By the summer of 1940 the Germans were winning the war. To the east, the Stalin–Hitler pact had brought an end to the independence of Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The unexpected alliance between the two totalitarian regimes had now lasted for nearly a year. Few people, least of all Stalin himself, expected it to end any time soon. In addition to dividing up Eastern Europe, the Soviets and Germans engaged in extensive trade and military co-operation. More than anything else, by ensuring quiet on the Eastern Front, the Soviets gave the Nazis a free hand to do as they wished in Western Europe, which they proceeded to do in May 1940.
In a matter of weeks, the Wehrmacht seized entire nations – with Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France having fallen. A new word had entered the world’s languages: Blitzkrieg (lightning war). France’s swift defeat at the hands of the Germans was a shock to the rest of the world’s democracies, first and foremost Britain. Following the French collapse, the combined empires of Hitler and Stalin now stretched from the Atlantic coast of France to Vladivostok on the Pacific. With the Americans still out of the war, Britain and its empire were the only opponents of Germany still standing and fighting.
The evacuation of nearly 340,000 British and Allied forces from Dunkirk over the course of a week at the end of May and into early June 1940 meant that all that remained of the British Army was a defeated force that had struggled to get home. Though Dunkirk is now fondly remembered as one of Britain’s proudest moments, it was Churchill who reminded the world that ‘wars are not won by evacuations’.
The remnants of the British Army in the summer of 1940 were no match for the triumphant Wehrmacht. Britain did, however, retain its powerful Royal Navy and the world would soon learn that the Royal Air Force, whose fighter pilots Churchill would immortalise as ‘the few’, was still a formidable opponent.
In addition to those forces, Churchill personally pushed for the formation of special forces to terrorise the Germans who, now occupied nearly all of Europe. On 5 June 1940 he wrote: ‘I look to the Chiefs of Staff to propose measures for a ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline, leaving a trail of corpses behind.’ The generals responded to the prime minister’s colourful language by proposing a raiding force based on the irregular bands of Boer commandos who had fought against the British in South Africa. Churchill, who was himself a veteran of the Boer War, greeted the idea with great enthusiasm.
But in those terrifying June days, it seemed only a matter of time until the Germans would carry out Operation Sea Lion, the invasion and occupation of Britain. Had the Germans been able to pull it off, it is unlikely the Americans could ever have entered the war in Europe. Hitler’s nightmare vision of a Thousand Year Reich may have become a reality. However, Operation Sea Lion was indefinitely postponed due to the inability of the Luftwaffe to take control of the skies over England. The fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force inflicted a stinging defeat on Hermann Göring’s hitherto victorious airmen. But no one could have foreseen that in the weeks following Dunkirk. To any reasonable person, the war seemed to very nearly be over.
Though the invasion of England may only have been in the planning stages at this point, the Germans were able to carry out what must have seemed a dress rehearsal for the real thing when they decided to seize the parts of Britain they could reach: the Channel Islands. The islands, though considered part of Britain, are actually far closer to France. In 1940, many of the islanders spoke a local patois that was more French than English. But since the time of William the Conqueror, these islands had been part of Britain and loyal to the British monarchs.
The larger islands are Guernsey and Jersey, with Alderney and Sark following far behind. And there are several smaller islands including Herm and Brecqhou. In 1939, there were 50,000 people in Jersey, 40,000 in Guernsey, 1,500 in Alderney, and Sark had just 500. Sark, the fourth largest of the islands, is tiny. Including Brecqhou, which is just off its western shore, Sark is about 5 sq. km in size. Then, as now, Sark had no paved roads and no airfield. One got about the island on foot, by bicycle or horse-drawn carriage. It could only be reached by boat. Its main source of income was tourism and agriculture. Ruled by a hereditary feudal lord, Mrs Sibyl Hathaway, the Dame of Sark, it was a throwback to an earlier – much earlier – era.
