Hitler's British Isles Read online

  For Nuala

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Introduction: Cut Off from the Main

  1. Rabbits and Rats

  2. The Ensigns of Command

  3. A Bolt from the Blue

  4. Surrender

  5. First Impressions

  6. The Spoils of War

  7. Under Cover

  8. Trouble at the Top

  9. Frenemies

  10. The Show Must Go On

  11. Amnesty

  12. The Honeymoon Is Over

  13. Making Do

  14. Troublemakers

  15. Caught Red-Handed

  16. A New Arrival

  17. ‘Subhumans’

  18. Murder in Paradise

  19. No News Is Bad News

  20. Sent Packing

  21. Unhappy Campers

  22. Cruel and Unusual

  23. Resistance

  24. Summer in Sark

  25. Running Low

  26. A Glimmer of Hope

  27. A New Front

  28. Overtures

  29. Starvation

  30. The Tables Are Turned

  31. Mutiny

  32. Liberation

  33. Ever After

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  CUT OFF FROM THE MAIN

  WHITEHALL

  Wednesday 19 June 1940

  ‘Repugnant!’

  The prime minister spat out the word, glowering at the small group of men seated around him. Give up British territory to the enemy without a fight? It was unthinkable.

  After just over a month in the top job, Churchill had grown accustomed to fierce arguments with the members of his war cabinet. Only three weeks earlier, he had seen off an attempt by his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to open peace negotiations with Germany using Mussolini as an intermediary. Then, a combination of dogged determination, inspired oratory and wily political manoeuvring – the PM had summoned an impromptu meeting of his entire, twenty-five-man cabinet to provide a more responsive audience for a typically barnstorming speech – had carried the day.

  This time it was the Chiefs of Staff who had brought Churchill a distinctly unappealing proposal. With the German Army now occupying the coast of France, the time had come, they believed, to withdraw their forces from the Channel Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Normandy that was home to more than ninety thousand British subjects. The islands were, they concluded, ‘not of major strategic importance’, and defending them was more trouble than it was worth.

  Churchill was horrified. The Channel Islands had been dependencies of the Crown for the better part of a thousand years. Whatever their strategic value – or lack of it – as far as he was concerned, holding onto them was a matter of principle. After all, wasn’t he the man who had promised to fight on the beaches and never surrender? The prospect of German jackboots falling on British soil – and without a single shot being fired – hardly chimed with that impassioned pledge.

  Before becoming prime minister, Churchill had spent five years as First Lord of the Admiralty. Surely, he declared, the Royal Navy ought to be able to defend the islands from the enemy. ‘If there is a chance of offering a successful resistance,’ he argued, ‘we ought not to avoid giving him battle there.’

  But the response from the vice-chief of Naval Staff was not encouraging. The islands were too far away from the British mainland, and too near to enemy bases at Brest and Cherbourg, for naval forces to adequately protect them, he explained. Added to which, the necessary material simply wasn’t available – if anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft were deployed to the islands in the numbers required, it would leave the coast of England vulnerable to attack. To put it bluntly, the Channel Islands could only be defended at grave risk to the security of the mainland.

  Put that way, there was really no choice. Whether the islands were expendable or not was no longer the issue. They simply weren’t worth losing the war over.

  That summer, losing the war was looking like a very real possibility. The blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, unleashed on France, Belgium and the Low Countries had more than lived up to its name. In six blistering weeks, the Wehrmacht had swept through Europe, bringing nation after nation to its knees. Only two days before the war cabinet meeting on the Channel Islands, France had joined Belgium, Holland and Denmark in requesting an armistice, well aware that this would mean long-term occupation by the Germans.

  With every one of her former allies now under the Nazi yoke, Britain alone remained in the fight against Germany – and the odds were not in her favour. She had an army less than a third the size of the enemy’s, and a population only half as large from which to draw new recruits. There was no doubt that an invasion of Britain was already in Hitler’s sights, and short of outright surrender, there seemed little chance of avoiding it.

  Since the British Expeditionary Force’s scramble to safety from the beaches of Dunkirk a fortnight earlier, the British public had caught their first glimpse of what a German invasion might mean. In the wake of the exhausted, demoralised and bedraggled soldiers who stepped off the little ships came a stream of pitiful refugees – tens of thousands of ordinary civilians whose homes had been overrun by the German Army, and whose lives had already been destroyed thanks to the apparently invincible war machine. Many of those who saw them couldn’t help wondering if the wretched state of the new arrivals was a premonition of what was to come when the Germans finally landed on their own soil.

  On both sides, preparations for the expected invasion were beginning to get underway. The German Army, Navy and Air Force had been discussing possible strategies since the previous December. Now, following the fall of France, the German High Command began to draw up more definite plans, under the code name Operation Sea Lion. ‘I have decided to prepare for an invasion,’ Hitler wrote in his Directive No. 16, ‘intended to eliminate England as a base for carrying on the war against Germany and, should it be required, completely to occupy it.’ Once the RA F had been pummelled into submission by the Luftwaffe, the plan was for over a quarter of a million men to be landed in a matter of days – enough to seize the country for the Führer, and put an end to the war once and for all.

