When the Germans Came

INTRODUCTION

CUT OFF FROM THE MAIN

WHITEHALL

Wednesday 19 June 1940

‘Repugnant!’

The prime minister spat out the word, glowering at the small group of men seated around him. Give up British territory to the enemy without a fight? It was unthinkable.

After just over a month in the top job, Churchill had grown accustomed to fierce arguments with the members of his war cabinet. Only three weeks earlier, he had seen off an attempt by his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to open peace negotiations with Germany using Mussolini as an intermediary. Then, a combination of dogged determination, inspired oratory and wily political manoeuvring – the PM had summoned an impromptu meeting of his entire, twenty-five-man cabinet to provide a more responsive audience for a typically barnstorming speech – had carried the day.

This time it was the Chiefs of Staff who had brought Churchill a distinctly unappealing proposal. With the German Army now occupying the coast of France, the time had come, they believed, to withdraw their forces from the Channel Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Normandy that was home to more than ninety thousand British subjects. The islands were, they concluded, ‘not of major strategic importance’, and defending them was more trouble than it was worth.

Churchill was horrified. The Channel Islands had been dependencies of the Crown for the better part of a thousand years. Whatever their strategic value – or lack of it – as far as he was concerned, holding onto them was a matter of principle. After all, wasn’t he the man who had promised to fight on the beaches and never surrender? The prospect of German jackboots falling on British soil – and without a single shot being fired – hardly chimed with that impassioned pledge.

Before becoming prime minister, Churchill had spent five years as First Lord of the Admiralty. Surely, he declared, the Royal Navy ought to be able to defend the islands from the enemy. ‘If there is a chance of offering a successful resistance,’ he argued, ‘we ought not to avoid giving him battle there.’

But the response from the vice-chief of Naval Staff was not encouraging. The islands were too far away from the British mainland, and too near to enemy bases at Brest and Cherbourg, for naval forces to adequately protect them, he explained. Added to which, the necessary material simply wasn’t available – if anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft were deployed to the islands in the numbers required, it would leave the coast of England vulnerable to attack. To put it bluntly, the Channel Islands could only be defended at grave risk to the security of the mainland.

Put that way, there was really no choice. Whether the islands were expendable or not was no longer the issue. They simply weren’t worth losing the war over.

That summer, losing the war was looking like a very real possibility. The blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, unleashed on France, Belgium and the Low Countries had more than lived up to its name. In six blistering weeks, the Wehrmacht had swept through Europe, bringing nation after nation to its knees. Only two days before the war cabinet meeting on the Channel Islands, France had joined Belgium, Holland and Denmark in requesting an armistice, well aware that this would mean long-term occupation by the Germans.

With every one of her former allies now under the Nazi yoke, Britain alone remained in the fight against Germany – and the odds were not in her favour. She had an army less than a third the size of the enemy’s, and a population only half as large from which to draw new recruits. There was no doubt that an invasion of Britain was already in Hitler’s sights, and short of outright surrender, there seemed little chance of avoiding it.

Since the British Expeditionary Force’s scramble to safety from the beaches of Dunkirk a fortnight earlier, the British public had caught their first glimpse of what a German invasion might mean. In the wake of the exhausted, demoralised and bedraggled soldiers who stepped off the little ships came a stream of pitiful refugees – tens of thousands of ordinary civilians whose homes had been overrun by the German Army, and whose lives had already been destroyed thanks to the apparently invincible war machine. Many of those who saw them couldn’t help wondering if the wretched state of the new arrivals was a premonition of what was to come when the Germans finally landed on their own soil.

On both sides, preparations for the expected invasion were beginning to get underway. The German Army, Navy and Air Force had been discussing possible strategies since the previous December. Now, following the fall of France, the German High Command began to draw up more definite plans, under the code name Operation Sea Lion. ‘I have decided to prepare for an invasion,’ Hitler wrote in his Directive No. 16, ‘intended to eliminate England as a base for carrying on the war against Germany and, should it be required, completely to occupy it.’ Once the RA F had been pummelled into submission by the Luftwaffe, the plan was for over a quarter of a million men to be landed in a matter of days – enough to seize the country for the Führer, and put an end to the war once and for all.

