'When Hitler Invaded Britain', ITV Tonight, 10.15pm Feature-length drama documentary telling the story of just how close Britain came to invasion by Germany in the summer of 1940 'Island at War', starts 11th July from acclaimed writer Stephen Mallatratt, is based on the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. It tells the story of three Island families whose lives are irrevocably changed by the occupation. Mirroring history, the series culminates in the chilling deportation of 2,000 channel islanders to German interment camps during September 1942 The following article is taken from the Sunday Times 27th June: Islands in the storm Will ITV’s lavish drama about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands win the battle for ratings, asks Jeff Dawson June 1940, somewhere in the Channel Islands.” At the George hotel, a grand Victorian affair with wrought-iron railings and a seafront aspect, Baron von Rheingarten and his Wehrmacht goons strut in. Waiting in the lobby are the local bailiff and his deputy. Having already surrendered their authority, these provincial dignitaries cravenly introduce their wives. “Such elegance,” responds their new Kommandant (it’s unclear whether he means the oak staircase, or — mein Gott — the lovely ladies), “the spoils of war.” Outside, jackboots stamp, though less to the Horst Wessel song, more to stave off the frost. For “Iles Normandes: late spring”, read “Crosby, Liverpool: early winter”. The hotel, a dressed-up mansion once owned by Sir Henry Tate (of Tate & Lyle, a man whose neighbours, one supposes, remained untroubled for a cup of sugar), was also used in the filming of The Forsyte Saga. But the neighbourhood has seen better days: on a wall perch some tracksuited scallies eyeing up the silverware. A man shuffles past with a great dane he claims weighs 16 stone. Two gawping girls sport crop tops. I swear their midriffs are purple. ITV’s Granada-produced Island at War, starring James Wilby, Clare Holman and Philip Glenister, will be going out in 90-minute chunks for six weeks. With a budget of £8m, it’s a fairly lavish affair for the small screen. On the heels of Dr Zhivago, two Forsytes and Henry VIII, it’s part of Granada’s continuing mission to demonstrate that the Sunday-night costume romp is not the sole preserve of the BBC. Loosely speaking, the series dramatises the travails of three Channel Island families during the German occupation (including Wilby and Holman as Mr and Mrs Deputy Bailiff). And if not a single frame was actually shot there — the bulk of filming was undertaken in the tax-incentivised Isle of Man — it does, we are promised, draw heavily on real-life Channel Island experiences. Such a shame, then, that they went and set the story in the mythical locale of St Gregory. “If you put it on a fictional island, you can have bits of everything that went on (in both Jersey and Guernsey) sort of amalgamated,” explains the drama’s writer, Stephen Mallattratt. “But I think anybody who knows anything about the occupation will recognise an awful lot of it. It just seemed the right thing to do.” Better not mess it up, then, for genuine Channel Islanders don’t take kindly to having their history revised. “This is what annoys people over here: all you get is books like Madeleine Bunting’s The Model Occupation (1995). I mean, she obviously wrote her book from an agenda, and we were all collaborators,” grumbles Michael Ginns MBE, president of the Jersey-based Occupation Society, a group dedicated to pre-serving historical sites and reconciliation between former foes. “The place was in an uproar over that one.” Ginns should know what he’s talking about. In 1942, aged 14, he was one of 2,000 islanders carted off to an internment camp in southern Germany, where he saw out the rest of the war. He may talk about it with a characteristic veteran’s modesty (“Compared with what went on elsewhere, it was pretty benign”), but it should not detract from the fact that the occupation was a deadly serious business. The catalogue of inhumanity in the Channel Islands has been well documented. Lest we forget: with the fall of France, Britain had abandoned this tiny archipelago, nestling in the crook of the Cherbourg peninsula, as indefensible. From June 30 to July 3, 1940, the Germans marched into Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney and Sark. Hitler boasted that he was “wiping his boots on the doormat of England” (though he should have known better than to call a Channel Islander “English”). And if, indeed, it was at first trumpeted as a “model occupation” — so much so that Ambrose Sherwill, president of the Guernsey controlling committee, in an ill-advised broadcast, proclaimed how civil the Germans had been — it soon exceeded even Robert Kilroy-Silk’s worst Euro-nightmare. Thus followed the deportations, persecutions, slave labour, executions (and, at the end, siege and starvation) that were the hallmark of everywhere the Nazis stuck their swastika. Alderney, infamously, housed a concentration camp. With the mainland embroiled in the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and everything after, however, the islands became a minor sideshow, even an embarrassment. Afterwards, the bunkers and fortifications mossed over into a tourist attraction. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when historians, revisionist or otherwise, started accessing archive material that people began reflecting on what had happened. It does seem strange that, despite a veritable cottage industry of local literature, events in the islands should have yielded so little in the way of screen dramatisations. Here, after all, was the only bit of the British Isles to come under Nazi rule. It was the most heavily fortified part of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Not liberated until May 9, 1945, the day after VE-Day, it also endured the longest occupation of the whole war. Save for a brief interlude in the film The Eagle Has Landed, the only significant outing for these events was LWT’s Enemy at the Door, back in 1978. The second world war is clearly the new rock’n’roll (Granada’s version of the Colditz story, starring Damian Lewis, is also coming soon), so perhaps it was inevitable that the Channel Islands would come up for re-examination. “We’re probably more at war than we have been for a long time,” ponders Sita Williams, the executive producer, whose idea this series was. “Making judgments about how people live with the enemy is difficult unless you have had to do so. The boundaries of what’s right and what’s wrong get blurred. That’s what drew us to the story. When we started reading about it, it was a wealth of drama, to put it crudely.” Quite what will be made of her assertion that it’s about “seeing the Germans as if they were the British coalition forces” is another matter. But if early scenes of invading troops posing for snapshots seem more Port Stanley than Basra, there is clearly something in the water — a drama- tisation of Roy McLoughlin and Simon Lee Watkins’s 1995 book Living with the Enemy is reportedly in the works. The recent D-day commemorations have thrown everything into sharp relief. From that momentous event, continental Europe was gradually relieved of its Nazi yoke. With it, the question is asked as to what would have happened in mainland Britain if the RAF (and the Channel) hadn’t kept the wolves at bay. Loyal partisans fighting from the last remaining cave (as we would prefer)? Or a nation forced into denial about the extent of its treachery? The Channel Islands, with its bemused British bobbies looking on as the troop carriers rolled in, tends to be seen as a Britain in microcosm. But, says Ginns, it’s a specious argument. In the Channel Islands, the circumstances were particular and unique. A third of the population had been evacuated, most men of fighting age had gone and there were no resistance movements set up and ready to go into hiding. “You didn’t have that here because there’s nowhere to hide. You had one German soldier per 2.1 civilians. You just couldn’t.” Some of the real-life protagonists were truly remarkable, such as Albert Bedane, who hid a Jewish woman, a French POW and several Russian labourers; or Louisa Gould, who died in Ravensbrück concentration camp for harbouring an escaped forced worker. Yet perhaps the most interesting thing is that for all the “quiet acts of heroism”, as Mallattratt puts it, or even institutional resistance in the shape of the obstreperous bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, most people just got on with their lives, left in that grey state of mutual coexistence, struggling through a conflict in which there was simply no end in sight. “A kind of pragmatism that dissolved into different shades,” as the director, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, puts it. “Some were on the black market. Some went to work for the Germans and got paid. Some washed their dirty linen. Some would give them a meal because they liked them. Some would give them a cup of tea. So what is collaboration? There was very little collaboration of the sort you got in France. It was a little bit more subtle.” If one interesting thing comes out of the first episode, it’s the played-down notion that while the mouse may have been roaring, it was directing much of its early noise northwards. “The villain of the piece was the British government,” insists Ginns, pointing out that Whitehall had neglected to inform the Germans that the islands were demilitarised, which would have spared them an air raid. “The only gun was on the mail boat out of Sark, a twin Lewis gun,” he adds. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, look, Heinkels!’ We heard the whistle of the bombs and that was it.” Whether the complexities of the occupation can be successfully filtered through the prism of primetime ITV is another matter, for there are an awful lot of dramatic functions to be fulfilled. Watch the lonely local singletons thrill to those nude-bathing Nietzschean supermen! And don’t forget, either, in the shape of von Rheingarten (Glenister), the “good” German (“A sort of Tony Blair of the Third Reich,” chuckles the actor) who is no great lover of the Führer, but might want to keep tabs on your wife. Outside the George, in a camera truck, Williams shows computer-generated footage of dive bombers strafing St Gregory’s harbour — not quite Band of Brothers (which needed about 10 times the budget, not to mention the muscle of Steven Spielberg), but at least it’s not starring Ross Kemp. The first series goes only as far as summer 1941; two more are waiting for commission, pending its success. So, we may have to wait until summer 2006 to find out who gets tarred and feathered. Meanwhile, the islanders are “bracing themselves”, says Ginns. “After the war, everybody just wanted to get back to normal. It’s 60 years ago now. The place is full of German tourists, Volkswagens and BMWs.”