  In Britain, ordinary people were readying themselves for the expected onslaught. Almost half a million men aged from seventeen to sixty-five had already enrolled as Local Defence Volunteers (not yet rebranded as the Home Guard) and were practising making Molotov cocktails to hurl at German tanks. Up and down the country, temporary roadblocks had been prepared using tree trunks, abandoned cars and carts full of builder’s rubble, and fields where enemy aircraft might land had been peppered with obstacles too. The Petroleum Warfare Department was looking into ways of repelling an enemy fleet by setting the sea itself on fire.

  The day before the war cabinet meeting on the Channel Islands, Churchill had told the British people to prepare themselves to face ‘the whole fury and might of the enemy’, and to brace themselves for a battle that would be remembered for a millennium as the nation’s finest hour. As the prime minister delivered his speech in Parliament, government printing presses were rattling off 1.5 million copies of a leaflet entitled ‘If the Invader Comes’, to be distributed up and down the country over the next few days. ‘Think always of your country before you think of yourself,’ it declared firmly.

  Privately, many civilians were starting to wonder how they would cope if the Germans came knocking on their door. Some resolved to commit suicide, ideally taking a few of the invaders down with them – a wealthy lady in Buckinghamshire planned to invite a group of officers in for champagne laced with weed killer. Others felt they
could do their bit by depriving them of valuable supplies. The government had advised homeowners to hide maps, bicycles, petrol, even food. At a Dorset branch of the Women’s Institute, there was a spirited debate about how to prevent their large stock of home-made jam from falling into enemy hands. Some members felt that every jar should be smashed to smithereens, others that merely hiding them under the floorboards was sufficient.

  The government leaflet didn’t mention the possibility of long-term occupation, but many of those who read it must have had that thought at the back of their minds. They had seen the nations of Europe collapse one by one under the weight of the German advance, and the result in every case had been the same. For all Churchill’s impassioned rhetoric, there was no guarantee that the great fight to repel the invaders would succeed. And assuming it failed, what then? What would a German occupation of Britain look like?

  Of course, they – and we – never had to find out. Three months later, in September 1940, after the Luftwaffe unexpectedly failed to cripple the RAF in the Battle of Britain, Hitler reluctantly shelved Operation Sea Lion. A German invasion, and occupation, was no longer on the cards.

  But for more than seventy-five years, the spectre of what might have been has haunted us: there, but for the grace of God, went we. Our collective nightmares have been realised in a variety of chillingly realistic fictions, beginning with the 1942 propaganda movie Went the Day Well?, in which a platoon of disguised German paratroopers take over a small English village. The prospect of a Britain under occupation has proved irresistibly fascinating in novels such as Len Deighton’s SSGB (in which the Germans successfully invaded) and C. J. Sampson’s Dominion (in which the British, under Prime Minister Halifax, surrendered), in films including It Happened Here and Resistance, and in Noël Coward’s 1946 play Peace in Our Time.

  These counterfactual occupations continue to fascinate audiences today, even those who were not alive during the war itself and thus have never known first-hand the dreadful tension of that summer in 1940, when fate could easily have taken us in a different direction. In 2015, Amazon Studios’ adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, set in a distinctly disunited states carved up between German and Japanese occupiers, scored the highest viewing figures of any original series on their streaming service.

  These fictions allow us to ask what might have been had the pendulum of history swung against us. How would those plucky men and women who endured the blitz have fared under German occupation? Would we have suffered the same brutality and humiliations as were heaped on the citizens of Europe? What kind of accommodation would we have come to in order to survive, and what efforts would we have made to push back?

  Except here there is no need for fiction – because for five years during the Second World War, almost seventy thousand British subjects faced just such an existence. The only English-speaking people to feel the full force of the German yoke, the Channel Islanders’ experiences show us what so nearly came to pass for the rest of Britain. Their stories – of resilience, of desperation, of a complex mixture of compromise and defiance – offer a glimpse into our own alternate history.

  For too long, the Occupation of the Channel Islands has been treated as little more than a historical footnote. But for anyone willing to scratch the surface and look beneath the Churchillian rhetoric that has encouraged us to believe that Britain’s victory in the Second World War was a matter of destiny, these stories are far more important than that. The Occupation represents a crucial, if neglected, facet of the history of the war, and one that deserves serious, and measured, consideration.

  ‘Repugnant’ it might have been, but the decision was ultimately taken, around a table in Whitehall, on that warm summer’s day in 1940. For once, the famously pugnacious prime minister found himself exercising the better part of valour. On Churchill’s orders, the two thousand-odd British troops stationed in the Channel Islands were instructed to evacuate as soon as possible, clearing the way for the Germans to walk in and seize them without facing any military resistance.

