The British Channel Islands Under German Occupation, 1940-1945 PDF Download

Author: Paul Sanders
Publisher: Paul Sanders
ISBN: 0953885836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

View

Book Description
The British Isles have only been successfully invaded and occupied once since 1066: the German occupation of the Channel Islands from 1940-1945. This book commemorates a defining period in the history of the islands and an important aspect of contemporary British history.

Author: Roy McLoughlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780952565901
Category : Channel Islands
Languages : en
Pages : 223

View

Book Description
"This book shows that Islanders learned how to contend with Nazi regulations, how to survive and how to trust those Germans whose human side was often in contrast to the brutality of Hitler's regime." -- back cover.

Author: Robert Bard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781445640372
Category : Channel Islands
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
The incredible true story of what really happened in the Channel Islands during the Second World War. The Channel lslands were occupied on 30 June 1940 when four German planes landed at Guernsey Airport. They were the only part of Britain to be occupied during the Second World War. The islands had been officially demilitarised on 19 June, but the War Office in London overlooked the necessity to inform the Germans. This led to a German air attack on 28 June, which resulted in thirty-eight civilian deaths. Hitler was extremely proud of the conquest of the Channel lslands, and saw it as a stepping-stone to the full invasion of the rest of Britain. The occupying forces were instructed to behave correctly. This would show the rest of Britain that there was nothing to be feared from life under the Third Reich. This book looks at the German Occupation, the unsavoury events that occurred on the Islands, and why at the end of the war a cover-up of these events was instigated by the British Government.

Author: Will Fowler
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750968796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
When Germany occupied the originally 'demilitarised' Channel Islands in 1940, Hitler ordered the area to be staunchly fortified with colossal permanent structures like Battery Moltke on Jersey. As it was the only piece of the British Isles in Nazi control, he was determined that the islands should remain German forever. Churchill was equally obsessed, urging numerous commando raids and harebrained schemes for the invasion and liberation of the islands. But when France was freed in 1944, the Channel Islands were completely bypassed. German troops were cut off from their supplies and the island population began to starve. Occupied for almost the entire war, these quintessentially English islands serve as a fascinating microcosm of what Britain might have been like under Nazi rule. With one German soldier to every three islanders, resistance had to remain at a low level: possession of a radio merited a prison sentence. The Last Raid is an atmospheric account of life under German occupation, as well as the political manoeuvring behind the scenes. With the first detailed account in English of the Granville Raid, a unique German commando operation, Will Fowler combines the social experience of war with the military to form a fascinating chronicle of the fight for the Channel Islands during the Second World War.

Author: Jenny Lecoat
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 1788855655
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
Based on a remarkable true story of love and survival. In June 1940, the Channel Islands are occupied by Hitler's forces. Hedy Bercu, a young woman who fled from Vienna to Jersey to escape the Occupation, finds herself once more entrapped by the Nazis, this time with no escape. Concealing her Jewish status, she finds translation work with the German authorities and embarks on secret acts of resistance. Most extraordinary of all, Hedy falls in love with a German lieutenant – a relationship on which her survival comes to depend. 'Combines historical fact with the fictional narrative, and offers a cast rich with multidimensional characters. Readers will be riveted' – Publishers Weekly

Author: Gillian Mawson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780752470191
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 192

View

Book Description
In June 1940, 17,000 people fled Guernsey to England, including 5,000 school children with their teachers and 500 mothers as 'helpers'. The Channel Islands were occupied on 30 June - the only part of British territory that was occupied by Nazi forces during the Second World War. Most evacuees were transported to smoky industrial towns in Northern England - an environment so very different to their rural island. For five years they made new lives in towns where the local accent was often confusing, but for most, the generosity shown to them was astounding. They received assistance from Canada and the USA - one Guernsey school was 'sponsored' by wealthy Americans such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hollywood stars. From May 1945, the evacuees began to return home, although many decided to remain in England. Wartime bonds were forged between Guernsey and Northern England that were so strong, they still exist today.

