Being born in 1946, a large part of my schoolboy reading was based around the Second World War: the Dam Busters, Colditz Story, that sort of thing. One book which brought me up short was called, I think, “Islands in Danger” and described the occupation of the Channel Islands during the war. Most of the other books were pretty gung-ho but this was about a part of the UK which had been occupied. I hadn’t realised that had happened. (For anyone into Channel Islands history, the term ‘UK’ may not be appropriate but that is another story, going back to William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066.)
I have always wanted to visit the Channel Islands but somehow that never happened until just recently. It wasn’t a holiday, it was a visit with a group of bell ringers. We stayed on Guernsey and visited Jersey and Alderney one day by air to ring at the towers on those two islands. We had a couple of extra days, giving us the chance to walk some of the Guernsey coastline.
One thing which stood out was the immense effort the German occupiers put into fortifying the islands. We saw a lot of it on the Guernsey coast and on Alderney, where we were given a thorough bus tour of the island in addition to ringing at St Anne’s church (and having our organiser interviewed by Radio Guernsey). The work on Alderney has a sombre undertone: the inhabitants elected to be evacuated before the occupation and, I guess, away from any public gaze the fortifications were build by large numbers of slave labourers, mostly from Eastern Europe. There is a memorial to them, and a plaque on the church wall, but their suffering and death in many cases deserves better recognition.
What struck us, looking at observation towers and gun batteries on the south west coast of Guernsey, was that all of this effort and suffering was in vain. The fortifications were never put to the test because the invasion of France passed them by.
My interest raised again, I bought a copy of “The German Occupation of the Channel Islands” by Charles Cruikshank in a book shop in St Peter Port. I am just getting into it but already I learn that, as early as the 1920s, the UK govenment decided that the Islands had no strategic importance. I am not a military strategist but it does make some sense: too near France to be defended by the British, too far from England to be useful to the Germans. Of course, the political significance is something else altogether.
Given this, why did Hitler insist that the Islands should be turned into a fortress? I suppose it was political – the significance of having occupied British soil. But what would have happened on D-Day if he had put all of that effort into strengthening the fortifications on the Normandy beaches. Playing the ‘what if’ game is dangerous, so I won’t continue.
I’ll just finish by saying that the seven towers we visited were some of the best-kept bells I have ever rung on, and that all of the Island bell ringers we met were most welcoming. A nice footnote to some rather sobering insights into the futility of war.