In Britain, ordinary people were readying themselves for the expected onslaught. Almost half a million men aged from seventeen to sixty-five had already enrolled as Local Defence Volunteers (not yet rebranded as the Home Guard) and were practising making Molotov cocktails to hurl at German tanks. Up and down the country, temporary roadblocks had been prepared using tree trunks, abandoned cars and carts full of builder’s rubble, and fields where enemy aircraft might land had been peppered with obstacles too. The Petroleum Warfare Department was looking into ways of repelling an enemy fleet by setting the sea itself on fire.

The day before the war cabinet meeting on the Channel Islands, Churchill had told the British people to prepare themselves to face ‘the whole fury and might of the enemy’, and to brace themselves for a battle that would be remembered for a millennium as the nation’s finest hour. As the prime minister delivered his speech in Parliament, government printing presses were rattling off 1.5 million copies of a leaflet entitled ‘If the Invader Comes’, to be distributed up and down the country over the next few days. ‘Think always of your country before you think of yourself,’ it declared firmly.

Privately, many civilians were starting to wonder how they would cope if the Germans came knocking on their door. Some resolved to commit suicide, ideally taking a few of the invaders down with them – a wealthy lady in Buckinghamshire planned to invite a group of officers in for champagne laced with weed killer. Others felt they could do their bit by depriving them of valuable supplies. The government had advised homeowners to hide maps, bicycles, petrol, even food. At a Dorset branch of the Women’s Institute, there was a spirited debate about how to prevent their large stock of home-made jam from falling into enemy hands. Some members felt that every jar should be smashed to smithereens, others that merely hiding them under the floorboards was sufficient.

The government leaflet didn’t mention the possibility of long-term occupation, but many of those who read it must have had that thought at the back of their minds. They had seen the nations of Europe collapse one by one under the weight of the German advance, and the result in every case had been the same. For all Churchill’s impassioned rhetoric, there was no guarantee that the great fight to repel the invaders would succeed. And assuming it failed, what then? What would a German occupation of Britain look like?

Of course, they – and we – never had to find out. Three months later, in September 1940, after the Luftwaffe unexpectedly failed to cripple the RAF in the Battle of Britain, Hitler reluctantly shelved Operation Sea Lion. A German invasion, and occupation, was no longer on the cards.

But for more than seventy-five years, the spectre of what might have been has haunted us: there, but for the grace of God, went we. Our collective nightmares have been realised in a variety of chillingly realistic fictions, beginning with the 1942 propaganda movie Went the Day Well?, in which a platoon of disguised German paratroopers take over a small English village. The prospect of a Britain under occupation has proved irresistibly fascinating in novels such as Len Deighton’s SSGB (in which the Germans successfully invaded) and C. J. Sampson’s Dominion (in which the British, under Prime Minister Halifax, surrendered), in films including It Happened Here and Resistance, and in Noël Coward’s 1946 play Peace in Our Time.

These counterfactual occupations continue to fascinate audiences today, even those who were not alive during the war itself and thus have never known first-hand the dreadful tension of that summer in 1940, when fate could easily have taken us in a different direction. In 2015, Amazon Studios’ adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, set in a distinctly disunited states carved up between German and Japanese occupiers, scored the highest viewing figures of any original series on their streaming service.

These fictions allow us to ask what might have been had the pendulum of history swung against us. How would those plucky men and women who endured the blitz have fared under German occupation? Would we have suffered the same brutality and humiliations as were heaped on the citizens of Europe? What kind of accommodation would we have come to in order to survive, and what efforts would we have made to push back?

Except here there is no need for fiction – because for five years during the Second World War, almost seventy thousand British subjects faced just such an existence. The only English-speaking people to feel the full force of the German yoke, the Channel Islanders’ experiences show us what so nearly came to pass for the rest of Britain. Their stories – of resilience, of desperation, of a complex mixture of compromise and defiance – offer a glimpse into our own alternate history.

For too long, the Occupation of the Channel Islands has been treated as little more than a historical footnote. But for anyone willing to scratch the surface and look beneath the Churchillian rhetoric that has encouraged us to believe that Britain’s victory in the Second World War was a matter of destiny, these stories are far more important than that. The Occupation represents a crucial, if neglected, facet of the history of the war, and one that deserves serious, and measured, consideration.

‘Repugnant’ it might have been, but the decision was ultimately taken, around a table in Whitehall, on that warm summer’s day in 1940. For once, the famously pugnacious prime minister found himself exercising the better part of valour. On Churchill’s orders, the two thousand-odd British troops stationed in the Channel Islands were instructed to evacuate as soon as possible, clearing the way for the Germans to walk in and seize them without facing any military resistance.

