{"id":22509,"date":"2018-01-24T20:50:59","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T19:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22509"},"modified":"2018-01-24T20:51:43","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T19:51:43","slug":"ever-heard-of-the-cockleshell-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22509","title":{"rendered":"Ever heard of the cockleshell heroes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1955, there was a British film called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0049083\/?ref_=nv_sr_1\">&#8220;The Cockleshell Heroes&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0which told the story of a daring British commando raid of 1942 when 10 men attempted to sink ships in the port of Bordeaux in German-occupied France.\u00a0Six ships were damaged as a result of the mission, but only two of the 10 commandos survived.<\/p>\n<p>I was seven at the time of the film&#8217;s release but I remember seeing it.\u00a0In the intervening 60 or so years, I&#8217;ve had no occasion to think much about Operation Frankton\u00a0&#8211; as it was called &#8211; but amazingly it came up in conversation today when I had lunch at a restaurant called &#8220;Tiles&#8221; in central London (sadly it is due to close down in a few days time).<\/p>\n<p>It turned out that the middle-aged French waitress Nicole was from near Bordeaux and has an elderly father back in France who is an active member of a British\/French society which commemorates the commando raid.<\/p>\n<p>You can read a fascinating article about the cockleshell heroes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/history\/world-war-two\/8090441\/Cockleshell-Heroes-the-truth-at-last.html\">here<\/a>\u00a0and you can find more detail on the operation <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Operation_Frankton\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1955, there was a British film called &#8220;The Cockleshell Heroes&#8221;\u00a0which told the story of a daring British commando raid of 1942 when 10 men attempted to sink ships in the port of Bordeaux in German-occupied France.\u00a0Six ships were damaged as a result of the mission, but only two of the 10 commandos survived. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22509"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22517,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22509\/revisions\/22517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}