Just a short blog today to share an article from 4 October 1941. You can read the article below.
If you have read any of my blog posts you will know that one of the things that irritates me is that many people think, and repeat, the story that we were totally forgotten about during the war. This is far from the truth.
You just have to look at some of the calls to action that were raised by many in the UK. Take Lord Portsea for example, whom I wrote about here and here. I also wrote about how the idea that Churchill had forgotten about the Islands is frankly rubbish. You can find that here.
It is of course understandable that those who were trapped in the Channel Islands would feel that way. Channel Islanders had little or no news from the outside world aside from underground news services and illicit crystal radios. Again you can find more here.
In the Sphere of 1941 another article proves that we were far from forgotten. Islanders would have of course been unaware of this at the time and would have not seen it until after the war.
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Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
A quick post to highlight the excellent news that not one, but two films are in the process of being made. They are about two ladies that committed acts of resistance in Jersey during the German Occupation.
At least one of the films has received funding from the Jersey Government. Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore put notes in German soldiers pockets or left them in German cars inciting them to revolt. They created many of these messages under the German pseudonym Der Soldat Ohne Namen, or The Soldier With No Name, to deceive German soldiers that there was a conspiracy amongst the occupation troops
They were arrested in July 1944 for listening to the BBC and inciting the German Garrison to revolt. Imprisoned until May 1945 it is amazing that they survived the war as they were sentenced to death.
Bailiwick Express have written an article about this which is well worth a few minutes of your time to read. Follow the link here to read it.
You can read more about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore here as there is an ten page article here from Jersey Heritage with photographs.
It is great to see that these films are going to be be made to tell their story.
I have a number of long blog posts in the works which will be out in the coming weeks.
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I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
Whilst I am working on researching some in depth articles I thought it might be worth sharing this video. It was made as part of the Imperial War Museum film Project in 2018. There is some video footage from the occupation in Sark and from Guernsey.
It features the story of a Sark girl Phyllis Baker & Werner Rang a conscripted German medical orderly who went to Sark to treat the sick.
After the war whilst Werner was a POW in England they kept in touch and they were later married.
I met both of them a number of times when I visited Sark in the 90s and early 2000s. I didn’t know their story, I just knew that they were incredibly friendly people who ran a jewellery shop in Sark. This video is well worth a few minutes of your time to watch.
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I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
Channel Four has a new series “Fortress Britain” with Alice Roberts. Episode two features Guernsey and Alderney. From thirty two minutes in you can find the bit that deals with Guernsey and Alderney.
It features various things including Pierre Renier of Festung Guernsey talking about the Underground Hospital, an interview with Roy Burton who was here as a child during the occupation, and Colin Partridge talking about the camps in Alderney.
Well worth a watch and you can find it on the link below. Apologies to those readers that can’t access Channel 4 from where they live.
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
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I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
Last year, for the anniversary of their arrest, I wrote a blog about the entire police force of Guernsey being arrested. Their crime was stealing food from German stores and giving it to civilians. You can read about it here.
Yesterday I became aware of an animated short film that explains what happened in a fairly concise way. The images used are quite clever; as some of them are using well known photographs of people and places as inspiration for the animation. Some of these places wouldn’t have existed at the time of the occupation but would be familiar now.
The film was made six months ago at the time of writing (March 2023) and is an unusual format to tell the story but gets the message across quite well. It even covers the underhand methods that the Germans used to try and get the officers to confess and the suggestion that they might be pardoned after the war by the local authorities.
If you look at it with the benefit of hindsight you might think of it as naive of anyone, be it the local authorities or the policemen themselves, to believe that the Germans would behave in a fair way and not use underhand tactics. However, you have to remember that at this time there was little access to information from the outside world and hadn’t been since June 1940.
Occasionally articles appeared in the British media in the post war years. Eventually they petered out with the odd exception in recent times referenced in my previous blog. Out of the post war articles the one below, from the Sunday Mirror, is probably the most comprehensive.