In September 1939, with the outbreak of war in Europe, the local government in Sark ordered a complete blackout, which was not particularly onerous on an island with few electric lights. Most people used candles or paraffin lamps, and only the hotels had electrical generators. Nevertheless, two local men were given the task of patrolling the island to ensure that darkness was complete.
The following month, the Dame of Sark formed an Emergency Committee to take care of food and fuel supplies and other urgent matters. Mrs Hathaway appointed herself as president of the committee. She organised the women of Sark’s British Legion to meet up in the afternoons to sew and knit articles of clothing for servicemen. A number of young men from the island volunteered to serve with the British forces as they had done during the First World War. One of them, Sub-Lieutenant Parkyn, did not survive the war.
Mrs Hathaway’s Emergency Committee quickly found itself rationing petrol, which was used by the island’s three tractors and its petrol-powered fishing boats. By January 1940, food rationing was introduced in Sark as it had been in mainland Britain. But few expected the war to reach the island. The experience of the First World War led most to believe that the fighting would be confined to the Continent. As a result, Sark’s hotels and shops got ready for the tourist season as summer approached. In March, the British Government confidently assured travellers that the Channel Islands, including Sark, would be ideal for summer holidays in 1940.
At the insistence of the British Government, German and Austrian citizens throughout the Channel Islands were interned. There was only one ‘German’ on Sark at the time, Mrs Annie Wranowsky, who claimed to be Czech but carried a German passport. That passport was stamped with a large ‘J’, meaning that she was Jewish. As a German citizen, she was deported to Guernsey and was interned there, but released towards the end of June and returned to Sark.
For the first nine months of the war, the Channel Islanders felt like the fighting was something happening very far away, and would hardly impact on their lives. But in June 1940, the German Army broke through the French defences and reached the Atlantic coast. Their guns could be heard from the islands, and the islanders worried about what was coming next. The Dame of Sark wrote in her memoir:
There was an ominous sign plain for all to see on 9 June when a dark pall of smoke rose sky-high from the coast of France and cast its shadow over the islands. The French were blowing up oil storage tanks: the enemy would soon be on our own doorstep.1
In London on 19 June, the British Government took the painful decision that the islands could not be defended. At that time, it was not even certain that England could be defended, let alone a handful of small islands just off the French coast. Churchill famously pledged that ‘we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …’
But not in the Channel Islands. Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark and the smaller islands were to be abandoned to their fate. British forces were withdrawn, including the tiny garrison on Sark, which consisted of a handful of men sent to guard the undersea telephone cable to Guernsey. The lighthouse keepers on Sark, as well as other Channel Islands, were collected by a special Trinity House vessel. This was the clearest evidence so far that things were about to change, and change dramatically, for the people of Sark.
Large-scale evacuations of civilians took place as well, including men of military age, a large number of whom enlisted to fight in the British military. Thousands left Guernsey and Jersey, and virtually the entire population of Alderney packed up and left as well. Mrs Hathaway announced that no matter what happened, she and her husband would remain on Sark. She was apparently quite persuasive. The authorities on Guernsey were informed that Sark would need no evacuation ship.
The British decision to demilitarise the islands was an important one, and the people who needed to be told this were the Germans. The government in London was busy with evacuations and sending final instructions on to the local governments in the Channel Islands to carry on and do their best. But they neglected to tell the German Army that there were no longer any British forces on the islands.
Friday, 28 June 1940 was a beautiful day with clear blue skies. At six in the evening, the Dame of Sark recalled:
We heard the intermittent drone of German aircraft and went out into the garden to watch three aeroplanes flying low over the island on their way to Guernsey. A few minutes later we heard the ominous explosion of bombs which were being dropped on St Peter’s Port; but we were too far away to hear the machine-guns which fired on civilians in the streets, hay-makers in the fields and an ambulance carrying wounded to the hospital.2
The Germans called this ‘armed reconnaissance’ and bombed the main ports in Guernsey and Jersey, killing and wounding large numbers of civilians. The Germans later insisted that they’d not been told about the withdrawal of British forces, and they mistook the lorries in the harbour for military vehicles.
