After The Battle Magazine Issue189 Back Issue

A STAGED SURRENDER IN CRETE — On July 8, 1941, just over a month after the end of the battle of Crete, a two-page photo report was published in issue 14 of the Luftwaffe magazine Der Adler. It was the first portrayal of an incident in which a party of British soldiers surrender to a squad of German paratroopers. The nine images featured in this early photo report would be used again and again in numerous later publications. However, when viewed as a whole, the images revealed a number of inconsistencies between the actions depicted, and questions arose as to their authenticity. Our author Nikos Valasiadis decided to undertake a systematic research project. EXPLOSION IN BERGEN HARBOUR — Karel Margry explains how on April 20, 1944, the Voorbode, a Dutch steamship commandeered by the Kriegsmarine and loaded with over 100 tons of dynamite and other ordnance, exploded in Bergen harbour in Norway, causing a catastrophe of unheard-of dimensions. COMMANDO TRAGEDY IN HOLLAND — On the night of February 27/28, 1944, a party of six French commandos from No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando landed on a beach north of The Hague in German-occupied Netherlands, their mission — code-named Operation ‘Premium’ — being to reconnoitre a route for putting Allied secret agents ashore at this point. The operation went wrong and the six Frenchmen mysteriously disappeared without a trace, leaving leaving their colleagues and higher headquarters in England guessing as to their fate. JUSTICE METED OUT AFTER LIBERATION — Jean Paul Pallud tells us how court-martials were set up right after the liberation of France to deal with the judicial process for redressing acts of collaboration, and in Grenoble a court-martial was convened on September 2, 1944. Ten members of the Milice, the paramilitary force raised by the Vichy Government that aided the Germans in the repression of the Resistance, were put on trial.