Alderney - 2010 £5 Battle of Britain

[<k>]

The Royal Mint has issued a silver five pound collector coin to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

See this link:

http://www.royalmint.com/store/BritishSilver/WW2BBSP.aspx





EDIT: Title changed to denote Alderney.
Bill.

[andyg]

In small print, halfway through the description I found this,
"The coin, authorised by Alderney"

Misleading I think, as it's far from clear that it is not a UK issue.

[<k>]

Christian often complains that the British are obsessed with the Second World War and the Nazis. He may have a point. However, it is true that in 1940, in living memory for many, we stood alone and in great peril. If we had been defeated, I imagine Nazism would still eventually have been defeated, however.

Should we commemorate wars? They are, after all, simply mass murder. OK, the British were fighting in a good cause, but as an empire with millions of subject people, we were hardly as pure as the driven snow. And yes, there was bravery, but there were also atrocities.

To see the other side of war, have a look at this picture. It is the result of an Allied air raid on Berlin. The year was 1944. The photo is both shocking and poignant. Civilians lie dead and neatly laid out in a sports hall, while officials or survivors calmly carry on with whatever conversation they were having. These dead spectators all had friends and family who loved them. They had gone to this function simply to enjoy themselves. Imagine having to suffer this sort of thing, day in, day out, during the war. How did people bear it? Of course, it also embittered and polarised civilians and military who might otherwise have borne no ill feelings towards the British or Americans. That bitterness was felt on both sides and led to an escalation of the violence. As we know, it all continued with Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima - and the rest.

[chrisild]

The piece comes in Cu-Ni proof as well. See http://www.celebratebritain.com/thefew ...

Well, I got the "invitation to order" but am not exactly into such heroic coins. (YMMV of course.) It does seem obvious to me though that the piece is an Alderney issue. The obverse (where it says ALDERNEY) is depicted as big as the reverse after all.

Note that the Cu-Ni version is limited to 50,000 pieces. The silver version says "LIMITED 10,000 EDITION*" ... and the asterisk takes you to a footnote which mentions a maximum mintage of 20,000. Huh?

Christian

[andyg]

Well, I got the "invitation to order" but am not exactly into such heroic coins. (YMMV of course.) It does seem obvious to me though that the piece is an Alderney issue. The obverse (where it says ALDERNEY) is depicted as big as the reverse after all.

No such picture on E.M.U's link though Christian

[chrisild]

And while I do find that "obsession" objectionable especially when it affects today's politics, I don't have any particular problems with this coin. Actually I was somewhat surprised that "only" Alderney, and not the UK, would issue these. Too busy with those Olympics coins, eh?

Christian

[FosseWay]

In small print, halfway through the description I found this,
"The coin, authorised by Alderney"

Misleading I think, as it's far from clear that it is not a UK issue.

Agreed, and this is something that annoys me a lot about the RM's marketing. The Channel Islands and IOM issue far more commemoratives than the UK, which is hardly surprising given that collector coins and stamps are significant part of their economy. But when these issues are publicised in the RM's Bulletin or on their website, the emphasis is always, and sometimes solely, on the event being commemorated, not the issuing authority or even the denomination.

I'm sorry, but to me these two aspects of a coin are always more important than the subject matter. Yes, I know this is a commemorative, and therefore it's legitimate to make a song and dance about the event being commemorated, and push publicity around 7 September for historical reasons and so on. But to ignore the basic info is basically to deny that this is a coin, since issuing authority and denomination are essential to make a piece of metal a coin and not just, er, a piece of metal. Of course, some would argue that the kind of coin exemplified by this Alderney piece are coins only in the most tenuous sense in any case. It doesn't help when the RM adds fuel to that fire.

[Figleaf]

It may help to distinguish between fighters (basically defensive and used mostly against miltary targets) and bombers (basically offensive and too often used against civilian targets.) The distinction is lost today, but was still valid at the time.

Peter

[Ukrainii Pyat]

Until WWII civilians had never been more than accidental deaths in war.  WWII changed all that, all sides treated civilians as viable targets for destruction.  Civilian deaths were at first accidental, then one side thinking the other side had deliberately changed the rules, attacked the other's cities.  Then tit for tat resulted in hundreds of thousands of people needlessly slaughtered.

Similarly Poland has recently issued coins last year and this year commemorating start of war, then Katyn massacre.

I hope the commemoratives will continue, that people may never forget how terrible this war was for so many people. 

I thought of that war very poignantly years ago when travelling through Hamburg, and seeing the ruins of St. Michaels Kirche - how sad this beautiful church built over centuries was destroyed in few minutes by bombs.  More than buildings of stone and wood, think of all lives lost - maybe the person to have discovered some cure for cancer or disease.