  The same day the war cabinet reached its decision, an envoy was despatched to take the news to those who would have to live with the consequences. The bailiffs (presiding officers) of the legislatures of the two largest Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey – the latter was part of a ‘Bailiwick’ containing the smaller islands of Sark, Herm and Alderney as well – had been begging Whitehall for a decision for days. Now that it had been made, the response was swift.

  Edgar Dorey, a jurat (elected lay judge and legislator) in the Royal Courts of Jersey who had been sent to London to sound out the government position, returned to the islands bearing a letter from Sir Alexander Maxwell, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office. In it, Maxwell explained that since demilitarisation of the islands would mean the recall of their lieutenant-governors – the official representatives of the British Crown, and their de facto heads of state – the bailiffs would be expected to formally take their place. The islands’ ancient system of government was effectively being rescinded.

  The Jersey bailiff Alexander Coutanche, an accomplished lawyer with a good grasp of constitutional niceties, called Maxwell in London to protest at a flaw in the plan. ‘I’m quite prepared to take the oath of lieutenant-governor,’ he explained, ‘but I cannot promise before God in the Royal Court that I will defend the island against all incursions of the enemy when I shall have in my pocket your order to surrender everything to the Germans as soon as they put their noses in.’

  By this point, however, Maxwell had bigger fish to fry. ‘Cut out anything that seems to you, in your special position, to be wrong,’ he told Coutanche. The exact terms of the oath were of little interest to him now. In a matter of days, the Channel Islands would no longer be his government’s concern.

  The message from London was clear: from now on, the islanders were on their own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  RABBITS AND RATS

  On the ground, the war cabinet’s decision didn’t go down well. Later that day, the Channel Islanders picked up their evening papers to find some alarming headlines splashed across the front pages. ‘EVACUATION,’ boomed the Star in Guernsey. ‘ALL CHILDREN TO BE SENT TO MAINLAND TOMORROW. WHOLE BAILIWICK TO BE DEMILITARISED.’

  The rival Guernsey Evening Press was a little more measured. ‘Arrangements are being made for the evacuation of (1) children of school age and (2) children under school age to reception centres in the United Kingdom,’ the paper announced, adding – in bold type – the words, ‘if parents desire it’.

  That ‘if’ represented a terrible dilemma. Across the islands, mothers and fathers wrestled with their consciences, trying to decide what was best for their children. Should they send them away across the sea to England, a country many had never even visited before and where they would have to rely on the kindness of strangers? Or keep their families united and face the arrival of the Germans together, along with whatever horrors they might bring?

  There was little time to make up their minds. In Guernsey the first boats were scheduled to arrive at 2.30 the following morning. Ambrose Sherwill, the island’s attorney general, had persuaded the Home Office to delay boarding until 6 a.m. so that the children could at least get a good night’s sleep before the voyage, but even so the registration process had to be well underway within hours of the announcement being published. The thousands of parents who were suddenly faced with the most fateful decision of their lives would need to think quickly.

  That evening, registration centres sprang up in every island parish. Volunteers worked into the night gathering the names of children, their mothers (those whose offspring were under school age were entitled to accompany them), and young men who planned to sign up for the forces on arrival in Britain.

  By 5 a.m. almost two thousand children had already arrived at the White Rock, as Guernsey’s main harbour was known. Every one of them was equipped with some spare clothes, a ration book, a gas mask, and some sandwiches to
eat on the journey, hurriedly prepared by a small army of volunteers in the kitchens of the nearby Royal Hotel.

  Hasty, tearful goodbyes were whispered in the dead of night, as the young passengers were handed over to the care of teachers and guardians. In the interests of public safety, parents were not allowed to approach the harbour themselves, so they were at least spared the sight of their little ones piling onto the boats and disappearing off to sea.

  It had been a difficult, restless night, with plenty of tossing and turning for those already beginning to doubt their decisions. When one Guernsey couple, Alfred and Eunice Mahy, went to wake their nine-year-old daughter Lucille for the journey to England, they found they simply couldn’t go through with it. ‘What are we doing?’ Alfred whispered, as they stood over the sleeping girl’s bed. She had never spent so much as a night away from them before.

  In the end, Lucille’s parents left her to slumber until morning, and the boat carrying her classmates sailed without her. But she was far from the only child left behind on the islands. Many other mothers and fathers found it equally impossible to send their children off alone into the unknown.

  That morning, as the young evacuees continued to file onto the waiting ships, the last of the military personnel stationed in the islands departed as well. At 8 a.m. the SS Biarritz left Guernsey, carrying a thousand troops. Some of the soldiers fled in such a rush that they left half-eaten plates of food strewn around their base in Castle Cornet. Around the same time, their counterparts in Jersey departed on the SS Malines.

  That left only the islands’ volunteer part-time soldiers. The Guernsey Militia had already been disbanded, but now their weapons and equipment were shipped off to England along with the departing troops of the regular army. At the same time, the two hundred-odd members of the Jersey Militia departed en masse to join the Hampshire Regiment, setting sail on the only boat available at such short notice, a potato-export vessel called the Hodder.