Hitler's British Isles Read online

  Other animals had been even less fortunate. A number of calves were found dead in the fields – those which had survived were soon put to death by the sharpshooters anyway, since it was only their milk-producing mothers that were worth the trouble of exporting – and the body of a horse was discovered sprawled across the road. It had apparently broken its neck attempting to jump a gate and escape from its field.

  Over the next three days, the party of Guernseymen rounded up as many of the farm animals as they could and loaded them onto the waiting boats, before setting sail for home. All, that is, apart from one. As the last boat was readied for departure, one of the marksmen, Alf Martel, decided that he would rather stay behind. ‘I’ll be the king of Alderney!’ he laughed, insisting that the rest of the party go without him.

  A few days later, Alf’s brothers from Guernsey arrived to bring him home. They found him passed out on a huge bed in one of the island’s smartest hotels, surrounded by empty whisky bottles.

  The evacuation of the islands had seen many people forced to shoulder unexpected responsibilities – not just those at the very top of the political ladder. Bob Le Sueur, a pimply nineteen-year-old office boy at the Jersey sub-office of the General Accident insurance company, was planning to travel to England and volunteer for the Royal Army Medical Corps. The day after the evacuation notice went in the paper, he cycled to the town hall on his way into work, hoping to register for a boat leaving as soon as possible and then head to the office to ask his boss, Mr Barnes, for permission to quit.

  Bob arrived at the town hall to find a huge queue snaking round the block. It would hardly help his case with his employer if he turned up for work several hours late, so he pedalled off in the direction of the office, resolving to return later in the day. But when he arrived at General Accident, Mr Barnes was nowhere to be seen – and nor were the rest of the company’s employees. Other than Bob, the only person who had turned up for work that day was a secretary called Phyllis – and the office was already packed with customers anxious to insure high-value items before they made the journey to England. The phones were ringing off the hook, and Phyllis was frantically struggling to take down all the messages.

  One by one, Bob began working his way through the waiting customers, patiently explaining that although he could sell them a policy it would only be valid on a licensed passenger vessel, and even then specifically excluded war risk. If their precious belongings sank to the bottom of the Channel there wasn’t much anyone could do for them.

  As the day wore on, though, the office only got busier, as more and more islanders, having secured their evacuation permits, arrived in search of insurance. Still there was no sign of the rest of the staff. It looked like they all must have already made for the mainland, leaving Bob and Phyllis to face the anxious hordes alone.

  Bob spent the rest of the week dealing with enquiries from customers, and still there was no sign of any of his former colleagues. On Monday morning, he decided to contact the branch manager in Southampton, Eric Thorpe, an imposing man with a walrus moustache who was known, thanks to his First World War service, as ‘the colonel’.

  ‘Are you drunk, boy?’ Thorpe bellowed when Bob told him that the islands had been demilitarised. ‘You expect me to believe that the government would abandon British territory without a single shot being fired?’ Clearly news of the evacuation had not yet reached home shores. ‘Put Mr Barnes on the line at once!’ the colonel demanded angrily.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I haven’t seen Mr Barnes since Wednesday,’ Bob replied. ‘I think he must have taken one of the boats for England.’

  The colonel sounded far from convinced, but he promised Bob to send Mr Barnes straight back again if he dared to turn up in Southampton. ‘You hold the fort until he gets back,’ he commanded brusquely.

  Bob still hadn’t entirely given up hope of leaving Jersey himself, so he booked himself onto the mailboat leaving for England a week later, reasoning that if the colonel was true to his word, there would be plenty of time for him to fill Mr Barnes in before he set sail. After two days in charge of the busy office, he was feeling distinctly stressed, and although the initial panic of evacuation had passed, Jersey remained under a cloud of anxious anticipation. Several times, German reconnaissance planes, with their distinctive black crosses under the wings, had been spotted flying over the islands. Bob had watched them without too much concern. After all, he would be leaving soon enough.