The same day the war cabinet reached its decision, an envoy was despatched to take the news to those who would have to live with the consequences. The bailiffs (presiding officers) of the legislatures of the two largest Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey – the latter was part of a ‘Bailiwick’ containing the smaller islands of Sark, Herm and Alderney as well – had been begging Whitehall for a decision for days. Now that it had been made, the response was swift.

Edgar Dorey, a jurat (elected lay judge and legislator) in the Royal Courts of Jersey who had been sent to London to sound out the government position, returned to the islands bearing a letter from Sir Alexander Maxwell, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office. In it, Maxwell explained that since demilitarisation of the islands would mean the recall of their lieutenant-governors – the official representatives of the British Crown, and their de facto heads of state – the bailiffs would be expected to formally take their place. The islands’ ancient system of government was effectively being rescinded.

The Jersey bailiff Alexander Coutanche, an accomplished lawyer with a good grasp of constitutional niceties, called Maxwell in London to protest at a flaw in the plan. ‘I’m quite prepared to take the oath of lieutenant-governor,’ he explained, ‘but I cannot promise before God in the Royal Court that I will defend the island against all incursions of the enemy when I shall have in my pocket your order to surrender everything to the Germans as soon as they put their noses in.’

By this point, however, Maxwell had bigger fish to fry. ‘Cut out anything that seems to you, in your special position, to be wrong,’ he told Coutanche. The exact terms of the oath were of little interest to him now. In a matter of days, the Channel Islands would no longer be his government’s concern.

The message from London was clear: from now on, the islanders were on their own.

CHAPTER ONE

RABBITS AND RATS

On the ground, the war cabinet’s decision didn’t go down well. Later that day, the Channel Islanders picked up their evening papers to find some alarming headlines splashed across the front pages. ‘EVACUATION,’ boomed the Star in Guernsey. ‘ALL CHILDREN TO BE SENT TO MAINLAND TOMORROW. WHOLE BAILIWICK TO BE DEMILITARISED.’

The rival Guernsey Evening Press was a little more measured. ‘Arrangements are being made for the evacuation of (1) children of school age and (2) children under school age to reception centres in the United Kingdom,’ the paper announced, adding – in bold type – the words, ‘if parents desire it’.

That ‘if’ represented a terrible dilemma. Across the islands, mothers and fathers wrestled with their consciences, trying to decide what was best for their children. Should they send them away across the sea to England, a country many had never even visited before and where they would have to rely on the kindness of strangers? Or keep their families united and face the arrival of the Germans together, along with whatever horrors they might bring?

There was little time to make up their minds. In Guernsey the first boats were scheduled to arrive at 2.30 the following morning. Ambrose Sherwill, the island’s attorney general, had persuaded the Home Office to delay boarding until 6 a.m. so that the children could at least get a good night’s sleep before the voyage, but even so the registration process had to be well underway within hours of the announcement being published. The thousands of parents who were suddenly faced with the most fateful decision of their lives would need to think quickly.

That evening, registration centres sprang up in every island parish. Volunteers worked into the night gathering the names of children, their mothers (those whose offspring were under school age were entitled to accompany them), and young men who planned to sign up for the forces on arrival in Britain.

By 5 a.m. almost two thousand children had already arrived at the White Rock, as Guernsey’s main harbour was known. Every one of them was equipped with some spare clothes, a ration book, a gas mask, and some sandwiches to eat on the journey, hurriedly prepared by a small army of volunteers in the kitchens of the nearby Royal Hotel.

Hasty, tearful goodbyes were whispered in the dead of night, as the young passengers were handed over to the care of teachers and guardians. In the interests of public safety, parents were not allowed to approach the harbour themselves, so they were at least spared the sight of their little ones piling onto the boats and disappearing off to sea.

It had been a difficult, restless night, with plenty of tossing and turning for those already beginning to doubt their decisions. When one Guernsey couple, Alfred and Eunice Mahy, went to wake their nine-year-old daughter Lucille for the journey to England, they found they simply couldn’t go through with it. ‘What are we doing?’ Alfred whispered, as they stood over the sleeping girl’s bed. She had never spent so much as a night away from them before.

In the end, Lucille’s parents left her to slumber until morning, and the boat carrying her classmates sailed without her. But she was far from the only child left behind on the islands. Many other mothers and fathers found it equally impossible to send their children off alone into the unknown.