Author: Jeffrey H. Jackson
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643752057
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
"The true story of an audacious resistance campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women -- Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe -- who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute wicked insults against Hitler and calls to desert, a PSYOPs tactic known as "paper bullets," designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home of Jersey in the British Channel Islands"--

Author: Duncan Barrett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781471148163
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 432

View

Book Description
True-life recollections from the Channel Islanders who were the only British subjects to live under Nazi rule in WWII. 'An absolutely fascinating account of life under German rule in the Channel Islands during the war. As a Guernsey girl I grew up with these stories and recognise family and friends in these pages. Duncan Barrett has done a brilliant job of reflecting the peculiar challenges that existed for those living under occupation. It is an under-told story of an extraordinary time in recent British history.' - Sarah Montague, The Today Programme presenter. **The new book from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Sugar Girls** In the summer of 1940, Britain stood perilously close to invasion. One by one, the nations of Europe had fallen to the unstoppable German Blitzkrieg, and Hitler's sights were set on the English coast. And yet, following the success of the Battle of Britain, the promised invasion never came. The prospect of German jackboots landing on British soil retreated into the realm of collective nightmares. But the spectre of what might have been is one that has haunted us down the decades, finding expression in counterfactual history and outlandish fictions. What would a British occupation have looked like? The answer lies closer to home than we think, in the experiences of the Channel Islanders - the only British people to bear the full brunt of German Occupation. For five years, our nightmares became their everyday reality. The people of Guernsey, Jersey and Sark got to know the enemy as those on the mainland never could, watching in horror as their towns and villages were suddenly draped in Swastika flags, their cinemas began showing Nazi propaganda films, and Wehrmacht soldiers goose-stepped down their highstreets. Those who resisted the regime, such as the brave men and women who set up underground newspapers or sheltered slave labourers, encountered the full force of Nazi brutality. But in the main, the Channel Islands occupation was a 'model' one, a prototype for how the Fuhrer planned to run mainland Britain. As a result, the stories of the islanders are not all misery and terror. Many, in fact are rather funny - tales of plucky individuals trying to get by in almost impossible circumstances, and keeping their spirits up however they could. Unlike their compatriots on the mainland, the islanders had no Blitz to contend with, but they met the thousand other challenges the war brought with a similar indomitable spirit. The story of the Channel Islands during the war is the history that could so nearly have come to pass for the rest of us. Based on interviews with over a hundred islanders who lived through it, this book tells that story from beginning to end, opening the lid on life in Hitler's British Isles.

Author: Barry Turner
Publisher: Aurum
ISBN: 1845137248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

View

Book Description
The Channel Islands were what could have happened to all of us: a test-run of German occupation. That was certainly Hitler’s plan. Once Britain had demilitarised the idyllic, unspoilt holiday islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark in 1940 their fate was sealed: in July the Germans invaded. The following five years in their history offer an intriguing, and often uncomfortable, virtual history of how Britain might have looked under Nazi rule – and how British people, more to the point, might have responded to it, whether through submission, courageous resistance or even collaboration. Barry Turner’s is the first history of the Occupation since Madeleine Bunting’s acclaimed but controversial A Model Occupation in 1995. It is an extremely readable and above all fair-minded account, rich in personal testimonies, showing the extreme privations suffered by the Channel Islanders, so utterly cut adrift by Britain – even if for defensible reasons of wartime expediency –, and above all the huge moral and civic task required of their pre-war governing class, several of whom could hardly have been expected to rise to the occasion. It also draws on newly released documents in the Public Record Office to reveal the messy confusion of Britain’s postwar attitude to the Channel Islands, a source of enduring resentment there.

Author: John Nettles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993265747
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
"This book was born of a series of documentay films about the German occupation of the Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945 entitled The Channel Islands at war. It is also the fulfilment of an ambition to tell in much more detail than was possible in those documentaries, the true story of those extraordinary years"--Back cover