As you will discover when you watch the short video at the end of this blog there were many implications for those officers after the war. Inspector Schulpher, who had been in charge of the force, was investigated in 1946 and had to fall on his sword and resign shortly after resuming his position.
Moving to the present day another year has passed with the 81st Anniversary earlier this month on 5 March. You may be wondering if there have been any developments in that year. An article in the 30 January 2023 edition of the Guernsey Press indicated that they might, finally, get a pardon this year. I won’t be holding my breath, but if they do get around to it, the families would have closure.
Guernsey Press – 30 January 2023
Thanks to all those that have kept the pressure up to get the pardon. I truly hope it will be granted. Enough of my waffle and time for the short film.
Film from Simple History YouTube Channel
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
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I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
This blog post is a slightly different one as it relates to events in the 1970s but about the Channel Islands during the Occupation of 1940-1945. It really is quite a curious tale, and it is hard to see what the character involved thought he might gain by his actions.
It lead me to a connection between Jersey and one of the most successful and well known double agents of the Second World War, as well as a traitor that was tried for treason after the war.
I recently found an article in the Guardian newspaper about a visit to the Channel Islands in October 1974. A man who claimed to be a former British Intelligence Officer turned author, Peter Tombs certainly seems to have been an interesting and controversial character throughout his life. He made strange claims about Martin Bormann and I found another, not immediately obvious, connection to the Channel Islands in that story. More about that later in this blog post.
He claimed that “he might take out a prosecution against the islands collectively under an ancient law of “harbouring of the King’s enemy”” when he appeared on a television show during his visit to the Channel Islands.
I wondered what motivated him to make this claim and why, if you were going to do so, you would travel to the very islands you are accusing to make those accusations on the local TV station. Much less be surprised when it provokes a hostile reaction from the population.
He claimed to have written a book on the subject although I cannot, at this time find any trace of, or of any legal action that he claimed he was going to launch.
He was believed to have completed a book, provisionally called “The Traitor Isles,” which accuses the Islanders of extreme passivity during the five years of occupation during the last war. He is considering taking out a prosecution against the Islands collectively under a sixteenth-century treason law for “harbouring of the King’s enemy.”
Guardian article 9 October 1974: Channel Islanders committed ‘treason’ in second world war.
One has to wonder why nobody checked on his past, previous claims, and accusations. I appreciate that it is much easier check the bona fides of people in the internet age but he had hardly been a stranger to the British national newspapers at the time.
Channel TV are quoted in the article giving their reasons and the reaction to the interview. Sadly I cannot find any footage of the interview.
A spokesman for Channel TV said last night: “Our switchboard was jammed with angry callers after the programme. Only one or two offered information about black marketeering and collaboration. The great majority very much resented what Mr Tombs said. We decided to invite him over when we heard about his book and like any good journalist we wanted to investigate it further.”
Guardian article 9 October 1974: Channel Islanders committed ‘treason’ in second world war.
He claimed that he had spoken to islanders and high ranking Germans that supported his story.
Now I am not saying that there weren’t people that made profits from the black market or that collaborated, these are well documented. Action was taken against those that had profited in 1946 to confiscate those profits and others had to live with the consequences.
He was going to launch a court case or at the very least to get questions raised in the House of Commons. I have searched the National Archives, British Newspaper Archive and Hansard. None of these provide any evidence of either or the book being published.
You can read the article about his appearance on Channel TV, the local ITV station for the Channel Islands here.
So who was Peter Tombs the British intelligence officer? Well it would seem that it was doubtful that he was a British intelligence officer at all. He first appeared in an article in 1969 where he claimed to be a double agent for South Africa & Tanzania.
A couple of years after the interview in the Channel Islands he made some “interesting” claims in the Birmingham Daily Post. According to Tombs, Martin Bormann was alive and well and farming in Norfolk.
A series of articles in this vein followed. This was a little odd, not least because Bormann’s body had been found, and he had been declared dead in 1973!
Birmingham Daily Post – Tuesday 09 March 1976Birmingham Daily Post – Tuesday 09 March 1976
His claim about Bormann was supported in the next article by another interesting character.