That morning, as the young evacuees continued to file onto the waiting ships, the last of the military personnel stationed in the islands departed as well. At 8 a.m. the SS Biarritz left Guernsey, carrying a thousand troops. Some of the soldiers fled in such a rush that they left half-eaten plates of food strewn around their base in Castle Cornet. Around the same time, their counterparts in Jersey departed on the SS Malines.

That left only the islands’ volunteer part-time soldiers. The Guernsey Militia had already been disbanded, but now their weapons and equipment were shipped off to England along with the departing troops of the regular army. At the same time, the two hundred-odd members of the Jersey Militia departed en masse to join the Hampshire Regiment, setting sail on the only boat available at such short notice, a potato-export vessel called the Hodder.

By mid-afternoon, the islands were officially defenceless. With less than a day’s notice, the power that had protected them for almost a millennium had abandoned them.

Along with instructions on evacuating children, the Jersey Evening Post had offered some advice to readers who were understandably alarmed by the ‘grave decision’ to demilitarise the islands. ‘We believe there to be no reason at all for panic,’ the paper had declared. ‘Keep calm, obey the regulations issued by the authorities and carry on, as far as it is possible, with one’s ordinary business.’

It was easier said than done. The hurried evacuation of children had sent a message that the islands were no longer considered safe, and as the new day dawned many islanders were in the grip of barely disguised panic. The town hall in Jersey’s capital, St Helier, had been besieged since the early hours by long queues of tense, silent people hoping to register to leave as quickly as possible. Once they had the necessary permits, their next concern was securing sufficient funds for a new life in England. That morning there was a run on the banks as thousands of islanders attempted to draw out their savings, queuing for hours and facing terrifying, surging crowds – only to be told that withdrawals had been capped at £5 per person.

At the harbours, the scenes were even more chaotic. Thousands of people were anxiously waiting behind barriers that blocked entry to the piers. Whole families sat together on the ground, their bags and belongings piled up around them as they sweltered in the blazing June sun.

The rush to evacuate had left a trail of chaos. Once-prized vehicles were abandoned by the roadside as their owners raced to board the departing ships – in some cases stopping just long enough to press the keys into the hand of a lucky passer-by – and the hedgerows and ditches along the roads leading into the island capitals, St Helier and St Peter Port, were soon littered with discarded bicycles.

Cats and dogs, meanwhile, were being put down in their thousands. When the vets’ supplies of euthanasia chemicals ran out, many owners resorted to killing their pets themselves. Others had the decision made for them. A Jewish couple who lived on Sark, Mr and Mrs Abrams, hopped on the first boat for England, leaving a pair of pet monkeys behind. Their housekeeper had agreed to look after the property while they were gone, but the exotic animals were a step too far for her, so she arranged for a neighbouring farmer to come and shoot them.

In Jersey, roughly half the population – a total of twenty-three thousand people – had soon registered to leave. But evacuation on such a massive scale presented a number of problems beyond the basic logistical challenge of transporting them all. If too many people left, it might be impossible for those who stayed behind to keep the day-to-day life of the islands going. Equally, they would be placing a heavy burden on the British government. Taken together, the population of the Channel Islands was not far short of a hundred thousand people. That number of refugees pouring into Weymouth or Southampton was the last thing anyone needed at what was already a time of crisis.

The island’s political leaders did their best to restore calm and attempt to stem the tide of evacuees. The bailiff of Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, addressed a large crowd in St Helier’s Royal Square, telling them that their only duty was not to panic. ‘I will never leave, and my wife will be at my side,’ he announced, promising that the rest of his government – the States of Jersey – would remain as well, and then leading his people in a rousing performance of the national anthem.

Inside the parliament building, Edgar Dorey – the man who had been sent as an emissary to London a few days earlier – took a more confrontational stance, denouncing those who planned to evacuate as ‘rabbits and rats’. ‘I have been filled with disgust,’ he declared angrily, in a speech that was reproduced in the following day’s newspaper. ‘I would like this house to express its utter contempt for what these people are doing. It is the worst characteristic of human nature, cowardice!’

