Avre Friday Briefing #70

The war history hiding in your holiday

One of us is writing this from a balcony overlooking the Aegean (see below), which got us thinking. Eighty-something years ago, the sea out there was a war zone — and the same goes for half the places that Europe goes on holiday today. So while we're still in summer mode, here are five spots where your beach towel now sits on Second World War ground.

The Aegean

Battle of Leros. Aegean Operations 9 Sept-22 Oct 1943

In the autumn of 1943, after Italy switched sides, the British made a grab for the Dodecanese islands in the eastern Aegean. It ended badly — Kos and then Leros fell to German air power and audacious landings in what's often called the last major defeat of the British Army in the war.

Leros, with its deep-water harbour Mussolini had boasted was "the Corregidor of the Mediterranean," later inspired Alistair MacLean's *The Guns of Navarone*. Throughout it all, raiding parties of the SBS and Long Range Desert Group moved between the islands in local fishing caïques — piracy in all but name, conducted across the same waters that the ferries cross today.

Crete

Maleme, Crete

In May 1941, Crete became the first place in history to be invaded almost entirely from the air, as thousands of German paratroopers dropped onto Maleme and the north coast. They took the island, but at such a cost that Hitler concluded the day of the mass airborne assault was over — Germany never attempted another. The Allies, watching closely, drew the opposite conclusion, and built the airborne forces that would jump into Normandy three years later. The olive groves around Maleme still hold the evidence if you know where to look.

Sicily

Gela, Sicily

If your sunbed is anywhere near Syracuse or Gela, you're on an invasion beach. Operation Husky, launched on 10th July 1943, was one of the largest amphibious operations of the entire war — on the first day alone it put more troops ashore across a wider front than Normandy would the following June. Thirty-eight days later the island was taken, Mussolini had fallen, and the road to the Italian mainland was open.

Anzio

Anzio, Italy

Now a seaside resort an hour from Rome, in January 1944 Anzio was the site of one of the war's most fraught landings — an attempt to outflank the Gustav Line that ended up besieged in its own beachhead for four months. The breakout in May, alongside the fall of Monte Cassino, finally opened the way to Rome. The town's war cemeteries sit minutes from the beach.

The Channel Islands

Jersey, Channel Islands

Jersey and Guernsey were the only British soil occupied during the war — five years under German rule, from June 1940 to the surrender on 9th May 1945, a day after VE Day. The Germans fortified the islands to an extraordinary degree as part of the Atlantic Wall, and the concrete is still everywhere: observation towers over the bays, gun emplacements above the beaches, and tunnels running under the cliffs.

If your holiday spot has a war story we've missed, we'd genuinely like to hear it — comment here, email or tag us on Instagram @avreind. We'll be back to talking jackets soon.