Britain may be an insignificant little rock in the North Atlantic,
but for centuries, the island we call home was coveted
by foreign powers, making fear of invasion a fact of life.
From north to south, east to west,
2,000 years of threats have left their mark.
In this series, we'll seek out these reminders -
from weaponry and castles to warships -
as we tell the story of a centuries-long obsession
with attack from overseas.
From my headquarters here at Walmer Castle,
I'll be exploring how a thirst for power, both here and abroad,
led to some of the most turbulent periods in British history...
Who were the Normans? And why does he want to invade England?
..and getting my hands on some truly extraordinary artefacts.
Oh! And this is the original?
Engineer Professor Danielle George and historian Dr Onyeka Nubia
will be travelling the UK in search of the physical evidence
that tells of a centuries-long struggle...
For me as an engineer, it's functional,
it looks like it's built to last.
..and experiencing how those foreign threats
impacted the lives of ordinary people.
Walking in here, I think I would be overawed.
I'm Professor Alice Roberts,
and this is the story of Fortress Britain.
CHURCHILL: We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
With every year that passes,
the Second World War recedes further into history,
passing out of living memory,
and perhaps we started to take peace in Europe for granted.
But recent events have shown us just how fragile it is.
And looking back, just over 80 years ago,
people in Britain, including my own grandparents,
faced a very real threat of invasion.
By spring 1940, Hitler's forces were pushing into northern France,
and British troops were in retreat.
People in Britain were really scared at this stage.
CROWD CHANTS
In this episode, we'll examine Britain's emergency plans
to withstand what felt like an imminent Nazi invasion -
from the construction of vast blockades on British soil...
Basically, you're turning villages, towns into fortresses
on key parts of the road network.
..to civilians training as undercover assassins,
and a radical change in attitude
towards the role of women in wartime...
So these are extraordinarily courageous women.
They're warned they probably will last around six weeks
until they're captured, tortured and probably killed.
..all while the Nazis occupied and built camps
on some British territories.
But before we explore Britain's survival plan
and examine the scars left behind,
we need to understand how we found ourselves facing
the threat of invasion in the first place.
Joining me at my castle base is Dr Sarah-Louise Miller,
who's studied the British wartime experience in detail.
Sarah, we arrive at this moment in history
where there were German troops assembled
on the other side of the English Channel waiting to invade.
How has it got to that point?
After the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles,
the Germans are not happy.
They are feeling the pain of the treaty.
And then when Adolf Hitler comes to power,
there is someone voicing how they feel.
So he's got this righteous anger or he's expressing righteous anger
that a lot of people are feeling, but then actually translating
that into a plan to expand, to invade other countries.
Absolutely, and it's not secret.
CROWD CHANTS
And then when it happens, it happens fast.
Very fast. Blitzkrieg - "lightning war".
It's this incredibly effective tactic.
Hit other countries so hard and so fast
that they don't know what's happened.
The invasion of Poland obviously kicks off the Second World War,
and he doesn't stop. He goes for Denmark, Norway,
Belgium, Luxembourg, and then ultimately, in May 1940, France.
So then this brings us to a point
where Britain is involved in the war.
We've got troops over fighting on the Continent,
but we have to retreat. Yes.
They're forced back to the beaches at Dunkirk
and ultimately trapped there.
Britain had hit rock-bottom,
with hundreds of thousands of troops stranded.
And while Operation Dynamo saw 330,000 men rescued...
..much of their military equipment was left behind.
And we can see that here. Look at all those vehicles,
all those jeeps lined up.
And this is how they managed to board some of the vessels
that had come to pick them up.
You can see they've used the vehicles here
to make effectively a pontoon. Oh, right.
So if you imagine... Yeah.
That's it. Those vehicles are abandoned on the beach.
They're gone. They're left behind, along with the piles of guns
and anti-aircraft artillery.
It's really devastating to the Army to lose all of this equipment.
To fight an enemy that is blitzkrieg-ing across a continent,
you need weapons. And also, what about the next stage?
Because there's now the concern that Hitler is going to continue.
A very real concern.
Hitler isn't quiet about what he's planning
and he actually issues... He issues a directive.
