It began with an attack on tomato lorries, but resulted in five years of Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, writes MARK HENNESSYLondon Editor
IN ST PETER Port’s harbour tonight, the Dean of Guernsey, Very Rev Paul Mellor, will read out a list of 33 people left dead after three Luftwaffe aircraft had strafed tomato lorries parked on the town’s quay on June 28th, 1940, in an attack which, even 70 years on, sees local blame divided between the attacking Germans and the British, for failing to tell islanders that they had gone.
Everywhere in St Peter Port, the memories of the conflict long past are visible: the memorial to the dead of June 28th; another marking the 16 British-born Guernsey residents who died in camps in Germany; one for the three Jews who ended up in Auschwitz after they were deported in 1942 and, finally, one that marks the arrival of British troops on May 8th, 1945, when they came to end the occupation of the only part of the United Kingdom to fall into Nazi hands.
British soldiers had quit Guernsey on June 20th when the SS Biarritz arrived to take them to England; a number of other ships left the same day carrying children. Nearly 20,000 adults quit the islands, despite the Guernsey Press headline, “No cause for panic. Run on banks must stop.”
For reasons never explained, the British waited until June 30th before asking the US ambassador in London to inform the Germans that all of their soldiers had quit Guernsey. The lives of thousands were affected by the events of those weeks.
Few, if any, families remained together. Norma Yardley, nee Topp, who was evacuated with her young brother, Maurice, remembered: “ had no suitcases, so had to carry our change of clothes, which was all we were allowed, in a pillowcase, our gas masks and a label attached to our coats.”
The Topp children spent the war in Sale, near Manchester, moving from house to house until they were finally billeted with classmates in Moseley Hall and their nun teachers, where their parents, who had fled Guernsey later, were able to visit occasionally. “Maurice and I were among the fortunate ones,” Norma remembered.
As the war years progressed, conditions on Guernsey became harsher. By 1943, Hitler ordered the deportation to Germany of all “former military officers, Jews and freemasons”, while nearly 2,000 English-born adults and children living throughout the Channel Islands subsequently were sent to camps in Germany, where 45 died, including a four-month-old boy, before they were finally liberated by Free French forces. The life endured by them is being remembered in an exhibition in a local museum, displaying, among other things, Christmas cards with a V-shape, denoting the V for victory symbol of the war years, fashioned from barbed wire, along with some rare cine-footage taken by a camp commandant.
By late 1944, near-starvation was the norm, leading some to flee to by-now liberated France, while aid did not come from the Allies but rather the Swedish Red Cross on Christmas Eve.
Liberation did not come for another five months. After the end of the occupation, the British inquired into the islanders’ conduct to find out whether some had collaborated, though the way in which the investigation was held irks some locals to this day.
Certainly, some in the British military were less than sympathetic: “It was generally agreed that the majority of the inhabitants of the island – Norman peasants with all the limitations of character and outlook – view German and Englishmen with almost equal indifference as long as their material prosperity is unaffected,” wrote Capt JR Dening of MI5. However, collaboration trials were never held. The islanders’ leaders of the time were granted decorations.
The survivors of the deportations meet every year on St George’s Day in late April to mark their liberation, though they have done much to build links with Biberach, the town near where the camp of the same name was based, which saw the Biberach Wind Orchestra come to Guernsey last year.
Later, the deportees organised their own visit to Biberach, including an ecumenical service, and prepared an exhibition that was shown in the Black Forest town’s civic offices, and later at schools there.
Marking the changes the years have brought, the association’s chairman, Chris Day, was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany at a very festive ceremony at the German embassy in London by ambassador Georg Boomgaarden.
Tonight’s ceremony in St Peter Port, which will begin with the sounding of the Victoria Tower air-raid siren at 6.45pm and will end at 19.35pm when it sounded again in 1940 to declare the raid over, is being organised by the Royal Guernsey Agricultural and Horticultural Society, marking the connection with the farmers and growers killed on that night.
It will be, said the society’s president, Ray Watts, a reflection “on this dark day”.