‘Because we are British, we are thoroughly neglected.’
Letter from an anonymous islander in The Times, December 1944
BEFORE JULY 1940, the Channel Islands were a mere 4½-hour boat journey from mainland Britain, across the seventy miles of water from Weymouth. There had been a constant traffic to and fro of passengers, trade and mail. All this had come to a halt. For the five years of Occupation the islands could have been as far away as Warsaw. The only direct contacts with Britain were the Red Cross messages, a few lines long, which came via Switzerland, and in which anything more contentious than ‘All fine. Hope you are too’ was censored. Thousands of relatives on both sides of the Channel waited anxiously for news. In Britain, newsletters were set up amongst the island refugees to scotch the more baroque rumours and pass on accurate information. On the islands, the people listened secretly to the BBC, hoping that one day there might be a message from friends or relatives who had been evacuated or were serving in the Forces. They also listened for a message of sympathy and concern for their own plight; perhaps a reference to the Crown’s oldest possessions in one of the King’s Christmas broadcasts, or even a word of encouragement from the great man himself, Prime Minister Winston Churchill. There was nothing.
The BBC broadcast programmes carrying messages to thousands of British families scattered across the Empire by the war. They encouraged the Belgians, Dutch, French and Poles to keep up their morale, easing the sense of isolation with messages of solidarity in the struggle against Nazism. But of the Channel Islands there was not a word. The islanders could be forgiven for thinking they had been forgotten.
The most bitter disappointment came in 1944. The islanders saw the planes flying overhead on D-Day, 6 June, for the invasion and liberation of France. They heard the bombing of St Malo and Cherbourg; from Jersey and Alderney they could see, with the aid of binoculars, the Allied forces moving on the Normandy peninsula. Every day, it seemed that Liberation must be imminent. But it was not. The Allies swept past the fortress islands, leaving their large German garrisons untouched, liberating Paris in August 1944, Brussels a month later, and reaching German territory by Christmas.
Far behind Allied lines, the Reich’s British holiday islands were left to starve. From the very beginning of the Occupation, islanders had hoped that an agreement could be reached between the British and German governments, with the Swiss as intermediaries, to allow supplies of fuel, basic foodstuffs and medicines through to the islands. The island governments broached various schemes to the German authorities, and in Westminster suggestions were put to the British government by Lord Portsea and evacuated islanders. Nothing came of either. After D-Day, supplies from France came to a halt, and the islands were under siege from the Allies. The islanders’ rations had been drastically reduced by September 1944, yet it took Britain another four months to be persuaded to arrange food parcels through the Red Cross. Why had Britain forgotten them? the starving islanders asked through the months of October, November and December 1944. Just what were the British doing for the islands during the Occupation? What did they know about conditions on the islands? And what, if anything, were they doing to alleviate them?
The fiasco of the 1940 military raids had not dampened Churchill’s enthusiasm for such adventures. In his view, the British public needed a morale booster, and nothing would better serve that purpose than the flamboyant, brilliant recapture of one of the Channel Islands to reinstate the integrity of British territory. Churchill’s ambitions were not shared by the highest echelons of the military command, but as M.R.D. Foot – himself involved in the planning for a raid on Alderney – points out, there were many relatively untried units in the armed forces eager to win recognition through such an operation. There was also a stock of young Channel Islanders in the forces who were committed and eager to do something for their home islands.
Seven large-scale operations were planned in the course of the war – several of them proposed by the Chief of Combined Operations, Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten – but none came to pass. A major attack would have been costly in terms of lives and equipment, and the likely gains were questionable. Mountbatten argued repeatedly in 1942 that Alderney could be captured, and would serve as a useful radar site and base for attacking German convoy routes, as well as providing a springboard for attacks on the Cherbourg peninsula. But he met with stiff opposition: an attack on Alderney could easily be repelled by the Luftwaffe, who had two aerodromes on the French coast within twenty miles of the island. Attacks on Jersey, Sark or Guernsey carried the danger of heavy civilian casualties, because the islands were densely populated. The intended morale booster was far more likely to turn into a bitter embarrassment. Mountbatten was never allowed to launch the operations he had envisaged.
The unhappy compromise was ineffective, pinprick raids, and four minor operations did go ahead. In one of them, ‘Operation Dryad’, on 2 September 1942, the Casquets lighthouse off Alderney was captured and seven Germans were taken prisoner. The lighthouse was a useful observation post but was indefensible, and was soon back in German hands. The raid strengthened Hitler’s conviction that the islands had to be heavily fortified to beat off possible attack. He referred to the operation in the course of a three-hour speech to his military commanders: ‘Above all, I am grateful to the English for proving me right by their various landing attempts. It shows up those who think I am always seeing phantoms, who say, “Well, when are the English coming? There is absolutely nothing happening on the coast – we swim every day, and we haven’t seen a single Englishman!”’
