An imperial Nazi eagle and a Swastika are etched onto a wall. The year’s hottest day is thus far shielded by the 47,000 cubic metres of concrete that surrounds us in a damp, squalid and oppressive windowless bunker.
This isn’t the Führerbunker in Berlin, however, but Batterie Mirus, on British soil – a subterranean labyrinth of once-secret corridors and huge gun emplacements that formed part of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall coastal defence, which stretched from Spain to Norway. The rural idyll of Guernsey sits three metres of concrete above our heads.
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The Nazi's invasion of Guernsey
Weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940, Britain abandoned the Channel Islands to the Nazis. On the 30th, German forces invaded Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey (including Alderney and Sark), and the archipelago became the only occupied part of the British Isles during the Second World War. The invasion was a propaganda coup for Adolf Hitler, who wanted the islands transformed into an impregnable fortress. More concrete was poured into fortifications here than anywhere else in the Third Reich and the islands held more guns than the 600 miles of Normandy coastline.
The Channel Islands became one of the most fortified places on the planet, yet these vast defences weren’t tested as an allied invasion never materialised. Three of the four 12-inch naval guns at Batterie Mirus initially didn’t function – their recoil was too much for their mountings – and once active they reportedly never hit a single ship. The tour guides, Steve Powell and Pierre Renier, turn to me. “You can now see why the Channel Islands are known as ‘Hitler’s Island Madness’.”
I’ll admit to being ignorant of the Channel Islands’ plight during the Second World War, instead lured to the horrors of the Eastern Front and drama of D-Day by the books of Beevor and the cinema of Spielberg. The 2008 Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society novel and its 2018 movie adaptation have more recently showcased this chapter of the war, however (although much of the film was shot in Devon), and also remedying this neglect is a volunteer band of brothers and sisters in Guernsey.
Powell and Renier are part of Festung Guernsey, a largely self-funded initiative formed in 2005, which is helping to preserve and promote Guernsey’s considerable Second World War fortifications. The group takes its name from Festung Guernsey, a 500-page manuscript produced by the German occupying forces in 1944 that detailed their fortification of the island.
“Hitler demanded that the Channel Islands became a fortress and wanted progress reports each month. The Germans were paranoid and petrified about gas attacks, which is why so much of the complex here is underground and with the ability to be made gasproof,” says Powell, who devotes over 20 hours a week to preservation duties on top of his full-time job. The 24 square miles of Guernsey alone have close to 1,000 German structures remaining today, and Festung (German for fortress) organises tours to its major sites.
Claustrophobic and haunting it may be, but today’s tour has been a fascinating and immersive insight into the Nazi war machine. Original German text from the 1940s remains among the graffiti, with the inner wall artwork – Wir Fahren Gegen Engeland (“We sail towards England”) – highlighting the threat that Britain faced when the bunker was being built, largely by prisoners of war, in the early 1940s. The silver lining of Hitler’s Channel Islands’ obsession, however, would be felt on 6 June 1944. “If this concrete was poured into defending the Normandy coast, then D-Day may have been very different,” adds Powell.
The sights of Guernsey
Out of the darkness and into the light and it’s hard to equate the horrors of war with Guernsey’s beauty. Our trip has seen us gaze at guillemots and lemon-yellow gorse, chomp on moules and crab sandwiches, cycle on the car-free island of Sark and amble on bike-free Herm. The latter especially enchanted us, with contenders for the title of Britain’s best beach in the Caribbean/Hebridean white sands of Shell and Belvoir.
Alongside Herm, it was the wilder west coast of Guernsey that also captured our hearts and minds, with its rugged coastal paths and slow-motion sunsets recalling the far reaches of Cornwall or Brittany. Yet within this springtime serenity, relics and remnants from a darker time regularly emerge. Some are subtle, like the bunker-turned-lawnmower store at our Camp de Rêves glampsite, others are stark, including the vast German observation towers.
Our next stop on today’s 6.5-mile walk is the Martello Tower at Fort Saumarez, which dates from the Napoleonic period in the early 19th-century but was updated by the Germans and converted into a four-storey concrete observation tower. The tower is privately owned but the L’Erée headland is not, boasting a megalithic tomb (or a ‘Cave of the Fairies’ if you believe the folklore) from 3,000BCE and views across to the Lihou Island Nature Reserve.
On Lihou walkers can encounter more than 200 species of seaweed and 150 species of bird, as well as the Venus bathing pools and a priory from 1114, of which little remains as it was used as target practise by the Germans. Take note of the tide times if you visit, however, as the causeway can only be crossed at low tides.