It's Directive 16.
And he actually says, "As England, in spite of the hopelessness
"of her military position, has so far shown herself unwilling
"to come to any compromise, I have decided to begin to prepare for
"and, if necessary, to carry out an invasion of England,
"and, if necessary, the island will be occupied."
Ah...
Hitler had a clear aim.
Dr Onyeka Nubia is at Churchill's War Rooms in central London,
where historian Guy Walters can reveal his plan
in alarming detail.
ONYEKA: Hello, Guy. Hi, good to meet you.
So, what have we got here? What is this map of?
This is the map that the man who sat in this room, Winston Churchill,
would have really wanted to have seen.
This is an actual German wartime map
that shows how the Nazis want to invade Britain.
Right. So these scribbles on the map
are authentic scribbles done by a German officer?
Yeah. And actually, they really are scribbles
when you look at the map closely.
But it's of a very serious matter.
This is a deeply serious matter
because it's showing huge German units massing
in the north of France and Belgium, ready to hop into boats
and land on the Kent Coast.
Do they have a name for it?
The name for the plan was Seelowe - Operation Sea Lion.
So what is the plan?
The plan, at its most simple, comes in three phases.
Phase one, send the German Air Force over the Channel
and destroy the Royal Air Force.
That's phase one. You've got to have air superiority.
It means the British can't attack you.
Phase two, make sure that the Royal Navy,
the biggest navy in the world, can't hamper your attacking force.
So somehow you've got to either distract the Royal Navy,
get them fighting somewhere else,
or mine the Channel,
and make sure that the Royal Navy can't get to your invasion force.
If you succeed in phase one and two, then you launch phase three,
and that is to put your army and your troops on barges,
send them across the Channel and, you know, obliterate the British.
And part of phase three is also to send paratroopers over,
shock troops to try and take installations and other key targets.
And obviously, what's the target? Right. Top left - London.
I see. And that's where they're ultimately wanting to get.
If this is the plan, when is it going to happen?
Well, the most likely date for Operation Sea Lion to go
into place is late September 1940.
So this operation, were people in Britain feeling
that this was going to happen?
People in Britain were really scared at this stage.
They knew that Hitler was turning his attention across the Channel.
This could be one of the greatest military triumphs
of all human history.
Seeing that map shows me that there were detailed plans
about the invasion of Britain.
This was not a conspiracy theory or a paranoid fantasy.
There were people on both sides
that expected Britain to be invaded by Germany.
In the late summer of 1940, Hitler's plan became clear.
After demolishing British air defences,
his troops would land on the southern coast of England
and push north to London.
Britain had to turn itself into a fortress to survive.
Professor Danielle George is in Guildford looking for physical
evidence of our rush to defend ourselves.
DANIELLE: When I got wind of some hidden, large-scale
defensive architecture from World War II, I got really excited
and all manner of intimidating locations flashed through my mind.
Where I didn't expect to end up
was the car park of a leisure centre.
But apparently somewhere around here is a bloke
who's going to shed some light on the whole thing.
That bloke is archaeologist Ben Robinson.
Well, this is it.
Oh, wow. Look at this. Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it?
Look at this! All the way up as well.
Yeah, yeah. What is it?
These are about stopping tanks.
The Government's seen what's happened on the Continent -
tanks in their blitzkrieg war have just marched across,
trundled across France in high order.
And they fully expected those same tanks to be here in weeks
in the summer of 1940. Yeah.
What's this on the top?
Well, this is angle iron, and there would have been a stake up here,
barbed wire, strands strung along.
Maybe you could put explosives on that barbed wire. Right.
And any German tanks sweeping through towards Guildford
would come across this and, "Ah, we've got a problem.
"We've got to try and dismantle these. We've got to try
and get round them. We've got to try and get over them."
And in that moment of indecision, you can attack them.
And there are positions up here.
There are gun pits, there are weapons pits.
So as soon as any troops get out, start dismantling the barbed wire,
trying to cut it, as soon as bulldozer tanks start coming along,
they're like... IMITATES GUNFIRE
Right. You know, you're taking them out.
