The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 588

The Cincinnati Enquirer 4 Sunday, April 30, 2000 UliilHO-fHlni Ptlotos Ol BETSA MARSH for Die Cincinnati Enquire! Hie Occupation Tapestry is one of the most moving displays on the Channel Islands, stitched by islanders all across Jersey for the 50th anniversary of liberation. The 12 historically accurate panels, one from each parish, tells the occupation story from the painting of the white cross of surrender on Royal Square through the joy of liberation. 1 1 i i t' braved the Blitz and braced for invasion, islanders had to find ways to cope under the jackboot Every aspect of life was regulated: driving, fishing, gathering firewood. The reichsmark replaced the pound. Clothing and footwear were rationed early on.

"AH human beings have an instinct in abnormal times that life must carry on normally," said Mr. Le Sueur. "You have to cook breakfast and then get some food for the next day. You create a situation of normality." What became normal for him was work at a British insurance company, where he went from being a 19-year-old office boy to acting managing director overnight "I wanted to get on the transport out but the queue was very long and I didn't want to be late for work," he recalled of the days before invasioa "So I went to work to ask if I could go to England, and they said to ask the managing director when he came back from London. Well, he never came back from London." Mr.

Le Sueur lived with his parents, who quickly took in a boarder so the spare bedroom wouldn't go to a German. They secretly listened to the BBC, an offense punishable by imprisonment or, later in the Occupation, by deportation. "Every family had to turn in its radio, but my mother was a compulsive hoarder and she'd kept an old set We hid it undef the floor boards in the hal I discovered that my grandmother was hiding her radio under an enormous tea cozy." Most rations held until June 1944, when the Allied invasion cut off all German lines to the Channel Islands. Until a desperate plea was sent to the Red Cross that winter, islanders made potato bread, marrow pudding and acorn coffee, trying not to starve. "We had swedes (rutabagas) that we made into a soup and ate three times a day," Mr.

Le Sueur said. There was no coal for heat or gas for cooking and no electricity. We were down to our last box of matches. We'd go to bed at 7 p.m. to get warm.

"It was bitterly cold that winter, and there was a lot of tuberculosis. Children were 3 inches shorter than normal when we were liberated. But it wasn't all grim. We had parties a party for the last day of gas, the last day of electricity. We'd take what food we had and drink calvados (apple brandy) on an empty stomach." When the Red Cross ship Vega arrived at the end of 1944, carrying 750 tons of food fpr the islands, "you could have played a tune on my ribs," Mr.

Le Sueur said. The Canadian Red Cross had used clothes and asked me what size trousers I wore. I hadn't bought clothes for five years. We discovered my waist was 24 inches." The Canadian and New Zealand Red Cross sent their POW parcels to the islands, full of such luxuries as coffee, tea, butter, chocolate, raisins, canned meat and above all, by popular request 13 million cigarettes. "My father was smoking blackberry Continued on next page Continued from previous page making shoes of old inner tubes.

Only people who have experienced occupation and a state of siege can fully understand how the Channel Islands felt when they leaned into their contraband crystal sets on May 8, 1945, and heard British Prime Minister Winston Churchill say the Cease Fire began yesterday to be sounded all along the fronts and our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today." The Allied liberation force came ashore the next day, and forever after May 9 has been celebrated as liberation Day. The shops shut down and the people came out to church services and street fairs and fireworks. "If a time for the locals to get together and celebrate the fact we are still free," said Denise Cheir, marketing manager for the States of Guernsey Tourist Board and a sixth-generation Islander. This year will mark the 60th anniversary of the Occupation and the 55th of Liberation. Travelers, too, are welcome to join in the alklay carnival on Guernsey, a parade with full military colors followed by a street fair with stiltwalkers, jugglers and fire eaters.

