Hitler's British Isles Read online

By mid-afternoon, the islands were officially defenceless. With less than a day’s notice, the power that had protected them for almost a millennium had abandoned them.

  Along with instructions on evacuating children, the Jersey Evening Post had offered some advice to readers who were understandably alarmed by the ‘grave decision’ to demilitarise the islands. ‘We believe there to be no reason at all for panic,’ the paper had declared. ‘Keep calm, obey the regulations issued by the authorities and carry on, as far as it is possible, with one’s ordinary business.’

  It was easier said than done. The hurried evacuation of children had sent a message that the islands were no longer considered safe, and as the new day dawned many islanders were in the grip of barely disguised panic. The town hall in Jersey’s capital, St Helier, had been besieged since the early hours by long queues of tense, silent people hoping to register to leave as quickly as possible. Once they had the necessary permits, their next concern was securing sufficient funds for a new life in England. That morning there was a run on the banks as thousands of islanders attempted to draw out their savings, queuing for hours and facing terrifying, surging crowds – only to be told that withdrawals had been capped at £5 per person.

  At the harbours, the scenes were even more chaotic. Thousands of people were anxiously waiting behind barriers that blocked entry to the piers. Whole families sat together on the ground, their bags and belongings piled up around them as they sweltered in the blazing June sun.

  The rush to evacuate had left a trail of chaos. Once-prized vehicles were abandoned by the roadside as their owners raced to board the departing ships – in some cases stopping just long enough to press the keys into the hand of a lucky passer-by – and the hedgerows and ditches along the roads leading into the island capitals, St Helier and St Peter Port, were soon littered with discarded bicycles.

  Cats and dogs, meanwhile, were being put down in their thousands. When the vets’ supplies of euthanasia chemicals ran out, many owners resorted to killing their pets themselves. Others had the decision made for them. A Jewish couple who lived on Sark, Mr and Mrs Abrams, hopped on the first boat for England, leaving a pair of pet monkeys behind. Their housekeeper had agreed to look after the property while they were gone, but the exotic animals were a step too far for her, so she arranged for a neighbouring farmer to come and shoot them.

  In Jersey, roughly half the population – a total of twenty-three thousand people – had soon registered to leave. But evacuation on such a massive scale presented a number of problems beyond the basic logistical challenge of transporting them all. If too many people left, it might be impossible for those who stayed behind to keep the day-to-day life of the islands going. Equally, they would be placing a heavy burden on the British government. Taken together, the population of the Channel Islands was not far short of a hundred thousand people. That number of refugees pouring into Weymouth or Southampton was the last thing anyone needed at what was already a time of crisis.

  The island’s political leaders did their best to restore calm and attempt to stem the tide of evacuees. The bailiff of Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, addressed a large crowd in St Helier’s Royal Square, telling them that their only duty was not to panic. ‘I will never leave, and my wife will be at my side,’ he announced, promising that the rest of his government – the States of Jersey – would remain as well, and then leading his people in a rousing performance of the national anthem.

  Inside the parliament building, Edgar Dorey – the man who had been sent as an emissary to London a few days earlier – took a more confrontational stance, denouncing those who planned to evacuate as ‘rabbits and rats’. ‘I have been filled with disgust,’ he declared angrily, in a speech that was reproduced in the following day’s newspaper. ‘I would like this house to express its utter contempt for what these people are doing. It is the worst characteristic of human nature, cowardice!’

  In Guernsey, the attorney general, Ambrose Sherwill, was attempting to prevent a crisis at the harbour, where the long wait for boats was on the verge of spilling over into outright pandemonium. He had instructed the government secretary to hold onto a dozen rifles and bayonets that were supposed to have been shipped off to England, reasoning that if things got really chaotic he could arm the police with them. Since there were no bullets left he felt he was still obeying the spirit of his orders to demilitarise the island, and there was no need for anyone else to know that the guns weren’t loaded. The mere sight of them, he hoped, would be enough.