And so you've got a really formidable obstacle here.
Blocks like this, less than 30 miles from central London,
were an essential part of the General Headquarters or GHQ Line.
This was an enormous chain of physical barriers
designed to slow the enemy's approach
if they'd already breached the coastal defences.
They basically expected the tanks to be coming up from the south coast
using the main roads, so they put roadblocks on the main roads,
but they expected them to smash through those.
Basically, you're turning villages, towns into fortresses
on key parts of the road network. Wow.
And the GHQ Line wasn't just a network of barriers.
There were thousands of armed posts too.
Ah. Now, this, I do recognise, Ben. This is a pillbox, right?
Yeah. Pillbox or block houses, as they were called.
It's a position for light machine guns, for rifles.
You can see these slots here.
That's where the rifles and machine guns would have been poking out.
Right. It's a wonderful piece of engineering.
You just pour the concrete in really quickly.
They were running out of steel for reinforcing,
so they would chuck in bed springs, any old junk they could get hold of.
Really? Concrete roof goes on the top,
and there you've got a fort in a matter of, really, hours.
I don't know if we're allowed, but shall we try and sneak and get inside?
Let's have a sneak, yeah. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Brilliant.
Oh, coming in. Oh, it's a squeeze!
SHE CHUCKLES
It is... It's tiny in here, Ben! It's a little bit cramped, isn't it?
Very cramped, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness.
But these aren't built for comfort.
Yeah. It's utterly functional, isn't it? These are forts.
There's no room for bunks. It's not a barracks.
This is you come in here in an emergency
and start manning these positions,
looking out of the lookholes here,
you know, see if you can see any movement of the enemy. Yeah.
And they've got platforms here.
This is for light machine guns, rifles to rest on.
And you're looking out of those narrow slits,
any sign of movement, anything rustling in the grass
on the other side of the river bank there, and you're on high alert.
It's utterly functional. It's stark.
It's kind of grim. It's grim. That's exactly what I was thinking.
It's just grim.
EXPLOSION GUNFIRE
So, Ben, we've seen the amazing tank traps.
We're in this really amazing pillbox.
The scale of construction...
Just give me an idea about the scale we're talking about here.
Well, this GHQ Line stretched all the way from the Bristol Channel,
south of London, east of London, up through Essex, Cambridgeshire,
and it was intended to go all the way to Edinburgh
when they stopped it. Wow.
So, as constructed, over 400 miles, nearly 500 miles of defences.
I mean, pillboxes, you're talking over 20,000 of these.
Around 6,000 remain.
So this construction is just massive.
This is a massive programme. Yeah.
We've never seen a construction effort so quick like this before.
Like this, yeah. It was a real emergency measure. Yeah.
ALICE: We may have a created a physical infrastructure to defend ourselves,
but with many troops abroad, Britain needed manpower.
On the 14th of May 1940,
Anthony Eden, then Secretary of State for War, called out
for volunteers in a radio announcement.
Since the war began, the Government has received countless inquiries
from all over the Kingdom, from men of all ages
who are, for one reason or another,
not at present engaged in military service.
We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain to come forward now.
The name of the new force which is now to be raised
will be the Local Defence Volunteer.
So the Local Defence Volunteers -
is this what then becomes later known as the Home Guard?
It is, yes. Later, in July, it's renamed,
and by that point there's 1.5 million men serving
in what becomes the Home Guard. Really?
So who are these people
and have they had any military training up until that point?
So you've got the younger side who are not old enough to join up yet,
so they're going to have very little experience. Yeah.
And then you've got the older guys,
who are coming in from World War I experience
with hand-to-hand combat training, some weapons training. Yeah.
And they do quite a good job, actually.
with the kind of dregs of technology and weaponry.
And presumably, you've got regular Army training up
the Home Guard as well?
To some extent. I think a lot of the responsibility fell
on the older Home Guard kind of World War I vets
and it's a case of learning what you can learn
from the people who are capable of teaching it
while you are, you know, holding down a full-time job
and probably dealing with a family.
And we've got this fantastic literature here,
these tiny little manuals - The Home Guard Pocket Manual. Yeah.