A raid on Sark in October 1942 had far-reaching consequences. The twelve-man raiding party met an islander who told them that the Germans were polite, and asked them why the King had not mentioned the islands in his last Christmas broadcast. The party went on to kill two Germans, and took a prisoner back to England. When Hitler heard about the raid, and that the prisoner’s hands had been tied, he ordered that in retaliation 1400 Allied prisoners in Dieppe should have theirs tied. Most of them were Canadian, and the Canadian government responded by tying the hands of the same number of German prisoners in Canada. Hitler also ordered that in future all commandos should be treated as acting as bandits, and shot. Finally, as a punishment for help given to the commandos by one Sark woman, two hundred islanders were deported from Jersey, Guernsey and Sark to German internment camps in February 1943.
Two small-scale raids in 1943 – one on Sark and one on Jersey – achieved nothing; the members of the former returned to Britain with the disconcerting information that residents on Jersey had not been co-operative; one woman refused to tell them where there were Germans, and told them to ask at another farmhouse. They did so, and found two petrified brothers who told them there was no resistance movement and that people were getting on well with the Germans.
The raids on the islands achieved nothing more than a few scraps of information, but they had very serious consequences for the islanders: Guernsey lost an able President of the Controlling Committee in Sherwill, and the raid on Sark led to more deportations. The raids provoked anxiety on the part of the islands’ population, who believed they were futile. No doubt they felt that they could do without this sort of attention from Britain.
The Occupation had become an embarrassment to the British government; it could not even recapture a few islands seventy miles from its own shore. It was decided that reminders of the Channel Islands were bad for the morale of the British public, and the Home Office went to considerable lengths to keep references to the Occupation off the airwaves and out of the newspapers. The islands were rarely mentioned in BBC news bulletins or programmes, and they were omitted from the King’s Christmas speech, which was a source of great disappointment to the islanders.
The Home Office also put pressure on Members of Parliament not to raise Channel Island issues at Westminster. But this was only partly successful, as the islands had two stalwart allies in Parliament: Lord Portsea, a stubborn, eccentric old Jerseyman, and Charles Ammon, MP for Camberwell North. Together these two managed to find an opportunity almost every month to press for action over the Channel Islands. The two particular issues over which they harried the government were that the BBC should give the islands some encouragement through a message or programme for them, and that the government should arrange to send food, medicine and fuel supplies to the islands.
Portsea and Ammon first took up the cudgels in the Houses of Parliament in July 1940, a few days after the Germans landed. They were concerned that there were not sufficient food and fuel supplies on the island. In the autumn of 1940 an exasperated Home Office wrote private notes offering to keep the pair informed if they in return would remove questions from the Order Paper, as ‘any public discussion on this motion is so undesirable’.
In January 1941 Portsea tabled a motion that leaflets with news of the war’s progress should be dropped over the islands (such leaflets, to the effect that Britain was still fighting the good fight, had been dropped once before, in September 1940) and that the BBC should make specific programmes with personal messages for the Channel Island audience. He also wanted a postal link to be set up with the islands via a neutral country, so that the thousands of islanders serving in the Forces could send letters to their families. The Home Secretary himself, Herbert Morrison, wrote an irritable note to Portsea asking him to withdraw the motion. He claimed that it was undesirable to send personal messages via the BBC, and that they should only go through recognised German channels. Raising the matter in the House, he said, could do nothing but harm. But Portsea was not persuaded, and Osbert Peake, the Home Office Minister, was given the task of bringing him round to the official way of thinking. Peake wrote to Lord Moyne, the government’s spokesman in the House of Lords: ‘I spent about an hour on Saturday morning trying to induce Lord Portsea to withdraw his motion . . . I am afraid I was unsuccessful. He is an obstinate old gentleman, very proud of his Channel Island ancestry, and apparently receives a lot of letters from island refugees . . . he therefore feels that he must make a demonstration of his keenness to press the government to do more by way of conveying information to the islands.’
Ammon and Portsea continued to raise the matter of the islands at Westminster without success. In May 1941 Ammon passed on a memo to the Home Secretary written by a Channel Islands officer serving in the Forces whose family was trapped on the islands. The memo accused the Home Office of an ‘apparent lack of interest in the welfare and ultimate fate of the eighty thousand British subjects who are virtually prisoners in the only portion of the British Empire that can be correctly described as “enemy-occupied territory”’. The officer called for a commission to be set up to monitor developments on the islands and to interview escapees systematically about conditions under the Occupation. He pointed out that rumours amongst the islands’ thirty thousand refugee community were rife and causing great anxiety; there had been newspaper reports that all the women had been put in concentration camps and that the population was near starvation. The Germans had allowed letters to be sent to British prisoners of war and to occupied France, so why could not this be arranged for the islands? He also asked why food supplies were not being sent to the islands when the Germans had invited the Americans to send supplies to France. The Home Secretary’s reply to Ammon was haughty and brief; he accused the officer of passing on secret information, and said that the Post Office was already trying to set up a postal route through Portugal or Spain. (This never came to fruition, but after March 1941 the islanders received two-line Red Cross messages at regular intervals.)