In Guernsey, the attorney general, Ambrose Sherwill, was attempting to prevent a crisis at the harbour, where the long wait for boats was on the verge of spilling over into outright pandemonium. He had instructed the government secretary to hold onto a dozen rifles and bayonets that were supposed to have been shipped off to England, reasoning that if things got really chaotic he could arm the police with them. Since there were no bullets left he felt he was still obeying the spirit of his orders to demilitarise the island, and there was no need for anyone else to know that the guns weren’t loaded. The mere sight of them, he hoped, would be enough.

Posters went up all over the islands, imploring those fleeing their homes to reconsider. ‘Keep your heads! Don’t be yellow!’ declared one. ‘Why go mad?’ asked another. ‘There’s no place like home. Cheer up!’ The moral force of the messages was somewhat undermined, however, when it became known that the man behind several of them had jumped on the next boat to England as soon as he finished putting them up.

‘Mad’ as the frantic rush to evacuate might have been, it was at least understandable for a population who had always considered themselves reassuringly cut off from international affairs. Although many islanders had served in the First World War, the islands themselves had remained a safe haven. In fact, only a few months earlier they had been promoted in Britain as the ideal wartime holiday resort. ‘Happily, our island is far removed from the theatre of war,’ the Jersey Tourism Committee had declared cheerfully. ‘The bays, with their eternal sands, sea and sunshine, together produce an atmosphere of peaceful tranquillity strangely different from the rest of the world.’

In mid-June the islands were certainly at their most attractive – the long, sandy beaches glistening under cloudless skies – and for their inhabitants, many of them English retirees who had grown used to the old-fashioned, gentle pace of life they offered, it was hard to credit that they could soon become the site of modern warfare.

And yet, that summer, the terror of the German war machine ran deep. The islanders had read and heard about the brutal blitzkrieg that had cut a swathe through Europe, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Only a week earlier, beleaguered French soldiers had been rescued from St Malo by a flotilla of little ships despatched from Jersey’s yacht club, stopping off in St Helier on their way to regroup in England. The sight of their bloodied bandages had made a strong impression on the locals. These were men who had gone up against the Germans and lost – they were lucky to have escaped with their lives.

For those whose memories stretched back as far as the last war, there was the lingering memory of propaganda cartoons in which the ‘Hun’ was depicted as a ferocious beast, intent on raping women and murdering babies. The prospect of these animals arriving, and making the islands their home, scarcely bore thinking about.

As the days wore on, the island authorities continued to do their best to provide reassurance, and gradually the initial panic gave way to uncertainty. Those who had long-established businesses or farms on the islands were loath to give them up for the life of a refugee. In time, thousands of men and women changed their minds about leaving. In Jersey, where Edgar Dorey’s furious speech had cast shame on a population gripped by fear, less a third of those who had registered for evacuation – around 6,600 people – ultimately went through with it. In Guernsey, where the official response was more muted, the number of evacuees was much higher, with seventeen thousand eventually leaving.

Some islanders changed their minds at the last moment, getting as far as the harbour and then baulking at the state of the overcrowded vessels, many of which were normally used for transporting foodstuffs, or even coal, rather than passengers. Reports from those who had already made the journey were not encouraging. A letter written by one evacuated islander, and subsequently published in The Times, described a voyage on a troop ship, the Antwerp, in which two thousand people were crammed into a boat intended for seven hundred, chased by a German submarine across the Channel and then left on board in Weymouth for seventeen hours without food or water.

A number of evacuees had arrived in England only to realise that they had made a terrible mistake. After just a couple of days, one woman had convinced herself that she should never have left her husband behind in Guernsey. She managed to secure passage on the next boat back, but soon found that her beloved had also come to the same conclusion. By the time she arrived home he had already left the island intending to meet up with her in England. It would be five long years before the couple saw each other again.

Others were torn between competing claims on their affections. In Guernsey, eighteen-year-old Ruth Leadbeater and her twin sister Mary had cheerfully waved their parents and younger sisters off, promising to join them on the mainland once they had finished packing up the family home. But a few days later, when they arrived at the harbour to board their own evacuation boat, the girls began to have second thoughts. With them were Ruth’s fiancé Cliff and Mary’s boyfriend Jack, both of whom were of military age and liable to be conscripted in England. The lads were no cowards, but they felt the war wasn’t really theirs to fight – and their families needed them on the island. Jack worked as a fisherman, bringing in the daily catch for his parents’ chip shop in the Bouet, just outside St Peter Port, while Cliff was a ‘grower’, tending the tomatoes in the family greenhouses.