Everything you need to know.
This is quite interesting too.
Aircraft Identification.
It says, "Friend or foe?"
So even just being able to recognise if it's a German aircraft
or one of our own overhead is quite important.
So, you know, you can't defend if you don't know
what you're looking for as the enemy.
The Home Guard volunteers, who were being partly trained by pamphlets,
would be the last line of defence
should the RAF fail and Germany invade.
And they'd be expected to do whatever was possible
to halt the enemy.
This is the famous anti-tank sticky bomb.
And the idea is that this is filled
with a kind of compound of nitroglycerin
and additives to stabilise it, because it's notoriously unstable.
Yeah. And then it's covered in an adhesive.
It is very sticky, hence the name "sticky bomb".
And what you would do with this is you would stick it to something,
to a tank, preferably, which means you have to get up close to a tank.
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, these weapons really are
about anticipating German tanks rolling on to British soil... Yeah,
that's the thinking. ..and the Home Guard being there as our defence.
Yes. Yeah. You are in the face of the enemy
if you have to stick this to a tank.
A tank is going to be rolling through Britain at that point. Yeah.
With the latest military equipment reserved for the main army,
the Government had little choice but to issue the Home Guard
with outdated weaponry.
Danielle is on her way to learn about a staple
of the Home Guard's arsenal, the Lewis machinegun.
Historic firearms expert David Maine is going to reveal the basics
of what's essentially a military hand-me-down.
DANIELLE: Hi, David. Hi, Danielle. How are you?
Thanks for joining us on this very blustery afternoon, isn't it?
It looks a bit more Peaky Blinders than World War II, shall we say?
Well, that's because it was developed pre World War I...
Oh, right. ..by an American inventor, Isaac Newton Lewis,
who couldn't sell it to the Americans,
but he managed to get it into production in the UK.
It came into British service in 1915.
During the First World War,
the air-cooled Lewis gun was cutting edge
and replaced the water-cooled Vickers gun.
But by the start of World War II, newer weapons like the Bren,
made the Lewis look heavy and unreliable.
Some of the guys had used it in the First World War,
but they hadn't trained on this in 20 years.
Some of the training manuals were paper thin.
There was not much information.
A lot of guys actually bought their own little training pamphlets
you could buy for a shilling or two and six
and they more or less trained themselves. Wow.
I want some idea of the position the Home Guard found themselves in,
so David has agreed to let me fire this 13kg machinegun.
So, in there? Yes. That's it, place it into your shoulder.
OK. So I'm going to flip the sights up
so you can see through the sights.
Like many Home Guard volunteers, I've never touched a gun before,
but unlike many of them, I've got expert help.
OK, short bursts.
Despite holding the trigger, the gun is stopping.
Nothing, David.
Again. See if it'll go.
The magazine is sticking in the cold, damp conditions.
It'll warm up. It'll go in a minute.
It's also unwieldy and tricky to aim
thanks to the kickback when it does fire.
That's good. A little bit higher next time. Yeah.
SHE MOUTHS
That's amazing.
When it does work properly,
firing the Lewis gun is a visceral experience.
But knowing they were training with unreliable weapons like this
must have been terrifying for the thousands of inexperienced members
of the Home Guard.
I've essentially been having a bit of fun on the firing range.
But after their training, the volunteers would have been fully
expecting to use outdated weapons against an invading army.
A German land invasion was looking inevitable.
England was being fortified.
And Anthony Eden's call to arms has led to a Home Guard,
now over a million strong.
Ordinary men in ordinary professions would be tasked with resisting
the Nazi advance.
Some civilians though would be expected to go much, much further.
Onyeka is in rural Wiltshire learning about what would
have become a key force in England's defence.
A dark shadow had descended across Western Europe.
The fear was that Britain would be next and the Home Guard
would be unable to hold the front line.
So the British Government started training a new type of elite soldier
here on the Coleshill estate.
By the summer of 1940,
these top secret fighters formed auxiliary units and they had bases
around the country.
Andy Chatterton is a member of the Coleshill Auxiliary Research Team
and a Second World War historian.
Andy, great to see you. And you.
