LOW WATER MEN A novel by William Gasston The British Channel Islands lie in the Bay of St Malo, just south of the Cherbourg peninsula closer to France than England. In 1940 the Germans invaded the islands and thus began five years of purgatory for the local population. 1 First published in February 2018 by William Gasston Cover, page design and overall production by William Gasston Copywright William Gasston All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior permission of William Gasston. Disclaimer Low Water Men is a work of fiction which has been based on historical fact. Except for some historical wartime leaders, the characters are all figments of the author's imagination . Any similarity with any living person is coincidental. Acknowledgements Many thanks must go to the Jersey Evening Post for their permission in being able to reproduce the text of the orders of the German High Command during the Occupation. I am deeply indebted to Peter and Verity Cruickshank of Jersey who have been a major source of information, their family and friends being low water fisherfolk since long before the war. Thanks also to my good friend Phil Greaves of Lambley, Nottingham, England who undertook the edit and encouraged me to push on. Website Whatever you think about the pros and cons of the internet, it is probably( up to now!) the major game changer of the twenty first century. It disseminates information and opinions faster than a speeding bullet. I have set up www.lowwatermen.com so that any reader, who has been kind enough to peruse and enjoy my story, could access information regarding the Channel Islands and the German Occupation. ISBN 978-0-6482693-1-1 2 LOW WATER MEN FOREWORD I was one of the lucky generation. Born in 1947 in England , I was never called upon to fight in any wars, to be in any army, navy or air force. My parents and grandparents were the innocent victims of two world wars which punctuated their lives and left a trail of death that spanned the globe. I spent my youth on the island of Jersey in fresh free air, not dodging bullets and bombs. I had freedom of choice and I lived in a democratic society where the majority held sway. All I endured was the austerity that followed in Hitler's wake , a bit of food rationing and a shortage of oranges. Small fry indeed. My childhood in Jersey was spent playing on the beach or in the park and around the concrete bunkers which remained after the German Occupation of the Channel Islands. I pretended I was Battler Briton, the famous British air ace, fighting off the Panzer Divisions of the Third Reich. My friends and I had little knowledge of the horrors of the conflict that had gone before and this small part of Hitler's Atlantic Wall was our playground. All of our parents had war stories of bombing raids, death and deprivation. I was fascinated by the tales that Jersey people told of life during the German Occupation between 1940 and 1945. Everywhere you look in the Channel Islands the evidence of those strange and awful times remains, hopefully as a reminder to the world not to let it happen again. Perhaps also to a new generation who has only known entitlement, it will remind them that it was not always so. They say history never repeats but recent world events would seem to lend the lie to this saying. 3 My interest in the incredible low water landscapes of Jersey's coastline was fired by my maths teacher, Mr M.C.Green, affectionately known as 'Gloop', who used to organise field trips on Tuesday afternoons under the guise of 'Local History'. His amazing enthusiasm was unfortunately not matched by the behaviour of his twelve year old charges and we looked upon the afternoon as a total skite. We went everywhere round the island on those outings, invariably catching a bus to get there and back. La Fontaine des Mittes was a stand-out memory. It was an ancient natural spring on the north coast, nestling down a slope surrounded by gorse and heather. The path to it was sparse and little used but we caterpillared our way through the dense vegetation to get there. For the courting couple who thought the gorse provided sanctuary for their romantic inclinations, it would have come as an unpleasant surprise when thirty of us trampled through their secret hideaway. This, of course, was just an amusing (to us!) adjunct to the interest in history that Mr Green sparked in a few of us. He is long since gone but I thank him profusely for putting up with us rotten adolescents. History is difficult to teach to young people as they themselves have no history. So it was for me when as a twelve year old I went on a school ski-ing trip to Koenigsee in the Bavarian Alps in the late fifties. As a side trip we visited nearby Berchtesgaden. I have the photographs still but at the time it meant very little to me that less than fifteen years previous to our trip, Hitler would have been taking tea on the terrace up there. The war was something our parents spoke of but for us it could have been a hundred years ago. Not so now, as memories like this are like gold to me. We grew up amongst all the concrete that the Germans had left behind, a spooky reminder of difficult times. The bunkers were eerie places with dark corners that smelled of stale urine. There were so many of them that, after the liberation, government simply did not have the resources to make them safe or remove them altogether. A friend of mine was tasked in the fifties with demolishing one of the concrete bunkers on Gorey Pier. An expert in explosives, he 4 made many attempts at completing the task but had to eventually admit defeat having made little impression on the German architecture. After that experience, they were practically all left in situ and sealed off. When the scars of the Occupation became less vivid, a lot of brilliant work has been carried out by the Channel Islands Occupation Society and the Societé Jersiaise in rehabilitating these structures so they can be viewed in the context of history. To my friends in Guernsey, I am sorry not to have included you more in the narrative of the story. There are some who say Guernsey and Sark had it far worse than Jersey in respect of food supplies and with a population of just a few thousand less than Jersey, they did it tough as well. Alderney, too, twenty odd miles to the north east and close to the Cherbourg peninsula was almost totally evacuated .While maybe not an extermination camp, it served as a last stop work prison for many unfortunates. There is no doubt there are awful tales here that will never be told. Alderney is a mystery because there was no body of locals to witness what went on. The SS were involved here but not on the other islands. It was also fortified on a similar scale by slave workers and the infamous Todt Organisation. But why? There was nobody left there. The more stories I hear and the more history I read then the more I realise that wartime has a ludicrous randomness. Events and situations happen fast . Did Hitler visit Jersey that warm and sunny summer's day in 1941? Did Glenn Miller, the famous American band leader, crash land on the rocky shores of Jersey that stormy December night in 1944? It just might have happened. 5 6 LOW WATER MEN CHAPTER 1 15 DECEMBER 1944 13.30hrs It was bitterly cold and fog swirled around the small airstrip of R.A.F. Twinwood Farm, just four miles north of Bedford, a market town near London, England. A black car was parked by the front door of the air traffic control tower .The two Americans inside the car, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell and Major Glenn Miller, peered through the gloom in expectation of a light aircraft landing. The weather had been so bad the last couple of days that the majority of non essential flights had been postponed. The war was stuttering to an end in Europe. France had fallen to the Allied forces which were now pushing eastwards towards their ultimate target of Berlin where Adolf Hitler was mustering his final defences. Five years of warfare had taken its toll on the local population but they nonetheless welcomed the Americans. "Even the birds are grounded today", said Miller, despondently. He was anxious to join his band of wartime musicians who had already flown to the recently liberated Paris to start a new tour. " Nah, don't fret ", said Baessell. They had met each other the night before at the nearby Milton Ernest Hall , a large country house used as a covert base by the Allies . It was close to the airfield at Twinwood just a mile down the road. Baessell had offered the musician a lift to Paris. He wound down the window and leaned his head out into the icy air. "I think I hear it." He did indeed hear an incoming aircraft droning overhead but the noise receded. "Perhaps he's going round again", said Baessell. "Perhaps he'll have more sense and head for the Bahamas", 7 replied Miller. The fog swirled around them again.