St Peter Port, and the five years the Islands remember

Every account of the Second World War in Britain describes a country that was never invaded, and it is true of the mainland. It is not true of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney and Sark, which the British government judged indefensible in 1940 and left undefended rather than fight for. German forces occupied the Channel Islands that June and did not leave until the 9th of May 1945, the day after the war in Europe formally ended elsewhere. Guernsey remembers that date every year as Liberation Day, a public holiday nowhere else in the British Isles observes, for the plain reason that nowhere else needed one.

An island fortified against an invasion that never came

Hitler regarded the Channel Islands as a symbolic prize, British territory his forces actually held, and ordered them fortified far beyond anything their size could justify. Guernsey became part of the Atlantic Wall, studded with concrete gun emplacements, observation towers and bunkers built to a standard usually reserved for the coast of occupied France. Much of that concrete is still there, sunk into headlands and cliffs around the island, too solid and too expensive to remove, and now treated as part of the landscape rather than a wound in it. Some of the fortifications were built using forced labour brought to the islands under the Organisation Todt programme, including workers held on Alderney in camps run under SS control, a chapter of the occupation that is remembered with particular gravity and is not one the islands treat lightly.

Life under occupation for the islanders themselves was a matter of rationing, curfews, confiscated radios and, for many, eventual deportation to internment camps in Germany. Supplies grew desperately short in the war's final winter, and it was a Red Cross ship, the SS Vega, that brought relief parcels to a population close to starvation in the months before liberation finally came. The islands' German garrison, cut off from resupply after the Normandy landings and Allied advance through France, simply waited out the rest of the war, defending territory that had, by then, lost any real strategic value at all.

British, but not quite the United Kingdom

Part of what made 1940 so unusual is that Guernsey was never, strictly, British territory to begin with. The Channel Islands are the last remnant of the medieval Duchy of Normandy still linked to the English Crown, governed since as a Crown Dependency with their own parliament, the States of Guernsey, and their own laws, currency and tax system, owing allegiance to the monarch rather than to the government in London. It is a technicality most visitors never notice, since the island feels thoroughly British in every visible way, but it is why the German occupiers were, in a narrow legal sense, occupying the King's territory rather than the United Kingdom itself, a distinction that mattered enormously to the propaganda value Hitler placed on holding it.

A harbour with an older story too

St Peter Port itself, Guernsey's capital, has a longer history than its wartime chapter suggests. Castle Cornet has guarded the harbour entrance since the thirteenth century, rebuilt and refortified by whoever held the Channel at the time, English, French or German in turn. In the previous century, the island had sheltered a rather different kind of exile: the French writer Victor Hugo, banished from France for his opposition to Napoleon III, lived at Hauteville House above the harbour from 1855 until 1870, and wrote much of Les Misérables looking out over the same water the occupying garrison would later be trapped by.

Getting there

Guernsey remains an easy call on a cruise from southern England. Ambassador's Seaside Charms sailing, nine nights from Portsmouth, takes in St Peter Port between Fowey in Cornwall and the French coast at Cherbourg and St Malo.

Fred. Olsen's River Cities of France with Guernsey, seven nights from Southampton, pairs the island with Honfleur and Bordeaux, while Ambassador's shorter Normandy, Channel Islands and Scilly Isles Summer Escape, five nights from Tilbury, adds St Mary's in Scilly to a quick tour of the Channel.

A day is enough for Castle Cornet, a walk up to Hauteville House, and a look at whichever piece of wartime concrete happens to be nearest the coastal path. Few places this small carry quite so much of the last century's history in such plain view.