The German Occupation of the Channel Islands

More about the book

This is the official history of the German occupation of the Channel Islands, based on British War Cabinet, Foreign Office, Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry, and Home Office papers in the Public Record Office, SHAEF papers, German Foreign Ministry and Wehrmacht records; files left by the <i>Feldkommandantur</i> in Guernsey and Jersey; and the Channel Islands' own wartime papers. Britain kept the demilitarization of the Islands secret, thus exposing them to German aerial attack to which they had no reply. Dr Cruickshank gives a full account of the invasion, of the subsequent landing of a succession of British agents, of actual and projected raids, and of a psychological warfare attempt to end the occupation, and he also describes the conditions under which the Islanders and the Wehrmacht lived, and the scale of resistance and collaboration. He explains for the first time Hitler's order to deport 2,000 United Kingdom-born Islanders, which mystified both natives and the occupation army, and he shows that the occupation was regarded by the Germans as a trial run for the occupation of Britain. The book throws new light on the attitude of the two national leaders: Hitler, whose plan to make the Islands a new Gibraltar, German for all time, consumed gigantic quantities of steel, concrete, and labour, which could have played an important part in the defence of mainland Europe on D-Day; and Churchill, who, in 1944, when the German garrison was starving to death, wrote 'Let 'em rot'--even though that meant that Islanders had to rot with them. Indeed, the Islands were not freed till the very day the war in Europe ended.