‘We were ditched by the UK government. We felt stripped naked. After demilitarisation, we had no means of defending ourselves. There’s no resentment, we realised Britain had its back against the wall and we realised Britain had to stay in the war to get our liberty back. But the local politicians were amateur; and they were frightened.’
Jersey schoolteacher Harry Aubin
EVERY CHANNEL ISLANDER old enough to remember 1940 can still tell you what they were doing on the evening of 28 June of that year. The midsummer sun was still brilliant in the cloudless sky over the islands. On Jersey, children like Stella Perkins and her three brothers were playing on the beach; on Guernsey, Vivyan Mansell was milking the cows which had been put out to graze on the airstrip. Ambrose Sherwill, Guernsey’s Attorney General, was on the telephone to the Home Office in London, running over official matters. There was little reason to take much notice of the small black machines which appeared high above in the sky. In the previous few months, planes overhead had become commonplace; British planes on their way to bomb Italy, and German planes bombing France. The little specks flying far above, to and from the war, seemed only to underline to islanders how remote they were from the convulsions Europe was undergoing. Belgium and Holland had already fallen to the German advance, and a week previously, France had accepted the most humiliating armistice in her history. As for the German reconnaissance planes seen over the islands in the previous couple of days, islanders were sure that their observations would have revealed how defenceless the islands were; there were no signs of anti-aircraft guns, naval ships anchored in the harbours, or army camps. In the few minutes it took to fly over the cluster of islands, they would have seen the rumpled green patchwork of fields dotted with granite farmhouses. They would have glimpsed rocky cliffs, brilliant white beaches and glasshouses blinking in the sun.
At 6.45 p.m. on 28 June, the planes came lower and nearer than ever before. They screamed over Sark, spraying bullets onto the roofs before heading towards Guernsey and Jersey. One hundred and eighty bombs were dropped onto the two main islands that evening in less than an hour, and countless rounds of machine-gun bullets were fired at the islanders as they tried to scurry to safety. The main towns of St Helier on Jersey and St Peter Port on Guernsey bore the brunt of the attack. St Peter Port’s harbour had been teeming with activity only a few minutes before; it was the peak of the tomato season, and a long line of trucks were waiting to offload the crop onto the ship for England. The mailboat was just leaving and, as usual, a crowd had gathered to see friends and relatives off.
The Methodist minister Douglas Ord noted down in his diary what he saw from his lawn overlooking St Peter Port: ‘We saw six machines climb out of the east, turn, and run down with guns blazing and bombs falling on the defenceless town and harbour, the mailboat and the crowds. Against the perfect blue sky, the sticks of bombs could quite clearly be seen.’ On Jersey, ten-year-old Stella Perkins watched with horrified fascination as the sunshine glinted on the bombs as they fell over St Helier. Edwin de Sainte Croix was working as a stevedore in St Helier harbour: ‘There was no air raid warning. Nothing. There’d been lots of planes flying about taking photos over the previous few days, so we didn’t take any notice of the low-flying planes until the bombs started dropping. There was panic. Some men dived under tarpaulin – but what shelter would that provide? We dived behind a tea-shack.’ Jersey carpenter Sandy Whitley was living at the other end of the island from St Helier, but he could feel the bombing raid as the whole island vibrated under its impact.
On Guernsey, St Peter Port harbour was in chaos; the line of lorries burst into flames, incinerating drivers caught in their cabs or sheltering under them. Frank Falla, a journalist on the Guernsey newspaper The Star, described the scene in his memoirs: ‘The blood of the wounded and the dying mingled with the juice of the tomatoes, and when I came on the scene just as the last Hun plane faded into the distance the sight was one I shall never forget; the flames, the bodies, the cries of the dying and the injured, and the straggling line of people emerging from their shelter under the pier.’
The air-raid warnings did not go off until ten minutes after the first bomb. There were no shelters. There was a shortage of men to help ferry the dead and wounded to hospital, because many had been evacuated to Britain or had joined up. Most of the St John’s Ambulance men had gone to Alderney to clear up the island after it had been evacuated by all but eighteen of its residents; from there, several hours’ sail away, they watched the raid helplessly. It took the fire brigade twenty-four hours to put out the fires. The final death toll was forty-four, with another thirty injured. The youngest person killed was fourteen, the oldest seventy-one years old.
In comparison with the bombing Britain was to experience the following autumn, the raid on the Channel Islands was small-scale; but the impact on the close-knit island communities was huge. Almost everybody knew someone who had been killed or injured. In an instant, the islanders’ assumptions that this war would pass them by – as the last war had done – were shattered. As Jersey girl Kathleen Whitley said of the raid: ‘We knew then it was serious; before that, it was so peaceful, we couldn’t believe the war would really affect the islands.’ Long after the German bombers had gone, six RAF planes appeared, painfully underlining the impotence of the country that had protected the islands for nearly a thousand years. When the Courier, laden with supplies evacuated from Alderney, docked in St Peter Port shortly after the raid, its master found the people very shaken: ‘Many tales of “hate of England” came to my ears for leaving them unprotected.’
Even worse, this enemy seemed to recognise no moral law. Harold Hobbs, son of the coxwain of the Guernsey lifeboat, was killed when the Germans randomly strafed the boat as they flew back to France. Hobbs’s death seemed a horrible intimation of the outrages against common decency which British propaganda had led the islanders to expect of the Germans. An enemy which attacked a defenceless, clearly-marked lifeboat could not be civilised.