A rock-strewn coastline and the offshore Hanois Lighthouse are features of the adjacent Rocquaine Bay and it’s easy to see why this trading route – combined with Guernsey’s huge tidal range – was one of the most precarious for passing ships in Europe. It’s an apt spot for the Shipwreck Museum at Fort Grey, which details the 90 vessels that entered the bay’s nautical graveyard.
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Among the tragic tales, the story of the SS Briseis brings a smile. The steamer was loaded with casks of Algerian wine and ran aground in 1937, its crew safely landing at L’Islet before the ship floated ashore, where thirsty locals were waiting with empty glasses. Debauchery and bedlam ensued, with some even licking the tipple as it streamed out of the barrels. Just three years later, war arrived in Guernsey.
Life on the island during wartime
Following the fall of France, evacuations to England began on 20 June, with 4,000 children taking the perilous 12-hour journey to Weymouth on crowded vessels. The boats were still leaving when the Germans bombed St Peter Port on the 28th, mistaking tomato trucks for military vehicles and killing 33 civilians.
“Vets worked around the clock to euthanise pets before the islands were evacuated,” says local historian and ‘Islands of War’ podcaster Keith Pengelley from outside Fort Grey. Four-fifths of the children and almost half of Guernsey’s population managed to leave for England before 17,000 German soldiers arrived to control what was now a population of 21,000.
The remaining islanders were faced with living with the enemy (quite literally, as German soldiers were billeted in thousands of private homes), choosing a path of collaboration, resistance or a line in between the two. “Some 10,000 Channel Islanders went to war against the Germans, so we’re somewhat sensitive to being described as collaborators,” Pengelley offers.
Hitler wanted a ‘model occupation’ to show Nazism as peaceful and civilised, but this evolved into a brutal society of informants, persecution, anti-Semitism and deportations. The island’s newspapers – their front pages still on display at the Priaulx Library in St Peter Port – became vessels of Nazi propaganda. The neighbouring island of Alderney, meanwhile, was emptied and the only concentration camps on British soil during the Second World War were constructed.
Leaflets were largely dropped instead of bombs by the allies, but both Guernsey’s airport and St Peter Port’s harbour were bombed in 1940 and 1942, respectively, by the RAF. “There were Allied plans to drop more bombs on the Channel Islands than they did on Dresden,” states Pengelley on Operation Constellation, which was proposed by Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1943 but went no further.
Food shortages turned into starvation, especially after D-Day. Winston Churchill didn’t want supplies to fall into the hands of German soldiers, so he initially resisted Red Cross attempts to send food parcels to the islands. “Let ’em starve. No fighting. They can rot at their leisure,” he wrote on a memo. Opinion is still divided in Guernsey over whether he meant the Germans or the civilians.
The Red Cross eventually delivered food parcels in the winter of 1944 after the island had been without bread for three weeks, and gas and electricity supplies had been exhausted. Locals had been living on a diet of stinging nettles and rotten potatoes, while a recently discovered letter by Claude Rondel highlighted how the German soldiers were eating the local pets.
One man reportedly died after gorging on a Red Cross parcel, while deaths from malnutrition were far higher than those recorded and continued after the war. “Both of my great grandfathers died from starvation, yet malnutrition was rarely put on any death certificates as it would have contravened the Geneva Convention,” explains Pengelley.
Liberation Day in Guernsey
After five long years of occupation, on 9 May 1945, nearly a year after D-Day, all German flags were lowered across the Island and British officers stepped back on to Guernsey’s shores to liberate the Island. Thousands of locals crowded into St. Peter Port to celebrate and the island’s children would return by Christmas, many too young to recognise their parents. There were also 65,000 mines left on the islands, which, thanks to documentation, were cleared by the end of July 1945 by German POWs and the Royal Artillery with only a handful of casualties.
Liberation Day is now celebrated yearly as a national holiday throughout the Channel Islands on 9 May. “People after the war didn’t want to know about the history of the conflict,” adds Pengelley. “It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of Liberation Day in 1995 that people really started to celebrate and not commiserate – previously it had been a quiet and reflective day.”
I bid farewell to Keith and rejoin the Guernsey Coastal Path, which extends 39 miles around the island. The clifftop trail is flanked by great granite rocks and in-bloom gorse, before the duo of Pleinmont Observation towers emerge, huge neo-brutalist structures that wouldn’t look out of place in London’s Barbican Centre, less so on a remote headland in the 21st century. Their jarring presence is further evidence of ‘Hitler’s Island Madness’ but also of the dangers of unchecked power, human greed and propaganda. Lessons that we should all never forget.
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Top image: Fort Hommet coastal defence gun casement bunker on Guernsey. Credit: Getty