Since their boyfriends wouldn’t come to England with them, Ruth and Mary decided to stay in Guernsey. But with the German Army about to arrive on the doorstep, two young women keeping house together didn’t seem like the safest idea. Fortunately, Jack’s parents were able to help, offering the girls a pair of rooms above the chippie, where Mary was already working shifts.

Ruth was thrilled. She might be staying in a poky box room, but at least she could still see her twin sister every day, plus Jack’s mother’s chips were widely considered the best on the island. She only hoped her parents would forgive her for breaking her promise to follow them to England.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ENSIGNS OF COMMAND

On 21 June, a day after the last British soldiers left the Channel Islands, the lieutenant-governors set sail for home as well and the bailiffs were officially sworn in to replace them.

In Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, the calm, unflappable lawyer who had held the island’s top office for five years, was undoubtedly the best man for the job, but in Guernsey the situation was more complicated. The elderly bailiff, Victor Carey, was little more than a placeholder, keeping the seat warm for a man twenty years his junior, Attorney General Ambrose Sherwill, while the latter acquired some much-needed political experience.

Realising that Guernsey would need strong leadership to survive under occupation, the island’s civil servants and legislators established a ‘Controlling Committee’, replacing the laid-back, deliberate processes of the States with what was in effect a war cabinet with executive powers. The role of president was thrust onto a somewhat reluctant Sherwill. Carey would remain as the island’s symbolic figurehead, but the attorney general was really in charge.

From the start, Sherwill viewed his new position as a poisoned chalice. In fact, he was struck with such a terrible headache that he could barely focus on the task of appointing the rest of the committee. Nonetheless, he threw himself into the role, doing everything he could to maintain order at an exceptionally volatile time.

An early test of the new president’s abilities came on 23 June, a Sunday, when a group of doctors summoned him to an emergency meeting. They had been up since 4.30 that morning debating whether total evacuation of the island might in fact be necessary given the risks from starvation and the lack of medical supplies that could ensue under a lengthy occupation.

During a lull in the debate, Sherwill’s own doctor privately asked him whether there was any way of getting his Jewish business partner off the island before the Germans arrived. After racking his brains for a moment, he devised an ingenious solution: the Jewish doctor would be sent on an official mission to the Home Office in London, where he would recommend total evacuation of the island. Sherwill knew full well that the British government would never agree to the policy, but his plan killed two birds with one stone – getting the Jewish man out of danger and keeping the anxious doctors at bay for a few days while they waited for the official refusal.

With tensions running high, strong leadership was invaluable. This was never more clearly demonstrated than by the contrasting fates of the two smaller inhabited islands in the archipelago, Alderney and Sark, both of which fell under the umbrella of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

Sark, a small island of about 1,000 acres, was old-fashioned even by the standards of its neighbours. Its benign climate supported a traditional rural community whose bucolic way of life had changed little in the past hundred years, with its dusty roads plied by horses and carts rather than cars. The island’s six-hundred-odd inhabitants were ruled, according to an ancient feudal system, by ‘the Dame’, Sybil Hathaway, an imperious woman who commanded instant respect among her people.

That Sunday evening, after church, Dame Sybil addressed an uneasy gathering at the island hall, exhorting them to stay and face the challenges of the future together.

‘You, who are thinking of going away, where are you going?’ she asked. ‘You will be going to towns that will be bombed. No town in England will be safe.’ She could see the doubt on her people’s faces as they struggled to decide what to do. ‘I am not promising you that it will be easy,’ she told them. ‘We may be hungry but we will always have our cattle and crops, our gardens, a few pigs, our sheep and rabbits.’

Warming to her subject, she told the crowd, ‘We are one big family and must live as such. Each must help the other.’ Then to rapturous applause she concluded, ‘Britain must win! Britain will win!’

It was a command performance, and the result was hard to argue with. Although some of the island’s English-born residents chose to return to their homeland, not a single native Sarkese packed up and left.

On Alderney, an island about twice the size of Sark and with a much more rugged, windswept aspect, the situation could not have been more different. Less than ten miles from the French coast, the men and women living there had an alarming view of the developments taking place on the Continent. They could see the fires blazing in Cherbourg, and taste the smoke from the burning oil installations.

That Sunday morning, while the Dame of Sark was rehearsing her speech, virtually the entire population of Alderney evacuated to England. In a matter of hours, more than 1,500 men, women and children, including the head of the island, Judge Frederick French, departed, taking all the island’s money with them. Only nineteen stout souls decided to stay behind and take their chances.