The shattered tomato crates lying along St Peter Port’s harbour spelled economic collapse. The islands produced little food for themselves; over the preceding century, their agriculture had been revolutionised, and by 1940 they primarily produced specialist crops for the British market. In return, Britain exported food, fuel and manufactured goods to the islands. At least Jersey’s new potatoes and vegetables could be used to feed its inhabitants, but Guernsey was covered with glasshouses for tomatoes and flowers. June was the height of the tomato season, and two thousand tons were ripening every week; the disruption of the export trade threatened immediate bankruptcy for thousands of farmers. Since the possibility of invasion had scared off the tourists and frightened the English with their private incomes and pensions back to the Home Counties, the export trade was the last remaining pillar of the islands’ economies. If trade links with Britain were cut, how could islanders feed themselves and keep warm? The future was suddenly full of frightening, unexpected possibilities – of invasion, atrocities, bankruptcy and starvation. Symbolically, the big clock on the Guernsey weighbridge by St Peter Port’s harbour, a town landmark, had stopped during the bombing raid at two and half minutes to seven.
The bombing raid was a rude shock to the islanders, and the fact that it was a consequence of British government bungling would have been equally so. It was not until more than thirty years later, with the publication in 1975 of the islands’ official history of the Occupation, that it became clear that a decision to demilitarise the islands had been reached in the War Cabinet thirteen days before the raid. A week before the German attack, all military machinery and men had been withdrawn from the islands. But unlike the French government, which had declared Paris an open city so as to avoid bombing raids, the British had omitted to inform the enemy of the demilitarisation.
Attorney General Ambrose Sherwill was on the telephone to the Home Office from his office in St Peter Port when the raid began. He held the receiver out of the window so that Charles Markbreiter, the Assistant Secretary at the Home Office concerned with Channel Islands affairs, could hear the explosions. Sherwill tersely suggested that the British government should lose no time in letting the Germans know that the islands had been demilitarised.
Both the British and the Channel Islands authorities had assumed that the war would never reach the islands. The War Office told the Home Office in September 1939 that the possibility of an attack on the islands was ‘somewhat remote’. In the same month Jersey had requested anti-aircraft and coastal guns, but was told by a hard-pressed Whitehall that the earliest date of delivery would be August 1940. Several government ministries considered the islands’ position and complacently concluded that any interruption of food and fuel supplies would only be temporary. Encouraged by Whitehall’s confidence, the island authorities promoted the islands as the ‘ideal wartime holiday resort’, safe from the bombing raids expected on London and the south coast, for the summer of 1940. Advertisements were placed in national newspapers extolling the islands’ attractions.
Although the islands appeared to be under no direct threat, they rallied to the British cause as loyally as they had done in the previous war. Thousands of islandmen and women volunteered; in the course of the war ten thousand islanders served in the British forces, more than one in ten of the population – probably the highest proportion of any part of the Empire. Guernsey voted to double its rate of income tax so that it could give the British government £180,000 towards the cost of the island’s defences. Jersey raised a loan of £100,000 as the first instalment of a gift to the British government – Jerseyman Lord Portsea pointed out in The Times that the proportionate sum in the UK would have been £118 million – and as late as 10 June 1940 Jersey was considering making arrangements for a loan of £1 million. War Savings Groups had been set up to collect voluntary funds, and the RAF Comforts Committee had got knitting; on 28 May 1940 they sent off a grand total of 235 balaclavas, 186 sleeveless pullovers and 167 pairs of oversocks to be distributed to those serving in the forces.
It was not until Hitler launched his Blitzkreig on the Low Countries in May 1940 that the possibility first dawned on the islanders that their role in this war might amount to more than knitting, saving their spare pennies and waiting for their loved ones to return. The extensive use of parachutists in the German attack on Holland had particularly alarmed the islanders. The letters columns of the Jersey Evening Post were filled with schemes for the islands’ defences and panic about fifth columnists. Many of these letters have a taste of retired colonels brushing up their military skills over a whisky at the yacht club, but there were more serious voices. ‘Jerseymen would do well to look at a map of France and do some hard thinking . . . Jersey may well be in a very unpleasant position indeed,’ wrote ‘Miles’ on 21 May 1940. Two days later, Brussels fell and refugees flooded south to the French border. One Frank Johnson wrote presciently to the Evening Post:
We are told that Jersey is the last place the Nazis would attack. It is of neither economic or strategic importance [but] so far from this being the case, I think – nay, I am sure – that the exact opposite is true, and that at the present juncture no part of the Empire is in greater peril. Just try to imagine the tremendous effect on the morale of his people, were Hitler able to tell them not only that he had commenced to attack England, but that the oldest part of the British Empire – Jersey – was in German hands. He would proudly point to it as the beginning of the end, the break-up of the Empire . . . And as I see the position at present, based on this fatal self complacency, it would be as easy as the proverbial ‘falling off a log’.
On 28 May 1940 – the day on which the Belgian army capitulated – Major General James Harrison, the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey, pointed out to the War Office that he had only 150 members of the militia and fifty naval ratings, most of whom were mechanics, to defend the fifty thousand British subjects on the island. Islanders were demanding to know what arrangements had been made for their defence. The British Expeditionary Force had already begun its epic evacuation from Dunkirk, and Calais had surrendered. It was only a matter of time before France was defeated and the Germans reached the Normandy coast – a mere fourteen miles from Jersey.
Preoccupied with more pressing matters, the Chiefs of Staff Committee didn’t find time to consider the defence of the Channel Islands until 5 June, when they were presented with a paper outlining the position. The paper reviewed in lordly manner the history of the islanders’ fighting spirit since armed bands gathered in AD 578 to fight the Bretons, and concluded: ‘If the enemy effected a landing on these islands, it would be essential to eject him as a matter of prestige.’
By 10 June the Germans were bombing Cherbourg, and the Channel Islanders could hear the rumble of the explosions. Windows vibrated in their frames, and from Alderney and Jersey smoke could be seen rising on the horizon where oil tanks were being blown up by the French to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Still no one on the islands knew what was being planned for them, and Major General Harrison sent an irascible personal letter to the Home Office: ‘One doesn’t even know if the powers that be have considered at all what might happen to the Channel Islands and if so, what action they would like to take. If they have any views, I think we ought to be taken into their confidence. We are British Isles, though too far away for protection.’ He and Alexander Coutanche, the Bailiff of Jersey, had already discussed the possibility of German occupation.
