Last weekend I went on Tim Osborne’s guided walk around Sark. This was an interesting tour covering multiple events that happened between 1940 and the liberation in May 1945.
The tour is a full day in Sark leaving on the first boat in the morning and returning from Sark at the end of the afternoon. Tim is very knowledgable about the occupation of Sark and really brought the stories to life. He had also secured access to private property to enable us to see some of the key sites not normally open to the public.
During the day we walked in the footsteps of the commandos that undertook Operation Basalt and Operation Hardtack 7. This is the start of the tour after refreshments upon arrival.
The site of the Operation Basalt and Operation Hardtack 7 memorials is a great spot to admire the stunning views out over the Sark coastline.
This took us towards La Jaspellerie, the white house in the photograph below. We stopped at various key points along the way and Tim explained the story of the raids as they happened.
After this we followed in their steps to the Dixcart Hotel and then on to Stocks Hotel for a brief refreshment stop before going into a tunnel in the grounds.
The second tunnel was just up the hill and a little more challenging as there was no lighting and it was a little muddy. Despite having walked by this tunnel many times I was completely unaware of it.
Following this we walked up to the top of the valley to the visitor centre and then on to a delicious lunch at the Island Hall.
After lunch we visited the site of a Lancaster crash landing. Following this we visited the graveyard at the church and Tim told us about some of the people that were buried there.
The penultimate stop was at the former German headquarters and the cottage adjacent to it where they surrendered on 10 May 1945.
The final visit was to a house where a murder took place and a complicated investigation ensued. A really fascinating murder mystery story!
Following this we made a beeline to the top of the hill and had time for a quick drink before heading down to the boat to return to Guernsey.
This tour not only tells you the history of the occupation of Sark but also allows you to enjoy walking around car free Sark and enjoy the views and enjoy the peace and quiet.
I have given an overview of the tour and a few photos to give a flavour of what you can expect if you go on this tour in the future. I haven’t gone into great detail as that would spoil the tour should you wish to go on it.
Tim is running this tour again in September so give his page a follow on Facebook and look out for it, the link is below. He also does other walking tours in Guernsey and Alderney.
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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.
The 16th of May marks the anniversary of the liberation of Alderney. Alderney had been almost completely evacuated save for the family of Alderney resident George Pope. There were therefore few Alderney people there to see the liberation.
Force 135 had bypassed Alderney as there were estimated to be some 3,000 Germans there as well as some political prisoners and slave workers, although many of those had been removed from the island in late 1943 and 1944.
On 16th May “Plan Merit” was undertaken to liberate Alderney. An armed trawler HMT Beal set off for Alderney along with two LCI’s, Landing Craft Infantry, carrying approximately two hundred men of all ranks.
Brigadier Snow A.E. Snow accepted the surrender of the Alderney garrison from Oberstleutnant Schwalm, who was the Island Commandant, at a property which is called Peacehaven which was used as the Officers’ Mess.
The picture below shows five German officers in uniform sitting around a table within the interior of an Officers’ Mess. One of the German officers, Schwalm, signs a document on the table in front of him, watched by a British naval officer who is sitting on the same side of the table, two British officers sitting at the end of the table and a crowd of British officers gathering at the door behind them.
Once the document was signed the Union Flag was duly raised.
Alderney had been left in a terrible mess by the Germans who had destroyed many of the buildings by stripping them of wood and other materials to burn as well as causing other damage.
Some of the Germans were kept back to clear up the mess they had made and deal with removal of land mines and other weapons but a large number were removed within a few days and taken to England as prisoners of war.
As I mentioned above there were only a handful of Alderney residents there at the liberation. 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” you can read about that in my blog post below.
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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 researching material for another blog post I came across a newspaper article about Corporal John Dennis, Royal Army Service Corps. This article tells the story of how he managed to evade detection by the German authorities for the entire five years of the occupation of the Channel Islands.
His reason for appearing in this article was because he had been invited back to Ramsgate, where he had been previously based in 1940, after returning from Dunkirk. Dennis was bringing a message of thanks for the Red Cross parcels that were received by Channel Islanders.1
Dennis was at home in Guernsey, on leave, when the Germans arrived. I have previously written about visitors that found themselves caught up in the occupation of the Channel Islands, but not military personnel. You can find that blog post here.
There were other military personnel home on leave who were caught up in the capture of the islands and they were taken prisoner and held at Castle Cornet before being sent to P.O.W. Camps in Germany.
Dennis had other ideas. When the enemy arrived he burnt his battledress and wore civilian clothes. He appeared on the “other ranks casualty list” in September 1940 as missing.
WO417/18 Casualty Lists (Other Ranks) 304-322 page 20 held at the National Archives.
By 1941 he appeared on a list of the missing circulated around POW Camps to try and locate missing personnel.
I was intrigued by the newspaper article as I had never heard of anyone doing this, and had not heard of John Dennis. Having asked around it seemed that nobody else had heard of this story either, apart from one possible post war lead that turned out to be a dead end.
I checked the many books and publications that I have and still turned up nothing, other than a Private who presented himself at the Royal Hotel to meet with Lieutenant-Colonel Stoneman of Force 135 on 9 May 1945. That was Private Le Goupillot, who had initially been detained by the Germans for eleven weeks in 1940, before being released back into the civilian population due to ill health.2
One of the regular readers of the blog is Alan Dennis so, although a long shot, I asked him if by any chance John Dennis was a relative. It turned out he wasn’t a relative but Alan had been told about Dennis by his Grandmother. His Grandmother had lived near where John Dennis lived during a large part of the occupation.
This spurred me on to find out more, armed only with the newspaper article this wasn’t going to be easy. My next port of call were the ever helpful staff at the Island Archives to see if they knew anything of Corporal Dennis. They didn’t know of a Corporal Dennis but they did have a registration form for a John Dennis.