When news of the hold-outs reached Ambrose Sherwill, he was concerned. Nineteen people was not enough to form a viable, self-sustaining community, and if a German invasion saw Alderney cut off from the other islands in the Bailiwick there was every chance that they would simply be left to starve. Like it or not, they would have to be brought over to Guernsey. Sherwill despatched the coxswain of the Guernsey lifeboat, Fred Hobbs, with orders to fetch those who had chosen to remain, ‘by force if necessary’.

Taking the attorney general at his word, Fred, a broad-shouldered man who had spent ten years as the island’s top lifeboatman, armed himself with a Colt revolver and set off on the twenty-mile voyage to the smaller island.

When he arrived, he successfully persuaded seven of the inhabitants to return to Guernsey with him, among them the rector of the island and his wife. The others insisted on remaining, despite the revolver.

A second attempt was made to remove them by members of the St John Ambulance. Unfortunately, caught in the grip of invasion hysteria, several terrified islanders mistook their smart, pseudo-military uniforms for those of the Wehrmacht and thought the Germans had already arrived. One woman locked herself and her children in the house and refused to come to the door, while at another home the volunteers were met with a shotgun pointed in their faces.

Even those residents who were willing to talk could not always be budged. One very old man calmly explained that he had lived in his house for the better part of a century and he was not going to leave, whatever the consequences.

In all, a dozen of the nineteen individuals who had skipped the evacuation boats were successfully brought over to Guernsey. The names of their die-hard neighbours were kept in a file in Sherwill’s office.

It wasn’t just the human population of Alderney that the attorney general was concerned about. Four hundred cows had been left to their own devices since the departure of the farmers who owned them, along with almost two hundred pigs, twenty horses and innumerable domestic cats and dogs. Although the local butcher had managed to put to death much of the island’s canine population on the morning of the evacuation, some had evaded capture and were now wandering the streets in search of their owners, while many of the island’s cats, too wily to let themselves be caught, could now be seen mewling pathetically outside their shut-up homes.

With no owners left to feed them, the pets that remained faced almost certain starvation. To Sherwill, a speedy death seemed like a far more humane option, and he soon despatched another party to Alderney to take care of the island’s remaining animals. A group of volunteer farmers and farm hands would round up the livestock and transport them to Guernsey, while a trio of experienced marksmen – one of whom had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his service in the First World War – shot dead as many domestic pets as they could lay their gunsights on.

The new arrivals landed on the Tuesday morning, forty-eight hours after the island’s hasty evacuation. Now all but devoid of human residents, Alderney had a post-apocalyptic feel. Vehicles had been abandoned on the approach to the quay, and the front doors of houses swung open in the wind. Inside the deserted homes, half-packed suitcases spilled over with clothes, and uneaten meals were beginning to turn mouldy. Escaped cows were roaming the streets, their udders swollen after two days without being milked. When the farmers finally relieved them of their painful burden, they found the milk had thickened and soured.

Other animals had been even less fortunate. A number of calves were found dead in the fields – those which had survived were soon put to death by the sharpshooters anyway, since it was only their milk-producing mothers that were worth the trouble of exporting – and the body of a horse was discovered sprawled across the road. It had apparently broken its neck attempting to jump a gate and escape from its field.

Over the next three days, the party of Guernseymen rounded up as many of the farm animals as they could and loaded them onto the waiting boats, before setting sail for home. All, that is, apart from one. As the last boat was readied for departure, one of the marksmen, Alf Martel, decided that he would rather stay behind. ‘I’ll be the king of Alderney!’ he laughed, insisting that the rest of the party go without him.

A few days later, Alf’s brothers from Guernsey arrived to bring him home. They found him passed out on a huge bed in one of the island’s smartest hotels, surrounded by empty whisky bottles.

The evacuation of the islands had seen many people forced to shoulder unexpected responsibilities – not just those at the very top of the political ladder. Bob Le Sueur, a pimply nineteen-year-old office boy at the Jersey sub-office of the General Accident insurance company, was planning to travel to England and volunteer for the Royal Army Medical Corps. The day after the evacuation notice went in the paper, he cycled to the town hall on his way into work, hoping to register for a boat leaving as soon as possible and then head to the office to ask his boss, Mr Barnes, for permission to quit.