On 12 June, the War Cabinet considered the plight of the Channel Islands. Their first conclusion was to confirm the view which had held sway since 1928: that the islands had no strategic significance. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir John Dill, said that two battalions had already been ordered to the islands to strengthen their defences; in the morning the War Cabinet approved this decision, but after lunch they changed their minds. With the French coast in enemy hands, the two battalions would be at risk of attack, and besides, the men might be needed to defend the British mainland. It was decided to withdraw the battalions. If the Germans landed, the Lieutenant Governors should surrender. These decisions were not conveyed to the authorities on the Channel Islands, and on 14 June Jersey officials phoned the Home Office to ask what was going to happen, and pointed out that if the islands were demilitarised – as was becoming increasingly likely – many islanders would wish to be evacuated. The following day the War Office telegraphed the Lieutenant Governors of Jersey and Guernsey that both islands’ airfields should be defended, so that the RAF could support armies operating in north-western France. The telegraphs concluded: ‘Thereafter the policy of demilitarisation will rule.’
At 5 a.m. on 16 June, the order came for the troops to evacuate Alderney. Frederick French, the Judge or chief administrator of Alderney, was bewildered, and could offer the anxious islanders no explanation. He suggested that perhaps the troops were being pulled back to Guernsey and Jersey. Meanwhile, all that separated Alderney from the approaching Germans was a meagre seven miles of water.
On the same day, the British government asked Jersey and Guernsey to help in the evacuation of British and French troops cornered in St Malo. Guernsey was too far away to get boats there in time, but eighteen yachts put out from Jersey to ferry soldiers from the beaches to waiting transports, in an operation akin to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force two weeks previously from Dunkirk. The troops stopped off on Jersey before going on to England, and Jersey boy Bernard Hassall remembers seeing French sailors pouring through the streets of St Helier. There was a strong smell of Gauloise cigarettes, and he stared at the blood seeping through their bandages. The war was encircling the islands.
Over the past ten months the islands had responded promptly and loyally to requests for help, but now Whitehall was proving more tardy. With no final decision forthcoming from the War Office, the Home Office had come to its own conclusion that the islands should be demilitarised, and called an urgent meeting with island representatives in London. The main subject under discussion was evacuation. It was decided that the priority was evacuating three thousand young men of military age and five hundred Irish labourers. Only after these had been evacuated could they deal with the thousands of islanders now becoming increasingly anxious to leave the islands.
On 19 June, Major General Harrison had still had no official word about demilitarisation from the War Office. He was addressing a session of the States of Jersey when he was interrupted and asked to take a phone call from the War Office: he was finally told that it had been decided that the islands were to be demilitarised. He returned to the chamber to tell the deputies. The islands’ papers carried the news that evening. One reason for the delay in informing the islands of Britain’s plans had been that the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was reluctant to give them up without a fight. On 14 June he had told the War Cabinet: ‘It ought to be possible, by the use of our sea power, to prevent the invasion of the islands by the enemy and . . . if there was a chance of offering successful resistance, we ought not to avoid giving him battle there. It [would be] repugnant now to abandon British territory which [has] been in possession of the Crown since the Norman Conquest.’
But the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff, Vice-Admiral Tom Phillips, pointed out that the anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft required for this purpose could not be supplied to the islands without denuding British defences; the islands were too far away from Britain, and too near Brest and Cherbourg, which it was clear would soon fall to the Germans, for a naval force to prevent invasion. Churchill was overruled, and he tetchily ordered that all food should be got off the islands to prevent it from falling into enemy hands – he didn’t make it clear how he expected the islanders to feed themselves. It was left to the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, to urge the Cabinet that ‘if the islands were not to be defended, the least we could do would be to provide the inhabitants with the opportunity of leaving’.
On 20 June, the last troops left the islands, and the submarine telephone cable – the last still linking Britain and France – was cut. The Lieutenant Governors left the next day, handing over their responsibilities to the Bailiffs. The Chiefs of Staff then informed the Foreign Office that demilitarisation had now been completed, and asked them to inform Germany of this through an intermediary government. The Home Office drafted a press statement to the same effect. But the Foreign Office did not arrange to have the Germans informed, and the Home Office’s press release was held back. It was feared that letting the Germans know that the islands had been demilitarised would be tantamount to an invitation to walk in. The result was the worst of all possible worlds: the islands were in the dangerous position of being undefended, and yet were considered by the Germans as legitimate military targets.
The Bailiffs of Jersey and Guernsey received a message of sympathy from King George VI on 24 June: ‘For strategic reasons it has been found necessary to withdraw the armed forces from the Channel Islands. I deeply regret this necessity and I wish to assure my people in the Islands that in taking this decision my Government has not been unmindful of their position.’ The royal message came with a covering note from the Home Secretary which contained the baffling request that the message should not attract too much publicity; the Home Office was anxious that German intelligence should not pick up the information that the islands had been demilitarised. The Bailiffs had no idea that the Germans had not been informed. The Chiefs of Staff pressed the Foreign Office on 26 June to inform the Germans of the Channel Islands’ demilitarisation. They pointed out that the safety of the islands’ populations depended on it, although they agreed that it would serve no military purpose to tell the Germans. The force of their argument was fatally undermined by their conclusion that ‘it was almost certain that the Germans would have learned of the demilitarisation through intelligence channels and therefore they would be unlikely to waste their resources in bombarding the islands’. Two days later, on the fateful 28 June, in reply to a written parliamentary question, Sir John Anderson wrote: ‘We have been at pains to prevent any publicity being given to the fact that a measure of evacuation from the Channel Islands has been carried out . . . There are military reasons for this which I would rather not put in writing.’ A few hours later, the islands were being bombed.
