British war cabinet abandoned Channel Islanders to the Nazis during World War II
IN June 1940 Britain’s war cabinet voted to leave the Channel Islands to fend for themselves during a German invasion.
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WITHIN sight of France but part of England since 1066, as Europe braced for German invasion in early 1940 the Channel Islands were still advertising as a summer holiday haven.
None among the 100,000 population on seven small islands foresaw events of June 1940, when Britain’s war cabinet voted to leave them to fend for themselves in the face of a German invasion.
Life on the Channel Island of Guernsey under German occupation during World War II is the theme of joint British American film, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, opening in Sydney tomorrow.
As Germans marched into Paris on June 14, 1940, the British war cabinet debated demilitarising the Channel Islands, believing Britain did not have the military might to defend an area of no strategic value.
The Channel Islands lay in the English Channel about 161km from England and 22km from Normandy. The largest, Jersey, is 118sq km and had a population of about 45,000. At
65sq km, Guernsey had about 40,000 people. Alderney and Sark were smaller. Locals derived their income from tourism, fishing, agriculture and horticulture.
On June 19 island administrators were instructed to demilitarise: all arms, uniforms and equipment used by the militia and defence volunteers were to be deposited at the town arsenal, and private firearms handed to police.
This was despite prime minister Winston Churchill’s insistence that Britain should be able to use naval power to protect the islands, arguing it was “repugnant ... to abandon British territory which has been in the possession of the Crown since the Norman Conquest”.
Chaos prevailed in Guernsey, where locals arranged evacuation of the first 1900 schoolchildren, some with their mothers, others with schoolteachers. Each child could take one change of clothes, nightclothes, a towel and toothbrush. Mothers and men of military age could evacuate, resulting in about 30,000 residents fleeing.
On Jersey, where children were on holiday to help with the potato harvest, schools did not get instructions to evacuate. Although up to 23,000 people registered to flee, only 1000 children left, often with parents, along with 67 teachers; about 4500 children remained. British propaganda posters urged locals: “Don’t be yellow, stay at home”.
On June 26 German planes swooped low over the islands, then the first German bombs fell. Witness Ralph Mollet noted: “At 6.55pm on the 28th, three German planes flew over La Rocque (Jersey), machinegunning the district and dropping two 50kg H E bombs near the Harbour.” The planes then bombed Guernsey, killing 10 people and wounding many more.
On Sunday, June 30, leaflets dropped, demanding surrender of Jersey authorities, with the display of white crosses and white flags on buildings. Occupying Germans imposed an 11pm curfew, outlawed crystal radio sets, and ordered traffic onto the opposite side of the road, until petrol shortages reduced travel to bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles. With one German soldier for every three islanders, resistance was difficult. Most was informal and passive, such as listening to forbidden radios or painting V-for-victory signs. When Britain and Russia took control of Iran in 1941, interring German citizens, an infuriated Adolf Hitler demanded deportation of 10 British citizens from the islands for every German interned. His orders were enacted in September 1942, when 2200 islanders were deported to Germany, where 45 died.
Internee Frank Falla wrote of his imprisonment in a Gestapo-prison in Frankfurt: “Opponents of the Reich of all nationalities who were chained in cellar cells and cried like animals were being executed by the Nazis by guillotine at the rate of 25 per week … In addition to suffering starvation and malnutrition, we were deprived of all human rights … Our relatives were not informed where we were, or even whether we were alive or dead.”
On the islands Jewish residents were registered and their businesses publicly identified. After the war, Guernsey bailiff Victor Carey offered £25 rewards to informers who betrayed those who painted V signs, while Methodist minister John Leale passed Germans the names of Jews, as collected by Carey’s police.
Hitler imported thousands of slave workers from Russia, Spain, France, Poland and Algeria to build bunkers, antitank walls, railway systems and tunnels across Jersey. Shopkeeper Louisa Gould, who lost a son serving in the Royal Navy, sheltered an escaped Russian prisoner of war for 18 months, telling a friend, “I had to do something for another mother’s son.” Arrested in 1944, she was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was gassed to death in 1945.
Food and medical supplies were almost non-existent when Red Cross relief ship SS Vega arrived in Jersey on December 30, 1944 with food parcels and medical supplies. The islands were liberated on May 9, 1945.