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We couldn’t do anything, we weren’t defended, we’d been left. Any British troops that had been here were taken out of the island before the Germans thought they were going to come across here. They softened up the island by bombing the harbour, I think up towards 30 people were killed and they were also strafing pedestrians who were caught out in the raid.

It was all on that one day, because a friend of mine, her husband was a fisherman and she had been down to the Bathing Pools looking for his boat to come in. She always did this, so she knew to go back home and get the tea going, and she was caught outside the Guernsey Brewery, by a very open road. She managed to run into the plantation and she hid under a bush but they were strafing all the way along there, so she had to run for her life. In fact, I didn’t realize at the time something my brother showed me a little while back, is that at the bottom of the Upper Walk of the Castle there are still bullet holes from where they strafed. Now they had no need to do that because they were bombing the harbour …
…….and there is also another story that it was low tide and there were a couple of youngsters, males, swimming on Havelet beach and again they had to run for their lives and they just lay down under the big sea wall. Yes, we weren’t declared an open town, and that’s probably why it happened.
RUTH WALSH

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