On the BBC radio news at nine o’clock that evening, two hours after the bombing, it was belatedly announced that the islands had been demilitarised, but it was not until the following morning that the bombing raid was reported. This sequence reinforced British propaganda that the Germans recognised no laws of war, and had bombed a demilitarised target. It was left to a member of Guernsey’s Controlling Committee, in an emergency session the day after the bombing raid, to ask the awkward question which remained unanswered for over three decades: ‘Had the British government informed the German government that Guernsey had been demilitarised?’
On 30 June the Foreign Office finally asked Joseph P. Kennedy, US Ambassador to Britain, to send the US Embassy in Berlin a message for the German government: ‘The evacuation of all military personnel and equipment from the Channel Islands was completed some days ago. The Islands are therefore demilitarised and cannot be considered in any way as a legitimate target for bombardment. A public announcement to this effect was made on the evening of June 28.’
The Times accused the Germans of murdering civilians after the islands had been demilitarised, and stated that, morally speaking, the attack on the Channel Islands was worse than the German bombing of refugees fleeing the Lowlands; they at least were in an area of military operations, whereas the victims in the Channel Islands were not.
Confusion and misunderstanding between the islands and Whitehall also characterised the evacuation of nearly thirty thousand islanders. For four days, from 19 to 22 June, there were scenes of complete panic in the islands. Almost half of Guernsey’s population left (seventeen thousand out of forty-one thousand), while on Jersey only six and a half thousand out of fifty thousand decided to evacuate. On Alderney all but eighteen of the fourteen hundred residents left for Britain, but on Sark, of the six hundred-strong population, only 129 departed.
The documents revealing the chaotic, contradictory official decision-making in London, St Peter Port and St Helier were not opened to. public scrutiny until 1992 – fifty-two years after the event, in response to parliamentary and public pressure. They were originally intended to be kept secret until 2045: one hundred years of quarantine was considered necessary to limit their potentially damaging impact on Britain’s relations with the oldest possession of the Crown.
The first mention of evacuation was at a Chiefs of Staff meeting in London on 11 June, when it was decided that in the event of the islands’ demilitarisation, ‘it will be unnecessary and undesirable to evacuate women and children’. The prospect of having to set aside much-needed shipping for the purpose was unwelcome. But in case the position should change, the ever cost-conscious Home Office checked with the island governments that they would foot the bill for any evacuation judged necessary. As the days went by without any definite decision on either demilitarisation or evacuation, the islanders grew panicky, particularly on Alderney, the island closest to the French coast, where they could hear the bombing of the Normandy peninsula, and they could see German troops through binoculars. Even more frightening, a hundred starving and exhausted French women and children arrived on 13 June in overladen boats after having lost their way; they had been three weeks at sea, and two of their number had died. Alderney residents watched the last British troops depart, blowing up their vehicles and leaving behind quantities of stores in their haste, and yet still there was no word of evacuation.
It was not until 18 June that the Home Office decided to plan evacuation, on the presumption that the islands would be demilitarised, but nobody knew who should be evacuated. The first to go, the authorities agreed, would be men of military age, but after that it was unclear: should families be split up, and only children evacuated? What about mothers and fathers? The Home Secretary had said in the War Cabinet that any islanders who wished to go should have that opportunity, but his officials balked at the idea of ninety thousand islanders pouring through Weymouth in need of accommodation and economic support. Besides, there was certain to be a small number who refused to leave the islands, who would present the awkward choice between forcing them to go, or leaving them to starve.
A large portion of the blame for the panic has been laid at the door of the Channel Island governments. On Guernsey, officials gave no clear direction and contradictory advice. Some urged evacuation, others scorned such an option as cowardly. In Jersey the official line was more consistent, and many islanders who had registered for evacuation were persuaded to change their minds and stay. But the real blame lies with the Home Office, as the newly released papers show. In an internal Home Office memo reviewing the whole débâcle, dated 7 July 1940, Charles Markbreiter admitted to Sir Alexander Maxwell, the Permanent Under-Secretary: ‘The general impression is that evacuation was bungled either by the Home Office or by the insular authorities or both. This was stimulated by the fact that the island governments (in fact at our request) did endeavour to stop any movement for mass evacuation . . . this resulted in many fewer people leaving Jersey than we had estimated for.’ After the event, the Home Office acknowledged that there had been a muddle. But during the critical period in late June it had been adamant that total evacuation was not feasible. When Dr William Montague (a Guernseyman who was evacuated because his Jewish origins placed him in particular danger from the Nazis) went to the Home Office to request that all the islanders should be evacuated on the grounds that their health would be threatened if trade was cut with Britain, Markbreiter noted:
Despite the possibility that the Islands may come under German Occupation, I think there are grave objections to any policy of inviting and encouraging the islanders to leave. Apart from the difficulty of absorbing them here, there is the consideration that we might have in the end to adopt some measure of compulsion, because those remaining would be too few to sustain a communal life. Tell Mr Sherwill that we think the present policy must be maintained of encouraging the population to stay.
A month later, after the Germans had occupied the islands, the subject came up in Parliament. The fact that British subjects had been abandoned to the enemy because of the ‘difficulty of absorbing them’ in Britain was not regarded as suitable for public consumption. The facts were skilfully reconstituted for the government’s reply to the House of Commons:
The information before the government indicated that substantial numbers of the inhabitants would be unwilling to leave their homes, and that any scheme for attempting by compulsion or inducement to transplant to this country the whole of the population of the islands including those who have been, for generations, settled on the land would be both impracticable and undesirable . . . Evacuation was planned on the principle that women and children should be brought away but a sufficient part of the population should remain behind to enable the life of the islands to go on.
