Island at Peace . . . At Last ; Sarah Oliver Visits Guernsey As Its Often-Painful Wartime Past Is Thrust Into the Limelight by a Blockbuster Television Series

Summary

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AT THE close of the first episode of the ITV blockbuster Island At War, Nazi bombers fly low over an innocent harbour and release their deadly payload on to a convoy of farm trucks. Civilians are killed and injured, families torn apart and livelihoods lost in a terrifying foretaste of the fullscale invasion which is to follow within days.

The island is a fictitious one, St Gregory, and is set supposedly hundreds of miles further north than Britain's own Channel Islands, the only part of our sovereign territory to fall under the jackboot of German occupation during the Second World War. And yet this fictitious scene summons the ghost of a real-life Luftwaffe raid on St Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey.

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Island at Peace . . . At Last ; Sarah Oliver Visits Guernsey As Its Often-Painful Wartime Past Is Thrust Into the Limelight by a Blockbuster Television Series

There, on June 28, 1940, 25 men died and 33 were injured when, with the town already in a state of abject, official surrender, lorries queueing up to load tomatoes were mistaken for Army trucks and bombed at the water's edge.

On June 30, Guernsey fell undefended to the Nazis when Hitler landed troops to establish a garrison which would become an integral part...

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