They pulled out the documents for me and I went along to see what leads they would give me. Having looked at his registration documents I noted that he had a wife Adèle Dennis with whom he seems to have lived for part of the occupation. Having found her registration form in the same folder I was able to ascertain that, whilst she now had British nationality, she was originally from Austria.
John Dennis shown from the picture on his registration form held at the Island Archives.
The documents held at the archives reveal that he moved around a lot during the early part of the Occupation, although remaining in St Peter Port. Living at Truchot House, Le Truchot, then 29 Havelet, 29 Hauteville, 4 Sir William Place and then 3 Vauvert Terrace.
After this he was looked after by a Scotswoman for the remainder of the occupation and lived in Mount Durand. Initially at 1 Mount Durand from July 1943 then at 2 Mount Durand from 28 December 1943. Curiously in the article in the newspaper he says that the he was looked after by a Scottish lady for the whole five years.
For five years I was cared for by a Scotswoman at Mount Durand, Guernsey, and had it not been for her great help I probably could not have fooled the Nazis.
Cpl. John Dennis – Interview with the Thanet Advertiser & Echo, Tuesday 12 June 1945
One thing that nobody picked up on, or if they did they didn’t act on it, was that on his registration form he had entered the date of leaving the British Army as 8 July 1940, some 8 days after the Germans had occupied Guernsey.
Extract from John Dennis’s registration form from 1940. Held at the Island Archives.
At various points throughout the occupation the Germans were convinced that there were British soldiers hiding here, particularly after commando raids. They were successful in rounding up all that didn’t escape after the raids. Dennis and those that helped him were putting themselves at great risk. They risked being deported to camps in mainland Europe or worse shot.
His updated registration form dated 22 December 1942 lists him as judicially separated from his wife and and working as a lorry driver for for a German firm Ruby. You may be wondering why he is working for a German firm. Frankly those that lived in the Channel Islands had little choice as if they refused they would imprisoned, not be able to obtain food or escape the island. Unlike France they couldn’t disappear from the area.
The form had a number of slips attached to it updating details of where he worked and lived. From October 1943 until February 1944 he worked as a labourer for the German Forces. After this he became a docker working for Blum & Co until November 1944 when he returned to being a labourer.
The report in the Thanet Advertiser & Echo records that he told their reporter “a harrowing story of the misery he had seen, and experienced himself, and some of the details of the Germans’ behaviour are so revolting that they are unprintable”.
The remainder of the article tells of the hardships faced by the civilian population. He talks about the difficulties in obtaining food and that the Red Cross ship Vega delivering food saved many from starvation. I wrote about that in a blog post here.
I also found a small article which recorded him talking about the cost of obtaining rabbits and chickens on the black market being £20. That is the equivalent of £1,105 at the time of writing this in May 2023.
As well as shortages of everyday items medicines had all but run out. As a result of this he reports having had twenty two teeth extracted without anaesthetic.
He appears again on the casualty lists from July to August 1945 as reported not missing.
WO417/95 Casualty Lists (Other Ranks) 24 July 1945 to 14 August 1945 page 6 held at the National Archives.
The article finishes by providing the address that he was staying at and inviting those Channel Islanders in England seeking news of relatives to contact him.
So what else do we know about Corporal Dennis? Sadly the answer to that is not a lot. If you are reading this and are by any chance related to him or know something about his time in Guernsey or the Scottish lady that helped him I would love to know more.
Massive thanks to the following people for their assistance with locating information on Corporal Dennis.
Alan Dennis for passing on the story that his grandmother had told him about this gentleman which spurred me on to keep looking.
The team at Island Archives for searching their records to see what they could find on anyone called John Dennis. This enabled me to find more about who he was, where he lived, and what he did.
Pierre Renier for tracking down the service number of Dennis and that he had appeared in a casualty list as missing and then a later list as no longer missing. This helped me to track down some more information.
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.
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.
Oberstleutnant Hans W von Helldorf was the former aide-de-camp to Graf von Schmettow who was Commander of the Channel Islands until February 1945. You can read about how von Schmettow was ousted by Vizeadmiral Friedrich Hüffmeier here. Helldorf was part of the undermining of von Schmettow along with Hüffmeier.
Despite this he was implicated in a plot to assassinate Hüffmeier in April 1945. Each day Hüffmeier used to walk to Castle Carey and have a glass of milk. Along with others von Helldorf had planned to poison Hüffmeier but they were betrayed.
As a result von Helldorf was stripped of his rank and banished to the island of Herm pending a court martial.
The eight people who lived on the island saw him put ashore on April the 28th 1945. He was carrying a parcel containing a few personal belongings and with his head bowed walked slowly up the hill from the harbour in search of a place he might sleep.1 Accounts record him as having stayed at the Manor House on the island but was hardly ever seen to leave the house.
It was fortunate for him that the war ended before he could face the court martial as Hüffmeier, an ardent Nazi, would likely have had him shot.
The Germans only briefly had a garrison on Herm and they had left in 1942 after their flak battery had shot down one of their own aircraft. Other than this brief period where Herm had a garrison they mainly used it as a place of recreation including shooting pheasants and rabbits.
As the only German on the island on the 12th May 1945 he surrendered to a British officer that came to Herm.
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.
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.
Today I came across a tweet from The History Islands (@HistoryIslands) highlighting this film by Tristan Tull. (@RegentsMedia) from 2021.
The film is about life in Jersey during the Occupation. Surviving islanders telling their stories interspersed with archive footage, animations and photographs.
Whilst there have been a number of other documentaries over the years this one has a different style. It doesn’t trot out the same old footage. I really enjoyed watching it and recommend it. Tristan has kindly made this free to watch on Vimeo. You can click the link below to watch 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
