PillBlogs: Invasion 70

I've finally launched Invasion 70, a feature that displays 'on this day' extracts from unit war diaries 70 years on. Today being 16 May, I had actually hoped to have launched on 10 May, but computer problems set me back a week.

Invasion 70 comprises selected war diary entries 70 years ago to the day and will hopefully give an idea as to how the invasion threat was being met across front-line East Sussex. I haven't yet decided on an end date, but it may be in October/November when the season was too late for invasion to take place before Spring 1941.

Fortunately, most of the diary extracts have already been transcribed until July 1940; this was done back in 2006 and was actually the first database I compiled for what later became the Defence of East Sussex Project. This database was absorbed into my main archive database and so I decided to put some of this data to work.

Extracts are pretty much verbatim; unfortunately they include many abbreviations and military jargon that I have no easy way of providing a glossary just yet. As I'm not sure how standardised such terms are and how consistent I was in entering them all those years ago, I would need to go through the whole lot to check, and I don't have the time to do that at the moment! Once I have done this though, I can simply set Pillboxopedia on the case.

Each day will have at least one extract, the first of which will be displayed on the homepage; the full day's extracts (and all of those released thus far can be accessed from Invasion 70.

- Pete

Hibbs, Peter PillBlogs: Invasion 70 (2010) Available at: http://www.pillbox.org.uk/pillblogs/detail.asp?ID=286 Accessed: 08 September 2010