The first anniversary of the Occupation, in June 1941, was viewed as extremely sensitive by Whitehall. No one wanted to remind the British public of the previous summer’s humiliation. It would be ‘undesirable’ to broadcast any mention of the anniversary as it could be put to propaganda use by ‘ill-disposed’ people, said a Home Office memo. Winston Churchill was sent a letter by the Exeter Channel Islands Society, a group of sympathisers and evacuees, at the time of the anniversary, and his proposed reply was subjected to careful drafting and redrafting by the Home Office before being forwarded to him for his approval. All references to the anniversary were deleted, and the final reply was masterfully anodyne: ‘No one who knows anything about the history of the Channel Islands, least of all Mr Churchill, is unmindful of the services rendered to the Crown by men from these islands both in the remote and in the recent past. The most suitable method of making known to all islanders, the government’s appreciation of their loyalty to the Crown and their services to the Empire, is receiving sympathetic consideration . . .’
Churchill refused to broadcast a message on the anniversary, and even the Channel Islands Refugee Committee’s request to make a radio programme on how the island refugees were faring in Britain was refused.fn1 They had to be satisfied with the Home Office’s suggestion of a message of sympathy broadcast by the Bishop of Winchester, Cyril Garbett, to island refugees in Britain – which made no reference to the anniversary or to those left behind on the islands. The Home Office did admit that ‘islanders find Parliamentary answers disappointing after the BBC’s references to the gallantry and suffering of the Allies’.
In the autumn of 1941 Bishop Cyril Garbett spoke to Dennis Vibert, the Jersey escapee who had virtually rowed across the Channel solo; he was alarmed by Vibert’s reports that food and fuel supplies were running short, and wrote to Churchill asking him to send Red Cross supplies to the islands. The Home Office drafted the reply: ‘The Prime Minister is sorry if there is a feeling among the islanders that they have been forgotten and that very little is said about them . . . he would very much like to make it known to our fellow countrymen who remained in the islands that the government has not forgotten them, and to send them a message of encouragement. There are, however, obvious difficulties in doing so while the islands are in enemy occupation.’
By November 1941 the Home Office’s reluctance to arrange food supplies for the islands had been complicated by the precedent of Belgian refugees in Britain, who had organised a system of sending food parcels to occupied Belgium via Portugal. The Home Office’s Charles Markbreiter was worried that Lord Portsea might get wind of the scheme. He wrote to Lord Moyne that it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that Portsea would hear of the Belgian food parcels, but in case he did, Moyne should have his defence ready. Markbreiter wrote that ‘no one knows whether the Belgians benefit from the scheme, but it is certain the people in the Channel Islands would not. Needless to say, the matter should not be mentioned if it can possibly be avoided.’
The Ministry of Economic Warfare opposed the idea of sending food to the islands; it would only be re-exported to earn money for the Germans, they claimed. They told the Home Office that Belgium was an exception reluctantly allowed for ‘propaganda reasons’, but that a further exception for ‘our own people’ would be embarrassing.
At Christmas 1941, the question of a broadcast message of encouragement reared its head again. Markbreiter told the BBC that no reference should be made to the Channel Islands, and that Churchill would not broadcast any message; he explained that it could provoke reprisals against islanders or the confiscation of their radios. The BBC wrote back that they had followed Markbreiter’s instructions and had omitted the islands completely from their Christmas Day ‘Absent Friends’ programme. Lord Portsea was furious, and in January he raised the matter in the House of Lords. Markbreiter drew up a studiedly bland reply for the government, apologising to the islanders if they thought they had been forgotten and concluding that there had been ‘several broadcasts of interest to islanders included in the general programmes on the BBC’.
The indomitable Portsea was tired of such bland government statements, and announced in the House of Lords that if the British government would provide a ship, he would collect the food and sail it to the Channel Islands himself. His scheme was greeted with delight by the Daily Mail, and offers poured into the newspaper’s offices from sailors willing to crew the octogenarian lord’s voyage. Neither this plan of Lord Portsea’s nor another for him to be parachuted into the islands came to anything, and by this time the Home Office had lost all patience with Portsea.
In October 1942 all the British newspapers carried news of the deportation of more than two thousand islanders to German internment camps. The information had been uncovered by members of the military raid on Sark that month, and the British government had been forced to release it in a statement in response to Hitler’s accusations that the raiders had shackled their prisoner. The Times, Daily Sketch and Daily Mirror devoted considerable space to this latest instance of German barbarity. Headlines ran ‘Nazis Send Captured Britons as Slaves, Island Raid Reveals’ and ‘Islanders Starve as Nazis Grab Food’. Under the title ‘It Might Have Been Your Fate’ the Sunday Chronicle declared that Oberst Knackfuss, the Feldkommandant, ‘should go down on the black list alongside the murderers of Lidicefn2 and those who stole the food from the Greeks and left them to starvefn3 . . . the real truth has emerged of deportations and forced labour’.
Ammon asked Churchill at Question Time whether he intended to protest at the deportations of the islanders. The Prime Minister’s cryptic answer was, ‘We do what we can to beat the enemy.’ Unsatisfied, a week later Ammon questioned Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, about the deported islanders, decrying the lack of intervention over the islands and the little notice taken of their plight in the House. He returned to the deportation issue on several further occasions; the government’s silence was deafening, they had no wish to give any more publicity to the issue. But the government was deeply troubled, and within a few months the deportations had been quietly listed as a war crime, for which the Germans could be prosecuted after the war.