The only example of anyone firing back reportedly came from the Isle of Sark mail boat. With Captain Golding in command, this little boat had been painted grey and equipped with four Lewis machine guns. The crewmen reacted instantly to the German bombing and kept up a continuous barrage.3 As the Dame later wrote, ‘Within half an hour the planes flew back over the sea to Sark, swooped down and machine-gunned our small fishing boats around the coast. As luck would have it their aim was faulty and no hit was scored either on the fishermen or their boats.’4
It is now generally believed that had the Germans known that the islands had been abandoned to their fate, and were demilitarised, they would not have carried out the bombing raids. The British Government did eventually inform the Germans of the demilitarisation of the islands through the good offices of the American Ambassador to the Court of St James, Joseph Kennedy. And according to some reports, the BBC declared the islands to be ‘open towns’ on their nine o’clock news programme on the day of the raid. But the message arrived too late to stop the 28 June raids.
Why the delay? It appears that the government was simply not keen for anyone to know, least of all the British public, that it was conceding a chunk of British territory and tens of thousands of British subjects without a fight. Both decisions, to abandon the islands to their fate, and then to not inform the Germans in time, did little to strengthen the bonds between Britain and the islanders.
For the Germans, the capture of the islands was a propaganda coup, proof that their unstoppable march through Europe would not end at the French shore of the English Channel. Taking the islands was seen as a dress rehearsal for the coming invasion of mainland Britain. But more than that, if the Germans could successfully occupy the islands and secure the co-operation of the islanders, it could be what they called ‘a model occupation’. That might cause some Britons to rethink the need to fight to the bitter end, as Churchill was demanding. There were already plenty of British leaders, among them the Duke of Windsor, who would have preferred to reach an accommodation with a triumphant Germany in 1940 rather than continue with the war.
The day after the bombing of the harbours in Guernsey and Jersey, the first Germans landed by plane, met no resistance, and sat down with the local leaders in Guernsey and Jersey to give them their orders. Other Germans came over the course of the next few days, taking control without another shot being fired. For several days, no one seemed to notice Sark.
Meanwhile, in London, Churchill demanded that his army chiefs come up with a plan to take the islands back. He was convinced that with so few Germans having already landed, this could be done with a modicum of effort. He may have been right. But the same reasoning that led the British forces to withdraw from the islands in the first place convinced military leaders that they could not be defended. Every soldier was needed to defend the British mainland and could not be wasted on indefensible small islands just off the French coast. The tiny island of Sark was not particularly important to anyone at the time.
Not very many local people took the opportunity, in the days before the German forces arrived, to be evacuated to England. Some did, among them the island’s only doctor, who fled on a yacht just before the Germans arrived. The island’s one Jewish family, the Abrahams, also reportedly fled. The Dame herself was certain that the Germans had no interest in Sark. At a meeting attended by many locals on a Sunday evening in late June, she said: ‘The Germans are not coming here; there is nothing here for them to come for. I am having my granddaughter here; do you think I would have her here if I thought the Germans were coming?’5 It was not an unreasonable thing to say, or believe. Sark had no strategic value to the British or the Germans. If the Germans were to come and occupy the island, it would only mean they’d be wasting valuable resources, and in particular trained fighting men, defending themselves. What would be the point in that?
At the end of June 1940, the islanders on Sark, the Dame included, knew very little about what was going on in the other islands as the Germans made a point of cutting the telephone cable that connected Guernsey to Sark. The Wehrmacht had taken the other islands, their aircraft had strafed some of Sark’s fishing boats, but would they bother with an occupation of tiny Sark?
