The German response to Operation Basalt, and in particular the binding of the hands of captured soldiers by the commandos, repeatedly referred to Dieppe. On 19 August 1942, little more than six weeks before the Sark raid, the Allies had landed troops at the French port of Dieppe. The aim of that raid, which involved several thousand troops including commandos from the Canadian, British and American armies, aimed to capture the port and test German defences. After just a few hours, the Allies were forced to withdraw, the majority of the men who made it ashore having been killed, wounded or captured.
According to an internal British memo, ‘The German High Command declared that the men [on Sark] had been illegitimately roped and that it was while resisting this that two had been shot, and treated this alleged barbarity as a sequel to similar alleged barbarity at Dieppe’. The British did eventually concede that there had been ‘an unauthorised order at Dieppe to tie the hands of prisoners to prevent them from destroying papers. The order had been countermanded, and in fact none of the Dieppe prisoners had had their hands tied.’1
None of the Germans taken prisoner at Dieppe had their hands tied – which may explain why the ‘alleged barbarity at Dieppe’ did not provoke the kind of fierce reaction that the Sark raid did. But, the memo continued, it was not only in Dieppe that the British had committed this kind of war crime:
In the midst of a storm of libellous allegations against the Allies – extending from the employment of prisoners to clear mines in the Mediterranean, and the shooting of shipwrecked soldiers in the Levant, through the gagging and binding of a German prisoner taken on the Lofoten Islands and the machine-gunning of some first aid units of the Folgare Division, besides other Libyan atrocities, down to keeping Japanese in prisoners of war camps on the cold ground – they announced the shackling of all officers and men taken at Dieppe.2
A total of 1,376 British prisoners were to be shackled in reprisal not only for the raid on Sark, but for all the alleged British atrocities carried out so far. The behaviour of the commandos on Sark was the final straw.
The British response to the shackling of Allied prisoners was to have Combined Operations Headquarters publish an account of the raid:
Adding certain details as to the forced deportation of the inhabitants of Sark … A number of points were now brought into controversy, such as how far a distinction could be drawn between what may be done in the course of battle and what may be done after the prisoner is in safe custody, and whether there were any barracks on the island.
The Germans had responded to a spurious war crime committed by the British with a genuine one of their own. As the official historian of the occupied Channel Islands, Charles Cruickshank writes:
In Sark the prisoners had been bound merely so that their arms would be linked with those of their captors. When they escaped they had to be shot to prevent them from raising the alarm. The Geneva Convention said nothing about tying prisoners, but merely prescribed humane treatment. The Convention did forbid reprisals, however, and the German government was clearly guilty.3
As Brian Lett put it, ‘The Geneva Convention simply did not contemplate the situation in which the SSRF had found itself.’4
In addition to rebutting German charges of inhumane behaviour, the Canadian Government then announced that it would shackle an equal number of German prisoners. The prisoners of war who were shackled did not always meekly accept their new treatment. In a prisoner-of-war camp in Bowmanville, Ontario, a decision was made to shackle over 100 German prisoners. The prisoners rebelled, engaging in hand-to-hand fighting with their guards in what has come to be known as the ‘Battle of Bowmanville’ and which lasted for a couple of days. As Time magazine put it at the time, ‘When the Canadians came with the manacles, the big blond Nazi boys at Camp Bowmanville put up an awful fight.’5 The Germans were eventually subdued with tear gas and fire hoses.
The German prisoners in Canada had their chains removed two months later following a proposal by the Swiss Government. The Germans hesitated to do the same with their shackled prisoners, demanding that in addition the British Government needed to give an assurance that they would no longer engage in the shackling of captured German soldiers. They were eventually satisfied that this was the case.
Though the British made a strong case that the Geneva Convention did not forbid the temporary tying of hands of captured soldiers under battlefield conditions, behind the scenes there was a debate in Cabinet and there was concern that, legal or not, the binding of prisoners was not helpful. On future raids, the commandos had clear orders not to repeat this.
Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, distanced himself from what the commandos had done on Sark. In a letter, he wrote:
I specifically told Major Appleyard (if my memory serves me right) before he undertook the raid on Sark that he was not to tie the hands of any of his prisoners. Unfortunately this order was disregarded … One of the prisoners gave out a great cry for help and ran away in the dark. The Commandos shot him as he ran. The others were brought back to safety with their hands bound. Their hands were immediately untied when they got into the boat.6
Mountbatten’s memory clearly failed him on at least one point, as only one prisoner was taken alive. Perhaps his recollection of Appleyard’s ‘disregarding’ of his order was also inaccurate. In any event, Appleyard never had the chance to respond to his commander’s allegation.
1 Cruickshank, p.204.
2 DEFE 2/109.
3 Cruickshank, p.204.
4 Lett, p.122.
5 Time, 26 October 1942.
6 Cited in Keene, p.187. His source is a letter from Mountbatten at the Broadlands Archive, Hartland Library, University of Southampton.