A day late...but they made up for lost time

After five years under the Nazi jackboot the Channel Islands, the only part of Britain occupied by Germany, were finally liberated on May 9, 1945

- By Ian Hernon

FACTORY girl Stella Perkins recalled frenzied celebrations: “It was a crazy mood, absolutely crazy. There was loud music everywhere. Everybody was shouting and dancing.” Illicit radios and gramophone players were brought out of hiding, as were bottles of alcohol squirrelled away for the occasion. The curfew and blackout were forgotten as parties went into the night.

But these VE Day celebrations were hundreds of miles from London and a day later to mark the liberation of the only part of Britain occupied by Germany, the Channel Islands, which had been under the Nazi jackboot since June 1940.

Apart from a few commando raids, the islands were ignored by the British while the Nazis built massive concrete defences. Wartime leader Winston Churchill had taken the hard decision at the start of the war that Britain could not realistically defend the islands, and thousands were evacuated before the Nazis arrived.

Adolf Hitler decreed that it would be a “model occupation” with his troops paying local shopkeepers while leaving civil government largely in place as puppet administrators.

Yet nothing could hide the reality of a military occupation-radios confiscated, a free press abolished, strict rationing, travel bans and any objection to the Nazi jack-boot rigorously crushed.

And it was hardly bloodless. At least 32 Islanders died in Nazi concentration and prison camps for offences including cutting telegraph wires, owning a radio, producing leaflets and, in the case of one female Jersey hotel worker, for slapping a German soldier who made improper advances.

Up to 3,000 islanders were sent to work camps across Europe. Three Jewish women were sent to Auschwitz where they died, and others simply disappeared in dawn roundups. At least 700 slave workers, mainly from Ukraine, died building concrete tunnels and other Atlantic Wall defences on Alderney alone.