In fact, huge numbers of islanders were more than willing to leave their homes. On Guernsey they queued for hours following the publication of notices on 19 June which stated that all children of school age accompanied by teachers, mothers and small children, men of military age and ‘all others’ had to register for evacuation by that evening. On Jersey all women and children, and men aged from twenty to thirty-three, had until 10 a.m. the following day to register. On the same day a ship arrived at Alderney with strict instructions (no one knew from whom) that only schoolchildren and their teachers could board it for evacuation to Britain. Mothers waved their children goodbye in great distress.
By 10 a.m. on 20 June, 8800 Jerseymen and women had managed to register, and the queues still wound round St Helier. A young insurance clerk, Bob Le Sueur (whose father had decided not to evacuate as he had no intention of becoming a ‘penniless refugee’ at his age), got up early to register for evacuation at the Town Hall before going to his office:
The queue was already six hundred yards long at 8.30 a.m. and I couldn’t possibly be late for the office. When I got into work, there was only one typist and she was inundated by requests from people. There were huge queues outside our office. It took me two days to get through to our branch manager in Southampton. When I eventually explained the situation to him, he asked me if I had been drinking. Then he said that, ‘If this cock and bull story is true and the Jersey manager turns up in Southampton, we’ll send him back. Meanwhile you’re to wait there until he does.’ I waited five years.
Ultimately twenty-three thousand people registered on Jersey. In an attempt to calm the panicky crowds the Bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, addressed a huge public meeting, at which he said that he and his wife had no intention of leaving the island, and asked everyone to join him in singing the National Anthem. To the same end, Jurat Edgar Dorey gave an emotional speech in the States which was reported in detail in the Jersey Evening Post the next day: ‘I have been filled with disgust . . . I do not understand those of old Norman stock who should be rooted to the soil, pressing to leave. We, who were always a calm, steady people who have jogged along in our own way, loving our lands and our surroundings . . . I would like the House to express its utter contempt at what these people were doing . . . it is the worst characteristic of human nature – cowardice – rabbits and rats.’ The Post praised Dorey’s stand: it was right to call those trying to leave rabbits and rats, its editorial pronounced. Those who had been proud to proclaim their devotion to their native island were now quick to desert it. The mother country had enough problems of her own without an influx of thousands of refugees.
Coutanche and Dorey’s efforts had an impact; of the twenty-three thousand who had registered, more than two-thirds changed their minds, and only six and a half thousand finally left. By 21 June Jersey’s evacuation was almost complete, and calm had largely been restored. It was a different story on Guernsey. Victor Carey, the Bailiff, was an old, weak man and Ambrose Sherwill, the Attorney General, genuinely didn’t know what was the right thing to do. As he later wrote in his unpublished memoirs:
The period of the evacuation was, I think, the most difficult and painful I have ever experienced. Waves of panic and indecision swept over people; official notices were misread, words of advice were completely misunderstood and the most grotesque rumours passed for truth. One official, at his own expense, had posters with ‘Don’t be Yellow’ printed in black on a yellow ground, put up all over town. He then suddenly remembered that he ought to go and did so.
The doctors of Guernsey gave conflicting advice. John Leale, a Jurat, told the States that they had advised him that the population could survive on the milk and vegetables produced by the island, but two days later they changed their minds and told Sherwill that everyone should be evacuated. Sherwill wrote: ‘One of them argued that total evacuation was necessary to avoid starvation . . . I had never before, nor have I since, felt waves of panic emanating from a person near me. They were affecting my own judgement and, but for politeness’ sake, I would have asked the source of them to go and sit at the other end of the room.’
But Sherwill recognised that even if the doctors were right, it was now too late to organise a total evacuation. In a follow-up phone-call to Dr William Montague’s visit to the Home Office, both Sherwill and Leale repeated to Markbreiter that they would prefer total evacuation. But they were told that the British government would not countenance such a possibility, and to prevent a run on the boats the Guernsey authorities mounted a campaign to encourage people to stay. A member of the States broadcast on a public address system every evening in St Peter Port, and posters appeared on walls around the island: ‘Why go mad? Compulsory evacuation A LIE! There’s no place like home. CHEER UP!’ The aggressive anti-evacuation campaign aroused the suspicions of the commander of HMS Sabre as he passed through the island, and he signalled to the Admiralty: ‘Suggest this should be exposed as being of enemy origin and a vigorous counter-propaganda campaign instituted.’
On Alderney the Judge, Frederick French, was becoming increasingly exasperated by what he believed was the complete neglect of the island by Guernsey, the head of the bailiwick. French’s repeated wires to the Guernsey authorities asking to know what arrangements were being made for Alderney received no reply, and islanders were resorting to hiring private yachts to take them to Guernsey. After several days of waiting for ships to evacuate the population, French took matters into his own hands and appealed directly to the Admiralty. On 22 June the Vestal came to collect lighthouse personnel; the captain offered to take 150 civilians, but French feared there would be a stampede for the ship, and turned down the offer. The following day, six ships arrived, and in the course of five hours took the entire remaining population of about 1100 off the island, barring eighteen who refused to leave. After his arrival in England, French was still seething with fury. In a memo to the Home Office he alleged that the panic on Guernsey was the result of the ‘collapse of effective control in Guernsey civil government’. He accused the Guernsey authorities of:
Complete failure to furnish help similar to that arranged for herself . . . to give any information, any instructions . . . giving the impression that the authorities were either panicking or incapable of dealing with the situation, or that they were deliberately seeing after themselves and their own people. I wish to lodge an official complaint against the Guernsey civil authorities. [They were] guilty of a gross failure to perform their duty . . . their actions amount to criminal neglect.