So what were the auxiliary units?
So the auxiliary units are made up of men in reserved occupations.
Sorry, what are reserved occupations?
So reserved occupations are jobs which means you couldn't get called
up to the regular forces.
So farmers producing food, miners, gamekeepers, people
who knew their local surroundings intimately, people like that.
So if the Germans occupied this country,
what would their role be?
So they're just an anti invasion force, these guys.
So they would disappear and they would come out at night
and their role is to slow down the invading force.
And they would they would blow up ammo and fuel dumps.
They would destroy trains, go into airfields
and destroy Luftwaffe planes.
This isn't a long-term resistance.
They had enough rations for two weeks.
This was essentially a suicide mission. So they're James Bond.
They're like country James Bond,
they're like farmer James Bond, yeah. Wow.
Really highly secret and hugely ruthless.
You've mentioned that their operations are mostly at night.
What would they be doing during the day?
Let me show you. Come this way.
The auxiliary units were so secret that the Home Guard
didn't know they existed.
So believe it or not, we are here.
The soldiers couldn't even tell their families
about their mission.
After you. OK.
Like Orpheus descending into the underworld.
Wow. It's fantastic.
So this is where the auxiliary units would have been during the day.
This is their operational base, their secret underground bunker.
So how many people would be living here?
So each patrol generally is six to eight men.
And once they were down here, once they disappeared, there's no
outside instruction from anyone else, they were that highly trained.
So is this almost like a group of spies or like a cell structure?
Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think the Germans
would have described them as a terrorist cell.
There might be another one five to six miles away, but they would have
no idea who was in that patrol or where it was.
So very separated terrorist cell networks.
Right.
Over 500 operational bases just like this had been created by 1944.
And in total, 3,500 soldiers received specialist training
in sabotage, close combat and assassination.
And what kind of tools did they have at their disposal to carry
out their activities?
So the key for the auxiliary units is that they were
incredibly well armed.
And here's a really good example of a Smith & Wesson.
And these aren't just for officers.
This is for every single member of the auxiliary units
all over the country.
But actually, that's no good to them.
What they need is silent weapons, because what they need to do is get
rid of the sentry that's guarding the thing they need to blow up.
And if they shoot them, that's going to give away their position
immediately. So they used weapons like these,
the Fairbairn-Sykes knife. OK.
Why is it called the Fairbairn-Sykes knife?
It's named after two chaps, Fairbairn and Sykes,
who were policemen in China.
And they then came back over and trained the auxiliary units,
but also the commandos in silent fighting, in dagger use.
And exactly what you don't expect from the British Army in 1940.
What you're saying here is rewriting our ideas
about the Second World War - silent assassins quietly doing their work.
It's a completely different picture.
And Coleshill has a special place in this history.
Yes, so Coleshill was integral.
So Coleshill was the was the headquarters, but also
the training centre. They would train in bunkers like this to learn
what it was like to live underground for periods of time.
And they would come from all over the country.
They'd get a letter saying you need to come to Highworth post office.
A post office? A post office where they would meet the postmistress,
Mabel Stranks, apparently quite a miserable character.
You would then have to give a password to her.
She would phone up Coleshill House and then Coleshill would send
a truck round and they would drive a convoluted route back to Coleshill.
So when you arrived, you have no idea where you are.
Absolutely no idea.
So Mrs Mabel Stranks was literally the guardian. The gatekeeper.
Yeah, the gatekeeper of this regiment. Of this unit.
Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic.
Andy, it's been fascinating and it's been revelatory.
I've got one question - how do I get out?
The same way as if a German grenade had come
down the chute - there's an escape tunnel down there. That way?
Right.
ALICE: Britain was preparing itself and the elite training the auxiliary
units received led many to join the Special Forces
after the war had finished. Male soldiers and volunteers
like the Home Guard and auxiliary units were vital
in defending Britain.
But the country needed more than just MANpower.
Sarah, we've talked a lot about men's role during the war,
but of course, women had a role to play as well.
And we're familiar with women working in factories.
But what about military roles?
As the war continued, more and more men were needed to fight overseas
in combat roles, which meant there were more and more roles
for women to take up at home.