The Sark raid had also revealed that the islands were in grave need of food and medicines, and the Channel Islands Refugee Committee wrote to Herbert Morrison in the autumn of 1942 to press on him the urgency of getting supplies through to the islands. They warned that children and invalids were ‘now suffering from serious dietetic deficiencies and there is grave fear of permanent injury to their health’. Finally, the UK government gave medical supplies, including insulin, to the International Red Cross to pass on to the islands, but it refused to allow food, dried milk and vitamins through the blockade.
By November 1942, Portsea’s periodic pleas for food supplies to be sent to the islands were reinforced by the news that four thousand tonnes of food per month was reaching Greece from Britain and America. Other parts of occupied Europe were also getting food supplies: Belgium was receiving a thousand tonnes of food per month and four tonnes in food parcels, mainly of nutritionally rich sardines and honey, and food parcels could also be sent to France and Norway. The Ministry of Economic Warfare told the Home Office they no longer had objections to food parcels being sent to the islands from Portugal, ‘though it would suit them very much better if nothing was done at the moment’. The Ministry claimed that the islands were better off than France and Belgium (there was no evidence that this was correct), and incomparably better off than Greece and Poland (which was true). A few months later the Ministry suggested that between five and twenty tons of food could now be sent to the islands, but the government did not take up the suggestion.
Six months later, in June 1943, Lord Portsea had hatched another scheme. He pleaded in the Lords that parcels of coffee and tea should be dropped from the air on Jersey and Guernsey, as a way of showing encouragement and sympathy for the islanders. Needless to say, the idea came to nothing.
The Home Office was now the unwilling recipient of letters from concerned members of the public asking why food could not be sent to the islands, which were only twelve hours from Weymouth by boat, when it was being sent to Greece. An ex-Indian Army Colonel wrote to ask if it was true that the islanders were starving; the Home Office minuted on his letter that they did not know what to answer. One of the most persistent and articulate letter-writers was a former Member of Parliament, Edith Picton-Turberville. Markbreiter replied to one of her letters that the government could not be seen to treat its own kind more favourably, and the government was doing all it could, etc. etc.
Before D-Day, in June 1944, the British government actually knew very little about conditions on the islands. They relied on a handful of escaped islanders such as Dennis Vibert, and the returning members of military raids, for a few details. Aerial reconnaissance gave some information about the disposition of labour camps and fortifications, but it could give no insight into the state of food, fuel and medical supplies, or the morale of the population.
The escapees were questioned by the Home Office and MI19, a branch of military intelligence, and reports of the interviews were circulated to several ministries in Whitehall. They did not paint an appealing picture of life under the Occupation. The escapees were highly critical of their fellow islanders, accusing them of collaboration, black marketeering and corruption. But escapees were not representative of the islanders; the very fact that they had embarked on a dangerous escape marked them out as unusually brave and uncompromising, and their judgements derived from their characters. The information they provided was to have a significant impact on the attitude of the government, and in particular of Churchill, towards the islanders’ conduct under German rule. In September 1941, for example, Dennis Vibert told the Home Office that the food situation was very serious, and added: ‘The Germans have had no need to apply compulsion, as they appear to have received all the assistance that they have asked for. For example, when three hundred labourers were required to work on the airport extensions about nine hundred applied . . . It appears to be the policy of the States to co-operate with the German military authorities, and they have actually been thanked by the German Commandant for their co-operation.’ There were too many such tales of behaviour, which Whitehall judged un-British, for it to be favourably disposed towards the islands.
In 1943, a Jersey escapee gave the first information about the brutal treatment of Russian slave labourers on the island. The Home Office suggested to him that he did not mention the matter to the Soviet ambassador; perhaps they feared sensationalist publicity. The government was already aware of the existence of camps on the islands, in particular on Alderney, because of aerial reconnaissance of the fortifications.
Guernsey escapee John Hubert was interviewed by the Home Office in August 1943. He said there had been some cases of malnutrition, but that for the most part islanders were keeping cheerful. It was the collaboration of the island authorities on which he chose to dwell:
Many officials will, I know, blow out their chests and tell great flourishing stories of their difficulties when the war is won, but I really hope that in the midst of their conceit, some reflection will bring to the guilty minds a realisation of their great weakness and cowardice in having failed to resist German orders, even when golden opportunities presented themselves . . . as Percy Dorey [President of the Guernsey Glasshouse Utilisation Board] said to me when enforcing a German order, ‘I don’t want to be sent to Germany.’
I confess to having been proud always of being a Guernseyman, but occupation experiences disclose great weakness. I have always listened to the British broadcasts whilst in Guernsey and cannot describe the confused feelings on hearing Colonel Britton speaking to the occupied countries regarding passive resistance.
There is one willing quisling . . . [and] many weaklings . . . officials used their position to obtain extra rations themselves and also supply their friends.
In April 1944 the first escapees from Alderney were questioned. Two Guernseymen who had been on Alderney for four months told MI19 that there were about thirty islanders currently working on Alderney, but that there were no longer any Jerseywomen, as they had all been sent home with venereal disease. The escapees also said that there were a thousand Jews wearing the yellow Star of David working on Alderney, and about five thousand ‘stripers’ – forced labourers so named because they had a stripe of paint down the side of their trouser leg.