Sark, also within the bailiwick of Guernsey, was governed by the imperious Dame of Sark, Sybil Hathaway, who was as unimpressed as French by the actions of the officials on Guernsey. She wrote in a letter on 24 June that the situation on Guernsey had been ‘disgraceful, with no one taking the lead’. On 27 June she complained to the Home Office that Guernsey had ‘officially forgotten us’, and concluded, ‘The responsibility of advising people to go or remain falls on me and I should be thankful for any assurance or hints from you. Personally I remain, unless ordered to leave, and all the Sarkese remain also.’
In Guernsey’s defence, communication between the islands had become very difficult following the strict injunction against using radio telephones, which could be overheard by the enemy. And Sherwill had not found it easy to persuade ships to go to Alderney, which was by then within range of enemy guns. After French refused the offer of places for 150 civilians and the ship returned from the island virtually empty, Sherwill concluded that the Alderney people were, like the Sarkese, staying put. It should be pointed out that the Guernsey authorities were in the unenviable position of implementing a contradictory policy determined in London. Britain didn’t want thousands more refugees; Coutanche, the Bailiff of Jersey, took the easiest option, and decided they wouldn’t get them. On Guernsey the Bailiff was incapable of giving leadership, Sherwill didn’t have the authority to do so, and to top it all the Lieutenant Governor, Major General John Minshull Ford, who could have offered much-needed advice in the days prior to his departure on 21 June, had only arrived for the first time on the island two weeks before.
It was a sorry débâcle, and every islander remembers it as such. Families had only a few hours in which to decide whether to stay together or be split up; parents were racked with indecision as to what was the best thing for their children – to send them alone to the uncertain safety of England, where they might fall victim to bombing raids, or to keep them on an island now facing starvation and occupation. Some islanders in 1940 spoke only Norman French; England was a foreign country with a foreign language. For some, the furthest they had ever travelled was the few miles to St Peter Port or St Helier; they had lived in country parishes all their lives, and had never left their island. Leaving for an unknown destination was a terrifying prospect. The few belongings evacuees were permitted had to be hastily packed; everything else had to be abandoned. The keys to homes full of antiques, paintings and books were handed over to neighbours who were staying behind. Valuables were buried in gardens, in a desperate bid to save something. Long queues formed at the banks and insurance offices, but withdrawals were limited to £20. Cars were given away for a few pounds at the harbour. Meals were left half-eaten on the tables in the scramble, and long queues formed at the vets’ to have much-loved household pets slaughtered. On Jersey alone, 2200 dogs and 3000 cats were put down by the authorities.
Fifteen-year-old Dolly Joanknecht’s experience was typical. On 19 June she was sent home early from her job as a nanny in St Peter Port, Guernsey. She found her great aunt’s home, where she lived, in uproar:
I had two cousins and they both wanted to be evacuated to England, but my uncle didn’t. I sat on the stairs, saying again and again ‘I want to go.’ My cousin Jack wouldn’t go because his girlfriend wasn’t going, Aunty wouldn’t go because Uncle wouldn’t go, so they all decided I should stay. I tried to get in touch with my mother. I phoned her neighbours but they told me she had already gone with my brothers and sisters. I didn’t know what to do; it was absolutely chaotic.
The next morning, I got up early and packed my clothes in a brown paper parcel – my cousins had already taken the suitcases. It was 5.30 in the morning when I left the house, and as I walked through St Peter Port to the harbour I tried to imagine what it would be like when all the houses were empty and the Germans were here. At the harbour I sat on the coiled ropes, watching the buses going by to the ships full of schoolchildren. Their parents were carrying all their belongings in pillowslips – they had no suitcases. I stayed until 11.30 a.m. but I couldn’t see my brothers and sisters. On my way home I met my cousins and they demanded to know where I’d been. I told them, then my parcel broke and all my clothes spilled onto the street. I was crying as I tried to gather them up. When I think about it now, I should have just gone, but you did what you were told then.
My father sent a telegram from England to the Guernsey police asking them to put me on the next boat, but my aunty said no. I remember the boat going out.
Ten-year-old Guernsey boy Herbert Nichols was the eldest of six children. He was of school age, and therefore in one of the priority categories for evacuation. His family lived in Cobo on the west coast of Guernsey, only four miles from St Peter Port, but communications broke down: ‘We were going to be evacuated. Two days in a row we waited all day at the school, but no buses ever arrived. At the end of the second day, they said to come back at 5 a.m., but we didn’t believe them. Those that did were evacuated. The buses went away half-empty.’
Daphne Prins and her small son got as far as St Peter Port harbour. But when she saw the refugees being packed in like sardines, and noticed that the boats were unarmed, she turned back; she and her son remained on Guernsey for the Occupation.
Vivyan Mansell remembers that her family were half-packed and were waiting for her brothers to return from Alderney, where they had been sent by the Guernsey States to collect the cattle and pigs abandoned when the island had been evacuated a few days before. Both young men were of military age, and their mother was anxious that they should get to England, despite the States’ injunction that farmers should stay to help feed the island. By the time the brothers returned from their salvage trip they no longer had any choice, as the last ship for England had gone. Vivyan helped the neighbours: ‘I took three car-loads of kids down to St Peter Port to be evacuated. It was heart-rending. Mrs T. dressed all her children in their best clothes – nothing warm.’
On Jersey Bernard Hassall remembered:
I got as far as the boats. A lot of people turned back at the last moment; it was hell. June 1940 was the most hair-raising and frightening month in the history of the islands. All one could hear was, ‘What are you going to do?’ People were crammed in those ships to be evacuated and the mind boggled at the idea of them crossing the Channel without escorts. On seeing those teeming pots of worms, my brother and I decided not to go.