  Posters went up all over the islands, imploring those fleeing their homes to reconsider. ‘Keep your heads! Don’t be yellow!’ declared one. ‘Why go mad?’ asked another. ‘There’s no place like home. Cheer up!’ The moral force of the messages was somewhat undermined, however, when it became known that the man behind several of them had jumped on the next boat to England as soon as he finished putting them up.

  ‘Mad’ as the frantic rush to evacuate might have been, it was at least understandable for a population who had always considered themselves reassuringly cut off from international affairs. Although many islanders had served in the First World War, the islands themselves had remained a safe haven. In fact, only a few months earlier they had been promoted in Britain as the ideal wartime holiday resort. ‘Happily, our island is far removed from the theatre of war,’ the Jersey Tourism Committee had declared cheerfully. ‘The bays, with their eternal sands, sea and sunshine, together produce an atmosphere of peaceful tranquillity strangely different from the rest of the world.’

  In mid-June the islands were certainly at their most attractive – the long, sandy beaches glistening under cloudless skies – and for their inhabitants, many of them English retirees who had grown used to the old-fashioned, gentle pace of life they offered, it was hard to credit that they could soon become the site of modern warfare.

  And yet, that summer, the terror of the German war machine ran deep. The islanders had read and heard about the brutal blitzkrieg that had cut a swathe through Europe, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Only a week earlier, beleaguered French soldiers had been rescued from St Malo by a flotilla of little ships despatched from Jersey’s yacht club, stopping off in St Helier on their way to regroup in England. The sight of their bloodied bandages had made a strong impression on the locals. These were men who had gone up against the Germans and lost – they were lucky to have escaped with their lives.

  For those whose memories stretched back as far as the last war, there was the lingering memory of propaganda cartoons in which the ‘Hun’ was depicted as a ferocious beast, intent on raping women and murdering babies. The prospect of these animals arriving, and making the islands their home, scarcely bore thinking about.

  As the days wore on, the island authorities continued to do their best to provide reassurance, and gradually the initial panic gave way to uncertainty. Those who had long-established businesses or farms on the islands were loath to give them up for the life of a refugee. In time, thousands of men and women changed their minds about leaving. In Jersey, where Edgar Dorey’s furious speech had cast shame on a population gripped by fear, less a third of those who had registered for evacuation – around 6,600 people – ultimately went through with it. In Guernsey, where the official response was more muted, the number of evacuees was much higher, with seventeen thousand eventually leaving.

  Some islanders changed their minds at the last moment, getting as far as the harbour and then baulking at the state of the overcrowded vessels, many of which were normally used for transporting foodstuffs, or even coal, rather than passengers. Reports from those who had already made the journey were not encouraging. A letter written by one evacuated islander, and subsequently published in The Times, described a voyage on a troop ship, the Antwerp, in which two thousand people were crammed into a boat intended for seven hundred, chased by a German submarine across the Channel and then left on board in Weymouth for seventeen hours without food or water.

  A number of evacuees
had arrived in England only to realise that they had made a terrible mistake. After just a couple of days, one woman had convinced herself that she should never have left her husband behind in Guernsey. She managed to secure passage on the next boat back, but soon found that her beloved had also come to the same conclusion. By the time she arrived home he had already left the island intending to meet up with her in England. It would be five long years before the couple saw each other again.

  Others were torn between competing claims on their affections. In Guernsey, eighteen-year-old Ruth Leadbeater and her twin sister Mary had cheerfully waved their parents and younger sisters off, promising to join them on the mainland once they had finished packing up the family home. But a few days later, when they arrived at the harbour to board their own evacuation boat, the girls began to have second thoughts. With them were Ruth’s fiancé Cliff and Mary’s boyfriend Jack, both of whom were of military age and liable to be conscripted in England. The lads were no cowards, but they felt the war wasn’t really theirs to fight – and their families needed them on the island. Jack worked as a fisherman, bringing in the daily catch for his parents’ chip shop in the Bouet, just outside St Peter Port, while Cliff was a ‘grower’, tending the tomatoes in the family greenhouses.