After D-Day, the British government received considerably more information. Firstly, the number of escapees increased dramatically as Jerseymen crossed the narrow stretch of sea between the island and the liberated coast of France. The escapees brought news of siege conditions on the fortress islands. In October 1944 five Jerseymen and one Jerseywoman were questioned by MI19. They said that the German soldiers were reduced to eating nothing but horsemeat and mashed potatoes. Their uniforms were disintegrating, and morale was low. MI19 reported: ‘The islands have been peculiarly isolated and rumour is correspondingly more rampant. No one ever dared correct a rumour, because if they did, there was grave danger of a “quisling” informer accusing him of having other sources of information such as a wireless. [The escapees] all think that leaflets could have stopped rumours and done much to check the passive attitude of many island government officials.’
Two Guernseymen questioned by MI19 in November 1944 said a group had emerged which called itself ‘The Guernsey Underground Barbers’. Its aim was to punish women who had ‘misconducted themselves with Germans’. The escapees described one recent case in which a woman informer had had her eyes attacked with scissors. These islanders were less critical of the authorities than previous escapees, but they said that the Guernsey Bailiff, Victor Carey, was too old and ‘effete’. His offer of a £25 reward for information on those painting V-signs was, they said, ‘unnecessary and gratuitous’. They added that German discipline was collapsing; there had been a riot over a food complaint in a billet involving forty-eight men.
Also in November, Guernseyman Fred Noyon arrived in Britain with a detailed account of the island’s food supplies entrusted to him by a group including members of the government who, exasperated by the Bailiff’s lack of action, had decided to take matters into their own hands. The gravity of the food crisis was such that on Jersey the Bailiff set aside his policy of opposing escapes and handed a memo outlining Jersey’s position to a Jerseyman who succeeded in delivering it to Britain. In mid-November MI19 reported on interviews with escapees: ‘Islanders have given up their confidence in the Home Office of Britain since the fall of Brest [on 18 September 1944] . . . The islands have been neglected by the UK propaganda and welfare branches . . . there had been no encouragement from the BBC, no Red Cross help . . . and in the present emergency still no word, lead or direct intervention by the British government.’
The second source of information on conditions on the islands was intercepted mail from islanders to deportees in the internment camps after D-Day and the liberation of France. Reports on the captured mail’s contents were prepared by the Postal and Telegraph Censorship. In November and December 1944, Whitehall received extracts from 227 letters before the postal link was cut by the advance of the Allied front line to the German border. They made unpleasant reading for the British government.
Ten letter-writers said that they were in such dire material distress that their health was affected, and they felt they could not hold out much longer: ‘Life is not worth living, we cannot sleep at nights, we are so worried and distressed . . . we are starving here . . . I wonder how much longer, it is more than human nature can endure.’
Six other writers expressed strong resentment of the British for not sending Red Cross food parcels, which deportees in the internment camps in Germany had already received:
I think they have forgotten us entirely in England. They gave it out over the wireless the other day in the House of Commons that the people in the Channel Islands were being well treated by the Germans . . . when we heard Churchill say another seven months [until Liberation] the other day, we nearly collapsed . . . I don’t think there’ll be many left to ring Victory bells. The BBC has forgotten us too. How everyone hopes the King will mention us at Xmas or that the BBC will put on a program for us . . . but not for us. For France and Belgium and all the rest, oh yes – but not for us. Who are we?
Other writers complained of informers being paid £105 for informing on people with radios, and cases were quoted of brothers and sisters giving each other away out of spite. A few of the letter-writers were pro-German: one girl wrote to say she was engaged to a German soldier, and a man working on the German troops’ newspaper felt that ‘many of them [Germans] show kinship of race with us’.
One writer complained that there was no fuel for heat or light, and that people were chopping up furniture and shelves to heat a saucepan of potatoes. The Germans were eating ten old horses a week, in the form of sausages. The letter continued: ‘Is there going to be some fun here one of these days! British versus Jersey-ites. The locals are rotten and we English are just spoiling to get at them.’
Little of this information leaked through to the general public. The Postal and Telegraph Censorship reports were secret, and the escapees in the latter years of the Occupation were advised not to talk to the press. But rumours flourished amongst the evacuee islanders, who were well-informed about what was happening on the islands. One anonymous islander gave a letter to an escapee to send to The Times. It was published on 5 December 1944, and summed up the complaints of islanders at the time: the sense of neglect by the government and the BBC, the disappointment, the growing fear of hunger and the desire for justice.
It seems so strange and shows a great lack of imagination . . . If we had been French, Polish or any other nationality, we would have been showered with messages and pamphlets . . . because we are British, we are thoroughly neglected . . .
The only people who can get any food now are the collaborators and the jerrybags and there are a few hundred of each kind . . . the States are in a state of complete jitters, and give way to the Germans over everything.
I only hope there will be an inquiry . . . the black marketeers must be dealt with and the informers and quislings . . . the lynching in Romefn4 will seem a kindergarten game compared with what will happen here when the pent-up wrath and indignation of the masses is let loose.