  At least the weather was balmy, and – despite the tense atmosphere – the island’s famous beaches were as stunning as ever. On Friday, at the end of his first full week as unofficial office manager, Bob decided to unwind with an early-evening dip in the sea. From his parents’ home at First Tower, a mile and a half from the centre of St Helier, he walked down to the beach and swam out about a hundred yards into the water.

  As he floated in the sea, Bob gradually became aware of the gentle hum of aircraft overhead. He looked up to see three German planes in the sky, flying low over Fort Regent, a remnant of the Napoleonic Wars which stood on the hill overlooking the town.

  Treading water for a moment, Bob kept his eyes fixed on the planes. He could have sworn he saw some small, dark objects falling out of them.

  A moment later, there was a series of loud explosions from the direction of the harbour, followed by a flash of fire as a timber warehouse went up in flames. This was no reconnaissance mission, Bob realised. The Germans were bombing St Helier.

  Frantically, Bob began swimming for the shore, his chest heaving as his skinny arms beat the water. He staggered breathlessly across the beach and up the slipway towards the road, racing to get back to his parents’ house. Then he saw something that made his heart stop: the German planes were flying towards him. They were racing along just above the esplanade as they headed west out of town, following the curve of the bay that separated St Helier from the neighbouring village of St Aubin. People were flinging themselves to the ground at the sides of the road, and Bob could see flecks of tarmac ping up into the air as they were hit with machine-gun bullets.

  In nothing more than his swimming trunks, Bob felt totally exposed. There was no real cover to make for, only a line of flimsy tamarix bushes that ran along the edge of the esplanade. In desperation, he hurled himself into them, burrowing under their soft pink blooms and pressing his face into the ground.

  Bob listened, terrified, as the planes stormed past overhead. The sharp pinging of the bullets hitting the road continued, growing faster and more insistent with every second, until gradually both it and the hum of the engines began to recede into the distance.

  His heart pounding, Bob picked himself up, dusted the earth from his bare chest and legs, and made for home. It was clear now that there would be no mailboat taking him to England.

  The time for evacuation was over. The German invasion had begun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A BOLT FROM THE BLUE

  It didn’t take long for the planes to find a new target. Just off Noirmont Point, on the far side of St Aubin’s Bay, the Guernsey lifeboat was on its way to St Helier, commanded by the burly coxswain Fred Hobbs. The RNLI in England were anxious about their boats falling into the hands of the Germans and had ordered Fred to collect the Jersey boat and then bring the two of them together across the Channel. He had responded with his usual brisk efficiency, raising a crew of seven men – including his own sons Alec and Harold – and setting sail within less than an hour.

  As the German planes banked around for a second attack on St Helier, Fred’s lifeboat must have presented a very tempting target – despite the large red cross painted on the deck, which was intended to ward off potential attackers. Seeing the three Heinkel bombers dip down low until they were only 100 feet above the water, Fred knew that he and his men were sitting ducks. ‘Get down, everyone!’ he shouted, making for the shore at full speed.

  Moments later, the boat was showered with a hail of bullets, but Fred pressed on, steering a zig-zag course to try to throw off the gunners. Over the roar of the engine he could hear the hull splintering as a number of rounds hit their target.

  Fred kept his eye on the shore ahead of him, racing through the onslaught until the ship ran aground in St Aubin’s Bay. The men scrambled out onto the beach as the planes zoomed past overhead, making for a second bombing run over St Helier.

  As Fred cast his eyes over the line of men standing beside him, he realised that someone was missing. He turned back to the boat, where a large body was slumped on the deck. Fred rushed over to find his son Harold, a strapping thirty-four-year-old man who had a boy of his own back home in Guernsey, lying motionless with a bullet hole in his head.

  A couple of miles away in St Helier, the air raid continued. For men and women who worked in the harbour area, it was a terrifying ordeal. In one of the warehouses along New North Quay, a group of young women were busy packing potatoes for export when the whole building was shuddered by the explosion of nearby bombs. The builder’s merchants next door sustained serious damage, sending chunks of masonry smashing right through the glass roof above the girls’ heads. They fled in panic, screaming as they rushed off home in search of their loved ones.