I presume that even at this point, they're going to be fighting pretty
entrenched stereotypes. Constantly.
We have a very clear example of that in a kind of news report
on the Women's Home Defence Corps.
If you wanted to play that. OK.
The weaker sex? The weaker sex.
Members of women's home defence are being shown
just how to deal with unwanted visitors.
First they practise on each other. That's easy.
That's easy!
Looks just like peacetime, doesn't it?
But as they get more proficient, the big moment arrives when perhaps
for the first time in their lives, they start pushing men around.
Yes, I did say perhaps.
And even if invasion never comes,
well, there's a time and place for everything.
You beast.
It's quite extraordinary. That's... That's not a spoof.
No. That was real? Yeah.
The idea of the weaker sex is a very real idea.
Yeah. Yeah.
Despite the hang-ups of some men, women went on to play vital roles
in specialist female units, such as the Women's Auxiliary Air Force,
and worked alongside men in intelligence units.
One of those units is the Special Operations Executive.
So what kind of work would they have been doing?
So the SOE is tasked with setting Europe ablaze.
That's what Churchill says set Europe ablaze.
Blowing up sections of railway,
communications, transport to aid Allied operations and inhibit German
ones, and also to collect information and send
that back to Britain.
So these are extraordinarily courageous women.
They are, they're told how dangerous it is when they go into it
and they're warned they probably will last around six weeks
until they're captured, tortured and probably killed.
And one example of someone who agreed to those terms is a young
woman called Noor Inayat Khan.
This striking young lady here.
So what do we know about her story?
Noor has an interesting story. She's technically an Indian princess.
She's related to a sultan.
And her father is a pacifist Sufi preacher, a Muslim preacher,
which makes her an unlikely choice as an SOE agent.
Her training isn't actually complete when she's sent into occupied France
by plane in 1943, and she's able to feed information back
to the British from occupied Paris.
I mean, if she's fine doing that,
that's it. Yeah.
And what happens?
She is a target.
So the Gestapo, they know she exists and they offer a hefty bounty
to anyone that turns her in.
And unfortunately, someone does for money.
Noor met with a very unpleasant end at the hands of the Gestapo.
She was tortured for information for quite a long time.
She was resistant.
She did not cooperate.
And actually, in a post-war war crimes report, one
of the commandants of the camp said it didn't matter what we did to her,
she would not speak.
And then ultimately in Dachau camp,
she was beaten very, very badly one
night and then shot in the back of the head.
I mean, it just, it's such an astonishing story.
What an amazing, an amazing young woman.
It's an example of just what women can do.
The bravery shown by the men and women of Britain was admirable,
but the enemy they were preparing to face was formidable.
Danielle's in the Channel Islands, where this was more frighteningly
apparent than anywhere else in the country.
DANIELLE: The vast majority of Brits who lived through the war will have
referred to what would have happened if Nazi forces had invaded
mainland Britain. But here in the Channel Islands,
they talk about WHEN the Germans came.
On the 30th of June 1940, while the British mainland
was being fortified to fend off attack,
the Nazis invaded and occupied the Channel Islands,
having conquered nearby France.
It was a devastating moment for the British residents here
that would see them live under a Nazi regime
for almost five years.
Hitler fortified the islands and use them as a key part of a wider
defence line stretching from Spain to Norway.
The physical evidence of this still stands today,
with structures like the 19th-century Fort Hommet, which
Hitler reinforced, the imposing Prevote Observation Tower
and the mighty gun emplacement at the Batterie Dollman.
This is a picture of an alternative reality that could have been so
easily repeated on the British mainland.
Nowhere is the scale of Hitler's impact more obvious than here.
An underground network of tunnels created mainly to store some
of the vehicles, munitions and fuel brought to the island by the Nazis.
Pierre Renier is from Festung Guernsey, an organisation set up
to protect Guernsey's occupation heritage.
So, Pierre, this looks amazing.
But where the hell am I?
You're in a massive tunnel complex.
75,000 square feet covering
7,500 square metres of floor space.
Wow. It's huge.
