JEWELS AND JACKBOOTS

The Channel Islands were the only part of Britain to be occupied in the war, and the Islanders the only British citizens to fall under German rule. The narrative unfolds through the words of those who actually endured those years.This is their story. This book was born of a series of documentary films about the German Occupation of the British Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945 entitled The Channel Islands at War (DVD). 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. The Channel Islands were the only British soil to be occupied in the war, the Islanders the only British citizens to fall under German rule. How the Islanders reacted to the invaders has recently been the subject of heated argument and impassioned debate and for very good reasons which are explored in this book. It used to be thought that the Occupation of the Channel Islands was a rather gentle, even benign affair, utterly unlike that of, say, France or Holland on mainland Europe. It was believed that by and large the German invaders be