  Since their boyfriends wouldn’t come to England with them, Ruth and Mary decided to stay in Guernsey. But with the German Army about to arrive on the doorstep, two young women keeping house together didn’t seem like the safest idea. Fortunately, Jack’s parents were able to help, offering the girls a pair of rooms above the chippie, where Mary was already working shifts.

  Ruth was thrilled. She might be staying in a poky box room, but at least she could still see her twin sister every day, plus Jack’s mother’s chips were widely considered the best on the island. She only hoped her parents would forgive her for breaking her promise to follow them to England.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ENSIGNS OF COMMAND

  On 21 June, a day after the last British soldiers left the Channel Islands, the lieutenant-governors set sail for home as well and the bailiffs were officially sworn in to replace them.

  In Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, the calm, unflappable lawyer who had held the island’s top office for five years, was undoubtedly the best man for the job, but in Guernsey the situation was more complicated. The elderly bailiff, Victor Carey, was little more than a placeholder, keeping the seat warm for a man twenty years his junior, Attorney General Ambrose Sherwill, while the latter acquired some much-needed political experience.

  Realising that Guernsey would need strong leadership to survive under occupation, the island’s civil servants and legislators established a ‘Controlling Committee’, replacing the laid-back, deliberate processes of the States with what was in effect a war cabinet with executive powers. The role of president was thrust onto a somewhat reluctant Sherwill. Carey would remain as the island’s symbolic figurehead, but the attorney general was really in charge.

  From the start, Sherwill viewed his new position as a poisoned chalice. In fact, he was struck with such a terrible headache that he could barely focus on the task of appointing the rest of the committee. Nonetheless, he threw himself into the role, doing everything he could to maintain order at an exceptionally volatile time.

  An early test of the new president’s abilities came on 23 June, a Sunday, when a group of doctors summoned him to an emergency meeting. They had been up since 4.30 that morning debating whether total evacuation of the island might in fact be necessary given the risks from starvation and the lack of medical supplies that could ensue under a lengthy occupation.

  During a lull in the debate, Sherwill’s own doctor privately asked him whether there was any way of getting his Jewish business partner off the island before the Germans arrived. After racking his brains for a moment, he devised an ingenious solution: the Jewish doctor would be sent on an official mission to the Home Office in London, where he would recommend total evacuation of the island. Sherwill knew full well that the British government would never agree to the policy, but his plan killed two birds with one stone – getting the Jewish man out of danger and keeping the anxious doctors at bay for a few days while they waited for the official refusal.

  With tensions running high, strong leadership was invaluable. This was never more clearly demonstrated than by the contrasting fates of the two smaller inhabited islands in the archipelago, Alderney and Sark, both of which fell under the umbrella of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

  Sark, a small island of about 1,000 acres, was old-fashioned even by the standards of its neighbours. Its benign climate supported a traditional rural community whose bucolic way of life had changed little in the past hundred years, with its dusty roads plied by horses and carts rather than cars. The island’s six-hundred-odd inhabitants were ruled, according to an ancient feudal system, by ‘the Dame’, Sybil Hathaway, an imperious woman who commanded instant respect among her people.

  That Sunday evening, after church, Dame Sybil addressed an uneasy gathering at the island hall, exhorting them to stay and face the challenges of the future together.

  ‘You, who are thinking of going away, where are you going?’ she asked. ‘You will be going to towns that will be bombed. No town in England will be safe.’ She could see the doubt on her people’s faces as they struggled to decide what to do. ‘I am not promising you that it will be easy,’ she told them. ‘We may be hungry but we will always have our cattle and crops, our gardens, a few pigs, our sheep and rabbits.’