The Home Office was furious at the letter’s publication; a memo commented that ‘the tone of the letter is not pleasant and I am surprised The Times published it . . . it should not have been given circulation.’ Whitehall did not wish rumours of corruption and collaboration to get any wider currency, but MI19’s interviews and the censorship reports had clearly indicated that the liberation of the islands would reveal some awkward questions.
Significantly, the one matter relating to the Channel Islands at this time in which Churchill did show great interest was an allegation of treason, which he asked Anthony Eden, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to look into. Churchill had heard that in 1944 a British soldier, a member of a raiding party, had been betrayed to the Germans by a police constable. His private secretary told Eden, ‘there must be other cases than this, and it is important that the guilty parties should be brought to trial’. A few months later, in reply to Eden’s enquiries, the Home Office declared that no evidence had been found to substantiate Churchill’s report. However, the incident is revealing of what was uppermost in Churchill’s mind in the last months of the war.
Liberation of the islands raised the spectre of the kind of social unrest which had haunted the liberation of Europe. Throughout the late summer and autumn of 1944, Britain had watched in horror as each liberated country had turned in on itself in a frenzy of vengeance against collaborators and fraternisers. The Scourge claimed the lives of thousands of people in France, and women alleged to have fraternised were humiliated in public rituals of head-shaving, tarring and feathering. Churchill found this disgusting. It could not be allowed to happen on the Channel Islands, Whitehall determined. The islands’ Liberation, said James Boag Howard, the young Home Office civil servant put in charge of planning it, would be a model one, quite unlike the rough and ready operations in Sicily and Italy.
Preparations for the Liberation began in 1943, as it was expected shortly after D-Day. By April 1944 every detail was ready: every shoe, sheet of toilet paper and tablet of soap which would be needed by the civilian population had been requisitioned and sat waiting in warehouses on the south coast of England. It was decided that the Liberation Force would include as many Channel Islanders as possible; and to ensure that there was no trouble there would be no privates – who were thought likely to be less disciplined than more senior ranks – and no troops from the Allies.
Collaborators and black marketeers were to be given swift but fair justice. Boag Howard had thirteen months in which to fill voluminous files with recommendations on how black marketeers’ profits could be taxed and what exactly was the definition of collaboration. He enlisted the help of a handful of prominent Channel Islanders in Britain to help him with these delicate matters, including the former Judge of Alderney, Frederick French, who had become a Brigadier, and Jerseyman Lord Justice du Parcq, a Law Lord.
‘Arrangements have already been made for the investigation of collaboration,’ said Boag Howard to French in April 1944. But what exactly was collaboration? he wondered. Was it collaboration ‘to make the best of a bad situation for oneself and one’s fellow citizens by doing one’s job as well as possible . . .?’ He was also troubled by the question of black-market profits: ‘It seems to us that if anyone in the Islands has been sailing near the wind to obtain financial gain, he will probably have farmed out his gains in such a way that we won’t be able to spot him through his bank balances.’
By December 1944, the Home Office had decided that black marketeers should be taxed, and that the opportunity to catch them would be when they changed Reichsmarks into sterling. C.W. Bickmore, the financial advisor to Brigadier Alfred Snow, the Liberation Force Commander, told the Home Office:
I should like to suggest that it does not lie in our mouths at all to mention collaboration; we have not felt the jackboot and we can form very little idea of what shifts we would have been put to if we had, and when all is said, we must admit that we left the islands in the lurch . . .
As regards profits, the astute collaborator will not have retained his ill-gotten gains in cash, or even in money in the bank; he will have salted it away in possessions of some sort [but] the witch-hunt for collaboration is likely to be only a passing phase.
Bickmore’s final point was the most important. He foresaw exactly the dilemma which was to confront the Home Office in the summer of 1945:
If at the outset we give any indication of our readiness to lend countenance to accusations of collaboration we shall be undermining the influence of the very instruments upon which we must rely to set the islands on their feet again, for it is only too clear from the information which is coming through to us that there is an element among the population dissatisfied with the conduct of the administrators who stood between them and their oppressors.
While the Whitehall civil servants were putting the finishing touches to their Liberation plans, the islanders were starving. The dwindling supply line with France had finally been cut after D-Day. The German garrison had been strengthened by troops evacuated from France, and now numbered about thirty thousand. Germans and islanders alike were suffering from malnutrition.fn5
In August 1944 the Jersey government drew up a memo for the German Feldkommandantur; the strictly rationed food and fuel supplies would run out in four months, probably sooner. The following month, the German Foreign Ministry formally asked Switzerland as a neutral intermediary to inform Britain that ‘on the former British Channel Islands supplies for the civilian population are exhausted’, and suggested that either all civilians should be evacuated, or food supplies should be sent in. The Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Chiefs of Staff and the Home Office saw no objection to sending food, but Churchill did. He wanted the German garrison starved into submission, and scribbled in the margin of a Liberation plan forwarded to him for approval, ‘Let ’em starve. No fighting. They can rot at their leisure.’
Churchill would not be budged; responsibility for feeding the islanders lay with the Germans, and if they did not have food, they should surrender. At the end of September he wrote in a minute: ‘I am entirely opposed to sending any rations to the Channel Islands ostensibly for the civil population but in fact enabling the German garrison to prolong their resistance.’