  Meanwhile, on Albert Pier, stevedore Bob Troy was supervising the loading of a ship. When he heard the sound of machine-gun fire, he shouted for his men to take cover. Some hid under lorries, others under large piles of sacking. Bob himself dashed to the foot of a crane, looking on in horror as several of his men were hit by the German bullets. One of them, Mr Tirel, had the toes of one foot blown off completely.

  A little way down the pier, Robert Fallis, a fifty-four-year-old former Royal Artilleryman who collected the tolls due from all vessels moored in the harbour, was sheltering by the Southern Railway sheds wh
en a bomb exploded nearby. Bob rushed over to try and help but as he saw the poor man’s mangled body – he had sustained a terrible injury from a bomb splinter – he realised that there was nothing anyone could do for him. Instead, the stevedore made a dash for his car, thinking he could take some of the wounded men to hospital. But the car wouldn’t start, and nor would any of the lorries lined up along the pier. They had all been put out of action by the Luftwaffe.

  Bob began leading the walking wounded up the pier towards the town, but before long they heard the Heinkels approaching again. They lay down and hugged the promenade wall as they heard the bullets whizz by over their heads.

  All told, the raid lasted for just under an hour. Bob and his men were lucky to escape with their lives. As well as Mr Fallis, two more men were mortally wounded on Albert Pier – a forty-five-year-old jeweller, Godfrey Coleman, and the forty-year-old Leslie Bryan, an employee at Voisin’s department store, who was hit by a bomb splinter while strolling along the promenade with his wife Florence. Both men died within hours of arriving at Jersey’s General Hospital. Another, William Moody, who had been injured at the weighbridge, survived until the following day before succumbing to his injuries.

  They were by no means the raid’s only casualties. In the quiet fishing village of La Rocque, two high-explosive bombs were dropped on the road near the harbour. Fifty-seven-year-old Jack Adams was struggling to get into his house when the blast from one of them knocked him face down onto his doorstep, killing him instantly. Two other villagers, Minnie Farrell and Thomas Pilkington, were shot by the Heinkels’ machine-guns as they sat on a bench, and died in hospital.

  In the neighbourhood of Mount Bingham, just outside central St Helier, another two bombs fell, badly damaging a number of houses, including that of seventy-eight-year-old retired plumber John Mauger, who was killed on the spot. (His wife Sarah, who was with him at the time, was lucky to survive.) In the town centre, Edward Ferrand, the landlord of the Bunch of Grapes, was hit by a hail of bullets outside his pub. He made it to hospital but died on the operating table. Sixty-four-year-old Arthur Parr, who was shot alongside him, perished four days later.

  Overall, Jersey’s death toll, including the lifeboatman Harold Hobbs, stood at eleven – a small number compared to the blitz later unleashed on the cities of the British mainland, but enough to shatter the complacency of islanders who had never expected to find themselves military targets. Jersey had not faced a hostile invasion in almost five hundred years, yet now St Helier’s harbour was littered with the blasted wrecks of boats and yachts, and the stores in Commercial Buildings were ablaze, with plumes of black smoke slowly rising into the sky. Two of the island’s leading hotels, the Pomme d’Or and the Yacht, had sustained bomb damage, and the stained-glass windows of the town church had been smashed to smithereens. Up on the hill at Fort Regent, the furze was on fire, and it would be several days before the blaze was fully extinguished. Along the coast at La Rocque, windows were shattered and doors blown off their hinges. There was no getting around it: this was the reality of war.

  It wasn’t just Jersey that suffered at the hands of the Luftwaffe that Friday. In fact, in Guernsey, the German air raid was even more devastating.

  It came – almost literally – as a bolt from the blue. It was a balmy summer’s evening, with not a cloud in the perfect azure sky. A little after six, Ambrose Sherwill appeared on the steps of the Guernsey Evening Press offices in St Peter Port to address a large crowd, in what had become a daily ritual for the members of his Controlling Committee. ‘Whatever else is wrong,’ he told them cheerfully, ‘it has been a beautiful day.’