[akona20]

History has a strange way of being distorted.

Civilians were always a major casualty of major wars. Death, rape, pillage and slavery were part and parcel of every defeated nation for most of history. If you lost the victors got the spoils. WW1 was for the western front a little different with the largely static front line for many years.

The war from the air added a new dimension to war, nothing more, nothing less. And all the bleeding hearts crying about what happened and when seem to forget with time why and how things started. You can't fight a war as a comparatively 'nice' country. The heavy odds are that you will lose. Simple. Should the Battle of Britain be commenorated? Absolutely.

Winners celebrate losers, well you know what I am getting at and those who forget history find an excuse to condemn the celebration.

[<k>]

And all the bleeding hearts crying about what happened and when seem to forget with time why and how things started.

It's hardly being a "bleeding heart" to regret the massive loss of life and suffering inflicted on all the nations involved.
It's right to recall the heroism that people were capable of in the War, but too often it seems to be vaunted as a mythical time of glamour and derring-do (understandably enough, since most of the current population in the West has never experienced war), so it's right too to discuss and remember all its various facets.

Why and how things started? Well, ultimately Britain and France declared war on Germany because of its invasion of Poland. There are those who argue that Hitler could have been stopped and defeated in 1938, before he acquired the Czechoslovak armaments industry, but apparently Chamberlain didn't want to present Hitler with an ultimatum at Munich! A pity, as force was the only thing Hitler understood. However, I don't blame Chamberlain for that: he took a position and went for it, without the benefit of foresight.

We have to remember that the Soviet Union was also an aggressor (against Poland), but also a victor at the end of the war. It kept its Polish spoils and went on to build a brutal empire of its own. Back in the 1970s, when I viewed the extent of Marxist influence in the UK in that awful decade, I often wished that we had just left Hitler to it so that the Nazis and the USSR could have slugged it out and exhausted each other, without dragging it out into a world war; there are lots of other factors to be considered there, of course.

From a broader viewpoint, I can regret that humanity was still so unevolved in the 20th century as to indulge in such a mass war, and not so long after "the war to end all wars". Of course, World War 2 turned out to be the world war to end all world wars - though we should not forget that in the 1960s we were 24 hours away from nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.

You can't fight a war as a comparatively 'nice' country. The heavy odds are that you will lose.

I'm well aware of that, and it's ironic that the more brutal of the participants had the initial advantage. War itself has its own internal logic of bitterness and escalation (I'd be bitter too if my friends and family were being killed), and as a Briton I wanted to show this from a non-national point of view. War has many facets, and one of them being that the population can be seen as the victims of states and politicians, and another that some populations suffer more than others.

I know of nobody in my family history who died or was wounded in WW2, but when I went on a school exchange to Germany in 1975 and commented on the fact that my exchange partner, Klaus, had no uncles, his mother told me with great bitterness that she'd had four brothers, all of whom were killed in the war. She wasn't bitter against the Allies, just against Hitler. She was a secretary and not an intellectual, so she put it as best she could when she commented bitterly that if politicians wanted to fight, why couldn't they just slug it out in the boxing ring and leave the population out of it? Of course, the Germans (though not a majority) voted for Hitler, and some say that he laid out his creed very openly in advance. To what extent the Germans, who were no more gifted with foresight than anyone else, actually believed he would carry it out is another matter. However, I consider them unlucky to have landed themselves with an individual who happened to be an absolute genius (though a perverted one) when it came to the manipulation of power and propaganda. But if we really want to go into the origins of the war, we'd have to go back to WW1 and Versailles, and then back to the Franco-Prussian war and even Napoleon, to follow the train of cause and effect.

Going back to your quote about not fighting war as a "nice" country, well, yes, war regrettably is a part of life and history. I suppose you could say, "Dog eat dog; nature red in tooth and claw". The irony is that that was precisely Hitler's belief, and believing that, he had no other logical option but to act as he did. In a wider sense, that war ultimately made the rest of us (in the West) that much safer, as the atom bomb truly did highlight the futility and destruction that modern technological world war brings you. And, of course, all our modern states and societies were forged in war, and those wars have made it safer than the days, not so many centuries ago, when to venture outdoors was to risk being killed by strangers (as is still the case in places like Papua New Guinea), or when the number of small unconsolidated states made war more or less inevitable.

