Pages

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Where the Eagle Landed

My latest reading has been Peter Haining's 'Where the Eagle Landed'. This is badged as the mystery of the German invasion of Britain in 1940.

I picked this up in a second hand bookshop in Hay-onWye, thinking it would be useful in my Seelowe Nord project. The author describes the threat to Britain in 1940 from Hitler's Operation Sea Lion and the many forms of defence planned by the British authorities. These varied from conventional defences to all sort of strange and impractical devices considered by special units, established for just that purpose.


The focus of the book is East Anglia. The author describes the defences there and the testimony of witnesses who discovered bodies and papers that might suggest landings by German troops.

Sadly, the book boils down to a likely short landing by an E-boat crew on a beach near Sizewell. Frankly, it hardly seemed worth the effort to write it and I regretted wasting my time reading it. It took a long time to get to the point and the point wasn't worth it. More a vanity project on the basis that I have done all this research, it didn't lead anywhere, but I am going to tell you about it anyway.

If you want to learn a bit about East Anglia in 1940, by all means read this book. If not, avoid it.

No comments:

Post a Comment