The man that supported his claim, Mr Eric Pleasants, obviously forgot to tell the reporter how he came to be in Berlin in 1945. The reporters also missed that Eric Pleasants had been tried for treason in 1946 and that he had a book written about his life in 1957.
Curiously Tombs claimed that he wanted to ensure that Bormann came to no harm. Which is an odd sentiment when talking about a senior Nazi! After the article above the story disappeared. One can only assume that he liked the publicity and got some sort of strange kick out of it.
When I looked further into Eric Pleasants and how he found himself in Berlin I discovered that he had been tried for treason in absentia in 1946. I then found that he had a connection with Jersey. He had left England in May 1940 to try and avoid military service. Caught up in the occupation of the islands he was sent to prison a number of times, during this time he met Eddie Chapman. Chapman was in prison in Jersey and went on to become “Agent Zig Zag”.
Following his deportation to Germany he joined up to fight for the Germans in the British Free Corps. He deserted and was captured by the Russians and wasn’t freed until 1954.
You can read about Pleasants here and Chapman here.
That is the end of this blog. If I find more I will share it.
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
You can also find articles, podcasts, TV appearances and other social media etc here.
I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
Last year I wrote a blog about this air raid. I recently came across this article, written at the time for the Star newspaper, and I thought it was worth sharing it.
It is important to remember that the content of the newspaper was controlled by the German forces, so presents their viewpoint.
My original blog post with tmore detail on the raid is here.
Report in the Jersey Evening Post reproducing the article from the Guernsey newspaper the Star. From a scrapbook kept by Helene Marie Sinnatt, née Jackson, during the Occupation. Book 3, Page 57. It is in the Jersey Heritage Archive ref L/C/306/A/3/57.
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
You can also find articles, podcasts, TV appearances and other social media etc here.
I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
I am busy writing a couple of in depth posts at the moment, working through almost six hundred pages of information from the National Archives. These are primarily military intelligence reports relating to the islands. As a result there has been a bit of a delay in getting things out on the blog at the moment. I want to make sure that what I write takes everything into account.
In the meantime you might enjoy these three documentaries with a lot of archive footage and interviews with people from both sides that lived through the occupation years. Sadly many of those interviewed are no longer with us.
They are presented by John Nettles, who not only starred as Bergerac in the TV series, but has produced excellent documentaries and books about the occupation. He has spent a lot time doing this and these are well worth a watch.
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
You can also find articles, podcasts, TV appearances and other social media etc here.
I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
Things have been a bit quiet on the blog for the last few weeks as I have had a bad dose of the flu! Hoping to get things back to normal soon because I have a lot of research from the archives to write up for forthcoming blogs.
In the meantime you might enjoy this film that I found from 1995. Fronted by the late Hugh Scully it features some great archive footage and interviews with people that were here during the occupation of the Channel Islands. This includes some German personnel, islanders and slave workers.
A few of these are people that I have written about before, click the links to go to the blog posts about them.
Topics covered include distribution of news from the BBC, secret photos sent to the british intelligence service, a secret transmitter, deportations and a lot more.
Well worth a watch if you want to hear some first hand accounts of life under occupation.
I have a list of other films that you can find here.
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
You can also find articles, podcasts, TV appearances and other social media etc here.
I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
Of the Channel Islanders that had been evacuated in June 1940 it was those from Alderney that had to wait the longest to return home. The reason for this was the sad state that the island had been left by the occupying forces.
The islanders had almost totally evacuated in the summer of 1940 and were not to return in any numbers until 15 December 1945, which is now celebrated as “Homecoming Day”. In advance of this there was much work to be done. Things were already moving apace with the British Army having arrived in late May 1945 and German POWs being supervised clearing the island of mines, ammunition and barbed wire.
The first to return to Alderney was Judge French who, along with a few small groups, arrived in the island on 2nd December 1945 to prepare for the return of the population. Judge French was the crown appointed leader of the island who had been in charge when the island was evacuated.