The journey across the Channel, the chaotic reception in Weymouth, and the five homesick years in industrial towns such as Bradford and Glasgow led many islanders to regret their decision to leave the islands. Edward Hamel described in his memoirs X-Isles how, on the journey from Guernsey, the cabins were crammed full, and even the ship’s decks were wedged with bodies and bundles. It poured with rain. When they docked in Weymouth, they weren’t allowed to disembark. Finally the order came, only for it to be countermanded an hour later. After hours waiting on the ship they landed, but things didn’t improve. The officials in Weymouth were swamped. Inevitably, children became lost. Nine-year-old Pat Nichols ended up in Glasgow despite the luggage label attached to her coat addressed to her grandmother in Kent. In Glasgow she was separated from her sister and four-year-old brother, and ended up in a children’s home. Her mother crossed from Guernsey with her two youngest a few days after the older children, but it took her five months to find Pat and her siblings.
It was to be several months before many of the islanders had found homes, jobs and schools. They were assisted in their efforts to start a new life by a group of islanders based in London who set up the Channel Islands Refugee Committee.
Britain had failed in its responsibilities to the oldest and most loyal possession of the Crown. It had abandoned British islands without a shot being fired, and it had not even been able to provide safe haven to all those British subjects who wished to evacuate. But there were mitigating circumstances. By 4 June Britain had completed the evacuation of Dunkirk, one of the most ignominious defeats in its history. Its military strategy lay in tatters, and Britain itself for the first time in centuries faced the imminent danger of invasion. In the fiasco over the demilitarisation and evacuation of the Channel Islands, it is possible to trace characteristics of British government which disappeared forever in that summer of 1940: an arrogant and complacent confidence, and a faith in the invincibility of the Empire. These were to be smashed in the course of a few months. As late as 5 June, when Hitler’s Panzer divisions had already redrawn the map of Europe and made redundant every British defence policy of the preceding century, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir John Dill, felt it appropriate to waste the Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting on a review of the history of the defence of the Channel Islands since the Dark Ages. When he finally got round to the islands’ current defence needs, it was clear that he had failed to absorb the significance of what had happened in Europe. If the Germans landed on the islands, he asserted, it would be essential as ‘a matter of prestige’ to eject them. He had not grasped that Britain was no longer fighting for its prestige, but for its very survival.
This fact had escaped the most senior members of Britain’s defence establishment, but the island authorities clearly saw the seriousness of what they were faced with: the safety and survival of nearly a hundred thousand people lay in their hands. Officials equivalent to county councillors were pitched into making decisions of unbearable importance. The advice from Whitehall, usually so readily forthcoming, and which for once the islands’ rulers would have welcomed – and which they had a right to expect – dried up overnight. The little that trickled through was late and contradictory.
To the Whitehall civil servants and the wider British public, reading reports of the Channel Islands evacuation in the newspapers, it was utterly inconceivable that British soil could fall into the hands of an enemy. Certainly not soil such as that of the Channel Islands. The islands triggered a host of powerful associations: of delightful summer holidays; of delicious tomatoes; of the first new potatoes and of sweet-smelling freesias and carnations. The islands had been the personal property of the British monarchy since 1066. The idea of a German occupation was simply too painful and humiliating to contemplate.
The bungled demilitarisation and evacuation did not escape the attention of two men, Lord Portsea and Charles Ammon MP. Over the next five years they were regularly to raise the plight of the Channel Islands in the Houses of Parliament, repeatedly pricking the conscience of the government and securing at least a few column inches in the press every time they did so. On 9 July, Lord Portsea, a Jerseyman, rose in the House of Lords to speak on the subject to which he was to return again and again, like a dog worrying a bone. Why, he demanded, did these islands have to be abandoned? Guernsey was further away from France than Dover; the islands had generously donated men and money to the war effort, while demilitarisation had broken ties more than eight hundred years old. Lord Mottistone followed up this passionate speech, saying that he was shocked that the British had abandoned the islands, on which the flag of Britain had flown for eight hundred years, without ‘firing a shot’: ‘It is peculiarly cruel, because these people rightly say they are the oldest of us all. I spoke to an officer of the First World War and he said, “To think we sacrificed more than ten thousand men for one line of trenches and yet did not fire a shot to save these islands.”’
In the House of Commons Charles Ammon, Labour Member of Parliament for Camberwell North, took up the subject in a written question to the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, on 11 July. He asked if it was true that a deputation from Guernsey had gone to the Home Office to ask for total evacuation, and were told that the matter was still under consideration on the very day the islands were bombed. Ammon was told that all those who wanted to evacuate had, and that there had even been boats which left the islands half-empty. The government’s smug conclusion was: ‘It is a matter for congratulations that so many people were brought away safely.’ Ammon wasn’t satisfied, and the following week he took up the cudgels again, armed with copious accounts which islanders had sent him. He started by accusing the government of suppressing news of the possibility that the Channel Islands were in danger of being occupied. Then he quoted from the letter of one islander who had evacuated:
So far from being ‘voluntary’ the evacuation was encouraged and ARP [Air-Raid Precautions] wardens went round (in my district at any rate) imploring the people to get out before they were blown out! We were told that the Jerries would be here in twenty-four hours and that the men would be taken to Germany to work as slaves in the munitions factories and as for our women – well, God help them!
The evacuation arrangements such as they were, were deplorable. I came over on the Antwerp, a troopship, licensed to carry and with lifebelts provided for seven hundred, and there were two thousand men, women and children aboard to be chased by a submarine half-way across. We reached Weymouth at 5 p.m. and we were left there without food or drink until 10 a.m. the next day when people started fainting in all directions and officialdom woke up at last.