Despite the Dame’s reassurances, some of the islanders were afraid. In the weeks following the German invasion of France, quite a few refugees from the Continent had reached the island and many were given help to continue on their way to England, and freedom. But the stories they told put fear into the hearts of the islanders. ‘They all told us tales of the horrors of Occupation likely to create alarm and despondency,’ wrote the Dame of Sark, ‘for it was apparent that in the very near future we, too, would suffer the same fate.’6
The occupation of the larger Channel Islands, in particular Guernsey and Jersey, may have made some strategic sense. They had a population of tens of thousands, and real economies that produced a considerable quantity of agricultural goods. The Third Reich also had a clear interest in controlling the passage of ships through the English Channel, and also in protecting the coast of occupied France. And there was the symbolic importance of occupying British soil, and having British subjects living under German rule.
But some of the Channel Islands, such as Brecqhou, were just too small to occupy. Sark seems to have fit somewhere in the middle, with its tiny land mass and population, too small to be of any real strategic importance but too large to ignore.
Part of the explanation for the decision to occupy the Channel Islands lies in the mind of Adolf Hitler, as was the case for so many of the decisions the Germans made during the war. Hitler was convinced that had the Wehrmacht not seized the islands when they did, they might have constituted a strategic threat to the Third Reich. He said in July 1942:
If the British had continued to hold these islands, fortifying them and constructing aerodromes on them, they could have been a veritable thorn in our flesh. As it is, we now have firmly established ourselves there, and with the fortifications we have constructed and the permanent garrison of a whole division, we have ensured against the possibility of the islands ever falling again into the hands of the British.7
Hitler’s views on the Channel Islands are known today because, during the course of the war, he was persuaded to employ a Nazi Party official whose job it was to sit at his dinner table and note down some of his pearls of wisdom. After the war, these were published in English as Hitler’s Table Talk. At one of those meals, Hitler said that:
The inhabitants of the Channel Islands which we occupy consider themselves as members of the British Empire rather than as subjects of the King, whom they still regard not as King, but as the Duke of Normandy. If our occupation troops play their cards properly, we shall have no difficulties there.
Hitler had never visited the Channel Islands, and was apparently unaware of the fierce loyalty of the islanders to Britain. A visit to the war memorials on any of them, including Sark, would have shown just how many of the islanders had fought in the First World War on the British side and against Germany. He may not have known how many young men from the islands had evacuated to England in June 1940 in order to sign up to fight on the side of the Allies.
Hitler had plans for the islands after the war, which he was confident Germany would win. The Channel Islands were unlikely to remain under British rule, and would probably revert to being part of France. Two years into the occupation, he mused the islands could ‘be handed over’ to Robert Ley, the head of Germany’s state-controlled labour front, which had replaced the country’s trade unions after the Nazi seizure of power. ‘With their wonderful climate, they constitute a marvellous health resort for the Strength through Joy [Kraft durch Freude] organisation,’ he said. ‘The islands are full of hotels as it is, so very little construction will be needed to turn them into ideal rest centres.’
As Lord Asa Briggs writes of Hitler:
At times he seems to have been obsessed with the Islands. He was thrilled to have occupied a part of the British Isles and when his hopes of occupying the rest were dashed they did not matter less. He wanted them to be fortified for ever. For him there was to be permanence there.’8
John Nettles, the actor who played the Jersey television detective Bergerac, is also a historian, and in his recent book about the occupation of the Channel Islands, he writes that ‘this obsession the Führer had with the islands and their fortification was lunacy, and indeed it was known as Hitler’s Inselwahn or “Island madness”’.9
By the end of June, with the other Channel Islands already occupied, Sark held its breath. As Hitler himself put it on the last day of that month, ‘Now we have our foot inside the door of the British Empire.’
1 Hathaway, p.112.
2 Hathaway, p.116.
3 Oddly, the German aircrews reported that this firing came from the actual island of Sark. This was repeated by German Admiral Schuster in his war diary.
4 Hathaway, p.116.
5 Marshall, p.8.
6 Hathaway, p.112.
7 This and the following quotes from Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, p.584.
8 Briggs, p.13.
9 Nettles, p.157.