They take over the cobblestone lanes of St Peter Port and entertain throughout the carnival. After dark, fireworks explode over ancient Castle Cornet AD is not frivolity, however. "In the morning, they set off the sirens and they sound just like air raid sirens," said Nikki Tostevin, a Guernsey native. "If quite eerie, and about two minutes later they sound the 'All Then the churches ring their bells like they did on Liberation Day." "By early morning the Town was alive alive with a fervour never experienced before," the Guernsey Weekly Press reported of the May 1945 Liberation. "People were arriving in St Peter Port from all parts of the Island and all wearing rosettes and bunting.

Church bells, so long silent, pealed forth their joyous tiding of liberation, victory, and freedom." Jersey, too, will commemorate the day with thanksgiving services, a reenactment of the Liberation Landing and a fly-by of World War II RAF aircraft. One surviving officer from the Liberation Force will participate. Even though the generation who experienced the evacuation to England and occupation by the Nazis is getting no younger, Channel Islanders seem determined to protect this part of their heritage and honor the sacrifices of those who have gone before. Increasingly, travelers interested in history are visiting these islands to see German fortifications on a scale unlike any left elsewhere in Western Europe. "Most of the fortifications in Spain and France have been intentionally destroyed," said Evan Ozanne, secretary of the Channel Islands Occupation Society.

He spearheaded the Fortress Guernsey preservation program in 1993, which protects and interprets Guernsey's fortifications from the Napoleonic, Victorian and German occupation eras. There are hundreds and hundreds of bunkers still on Guernsey," he said. "It was part of Hitler's 'Atlantic Wall' from Spain through France and the Channel Islands up to Scandinavia. The Germans brought 270,000 cubic meters of reinforced steel and concrete onto the island." They were just following orders Hitler's order of Oct 20, 1941: "Countermeasures in the islands must ensure that any English attack fails before a landing is achieved whether the attack is by sea, air or both." The Islands were to become "impregnable fortresses." To build the gun placements and tunnels of these impregnable fortresses, the Germans hired local workers and imported their own slave labor of Poles, Russians, Czechs, Moroccans, Dutch and Spanish Republicans. Soon, 5,100 laborers were pouring concrete on Guernsey, under the command of 13,000 troops, while more than 5,000 toiled on Jersey under a Nazi force of 12,000.

"No one wants to admit they worked for the Germans, but they did the Germans paid five times the average wage," said Peter Tabb of the German Underground Hospital in Jersey. "In World War the Germans perfected fighting underground, and they did exactly the same thing in the Channel Islands, with "Shelter An entire division could disappear underground, survive the shellfire and bombing, and come out and fight They built 16 tunnels on Jersey, 29 on Guernsey and 130 bunkers on Jersey alone. Vasilly Marenpolsky was only 15 when he began digging tunnels for the Jersey Underground Hospital in August 1942. "Every day we marched, before dawn, from the camp to the underground hospi-taL We were boys, frail, exhausted and dressed in rags. Twelve hours a day, we worked underground Constantly workers were injured by falling rocks, taken away and never seen again.

One morning three workers near me were killed by a rockfall The fate for all of us seemed the same. Death." At least 117 slaves did die building the massive warren deep into a Jersey hillside, intended first as an ammunition store and barracks, and later, after the D-Day inva- Teens on Alderney hold a party each summer at this German bunker. sion of Normandy, as a hospital for German wounded. Complete with air conditioning and central heating, it was never used. The hospital is an absolute monument to complete and utter futility," Mr.

Tabb said. The Underground Hospital in Guernsey, however, did see a few hundred wounded, and after three weeks or so in its dank corridors, running with water, "they were sicker than before," Mr. Ozanne said. Above ground, the troops dug in for the invasion that never came. The Allies knew how reinforced the German guns were, and never attacked.

British and American bombers occasionally were shot out of the sky returning from continental raids, and parts from crashed U.S. Army Air Force planes are enshrined at the Jersey Underground Hospital On the island of Alderney, the situation was much grimmer. Most of the 1,450 Islanders opted for evacuation, and the Germans were quick to pour concrete into hundreds of bunkers, towers and gun placements on the deserted isle. And to construct the infamous Syk concentration camp. They populated Alderney with slave laborers, at least 500 of whom were worked to death and hastily buried or tossed into the sea While their cousins across the Channel.