That is massive. That's incredible. How far down are we?
You can be anywhere from ten to 30 metres underground. Wow.
At its peak, there were 7,500 people
just in Guernsey to do construction work. Wow.
The tunnels were built by Organisation Todt, a paramilitary
alliance of some 1,000 construction companies that oversaw a vast array
of Nazi projects.
They use contracted workers, conscripted civilians and forced
labour that included prisoners of war.
Construction continued 24 hours a day.
These tunnels are vast and I'm hugely impressed as an engineer.
But what were they actually used for?
So you've got two tunnel systems that are linked here.
You've got tunnel number seven, which was originally intended
as a regimental infantry bomb-proof quarters, and then later
on as the tunnel system is being expanded,
this was also underground storage for machine gun companies
and associated equipment.
I mean, we can see behind you here. What is it?
Is it a dormitory or a hospital or...? It looks a bit bleak.
The area behind me, this is part of a hospital complex,
so they have to install ventilation system in the event of a gas attack.
They have to install heating.
So it would be a bombproof, secure storage for people.
This network of multipurpose tunnels formed just one part of Hitler's
so-called Atlantic Wall defences. The Atlantic Wall,
this was a fortification structure that Hitler wanted built all the way
from the Spanish border up to the north, the Arctic Circle
in Norway, and even extended round to the border with Russia.
So it's a line that was in excess of 1,500 miles long, and it was meant
to be an impenetrable system of bunkers to stop anyone
from invading from the Western allies, from Britain
or from America.
So this is part of Hitler's defence? Yes.
The islands were being fortified from very early on.
It's almost described as Hitler's island madness.
Even the German high command could not believe how much attention
Hitler was expending on the Channel Islands.
But to him, here's a piece of British territory that's owned
by the Third Reich.
This is a disturbing reminder that, for some British residents,
Hitler had already arrived, and he had an immediate impact
on the lives of every single resident.
Hitler's planned invasion led to a Herculean national effort
to create an infrastructure that would thwart the Nazi advance.
For British citizens living in the Channel Islands, though,
there was no time to prepare, and for five years they lived
under German occupation.
The residents here endured a life where newspapers and radio
broadcasts were censored,
German troops enforced strict curfews,
and towards the end of the war, many islanders experienced food shortages
as the Nazis couldn't provide enough supplies.
Danielle's on the trail of a rare first-hand account of these times.
DANIELLE: As the years tick by, there are fewer and fewer people
alive who lived through the Second World War.
But here on Guernsey, there's a guy who remembers life
under German occupation. His name is Roy Burton.
He's 92 and apparently as sharp as a tack, and he's agreed to meet me
for a chat.
During occupation, many children were evacuated, but ten-year-old Roy
was ill and stayed on the island with his parents.
I'm desperate to learn how occupation shaped Roy's childhood
and get a picture of the human cost of Nazi control.
Hi, Roy. Good to see you.
I'm really interested in what it was like for you growing up in German
occupation. Yeah.
When you went to school, did you learn in German?
When we come 11,
it was compulsory to learn German.
It was? Yeah. So you had to learn in German?
Yeah. Read and write it. Did you? Yeah.
And I could read and write it better than English.
Could you? Yeah. And do you still know it now?
Like if you, if you open that can you...?
Well, some words I can read but I'm not good enough to read
the whole thing any more.
Yeah. It's gone, you know.
And what about this? This is your identity card, in German as well.
Yeah. Wow. OK.
Up till the time you were 14, you didn't need a card.
But when you come 14, you had to do it.
So that's you at 14. Yeah, 14.
Wow. OK. And I see some other things in here.
So this is money. This is German money. But that's not
real proper German money.
That's occupation money that I saved.
So what could you buy for like one mark?
Well, with the one mark, I actually bought this little radio.
Oh, right. OK. Yeah. So this is a radio?
Yeah. A crystal radio. A crystal radio.
And what did you listen to on the radio? BBC.
So you were trying to get what was happening during the war,
the news. Yeah. We had that I suppose for about a month,
and then the man that brought it to me, he come again with this one.
And this one, we could get three stations on this one.
