From Harry Aubin

YOUR front-page article of Saturday 6 June regarding possible landings and attempts at recapturing the Channel Islands by British forces in 1942 implies that nothing was known in the islands about such possibilities before your stated recent discoveries made in the Public Records Office in Kew.

Perhaps you have not read the official report of the Occupation commissioned by the States of Jersey and Guernsey in the late 1960s, written by Charles Cruickshank, entitled ‘The German Occupation of the Channel Islands,’ published in 1975 by the Guernsey Press. I think it has been republished recently and is available at the Museum.

Very little was known in the islands during the Occupation years but the details and names of all intended and possible operations are well mentioned in Cruickshank.

Anyone reading the book is left with no doubt as to what would have happened to the islands.

According to Cruickshank, the capture of just Jersey would have required 39 squadrons of bombers (468 planes) protected by 33 squadrons of fighters (another 396 planes) just for mopping up and the final reduction of German defences (Cruickshank, page 237).

There were 40 88mm anti-aircraft guns (the best gun of WWII) as well as about 100 AA guns of lesser calibre just in Jersey.

In a book written by Major General Hans Speidel, chief of staff of Feldm. Erwin Rommel and nephew of Gen Feldm Gerd von Rundstedt, commander in France for most of the way, it is possible to appreciate that the German firepower from the mid-1940s round these islands was something like ten times what it was on the Normandy beaches. Thank goodness!

British planes would have had to fly so high in order to attempt avoiding AA fire that bombing would have been unintentionally indiscriminate, with much dropping in the sea, but property in the Island would probably have been destroyed with very much loss of local life. Battery Mirus in Guernsey was capable of closing off the Bay of St Malo almost by itself!

With a full division of German troops and a machine gun battalion in these islands of such small total area, they would have been almost impossible to capture. The loss of life of British troops, Islanders and German troops would have been enormous. Such a process might have been regarded as reckless by any stretch of the imagination.

Had the British government thought it practical, it would have happened. After all, Churchill did say later on: ‘Let them starve,’ so we know he had no compunctions if it had been the correct thing to do to defeat Hitler. However, it was not.

Rest assured that those who lived here during the Occupation and who have read Cruickshank and other books certainly do appreciate how lucky we were for the islands not to have been attacked by British or Allied troops prior to the very welcome Liberation landings on 9 May 1945.

Although we certainly longed for liberation, it would have done the British/Allied troops and Islanders little good if they and we had been dead.

As to whether the capture of the islands would have helped the Russian front by starting a second front in France is dubious, as the destroyed islands would have been a poor launch-pad for landings on the Cherbourg and Normandy coast. Hitler’s troops would probably have just pulled back and pasted the islands with everything possible. The ‘revelations’ are nothing new to those who already know.

There is, in fact, a precedent for a British landing of a D-Day type in Jersey, on 23 October 1651, when Oliver Cromwell, tired of ‘that hornets’ nest of Royalists’, sent a large fleet of ships under Admiral Blake bringing Colonel Heane and 3,000 Ironside troops to land in St Ouen’s Bay to capture the Island after the English Civil War had ended. Heane became the first Parliamentarian Governor of the Island.

Le Petit Jardin,
Poplar Close,
St Saviour.