Gerry van Tonder – författare

Mention of this Derbyshire market town’s name invariably conjures up an image of an iconic landmark: the crooked church steeple. However, it also speaks of a military heritage built up over two millenia. The word chester itself is derived from the ancient Roman fort or castrum – military garrisons that peppered the English countryside during Roman Britain.In 1266, at the Battle of Chesterfield, royal forces quashed a rebellion of local barons. Come the English Civil War 400 years later, anti-Royalist sentiment was again evident. Chesterfield deployed militia, together with a ‘company of foot’ from Derby, to defend the town from the king’s forces.In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, global conflicts attracted volunteers from throughout the Borough of Chesterfield. Egypt, South Africa and the Western Front became household names. In the Second World War, Chesterfield’s citizens, serving with battalions of the Sherwood Foresters, saw action in theatres across the world. So also came tales of acts of courage and bravery: names like Fred Greaves, Bernard Vann and Victor Robinson, alongside many others.

When the world held its breath It is 25 years since the end of the Cold War, now a generation old. It began over 75 years ago, in 1944 long before the last shots of the Second World War had echoed across the wastelands of Eastern Europe with the brutal Greek Civil War. The battle lines are no longer drawn, but they linger on, unwittingly or not, in conflict zones such as Iraq, Somalia and Ukraine. In an era of mass-produced AK-47s and ICBMs, one such flashpoint was Malaya By the time of the 1942 Japanese occupation of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had already been fomenting merdeka independence from Britain. The Japanese conquerors, however, were also the loathsome enemies of the MCP s ideological brothers in China. An alliance of convenience with the British was the outcome. Britain armed and trained the MCP s military wing, the Malayan People s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), to essentially wage jungle guerrilla warfare against Japanese occupying forces.With the cessation of hostilities, anti-Japanese became anti-British, and, using the same weapons and training fortuitously provided by the British army during the war, the MCP launched a guerrilla war of insurgency.Malaya was of significant strategic and economic importance to Britain. In the face of an emerging communist regime in China, a British presence in Southeast Asia was imperative. Equally, rubber and tin, largely produced in Malaya by British expatriates, were important inputs for British industry. Typically, the insurgents, dubbed Communist Terrorists, or simply CTs, went about attacking soft targets in remote areas: the rubber plantations and tin mines. In conjunction with this, was the implementation of Mao s dictate of subverting the rural, largely peasant, population to the cause. Twelve years of counter-insurgency operations ensued, as a wide range of British forces were joined in the conflict by ground, air and sea units from Australia, New Zealand, Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Fiji and Nyasaland.

In October 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services described the Irgun Tsvai Leumi - National Military Organization - as 'an underground, quasi-military organization with headquarters in Palestine ... fanatical Zionists who wish to convert Palestine and Transjordan into an independent Jewish state ... advocate the use of force both against the Arabs and the British to achieve this maximal political goal'.In 1925, Ze'ev Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist Zionism organization, whose secular, right-wing ideology would lead to the formation of the Irgun and, ultimately, of the Likud Party. Commencing operations in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1931, Irgun adopted a mainly guarding role, while facilitating the ongoing immigration of Jews into Palestine. In 1936, Irgun guerrillas started attacking Arab targets. The British White Paper of 1939 rejected the establishment of a Jewish nation, and as a direct consequence, Irgun guerrillas started targeting the British.The authorities executed captured Irgun operatives found guilty of terrorism, while deporting hundreds to internment camps overseas. As details of Jewish genocide - the Holocaust - emerged, Irgun declared war on the British in Palestine. Acts of infrastructural sabotage gave way to the bombing of buildings and police stations, the worst being the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem - the hub of British operations and administration - in July 1946, killing ninety-one. Freedom fighters or terrorists - Irgun was only dissolved when the independent Jewish state of Israel was born on 14 May 1948\. This is their story.

In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing 4 million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set up in Riga (northern), Mogilev (middle) and Kiev (southern), each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos.Communist and Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people-listed as 'Jews' or 'mostly Jews'-in Latvia and Lithuania in the early stages of the operation. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, there is a comment, '50,000 executions i?1/2foreseeni?1/2 in Kiev'. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jager, reported killing 138,272 (48,252 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children).The Einsatzgruppen were death squads-their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews.

In his first four volumes on the Korean War, the author traces the war's progress from the North Korean invasion of June 1950, the desperate American defence of the Pusan Perimeter, General Douglas MacArthur's daring and highly successful amphibious offensive at Inch'?n, and his subsequent advance across the 38th Parallel to the Yalu River on the Chinese Manchurian borderCommunist Chinese forces, that have been secretly infiltrating North Korean territory by slipping across the Yalu from mid-October 1950, ambush a South Korean regiment in the mountains of central North Korea. This is the first of several Chinese victories over unsuspecting and overstretched South Korean and American units in the winter of 1950/1.On 27 November 1950, Chinese leader Mao Zedong, ostensibly fearful of the consequences of hostile American forces on his country's border along the Yalu River, orders 250,000 troops into Korea, with express orders to annihilate the UN forces. In the western half of the theatre, US General Walton H. Walker's Eighth Army front along the Ch'?ngch'?n axis is breached, while to the east, the US X Corps suffers a series of crushing defeats, including at the Chosin Reservoir, precipitating a massive evacuation from the North Korean port of Hungnam.

As of October 1950, a quarter of a million Communist Chinese troops, in twenty-seven divisions, had poured across the Yalu River into North Korea, with the singular objective of forcing General Douglas MacArthur's United Nations troops back across the 38th Parallel and into the Sea of Japan.Shortly before midnight on 22 April 1951, to the west of the US Eighth Army's defensive front, the Chinese Sixty-third Army fell on the British 29th Brigade. On the left flank, the 1st Battalion, Gloucester Regiment ( Glosters') held a tenuous position at a ford on the Imjin River. Despite a gallant defence, the battalion was pushed back to make a desperate but futile stand on Hill 235\. On what became known as Glosters' Hill', the battalion ceased to exist. It was subsequently estimated that the attacking force of 27,000 Chinese troops suffered 10,000 casualties, forcing the Chinese army to be withdrawn from the front.From August 1951 to the summer of 1952, the USAF conducted Operation Strangle in a futile and costly attempt to disrupt Chinese supply routes. In the last two years of fighting, Communist Chinese and UN forces faced each other from well-entrenched positions in hilly terrain, where mapped hill numbers were contested. From June 1952 to March 1953, a series of five hard-fought engagements took place in central Korea as the antagonists sought ownership of Hill 266, commonly referred to as Old Baldy'. This was followed during April-July 1953 by two tactically pointless battles over Pork Chop Hill, in which the UN forces won the first battle and the Chinese the second, with both sides sustaining major casualties. On 27 July 1953, the two belligerents signed an armistice agreement, implementing a ceasefire that stands to this day. De facto, the Korean War has never ended.