During war we necessarily become brutal; afterwards we are embarrassed by that brutality. "Bomber" Harris of the RAF was never honoured by Britain after the war. Was the establishment embarrassed by the action it had itself sanctioned? Again, I don't blame Bomber Harris for his actions, as part of my post was to remind us that war polarises people and populations. He himself cheerfully said after the war that he could be regarded as a war criminal, and was quite happy to be regarded as such. War does have rules, of course, but these evolve, and in normal times all actions of war would be regarded as criminal, so in a sense the term "war criminal" becomes meaningless. War drives everyone mad, and I'm not in favour of convicting "war criminals", other than those at the very top who directed policy. Elsewhere on the forum I mentioned the father of a friend; that father was Ukrainian, fought with the Nazis in the SS Galician Division against Stalin, and settled in Britain after the war. He must surely have committed atrocities, but in peace-time he was a perfect citizen. He is dead now, but in any case I can't condemn his actions or will to survive.

And while I've pointed that I would not like to have endured war as a civilian, I will say the same about experiencing it as a combatant. And yes, while abhorring the brutality, I do admire the bravery shown by so many (on all sides), which I am sure I could never emulate in any circumstances. Having once begun the war, Britain needed to win it, and I'm truly grateful that we did, and to those who fought it, as there is no way I'd want to be living under Nazi rule, however it might have evolved.

Winners celebrate losers, well you know what I am getting at and those who forget history find an excuse to condemn the celebration.

I hope you don't mean me, as I haven't forgotten history: history is facts, but then there are varying interpretations of the facts - understandably in such a complex matter. Nor did I condemn the celebration. I simply asked, "Should we commemorate wars?", though I meant more specifically on coins. And I commented, "And yes, there was bravery, but there were also atrocities." I think there are more positive subjects to commemorate on coins, rather than a conflict of 60 years ago. This is not the same as encouraging people to forget: there are lots of reasons why we should not forget the bravery, the suffering, and the destruction. And also it's ultimately the reason why we are still free in Britain and the West.

In asking the question, "Should we commemorate wars?", I certainly started a debate, and the forum members here have all made thoughtful and valuable contributions highlighting different facets of a complex question.

Simple. Should the Battle of Britain be commemorated? Absolutely.

In a wider sense, yes. I join you in saluting the Few. One of my favourite British films is "The First of the Few", made during the war and somewhat romanticised in parts, but a fine film by any standards.

[Ukrainii Pyat]

E.M.U.; very well spoken, thank you.

Inasmuch as I would hope that mankind will not hence again desire to avenge the sins of the past, I rather believe from my world travels and conversations with people hither and tither that indeed war will visit upon us once the more.

Man is a primitive species in the act of warfare.  Not many other species of animals are so destructive of their own kind as man is.  We would like to believe that our intelligence renders us superior, but perhaps the jealousies made possible by it render us inferior instead.

I am somewhat uniquely situated herein in this discussion, in my family relations I can count losses on both sides of the conflict.  More closely on the Allied side, but some more distant cousins that were bombed out in Hamburg in July 1943.  I have family that perished in Western Europe, and Eastern Europe - at the hands of the Germans.  It would vex me though to find fault with the Germans, but not so the evil political system that they were thence under, coupled with the evil system in the USSR at the time that made it all possible.

One thing I can appreciate having lived in the ex-USSR is that the horrible memories of the War of 1941-5 are not quite so easily forgotten as in the west.  In downtown in early May there is large parade, still some hero soldiers of that war come, I am awed by the fact they survived something so horrible, yet also survived Stalinism.  It is not the same in America, people are largely forgetful of the wars. 

The Battle of Britain really was remarkable, had the RAF not held off the Luftwaffe, it would have been a matter of time before the fascists invaded Britain. But Hitler was an idiot, he was far from the military genius he placed himself, rather instead he continued the war with Britain and elected in early 1941 to invade the USSR.  He and his henchman couldn't take a bite at a time, rather they elected to end up choking by eating the whole flipping loaf and taking on everyone. 

[chrisild]

It is not the same in America, people are largely forgetful of the wars.

Ah, but then you have the Hitl---History Channel on TV.   As I wrote, in my opinion there is a difference between commemorating what happened between 1933 and 1945, writing and telling about it, and on the other hand "perpetuating" it. Fortunately we have had 65 years of peace in this part of the world, and I sincerely hope that WW2 was the last war we had here. But of course that also means it will forever be the "latest" one.

Christian

[Ukrainii Pyat]

Ah, but then you have the Hitl---History Channel on TV.  

Christian

All Hitler, all day.  All revisionist history, made for simple minded and short attention spanned people that want to be entertained, not educated.  The more gore the better.

[Gerhard Schön]

This is likely why it got listed as Great Britain KM#1161 and not Alderney.

In small print, halfway through the description I found this, "The coin, authorised by Alderney". Misleading I think, as it's far from clear that it is not a UK issue.