True-life recollections from the Channel Islanders who were the only British subjects to live under Nazi rule in WWII.

'Barrett has vividly summoned a troubling episode from our national past.' Mail on Sunday.

'An absolutely fascinating account of life under German rule in the Channel Islands during the war. As a Guernsey girl I grew up with these stories and recognise family and friends in these pages. Duncan Barrett has done a brilliant job of reflecting the peculiar challenges that existed for those living under occupation. It is an under-told story of an extraordinary time in recent British history.'  - Sarah Montague, The Today Programme presenter.

**The new book from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Sugar Girls**

In the summer of 1940, Britain stood perilously close to invasion. One by one, the nations of Europe had fallen to the unstoppable German Blitzkrieg, and Hitler’s sights were set on the English coast. And yet, following the success of the Battle of Britain, the promised invasion never came. The prospect of German jackboots landing on British soil retreated into the realm of collective nightmares.  But the spectre of what might have been is one that has haunted us down the decades, finding expression in counterfactual history and outlandish fictions. What would a British occupation have looked like? 

The answer lies closer to home than we think, in the experiences of the Channel Islanders – the only British people to bear the full brunt of German Occupation.  For five years, our nightmares became their everyday reality. The people of Guernsey, Jersey and Sark got to know the enemy as those on the mainland never could, watching in horror as their towns and villages were suddenly draped in Swastika flags, their cinemas began showing Nazi propaganda films, and Wehrmacht soldiers goose-stepped down their highstreets.

Those who resisted the regime, such as the brave men and women who set up underground newspapers or sheltered slave labourers, encountered the full force of Nazi brutality. But in the main, the Channel Islands occupation was a ‘model’ one, a prototype for how the Fuhrer planned to run mainland Britain. As a result, the stories of the islanders are not all misery and terror. Many, in fact are rather funny – tales of plucky individuals trying to get by in almost impossible circumstances, and keeping their spirits up however they could. Unlike their compatriots on the mainland, the islanders had no Blitz to contend with, but they met the thousand other challenges the war brought with a similar indomitable spirit. The story of the Channel Islands during the war is the history that could so nearly have come to pass for the rest of us.  Based on interviews with over a hundred islanders who lived through it, this book tells that story from beginning to end, opening the lid on life in Hitler’s British Isles.  
 

True-life recollections from the Channel Islanders who were the only British subjects to live under Nazi rule in WWII. **The new book from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Sugar Girls** In the summer of 1940, Britain stood perilously close to invasion. One by one, the Allied nations of Europe had fallen to the unstoppable German Blitzkrieg, and Hitler had his sights set on Britain. The attack was being exhaustively planned by the Nazis under the codename 'Operation Sealion'. And yet the promised invasion never happened due to our success in the Battle of Britain, and the prospect of German jackboots on British soil retreated into the realm of collective nightmares - and mainland Britain never had to face the reality of life under the Nazis, nor the compromise and complicity that went along with it. More than seventy years later, the spectre of what might have been still haunts us in literature with Len Deighton's SSGB and Robert Harris's Fatherland. The passing decades have done nothing to dampen our fascination with such tales, and their closest American equivalent, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, has just been adapted into a major new US TV series. Just what would a British occupation have looked like? Except that there's no need to imagine such a scenario, because for five years during the Second World War fifty-thousand British subjects lived through it. For the residents of the Channel Islands, occupation wasn't just the terrifying outcome if the war against the Germans was lost, it was the day-to-day reality of their lives. The story of how these men and women, and their children, coped under such difficult and dangerous circumstances is an important, but neglected, part of our own history of the Second World War. In their stories are reflected the experiences that almost came to pass for the rest of us. This book tells the story of life under Nazi occupation - Hitler's British Isles.