  Warming to her subject, she told the crowd, ‘We are one big family and must live as such. Each must help the other.’ Then to rapturous applause she concluded, ‘Britain must win! Britain will win!’

  It was a command performance, and the result was hard to argue with. Although some of the island’s English-born residents chose to return to their homeland, not a single native Sarkese packed up and left.

  On Alderney, an island about twice the size of Sark and with a much more rugged, windswept aspect, the situation could not have been more different. Less than ten miles from the French coast, the men and women living there had an alarming view of the developments taking place on the Continent. They could see the fires blazing in Cherbourg, and taste the smoke from the burning oil installations.

  That Sunday morning, while the Dame of Sark was rehearsing her speech, virtually the entire population of Alderney evacuated to England. In a matter of hours, more than 1,500 men, women and children, including the head of the island, Judge Frederick French, departed, taking all the island’s money with them. Only nineteen stout souls decided to stay behind and take their chances.

  When news of the hold-outs reached Ambrose Sherwill, he was concerned. Nineteen people was not enough to form a viable, self-sustaining community, and if a German invasion saw Alderney cut off from the other islands in the Bailiwick there was every chance that they would simply be left to starve. Like it or not, they would have to be brought over to Guernsey. Sherwill despatched the coxswain of the Guernsey lifeboat, Fred Hobbs, with orders to fetch those who had chosen to remain, ‘by force if necessary’.

  Taking the attorney general at his word, Fred, a broad-shouldered man who had spent ten years as the island’s top lifeboatman, armed himself with a Colt revolver and set off on the twenty-mile voyage to the smaller island.

  When he arrived, he successfully persuaded seven of the inhabitants to return to Guernsey with him, among them the rector of the island and his wife. The others insisted on remaining, despite the revolver.

  A second attempt was made to remove them by members of the St John Ambulance. Unfortunately, caught in the grip of invasion hysteria, several terrified islanders mistook their smart, pseudo-military uniforms for those of the Wehrmacht and thought the Germans had already arrived. One woman locked herself and her children in the house and refused to come to the door, while at another home the volunteers were met with a shotgun pointed in their faces.

  Even those residents who were w
illing to talk could not always be budged. One very old man calmly explained that he had lived in his house for the better part of a century and he was not going to leave, whatever the consequences.

  In all, a dozen of the nineteen individuals who had skipped the evacuation boats were successfully brought over to Guernsey. The names of their die-hard neighbours were kept in a file in Sherwill’s office.

  It wasn’t just the human population of Alderney that the attorney general was concerned about. Four hundred cows had been left to their own devices since the departure of the farmers who owned them, along with almost two hundred pigs, twenty horses and innumerable domestic cats and dogs. Although the local butcher had managed to put to death much of the island’s canine population on the morning of the evacuation, some had evaded capture and were now wandering the streets in search of their owners, while many of the island’s cats, too wily to let themselves be caught, could now be seen mewling pathetically outside their shut-up homes.

  With no owners left to feed them, the pets that remained faced almost certain starvation. To Sherwill, a speedy death seemed like a far more humane option, and he soon despatched another party to Alderney to take care of the island’s remaining animals. A group of volunteer farmers and farm hands would round up the livestock and transport them to Guernsey, while a trio of experienced marksmen – one of whom had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his service in the First World War – shot dead as many domestic pets as they could lay their gunsights on.

  The new arrivals landed on the Tuesday morning, forty-eight hours after the island’s hasty evacuation. Now all but devoid of human residents, Alderney had a post-apocalyptic feel. Vehicles had been abandoned on the approach to the quay, and the front doors of houses swung open in the wind. Inside the deserted homes, half-packed suitcases spilled over with clothes, and uneaten meals were beginning to turn mouldy. Escaped cows were roaming the streets, their udders swollen after two days without being milked. When the farmers finally relieved them of their painful burden, they found the milk had thickened and soured.