Operation Basalt: the significance of the raid and the battle for historical memory

The following is the text of the speech given by Eric Lee on Saturday, 21 May 2016, in the Island Hall on Sark at the launch of the book, Operation Basalt: The British Raid on Sark and Hitler’s Commando Order.

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Good evening, and welcome.

I want to thank all of you who have come here today, both those who live on this beautiful island and those who have come from the US, Israel and England to join us here today.

We are celebrating the launch of Operation Basalt: The British Raid on Sark and Hitler’s Commando Order, my new book published in March this year by The History Press.

Before I talk about the book, I want to acknowledge the help of some people here in this room, without whom the book would not have been possible. Here in Sark I had the help of a number of people, but above all want to acknowledge the support of Dr Richard Axton, who served as my guide through the archives and was a wonderful host during my visit in February 2015, as well as Jeremy LaTrobe-Bateman who took me on the commando route which we explored earlier today.

Graham Robinson, whose father Sergeant Henry ‘Tim’ Robinson participated in the raid, shared his memories including photos.

Some of those who read early versions of the manuscript are here today as well — Roger Darlington, Marty Lee, and Doerte Letzmann.

Cindy Berman visited Sark with me in July 2012 and again in 2014, and it was during those visits, walking the length and breadth of the island, that we discussed the possibility of this book. Her support throughout the many months of research and writing, having an entire wall of the house taken up with with maps and photos of the raiders, is greatly appreciated.

I want to say a few words about the significance of this raid.

In the broader context of the second world war, fought across four continents and the high seas, a war which cost the lives of tens of millions of people and lasted for nearly six years, Operation Basalt is indeed insignificant.

Only a dozen commandos participated in the raid. Only three German soldiers were killed. Just one was captured. And the whole thing from beginning to end lasted just a few hours on a single night in October 1942.

And yet it mattered — it mattered a great deal.

Because, as I say in the book, there may only have been two men who cared about this raid, but those men were Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.

Churchill was one of the great war leaders in history, if not the greatest. Facing catastrophic defeat in 1940, he took the decision to fight back and fight hard against the German aggressors. This included bringing the fight to the enemy whereever possible — whether through bombing raids on Germany, or commando raids on the fringes of the Nazi empire. The Germans may have reached the shores of north western France and even captured the Channel Islands, but Churchill wanted to make sure that they would never feel safe and comfortable there.

Operation Basalt and the other commando raids in these islands had precisely that effect.

The German soldiers never felt entirely safe here, and eventually tens of thousands of them were uselessly deployed guarding the beaches and cliffs of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney and Sark instead of helping their comrades in France or Russia.

It was the action of men like the Danish commando Anders Lassen, an expert with the commando knife, who made certain that no German sentry would feel safe ever again on this island or the others. It was the daring of men like Major Geoffrey Appleyard who jumped at the opportunity to take 12 lightly-armed men in the dead of night to an island holding some 300 heavily armed, well-trained German infantry, with minimal intelligence, at enormous personal risk.

When the raid was all over, Churchill summoned Appleyard for a meeting in his private offices in the Palace of Westminster to congratulate him on a job well done.

For Hitler, the raid triggered an outburst of rage. Certainly the Nazi leader was furious at the lapse of security, and the breach in the Atlantic Wall defenses. The German soldiers on Sark had just one job to perform: to stay alive and in place. That was all. They were on Sark to protect themselves. And they failed at this, as they failed in earlier commando raids on other islands.

But Hitler chose not to make the security lapse the issue. Instead he and Goebbels took the decision to wage a propaganda war on the Allies, accusing the commandos of war crimes, mistreating prisoners and executing defenseless men whose hands were bound.

The hypocrisy of the German propaganda shocks me to this day. This was a regime which was inventing entirely new classes of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They were killing defenseless Soviet prisoners of war in their millions — but protested the actions of the commandos on Sark?

And this brings me to my second point: the battle for historical memory.

The Nazis were very good at propaganda. We’d don’t really remember that so much today, and in most films about the second world war, they are cast as simply evil characters, making no attempt to justify or explain or defend their actions.

But at the time, they invested an enormous effort to sway public opinion both in the neutral countries and among the Allies. These efforts were largely unsuccessful. And yet, they sometimes succeeded, planting ideas that somehow remain alive even today.

One of these, perhaps the greatest Nazi propaganda success, was the idea that the bombing of Dresden was a war crime which proved that the Allies were no better than the Germans. Pro-Nazi historians like David Irving have contributed a great deal to the spreading of propaganda about Dresden that originated 70 years ago in Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin. Naive writers such as Kurt Vonnegut picked up on Irving’s account, and as a result, even today many people find themselves unintentionally repeating Nazi lies from 1945.

This is even true regarding Operation Basalt, and has led some historians to give some credence to the Nazi propaganda about the behaviour of the commandos that night.

The fact is that the commandos were incredibly brave men, doing an extremely dangerous job and doing it well, and they deserve our greatest respect and admiration. They did what needed to be done, and they did it with panache.

There were war crimes committed on this island, but it was not the men of the Small Scale Raiding Force who committed them. The deportation of Channel Islanders to Germany, some in retaliation for the commando raid, was a war crime even if no German soldiers ever paid the price for it.

“In a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

The battle for historical memory, the fight against historical revisionism and attempts to whitewash the war crimes of the German Nazis, to make an equivalence between aggression and self-defense, is an important fight.

I hope that Operation Basalt makes a contribution to that effort, and that is why I wrote it.

Thank you.