Thought it was an interesting programme, but a little 'weak' in places; perhaps too many re-enactors and not enough actors also at times? Worth watching, though.
Yes indeed, a little weak. A lot of build up the wrapped up very quickly with 'and of course this never happened...'. Still, now look forward to 'Island at War' Ryan
Didn't know whether it was meant to be an intelligent counterfactual (what if?) or an account of 1940; both would have been interesting but this programme managed to muddle both and make for a dire programme. If it were a counterfactual starting with the premise that an initial invasion had been successful and hundreds or thousands of men had been landed a month or so after Dunkirk, fair enough (although it should point out that this would have been virtually impossible even sans RAF - so why bother). Might be interesting to see what Germans would have done from that point - but Ch5 did a similarly dodgy production a few years back with this info. If it were a recreation of the perceived threat in 1940 and reaction to it, fair enough. But the programme did neither - and I though Romney Marsh was in Kent, not Sussex? Also a lot of the b/w pics of the BEF were Italy/Normandy shots: is there a shortage of film from 1940, when the BEF was waiting in France for 9 months with nothing to do but train? Also on a very cheap budget with dodgy re-enactments, but can't help that I 'spose for a Sunday night slot. Still, never that impressed with ITV history since W at W (which they sold on to BBC). More than offer the odd snippet of new info - and I'm no WW2 buff - to hold ones interest, I found that more often than not I was being offered info. that was highly debatable if not downright misleading. In terms of history books, it would rank as a Ladybird ages 4+ (which I used to use for my own history essays!) OW, IT MAKES ME MAD! MY BRAIN HURTS! Richard
Originally posted by DirtyDick@Jul 6 2004, 06:25 PM But the programme did neither - and I though Romney Marsh was in Kent, not Sussex? There is a dividing line between the two on the marsh and in fact about 20 or so feet between the signs of 'no mans land' maybe? They did mention Rye alot which is on the East Sussex side of the marshes Ryan
Originally posted by DirtyDick@Jul 6 2004, 12:25 PM Also a lot of the b/w pics of the BEF were Italy/Normandy shots: is there a shortage of film from 1940, when the BEF was waiting in France for 9 months with nothing to do but train? ...and also of the US Army (described as BEF) from early 1942 (lookat the equipment and gaiters!)! I was very disappointed with this programme. I thought that they were going to do a genuine reconstruction of an educated guess at a "what if", not try to "sex up" a story that has been reconstructed several times previously!. Think I'll just stick to reading "SS-GB" and "Fatherland" in future!!!! B.
Originally posted by salientpoints@Jul 4 2004, 09:08 AM it also endured the longest occupation of the whole war. I would nominate parts of Poland for this "honour", followed by Denmark.
Originally posted by angie999+Jul 20 2004, 07:06 PM-->(angie999 @ Jul 20 2004, 07:06 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'> <!--QuoteBegin-salientpoints@Jul 4 2004, 09:08 AM it also endured the longest occupation of the whole war. I would nominate parts of Poland for this "honour", followed by Denmark. [/b]Do you have dates of occupations? Be interesting to check these facts for all territories - Ryan
Originally posted by angie999+Jul 20 2004, 01:06 PM-->(angie999 @ Jul 20 2004, 01:06 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'> <!--QuoteBegin-salientpoints@Jul 4 2004, 09:08 AM it also endured the longest occupation of the whole war. I would nominate parts of Poland for this "honour", followed by Denmark. [/b]How about Czechoslovakia and, very arguably, Austria?