An official notice printed in the islands’ newspapers two weeks later stated that the occupying power no longer considered itself responsible for feeding the islanders, because it had referred the matter to the British. At the same time the Germans began to requisition food. The islanders became very alarmed – there was a danger that neither the British nor the Germans would take responsibility for the starving civilian population. The Guernsey Bailiff, Victor Carey, wrote a long letter to the Befehlshaber, Oberst von Schmettow, accusing him of ignoring the Hague Convention. Von Schmettow’s reply was emotional: ‘People in the islands do not know what war is, nor what war means. They can have no idea of what every German town, the whole of France, London and the south of England are experiencing daily in the way of sacrifices and sufferings.’ He went on to point out that the islands had had the good fortune barely to have experienced war as the rest of Europe understood it, and warned that ‘The German army does not build fortifications of such strength without holding them with the greatest bitterness, and until the exhaustion of its powers of resistance. Even the advent of a calamity for the population after some time, for which the besieger alone will be responsible, will change nothing of the facts.’
After the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, it became increasingly difficult to keep the islands supplied. The German authorities in France suggested that the civilian population be evacuated, as the islands could support the German garrison alone almost indefinitely. But, as von Schmettow pointed out, three-quarters of the islanders were engaged in ‘practical service to the troops, so that evacuation without damaging troops’ interest could apply only to those who cannot work – sick, children and the aged’. As the pressure on the available shipping mounted, even this much-reduced scheme was abandoned.
Throughout October the British government held to its line that it was the Germans’ responsibility to feed the islanders. But, faced with pressure in Parliament, in the newspapers and from the evacuees to send food, the government’s resolve was weakening. Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, prevaricated in a reply to Charles Ammon, now Lord Ammon, that food could not be sent to the islands until ‘the ‘time is ripe’. On 2 November Morrison said in reply to a question in Parliament that fuel, food and medical supplies were ready for despatch.
Only Churchill was still holding out; on 6 November he told the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, ‘I am entirely opposed to our feeding the German garrison in the Channel Islands and thus prolonging its resistance.’ But, the following day, Churchill finally gave way, and agreed that food and medicine parcels should be sent, on the understanding that the Germans continued to be responsible for providing the basic civilian ration.
By November, civilian rations on the islands had shrunk to virtually the minimum necessary to support life: 500 grams of bread, 125 grams of fat, 20 grams of meat and 500 grams of potatoes per week. The Germans’ rations were 2100 grams of bread, 500 of meat, 245 of fat and 2800 of potatoes.
The Channel Island refugees in Britain were very worried. Soothing words in Parliament had not translated into action, and on 3 December the Sheffield Channel Islands Society was the first of many local societies to present a petition to Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary. Nearly nine thousand people had put their name to a statement calling for food to be sent to the islands; Morrison refused even to receive the delegation bearing the boxes containing the petition. There was a steady stream of letters from Members of Parliament enquiring about conditions in the islands, to which Morrison refused to reply. ‘Any publicity would prejudice negotiations,’ was his only comment. Several Parliamentary questions were deferred or withdrawn. Finally, on 14 December, five weeks after Churchill had agreed to send food parcels, Morrison announced in the Commons that a Red Cross ship would set sail for the islands with food and medicines in the next few days. In fact the voyage from Lisbon was postponed, and it was not until 27 December that the Vega docked in St Peter Port with 100,000 food parcels, 4200 invalid diet parcels and supplies of soap, salt, medicines and tobacco.
The food parcels saga had left islanders both in Britain and on the islands extremely angry, as Morrison was only too well aware from the flood of irate letters to the Home Office. The whole business had been so protracted that the government received little credit for sending supplies at all. As the spring of 1945 approached, the collapse of Germany seemed only weeks away, and the Liberation of the islands was at last within sight. Morrison turned his energies to patching up the tattered relationship between Britain and the islands and to preparing the ground for a peaceful Liberation. In March he asked Churchill to mention the suffering of the islands in a speech, writing that it would ‘clear [the word was crossed out and replaced with ‘improve’] the local atmosphere when our troops go back to the islands’. But Churchill was still unfavourably disposed towards the islands, and his reply was abrupt: ‘I doubt if it will be possible for me to introduce the subject into my broadcasts. These have to be conceived as a whole, and not as a catalogue of favourable notices.’ Churchill would not relent, and Morrison had to make do with finally getting a programme on the Channel Islands onto the BBC. On 29 March 1945, four and half years after the idea had first been suggested, a fourteen-minute programme on the islands was broadcast. The islanders had to wait until 22 May – nearly two weeks after Liberation – before the BBC transmitted a half-hour programme of messages from evacuated islanders in Britain which had been recorded in August 1944.
As the diplomatic exchanges over food went back and forth between Bern, Berlin and London, the British government used psychological warfare in the hope of persuading the island garrisons to surrender. An attempt to recapture the heavily fortified islands by force had been ruled out as too costly in men and equipment. In the early autumn of 1944 thousands of propaganda leaflets were dropped on the islands urging the German troops surrender. A letter was dropped by parachute on Guernsey on 1 September addressed to von Schmettow, asking him to reconnect the Channel Island end of a telephone cable link to France. At the other end of the cable was a captured German general, ready to attempt to persuade him to surrender. Von Schmettow ignored the request, and Berlin announced on the radio that ‘the Channel Islands had refused several demands for surrender and were still holding out’.
