5 Pounds - Elizabeth II End of World War I - Over The Top

Alderney was evacuated of its civilian population in June 1940 and subsequently occupied by German forces until May 1945 — making it the only British territory to suffer full wartime occupation with its residents absent. The island's own wartime experience gives these commemorative issues an awkward dimension that purely metropolitan British commemoratives lack.

"Over the Top" refers to the Western Front tactic of infantry advancing from trenches into No Man's Land, most catastrophically associated with the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, when British forces suffered approximately 57,470 casualties in a single day.