Hello everyone, welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast. I'm your host James Rogers, and in this episode we're looking at a commando raid that changed the course of the Second World War.

I've pulled this one out of the Dan Snow's history hit archive because it is an astonishing story. In October

1942 the British launched a small raid on the Channel Island of Sark. There are Castor characters

involved in this one which in the end they'd give their colleague Ian Fleming a few ideas for his future secret agent James Bond, but they crept ashore and they aimed to capture German prisoners. They did this, but a scuffle broke out and two of the prisoners were killed.

The commandos managed to escape with one prisoner and that might well have been the end of it, but when

Hitler found out he went ballistic and very shortly after he issued his infamous commando order. Henceforth any

commando found would be shot on site. This was another ratcheting up of the ferocity and

criminality of the Nazi war effort.

So in this podcast Dan travels to the channel islands he meets local experts and he retraces

those very steps from this infamous raid. I've come to a headland on the south coast of Sark in the Channel Islands.

I've got a low autumnal sun which is turning this

cerulean blue water around me, silver as it shines down over Jersey I can see

about eight miles away and this is a precipitous cliff but it wasn't too precipitous for the British

commandos because here in October 94-2 they launched while they're more famous raids.

Britain had been driven out of the continent following Dunkirk in 1940 and

Winston Churchill was determined that the fighting would be taken to the Germans

on the continent not just in theatres like North Africa. First of they did a bunch of these.

Like this was not the only time they ever did a raid like that.

And the other ones they had done were particularly successful.

And it came out of Churchill's mind. Churchill couldn't bear the idea that parts of the British Isles were occupied by the Germans and nothing much was happening there.

So Sark was described by the Germans as a cliterider-Pardis, you know, a perfect little island of paradise.

The Ariif wouldn't bomb it.

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