A number of women from the W.V.S. went to the island as part of these advanced groups. They were sent to prepare to help with feeding and rehabilitating those that were to return. Miss Dunn-Pattison of the W.V.S. is reported in the Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail – Friday 24 May 1946 of telling her local W.V.S. group of her experiences. She told them of the trials and tribulations and the ultimate success of their task.
Another W.V.S. lady that went to the island, Miss Cicely Fosbrook, was interviewed by the Leicester Evening Mail and their 9 February 1946 edition reports that she had gone to Alderney in November as part of the W.V.S. team of twelve.
The team was well equipped with all kinds of provisions and equipment, including two goldfish for the officers’ mess for the Army personnel occupying the island.
Miss Cicely Fosbrook 9 February 1946
Her team were housed in the convent as she recalls most of the houses were ‘flat’, more of that later, and most of the remaining structures were of German construction. She recalls that all houses which were standing and any furniture left on the island were pooled.
They established a transit camp for returning islanders where they stayed for two or three days before being dispersed gradually. Throughought this time the convent became the centre of life and activity for them.
About forty children arrived before Christmas and a big party was arranged for them, while a Christmas tree was also brought over for the church and decorated with every candle they could find – they numbered seventy. A padre was brought from Guernsey.
Miss Cicely Fosbrook 9 February 1946
The final note in the article recalls that when she left Alderney there were positive signs of normal life returning with signs indicating that shops were reopening shortly.
The Salvation Army in Guernsey sent all three of their bands to welcome them home. The British Army provided a guard of honour to welcome them back.
Lieut.-General Phillip Neame’s, Lieut.-Governor of Guernsey, welcomed over a hundred war-time exiles of Alderney on their return to the Island on 15 December 1945 . In the course of his address he said:
On this great day, when you are returning to your own dear island, I want to quote to you some lines of Rudyard Kipling’s which have always appealed to me in regard to my own corner of Kent.
I am sure they will express the feeling for Alderney which is in your hearts today –
“God gives all men all earth to love,
But since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove,
Beloved overall.”
Lieut.-General Phillip Neame’s address as reported in the Faversham News and East Kent Journal 4 January 1946
Islanders were overjoyed to finally be returning. The Bradford Observer of 15 December reports an interview with Mr & Mrs F.C. Orderie who had run the bakery and confectionery shop in Alderney before the war. Their bakery had been destroyed by the Germans but they were still hopeful that they could reopen using a German constructed bakery.
This joy turned to a bitter sweet experience though as mentioned in the account above by Miss Fosbrook many of the houses had been flattened or had the interiors destroyed as the Germans ripped any wood out to use for fuel.
As there were all bar a handful of residents left after the evacuation, those that remained were the family of George Pope, the Germans had free reign to do as they wished. At least in the other islands the civilian authorities could protest and in some cases prevent some actions of the Germans.
George Pope had refused to leave as it would have meant that his cattle would have been left untended. Aside from the Pope family the only other Channel Islanders on Alderney were occasional working parties sent from Guernsey.
Whilst it became possible to return to other Channel Islands without a permit from 31 March 1946 it was not that easy to return to Alderney. By the end of 1946 only 459 islanders had returned. This was approximately one third of the population.
Belfast Telegraph – Friday 22 March 1946
The damage to the island and the difficulties of restoring some form of normality went on for a number of years causing all sorts of difficulties and arguments. It eventually led to an enquiry by the Home Secretary and a fundamental overhaul of their system of government. I will deal with that in a future blog.
If you would like to know more about the homecoming and hear from some who were there the film below is worth a watch.
A film made by David Earl about the 60th anniversary.
If you would like to receive email notifications of future blogs, you can sign up to the right of this blog post or here. Feel free to look around the website, where I have categorized posts to make them easier to find and other resources such as tours, places to visit and films that may be of interest.
You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @Fortress_Island where I share other information and photographs. If you prefer Facebook I also have a page there.
You can also find articles, podcasts, TV appearances and other social media etc here.
I will be adding more as time permits. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it on social media or add a comment if you did. Feedback is always appreciated.
Also happy to be contacted with questions about the war in the Channel Islands, media appearances, podcasts etc.
