JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Last full day in jersey and went to the war tunnels. This was excavated by slave Labour and locals and served as a giant hospital complex for the Germans who had 15000 troops here in a population of only 60000 locals.
Jersey was invaded in July 1940 when Churchill decided it could not be defended. Things must have looked ultra bleak what with the airborne battle of Britain the collapse of the Belgian and French armies which culminated in the evacuation at dunkirk of 338000 British soldiers.
Jersey is very much like devon, my county, and cornwall and is very english. It was very chilling therefore to see German troops in the context of English buildings, phone boxes, pedestrian crossings etc.
All this was of course whilst europe was collapsing, German tanks were driving through Paris and fully 18 months before The Americans joined. Our Aussie and kiwi friends had joined the allies at the start of the war of course.
The allies landed in Normandy in 1944 but it was not until ve day a year later that Jersey was liberated. As I mentioned yesterday liberation day is still a very big thing here
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Jersey was largely ignored. Retaking Jersey was pointless in terms of effort and benefit. It had been turned into a fortress. So had Norway. What was effective was keeping 15,000 troops in Jersey and 250,000 troops in Norway during the Normandy landings. Defending such a huge coast was impossible. What really mattered was control of ports and supply of petrol. These were solved by Churchill’s Mulberry ports and the extraordinary PLUTO petrol pumping all the way from Liverpool to Southhampton to the beach at Normandy and then into the countryside.
So many things were invented in those times. And after the war had huge impact on the rapid development of the modern consumer society. Cheap free Penicillin in massive quantities was perhaps the greatest result of the D Day landings. And 98% of the wounded soldiers who made it back to England were saved.
But Jersey had to wait. Like Norway. Logistics were the real battle when invading, not strong points and castles as in previous wars. In modern warfare these could be bypassed.
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Also hardly known in the rapid technical development during the war was the attempt to destroy the extraordinary superweapon, a German rail gun by crashing an aircraft into the site.
This cost the life of Joseph Kennedy, the older brother of John Kennedy. Joseph volunteered instead of going home after his survival of his tour of duty as a bomber pilot. The weapon was a remote control Libeator B-24 bomber stuffed with high explosive and flown remotely from an adjacent Liberator using a television camera. This predated the drones of today. But it could not also take off on its own and the takeoff crew including Kennedy were to bail out as the adjacent aircraft took control of the drone. Unfortunately the tricky remote bomb trigger was susceptible to radio interference as a British engineer had warned. So the bomb triggered over Kent, vaporizing Kennedy.
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“America joined the war late in 1941.”
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After Pearl Harbour. But they had already been shipping massive supplies to the UK and Russia under the Lend Lease program. Neither country would have survived the war without US help. The shipments to Russia were incredible. And when Russia finally reached Berlin, it was on US trucks. The Germans may have had mobility in tanks and aircraft, but they lacked the trucks and their soldiers walked into Russia in Blitzkreig with a million horses pulling wagons.
Even today along the Trans Siberian railway there are WWII trains as memorials. Check the wheels. All sizes are in inches. And there was enough rail line to build the Trans Siberian three times over. Food in vast quantities. Aircraft. Much came through Iran, a traditional strong connection from Persian days which persists today, something which also influences US policy with Iran. The battleground remains Afghanistan, the key to India.
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A major UK supreme court ruling states that women’s biological sex and gender are the same thing and trans people can not use women only space. The result has been relief by many and some small demos
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14627823/Thousands-trans-activists-protest-emergency-demonstration-against-Supreme-Court-gender-ruling-London.html
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Germany awash with solar power and exports the surplus but shortage at other times
https://notrickszone.com/2025/04/16/solar-madness-in-germany-gigawatt-hours-of-subsidized-electricity-gets-dumped-abroad-for-free/
Solar farms in the UK routinely include large solar batteries but I think they are only intended to smooth out intermittency and not as a massive storage faciloty
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But smoothing out intermittency between natural supply and human demand is what a massive storage facility is for.
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