Ammon quoted another evacuee who claimed that hundreds of people waited on the quayside on Guernsey all night in hope of transport. When one small boat arrived, several people were almost crushed in the hurry to board it. Ammon warned the government that the islands’ food stocks were low, and that the islanders left behind because of the muddled evacuation were in a ‘very parlous condition’. His efforts to raise these matters with the Home Office had been treated with indifference, he told the Commons. Meanwhile, two thousand refugee islanders in Britain had had to resort to seeking help from the Red Cross Society, because the meagre £20 allowance which they had been permitted to bring with them had quickly run out. Ammon concluded: ‘The Department had failed to realise its responsibilities. To say nothing of the humiliation which every Britisher must feel because we have walked out for the first time in history without making any stand whatsoever against the invader.’
Other MPs followed, quoting letters from evacuees: invalids had been left in hospital waiting for a hospital ship which never arrived; people were still being evacuated from France after the government had decided it was no longer possible to evacuate anyone from the islands; ships bound for England had been laden with potatoes and tomatoes rather than with people wanting to be evacuated.
The government’s response, through the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office, Osbert Peake, was to ridicule Ammon and his colleagues, and to remain adamant that their conduct had been exemplary: ‘I wish on all matters the government and the Home Office had as perfectly clear a conscience as they have on this question of the Channel Islands.’ In fact, the Home Office had a far from clear conscience. There were embarrassing parallels to be drawn, which would not escape the notice of critics. The entire fifteen thousand-strong civilian population of Gibraltar had been successfully evacuated; the principle that British subjects were owed protection had held good there, so why not in the Channel Islands, so much closer to Britain and with even stronger ties of history? Charles Markbreiter at the Home Office drew up an anxious memo for Sir Alexander Maxwell, the Permanent Under-Secretary, in which he pointed out that the evacuation of the islands appeared in a very unfavourable light when compared with that of British subjects from the Riviera. But he added that most of the criticism could be dismissed because a ‘number of influential people such as the Bishop of Winchester think we were right not to evacuate the islands to a greater extent’. The observation rang hollow.
On the islands, an uneasy calm had returned by 24 June after the last evacuation ship had left. Guernsey sent a working party to Alderney to try to persuade some of the eighteen individuals who had refused to be evacuated to England to come to Guernsey. They were only partially successful. Reginald Blanchford from Guernsey’s St John’s Ambulance was a member of the party:
It was very traumatic. There were cows roaming the streets with udders bursting and an old gentleman was trying to chloroform them to kill them. Going into the houses, you’d find a sandwich with a bite taken out of it and half a cup of tea drunk. We heard a noise in one house, there was an old lady there dressed in curtains and she thought I was the SS because I was in my uniform. She was demented, she thought the Germans had arrived. We got her back to Guernsey.
On Guernsey, Jersey and Sark, there was a forced normality. People still went to work, cooked, cleaned, visited the beaches – and waited.
There was one particularly jarring note; some strange stories were doing the rounds. The Jersey Evening Post reported that at the time of the evacuation many cars had been stolen. People turned back from the overcrowded ships had returned to where they had parked their cars to find they had vanished. The Post alleged that one man had stolen five cars, with the intention of putting them aside until better days. One of the Guernsey rescue parties which went to Alderney came back with rather more than the authorities had expected: clothes, furniture and food were dumped in the empty public pool at La Vallette by St Peter Port for everyone to take their pick. One man returned to Guernsey with loot including seventy-six curtains and thirteen clocks. A subsequent police investigation led to the imprisonment of a number of men.
Jersey housewife Dorothy Blackwell remembered: ‘There were some people who, when they knew someone had gone, would go into their homes and take everything they could. One family I heard of went down to the boats, but they didn’t go in the end and when they got back to their houses, there wasn’t a thing left in it. Not even the lino on the floor. Unbelievable that people could do such a thing.’
According to Guernsey teenager Dolly Joanknecht: ‘When I got back to my mother’s house after the evacuation, it had already been vandalised. The doors were wide open and the windows were smashed. All the drawers were tipped upside down and the china smashed. They must have picked out what they wanted. That was before the Germans arrived; it wasn’t touched all the five years of Occupation. Everything was exactly how it was left after being vandalised when my mother came back five years later.’
The islands had always been scrupulously law-abiding, and proud of the fact. Islanders had never needed to lock their homes or their cars before, and they were horrified by the thefts. Little did they realise that they were a foretaste of the way in which the moral fabric of these old communities was going to be tested and frayed over the next five years, in ways they could not have imagined.
Everyone was waiting, and as they waited their minds turned to what the Germans’ arrival would bring. In his memoirs, Ambrose Sherwill remembered that he, like many islanders, had no idea of what to expect:
Of the Germans I knew virtually nothing, I did not speak a word of German . . . My service in the Great War had certainly not endeared Germans to me. What I had read about their behaviour in occupied France and Belgium during the war made me gravely apprehensive of the treatment likely to be meted out to us when, flushed with victory and probably, drink, they arrived on Guernsey, as, to me, unlike those in Whitehall, it seemed certain they would.
Sherwill privately asked a British naval commander how he thought the Germans would behave. The reply horrified him: ‘They would probably be brutal and he had heard of cases where soldiers on the march in France and Belgium had, with their bayonets as they passed along, hacked off the arms of children standing on the pavement.’
Dolly Joanknecht was warned never to walk in front of a German, because they could stab you with their bayonets: ‘It suddenly came back to me how they used to talk in the First World War; they used to say that Germans ate babies and that they crucified girls on doors and raped them.’
It was a tense, eerie hiatus. Alderney housewife Daphne Pope was one of the few people left on the island; the memory of the abandoned dogs’ howls echoing in the empty town of St Anne’s haunts her still. Cows bellowed with pain as the milk filled their udders. On Guernsey and Jersey, streets which had once been busy were strangely quiet. Houses which had once teemed with children were silent. Sherwill noted that, as in the Bible, mothers whose children had been evacuated were ‘mourning and would not be comforted’. The immaculately tended gardens began to look a little unkempt as the midsummer grass continued to grow.