  About half an hour later, having answered a number of questions from the crowd, the attorney general returned to his office in Elizabeth College, where he received a call from London. It was Charles Markbreiter, assistant military secretary at the Home Office.

  The last week had been the most stressful of Sherwill’s career, but he was relieved to be able to tell Markbreiter that finally things seemed to be settling down. The first furious panic of evacuation had largely abated, and most people were doing their best to get on with their lives. The shipping traffic departing from the White Rock was no longer dominated by anxious evacuees – in fact the annual tomato export, which accounted for a sizeable chunk of the island’s economy, was now well underway. A queue of lorries almost a mile long was lined up along the seafront, stretching from the weighbridge, where the produce was loaded onto boats bound for England, all the way to the neighbouring parish of St Sampson.

  But if Sherwill’s conversation with Markbreiter was unusually cheerful, his good humour didn’t last long. Just as he was about to hang up, he became aware of the distant sound of aeroplane engines, followed by the sharp stuttering of machine-guns firing, as the Heinkels approached St Peter Port. The attorney general had served in the trenches of the First World War, and he knew exactly what he was hearing. As the noise from the planes grew louder, he held the phone up to his open office window, telling the astonished Markbreiter, ‘Here they come!’

  Not everyone was as quick to appreciate the situation, however, and it was another ten minutes before the air-raid siren was sounded. By then, the German bombardment was already well underway.

  More compact than St Helier, with its high street barely set back from the waterfront, St Peter Port endured an appalling onslaught, with over a hundred fifty-kilogram fragmentation bombs falling in less than an hour. One young man was in the bath when the first bomb went off nearby, shaking the house and sending the water splashing out onto the floor. When he attempted to stand up, a second blast knocked him off his feet and back into the tub. Then a third explosion shattered the windows, covering him in broken glass. Finally, as he stared – by now somewhat stunned – out of the empty space where the bathroom window should have been, a fourth explosion sent a dead seagull flying through the gap in the wall and into his lap.

  Although the Channel Islands had been demilitarised for over a week now, this had not been officially communicated to the authorities in Berlin. The raids on Jersey and Guernsey that evening were an exercise in what was known as ‘reconnaissance-in-force’, an attack intended to test the strength of the islands’ military defences by provoking them into opening fire.

  In the event, the sum total of resistance was provided by a single Lewis gun on the Isle of Sark mailboat, which was moored in St Peter Port Harbour. Those on board were subjected to a terrifying experience as the Heinkels swooped down over the town. One bomb exploded close enough to badly injure a man on board – he collapsed onto the deck, blood gushing from a wound in his groin. The gunner, meanwhile, received an arm injury so serious that it put him out of action. It was a miracle that the boat itself survived the raid more or less intact. While other vessels sank to the bottom of the harbour, smashed to pieces or burned to cinders by the bombs, the mailboat remained afloat, the passengers cowering below decks as they waited for the ordeal to end.

  Aside from its official reconnaissance value, the raid did of course have another, perhaps more significant, impact on the people of Guernsey: a show of strength that stunned its victims into submission prior to the arrival of enemy troops. In this, at least, it was extraordinarily effective, bringing death and destruction on a scale never before imagined in the quaint and charming seaside town. Many of the bombs fell on the long line of tomato lorries lined up along the waterfront, which the German bombers apparently mistook for military vehicles. Drivers who had sought shelter from machine-gun bullets under their lorries were crushed or burned to death as the vehicles caught fire and collapsed on top of them.

  By now the ground was littered with dead and dying, their blood mingling with the juice from the tomatoes, scorched and smashed to a pulp, which had spilled out all over the roadways. The whole neighbourhood seemed to be ablaze, with buildings and lorries alike consumed by the fires, and plumes of black smoke blanketing the island from coast to coast.