Free The Channel Islands At War by Peter King Page A

the Islands, five from Granville in December, and in March 1945 35 German POWs were rescued from Granville by force. At the time of the German surrender in May 1945, 2,832 in Alderney, 275 in Sark, and about 24,000 troops in the main Islands surrendered. By then they were a demoralized and starving force, and many were hospital cases. 'When we were first occupied', wrote Molly Finigan, 'and for a good while afterwards it seemed the Germans were always marching in groups and singing in the streets of the town. Now all was quiet, no more shouting, no more singing their familiar song I.E.I.O.' By the winter of 1944 the once proud occupiers, 'go about unshaven and dirty, badly clad and some in rags, seeking roots or potatoes to cat' wrote Mrs Tremayne. The last six months brought home to the Germans the conditions many Islanders had lived with for years.
    But in the early years it had been very different. The newly arrived forces represented the summit of years of training in the Hitler Youth, Land Jahr. and armed forces. When William Shirer saw the first British prisoners after Dunkirk he contrasted their physical condition with poor teeth, thin chests, and rounded shoulders after years on the dole with that of the Germans who really looked like a master race.
    Two groups found it particularly hard to ignore so handsome and stirring a body of men: the women and children. In Jersey Chapman noticed within a short time of Occupation that more and more girls were seen with Germans. 'They dined openly with them in restaurants, swam with them, entertained them, and attended their concerts.'
    In April 1941 Mrs Tremayne noticed 'some of the Sark girls are walking out with German soldiers, silly little asses. I feel I would like to shake them", while Frank Falla, who had to visit the Kommandanmr as a reporter for the Star saw 'What upset me considerably at first - the sight of the local lovelies. Guernsey, Irish and Austrian, disporting themselves in plush chairs and settees with Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers and no doubt later sharing their beds.'
    To an older woman like Mrs Tremayne the behaviour of the Germans was shocking. Her early tolerance soon gave way to suppressed hatred describing them as 'swine' and 'sweating bulls'. To her they were: 'A foul, fat. ugly, bullet-headed lot, capable of doing any dirty deed. They drink all day and night. They do no drill of any kind, just strut along the lanes armed to the teeth, with their behinds bursting out of their breeches with such good living.' She disliked their bathing and sunbathing habits. She noticed them 'wearing nothing more than a loin cloth, their bodies are a mahogany colour'. On one occasion soldiers opened her garden gate on a Sunday afternoon and came down the path in their trunks, although they ran off when her dog appeared.
    But some things that she disliked appealed to younger women, and some Island women were to become collaborators in bed. Fraternization was sometimes a genuine relationship. Phyllis Barker on Sark who knew German was often called in to interpret for the German medical staff, and later married Werner Rang, a medical orderly. Sergeant Hesse, a billeting officer in Guernsey, returned after the war to marry his girlfriend, and open a restaurant. But most relationships were casual. Mrs Tremayne noticed women whose husbands were away had soldiers in their houses in the evening, and she thought the way the young girls played up to Germans 'really too disgusting for words'. These good relations did not disappear in spite of brutality, the decline in living standards, or even as a result of the general war. As late as August 1944, Germans were able to swim from a public beach, and afterwards played their wireless. They switched on English dance-band tunes, and were soon surrounded by mothers and children while the Battle of Normandy could be heard in the distance. Such relationships could always lead to trouble. Molly Finigan found she got on well with