans (Barrett).

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⚀ Britain prime minister, Churchill, in his ‘bulldogged’ forthright fashion still wanted to defend the Channel Islands on a matter of principle, however the stark realities disclosed by the naval high command—the islands were situated too far from mainland Britain, too close to enemy bases in France, the martial materials required to do so would have left Britain vulnerable to defending itself—made the decision a “no-brainer” [Duncan Barrett, Hitler’s British Isles, 2018]

✦ there was token resistance to the raids from a solitary ground gun on the Isle of Sark

§ in both Guernsey and Jersey 200-250 strongpoints were constructed by OT

⋔ the Atlantikwall was an extensive Nazi coastal defence system built along western continental Europe and Scandinavia

✪ around 16,000 forced/slave workers were sent to Jersey alone [‘World War Two: Forced labourer who made Jersey his home, BBC, 10-May-2020, www.bbc.com]