Bob arrived at the town hall to find a huge queue snaking round the block. It would hardly help his case with his employer if he turned up for work several hours late, so he pedalled off in the direction of the office, resolving to return later in the day. But when he arrived at General Accident, Mr Barnes was nowhere to be seen – and nor were the rest of the company’s employees. Other than Bob, the only person who had turned up for work that day was a secretary called Phyllis – and the office was already packed with customers anxious to insure high-value items before they made the journey to England. The phones were ringing off the hook, and Phyllis was frantically struggling to take down all the messages.

One by one, Bob began working his way through the waiting customers, patiently explaining that although he could sell them a policy it would only be valid on a licensed passenger vessel, and even then specifically excluded war risk. If their precious belongings sank to the bottom of the Channel there wasn’t much anyone could do for them.

As the day wore on, though, the office only got busier, as more and more islanders, having secured their evacuation permits, arrived in search of insurance. Still there was no sign of the rest of the staff. It looked like they all must have already made for the mainland, leaving Bob and Phyllis to face the anxious hordes alone.

Bob spent the rest of the week dealing with enquiries from customers, and still there was no sign of any of his former colleagues. On Monday morning, he decided to contact the branch manager in Southampton, Eric Thorpe, an imposing man with a walrus moustache who was known, thanks to his First World War service, as ‘the colonel’.

‘Are you drunk, boy?’ Thorpe bellowed when Bob told him that the islands had been demilitarised. ‘You expect me to believe that the government would abandon British territory without a single shot being fired?’ Clearly news of the evacuation had not yet reached home shores. ‘Put Mr Barnes on the line at once!’ the colonel demanded angrily.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I haven’t seen Mr Barnes since Wednesday,’ Bob replied. ‘I think he must have taken one of the boats for England.’

The colonel sounded far from convinced, but he promised Bob to send Mr Barnes straight back again if he dared to turn up in Southampton. ‘You hold the fort until he gets back,’ he commanded brusquely.

Bob still hadn’t entirely given up hope of leaving Jersey himself, so he booked himself onto the mailboat leaving for England a week later, reasoning that if the colonel was true to his word, there would be plenty of time for him to fill Mr Barnes in before he set sail. After two days in charge of the busy office, he was feeling distinctly stressed, and although the initial panic of evacuation had passed, Jersey remained under a cloud of anxious anticipation. Several times, German reconnaissance planes, with their distinctive black crosses under the wings, had been spotted flying over the islands. Bob had watched them without too much concern. After all, he would be leaving soon enough.

At least the weather was balmy, and – despite the tense atmosphere – the island’s famous beaches were as stunning as ever. On Friday, at the end of his first full week as unofficial office manager, Bob decided to unwind with an early-evening dip in the sea. From his parents’ home at First Tower, a mile and a half from the centre of St Helier, he walked down to the beach and swam out about a hundred yards into the water.

As he floated in the sea, Bob gradually became aware of the gentle hum of aircraft overhead. He looked up to see three German planes in the sky, flying low over Fort Regent, a remnant of the Napoleonic Wars which stood on the hill overlooking the town.

Treading water for a moment, Bob kept his eyes fixed on the planes. He could have sworn he saw some small, dark objects falling out of them.

A moment later, there was a series of loud explosions from the direction of the harbour, followed by a flash of fire as a timber warehouse went up in flames. This was no reconnaissance mission, Bob realised. The Germans were bombing St Helier.

Frantically, Bob began swimming for the shore, his chest heaving as his skinny arms beat the water. He staggered breathlessly across the beach and up the slipway towards the road, racing to get back to his parents’ house. Then he saw something that made his heart stop: the German planes were flying towards him. They were racing along just above the esplanade as they headed west out of town, following the curve of the bay that separated St Helier from the neighbouring village of St Aubin. People were flinging themselves to the ground at the sides of the road, and Bob could see flecks of tarmac ping up into the air as they were hit with machine-gun bullets.

In nothing more than his swimming trunks, Bob felt totally exposed. There was no real cover to make for, only a line of flimsy tamarix bushes that ran along the edge of the esplanade. In desperation, he hurled himself into them, burrowing under their soft pink blooms and pressing his face into the ground.

Bob listened, terrified, as the planes stormed past overhead. The sharp pinging of the bullets hitting the road continued, growing faster and more insistent with every second, until gradually both it and the hum of the engines began to recede into the