A version of this article was first published in the Essex County Standard on 4th August 2017. © Richard Kemp

I saw old-fashioned British patriotism in Colchester after watching the movie Dunkirk at the Odeon last week. Tommy, a young soldier played by Fionn Whitehead, read the last words of Churchill’s ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech, the credits rolled and the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Exactly the reaction you would have seen to the newsreel report of Dunkirk in a Colchester cinema in June 1940.

The applause was not for the film, but for the Dunkirk spirit of embattled British soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians pulling together in the face of the mind-numbing peril it so powerfully conveyed.

Unknown to most in the cinema, a former pupil at Colchester Royal Grammar School pervaded every moment of the film, though his only appearance was a single mention of the name: Ramsay.

Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay, at CRGS before joining the Royal Navy in 1898 aged 16, masterminded the Dunkirk evacuation and by doing so won the Second World War. Why?

In words Tommy reads out in the film, Churchill said to the Commons on 4 June 1940, the day Dunkirk ended: ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations’. But the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk — against all odds — was the turning point that paved the way to Allied victory over Nazi Germany five years later. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Mail, Tuesday 4 July 2017. © Richard Kemp

Over recent years successive governments, both Labour and Conservative, have indulged in a shameful betrayal of our armed forces.

The very people who risk their lives to protect our country’s interests have been subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution, dressed up as legal investigation into abuses.

Disgracefully, the politicians have not only sanctioned this continual harassment but even encouraged it through vast legal aid subsidies and compensation payments.

Almost all the allegations of maltreatment brought against British troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned out to be baseless.

But the reluctance of the Government to combat vigorously this stream of empty charges has created its own cycle of exploitation by ‘tank-chasing’ lawyers and their clients.

In Iraq alone, the Ministry of Defence forked out £20 million to more than 300 claimants to avoid court hearings, even though it spent more than £100 million on legal fees.

This week, a whistleblower who worked for the law firm Leigh Day — at the forefront of pursuing allegations of abuse by British military personnel in Iraq — alleged that many of these settled claims were not merely exaggerated: they were utterly fraudulent.

According to this person, a favourite lawyers’ ruse was to persuade clients to alter their stories about detention, pretending they had been held by the British even if they had been taken by the Americans. Continue reading →

Article published by Breitbart, 16 June 2017

by Richard Kemp and Rafael Bardaji

On 25 January 2015, a bus driver was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist who also injured several passengers before he was subdued by Israeli police; on 6 March, this time in Jerusalem, another terrorist drove his car into a group of people at a light railway stop, injuring 7 before being arrested by police officers.
A forthcoming report by the High Level Home Front Group shows that between 13 September 2015 and 25 July 2016 there were 157 stabbing attacks and 46 vehicle ramming attacks, with dozen of deaths and hundreds of injured people in Israel. Despite this incessant carnage, the West didn’t pay too much attention.

Our perception was more attuned to car-bombings and suicide terrorists, so this kind of low-level violence was not really considered terrorism – a mistake, to our own peril, as we know now.

Newscasts and public attention in Europe tended to focus on large-scale terrorist attacks, as in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Paris in January and November 2015, or Brussels in March 2016.

Yet the pattern of a new kind of Islamist terror was also brewing on our soil: in May 2010 in London, a British MP was stabbed and seriously wounded by a female who had been inspired by Al Qaida; in May 2013 two men who described themselves as ‘soldiers of Allah’ rammed their car into an off-duty soldier also in London and then cut him up with knives and a meat cleaver; in December 2014, a man with a knife, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, attacked several police officers at a police station in Tours, France; in 2015 there were at least two stabbing attacks in France and in January 2016 the first ramming attack using a car against soldiers took place.

The first attack using a truck happened in Nice during the celebrations for 14 July.

This non-traditional small-scale terrorism was not limited to the UK and France, striking other European nations too. In Hanover, Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Express, 5 June 2017.  © Richard Kemp

TODAY we face the most serious threat to Britain since the Germans bombarded our cities with V1 and V2 missiles in 1944.

Eight Islamic terrorist plots have targeted this country since the end of March – more than one a week.

Five were disrupted by the security services but the three that got through have left dozens dead or with life-changing wounds.