Under the regime, access to stations that weren't
censored was prohibited,
so there was a black market for radios that could access
uncensored broadcasts from the British mainland.
And what about this?
I'm intrigued as to the story behind this clock.
Well, this clock was given to us by this soldier in here.
In here?
There, this one, Franz Werner his name is.
This one here? That one there. That's me
and that's my brother, Leonard.
Franz gave it to my parents when he was being deported back to France.
Right. Why did he give it to your parents, as a present?
Well, because he'd come to our house when he was off duty and chatted
with my people, made friends with us. Right.
So you made friends?
Oh, yeah. With German soldiers. Yes.
We had one, two, three, four, five, six actual German soldier friends.
Wow. Was that, was that normal?
Did that happen often? Oh, yes.
Especially with the young ladies.
Thank you so much, Roy.
It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and thank you
for sharing these as well. You're welcome. It's been so lovely.
Thank you.
The occupation of the Channel Islands left indelible marks
on the landscape, robbed the entire population of their freedom and many
experienced food shortages.
But Roy's childhood account reveals another legacy, a reminder that even
within an evil regime, some humanity can remain.
Sadly, any trace of humanity would have been absent
were I'm heading to next.
On nearby Alderney are the remnants of the only Nazi concentration camp
built on British soil.
Author and island resident Colin Partridge has studied
its brutal history.
So Colin, I'm struggling to process this.
I mean, that sign says German concentration camp.
Tell me what was happening here.
In 1941, Hitler decided, after giving up his attempt to invade
England, that the islands needed fortifying to be held
against any possible British counterattack.
And in order to build those fortifications, it was necessary
to bring a large labour force to the islands.
So here in Alderney we had four labour camps originally,
and this was one of them, which in March 1943 was taken
over by the SAS as an outstation of the Neuengamme concentration camp
in Germany.
Neuengamme and its satellite camps in north-west Germany
housed more than 100,000 prisoners...
..of whom 40,000 died.
Lager Sylt was run under the same brutal regime by an
SS officer who reported to Heinrich Himmler.
So how many men would have been at this concentration camp?
A thousand set out from Germany.
Wow. But by the time they came here,
we'd already lost 50, 56,
who had successfully escaped, and those who'd been recaptured
had been executed.
And then once they were in situ, it was found that the camp was not
large enough to take that number of prisoners.
So some of the prisoners had to sleep out of doors overnight. Wow.
In the first three or four months, there were quite a number of deaths.
The eyewitness accounts are pretty frightening.
It's impossible to imagine the horrors that took place here.
And it's chilling to realise that camps like Lager Sylt
could very easily have been built on the British mainland.
So Germany occupied the Channel Islands but never invaded
the rest of Britain.
Do you think that invasion could have happened?
Absolutely. It was very, very real, very serious.
And we only have to look at the physical landscape
of this country today to see that it's not a far-off battlefield.
It's your back garden.
It's when you open your front door every morning, when you go to bed,
constant risk of life changing like it did in the Channel Islands
in every single way with an invasion force coming and taking control
of the country.
How important was air superiority in terms of making sure
that invasion didn't happen?
Absolutely integral.
Hitler knew that if the invasion was to go ahead, he needed
total air superiority.
So winning that Battle of Britain in the air was, was crucial.
And we almost focus on that, on that tip of the spear.
But behind that, you've got this almost hidden, forgotten army.
I think it's very easy to do that.
But we do have a hidden army behind them of thousands of people.
We have pilots from the Commonwealth joining the British men
in the Air Force.
And then we have men and women behind the scenes doing everything
from developing cutting edge scientific equipment like coastal
radar stations to women actually manning those stations.
It's a huge national effort.
And in fact, it's not just national. It goes beyond that.
It's an international,
very big, very impressive, very sophisticated effort, yeah.
This international effort ensured the tireless preparation to defend
the British mainland against Operation Sea Lion was never tested.
But the marks are still with us and the danger quickly evolved.
The invasion never came, but the war would rage on for another five
catastrophic years, and the threat to the British people continued
as Hitler brought terror to our ports, factories and cities
during the Blitz.
But that's a story for another day.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media