Military Model Scene

Title: Fortress Britain 1940
Author: Andrew Chatterton
Publisher: Casemate
ISBN: 978-1-63624-345-0

Britain's Unsung and Secret Defences on Land, Sea and in the Air, a new 264-page hardback from Casemate Publishing.
Divided into 2 main parts, there are 13 chapters in all. The first 8 make up part 2, the Land war, while Sea & Air are covered in the smaller part 2, which has the final 5 chapters. Most readers will know about the LDV (Local Defence Volunteers), which became the Home Guard, and best known thanks to the marvellous old TV comedy series of 'Dad's Army'. Likewise, the Battle of Britain remains widely known thanks to the 'Few', made famous by Churchill's speech. After the disaster that was Dunkirk, it was something of a miracle that so many troops were recovered from the beaches of France but with most of their heavy equipment left behind, Britain was in real danger of invasion by the German Army which was riding the crest of a wave of success after their successful Blitzkrieg in France and the Low Countries. Read about the other plans to defend the UK, with the building of the defence lines of Pillboxes, the underground bunkers to be used by Auxiliary Units and other signallers, of spies and runners to relay intelligence information to MI6 and more. The Royal Navy prevented vessels of the French Navy being available to bolster the German Kriegsmarine while in the air, Bomber Command attacked the build up of invasion barges on the French & Belgian coasts so that the invasion would not have been a practical proposition when coupled with the surviving strength to the Royal Navy and the RAF.
The book demonstrates that there was much more to our plans than is more widely known and makes for interesting reading. We got volunteers for tasks which had a very limited life expectancy, and planned resistance action that might have attracted some violent reprisals had the Germans actually invaded. There as still some aspects for which documents are still not in the public domain, and people who never told their families what they had volunteered to do in the event of invasion in 1940. I found it a very interesting read.
Thanks to Casemate UK for the review copy.

Robin