We must confront this violent challenge to our way of life with the same defiance as our fathers met Nazi aggression.

This was the spirit of the police who shot dead three terrorists within eight minutes of the attack unfolding at London Bridge.

It was also the spirit of ordinary citizens who ran at the terrorists, hurling missiles at them to save their fellow Londoners.

It is the fighting spirit that we must all adopt, not candles, illuminations, teddy bears and group hugs.

The gloves must come off and we need to hold the Prime Minister to her strong words on Sunday that ‘enough is enough’.

When intelligence confirms that non-British citizens in this country are involved in extremism, they must be deported.

The threat these enemies pose to the lives of our people morally outweighs any risk to their own human rights.

British citizens who are involved and can’t be deprived of citizenship and deported or convicted in court should be interned.

One of the greatest dangers is from people from this country who have fought with the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere.

They have been bloodied in battle and involved in mass murder, torture and rape.

That makes it easy for them to kill again and they are trained, motivated and under orders to attack. Continue reading →

Article published in The Daily Mail, Monday 8 May 2017.

Part two of RICHARD KEMP and JOHN WEIGOLD’s account of how the Nazis turned Alderney into a secret base to fire V1 missiles with chemical warheads at Britain’s south coast. Here, they reveal how tens of thousands of slave workers died to fulfil Hitler’s evil plan.

The inmates of the slave labour camp lived their pitiful and short lives in constant fear.

One who against the odds survived recalled being marched to work and a fellow prisoner falling to his knees, unable to walk further.

‘The Germans shot him right there,’ he said. ‘Another man was crucified for stealing, hung by his hands. When I got up in the mornings I saw dead bodies in the bunks around me. Sometimes their lips, nose and ears had been eaten by rats.

‘There was a special hut where the corpses were piled. Later, they were taken away, loaded onto trucks and dumped in the sea.

‘We were fed just water with a few bits of turnip floating in it, so life was a constant struggle for food. I found a rubbish heap near to the construction site where I worked and was filling a bag with vegetable peelings and cabbage leaves when someone set a dog on me.

‘It attacked again and again, tearing all my clothing. When it let go, I was beaten with a stick by a German. I was very weak at the time. There were about 500 men in my camp, and at least 300 died while I was there.’

In all its gruesome detail, this recollection of the struggle to survive under the Nazis makes the blood run cold. What is even more chilling, though, is that the camp was not in some far-flung corner of the Third Reich. Continue reading →

How the Nazis murdered 40,000 people in Channel Island concentration camps – and planned to blitz the South Coast with chemical weapons

Article published in The Daily Mail, Saturday 6 May 2017. © Richard Kemp and John Weigold

On a spring afternoon, the grassy headland is bursting with a joy that lifts the soul. Sunshine, blue sea and sky; splashes of golden gorse catch the light and bluebells sway in the breeze; larks float on air currents while gannets in their thousands swoop and screech on a rocky island below.

This is the southern tip of Alderney, smallest of the three main Channel Islands. Across the water, Guernsey, Sark and Jersey glisten. It has to be one of the most beautiful, tranquil and inspiring sights in the whole of Britain.

But close your eyes, take your mind back 75 years . . . and this idyll is a scene of sheer horror.

We are standing on the remains of a massive World War II gun emplacement — a German gun. To the left, a small valley leads down to the cliff top.

All those years ago it was known as the Valley of Death because down it were herded unknown numbers of slave workers, too exhausted to be of use any longer to their Nazi masters, to be thrown to their death on the rocks and swept away by the sea.

Behind us, lost in the undergrowth, are the chilling remains of a concentration camp, run by the SS as ruthlessly and inhumanely as any of its counterparts in the Third Reich, where men were whipped, bludgeoned, starved, hanged, shot, even crucified.

You have to pinch yourself to remember that this is British soil.

Unspeakable atrocities — which we will spell out in detail later — took place here. Not in distant territories on the other side of Europe, but just 60 miles from the coast of England, on an island that is British through and through and has owed its allegiance to the Crown since 1066.

That tiny Alderney — less than four miles long and a mile-and-a-half wide — was the site of slave labour camps during the war has been recognised for decades. But the scale of the operation and the number of deaths there have always been played down. After years of research, we are now in a position to reveal the grimmest truths. Continue reading →