It was decided to drop a second letter by parachute on the night of 21 September, fixing a rendezvous point for the Allies to meet von Schmettow; this letter probably landed in the sea. A Canadian officer accompanied by another captured German general approached the coast of Guernsey, a request for discussions with von Schmettow was relayed to shore, and half an hour later the reply came that ‘Lieutenant General von Schmettow is fully informed as to the military situation and therefore declines any discussion.’ As they made for Cherbourg, their boat was fired on by the coastal battery on Alderney.
The German fortresses were left intact. In Churchill’s view they tied up a large number of German soldiers and contributed little to the German war effort; he is said to have called them the biggest and cheapest prisoner of war camps behind Allied front lines. Von Schmettow was a German officer of the old school, for whom surrender was incompatible with military honour. It was the German garrison who paid the price for his intransigence. In the last five months of the Occupation, from January to May 1945, they suffered most from the siege conditions. The islanders’ position had been eased by the Red Cross parcels, but the Germans’ rations became increasingly meagre. Their numbers had been swelled by soldiers fleeing from French ports such as St Malo after its liberation by the Allies in August 1944. Supplies by sea had come to an end, and transport planes became more and more irregular. The German officers did not know how long the situation would last, so stores were strictly rationed; some believed the war could go on for another two years. The soldiers lost weight, and were ordered to take a rest every afternoon to conserve energy. Virtually all exercises and training came to an end because the men were too weak to drill. Their uniforms and boots were disintegrating, and replacement shirts were made from sheets and curtains. There was virtually no gas or electricity on the islands, and the water supply was reduced to two hours in the morning and two in the evening.
Morale collapsed as the news came through that the Russians had reached the eastern German border. Defeat now seemed certain. A handful of soldiers deserted and were hidden by their island girlfriends, but for the majority there was nothing to do but wait for the war to be over and to worry about their families and friends in Germany, now at the mercy of the Russian army as well as Allied bombing raids.
As the weeks wore on, the Germans cut deeper into the islands’ food supplies, depriving islanders of staples of the Occupation diet such as milk and potatoes. Milkless days had already been introduced for civilians, and their milk rations were stopped altogether on 23 April; potato rations had been cut and then stopped. German soldiers searched desperately for food and fuel; they resorted to stealing from the fields, and even armed burglary. The officers attempted to keep discipline, imposing severe punishments for stealing, and the list of convictions in early 1945 was long. At least one farmer was murdered trying to defend his property. The Germans collected nettles for soup, and were even reduced to stealing cats and dogs. By May 1945 there were few pet animals left on the islands – most had been eaten.
German soldier Werner Grosskopf said: ‘We got so hungry we collected limpets and minced them and made them up like hamburgers; they were like chewing gum or gristle, but they stopped the hunger pangs for a bit.’
Seaman Hans Glauber arrived on Sark in 1944 after fleeing St Malo:
We ate cats, dogs, rabbits, limpets, and I even shot and ate two seagulls, which for a German sailor is a terrible thing to do. There is a superstition in the navy that in a seagull is the soul of a drowned sailor. I lost seven and half stone in nine months.
Once we caught a big tom-cat and we put it in a big zinc bucket after skinning it and cutting its head off. We boiled it for about two hours to get rid of all the bugs cats have, and boiled it again with nettles and a few potatoes. Then we put it on a beautiful white tablecloth laid with proper knives and forks and wine glasses, and we washed it down with champagne and coffee. It was a real feast.
Glauber remembered that there were secret stores of tinned food which were held back from the troops: ‘We secretly opened them up and ate them, and filled them up with sand and put them back. This was while eight hundred soldiers were lying in hospital malnourished.’
Some islanders, hard-pressed though they were, took pity on these gaunt, depressed Germans and gave them food. Jersey boy Maurice Green remembers: ‘For all I dislike the Germans, their discipline was fantastic. When we had Red Cross parcels, they didn’t try to grab food off you despite us provoking them. We used to sit on the wall, eating in front of them.’
Guernseywoman Dolly Joanknecht, pregnant with her German sweetheart Willi’s child, gave him a cigarette out of her Red Cross food parcel. Willi took one pull, and keeled over in a dead faint; his stomach was empty, and it had been a long time since he had last smoked real tobacco.
fn1 The Channel Islands Refugee Committee was a group of prominent London-based islanders who raised money for those islanders evacuated to Britain in 1940, dealt with all matters relating to their welfare, and lobbied the government on their behalf.
fn2 A village in Czechoslovakia, the scene of a terrible reprisal massacre by German troops.
fn3 In 1942 Britain and America organised massive airlifts of food to Greece, after a combination of disrupted harvests due to the war and the Germans’ and Italians’ failure to import food led to widespread famine.
fn4 Presumably the summary executions of fascists after the Allied liberation of Rome.
fn5 By this time, most of the forced labourers had been evacuated from the islands. See Chapter 8.