Douglas Willis, a BBC war correspondent, sailed with the liberating forces into the harbour at St Peter port with HMS Bulldog commented on the Liberation of Guernsey The report was written up for "The Listener", and a transcript is given below.
Apologies for any transcription errors - my copy of "The Listener", dated 17th May 1945 is not always clear enough for automated OCR, and I had to correct the OCR considerably from the original document in places.
What I like particularly is the immediacy of the broadcast, which comes across vividly even in the article in "The Listener", as we get an eye-witness report of events as they unfolded during the liberation of Guernsey. Brigadier Snow transferred across to HMS Beagle and from then sailed to Jersey to accept the surrender of German forces there.
The Bulldog Takes the Surrender
by Douglas Willis, BBC War Correspondent
This morning, May 8, we sailed from Plymouth. We are steaming now into Guernsey, into the harbour of St. Peter’s Port, and the time is one minute to midnight on VE-Day: just one minute left of this day for the German garrison aboard the island to surrender and to surrender the island which has been in their hands for nearly five years.
We actually arrived here about two o’clock this afternoon and the Germans sent out an emissary, but he was only a junior officer, a captain-lieutenant. His name was Arnim Zimmermann. He was aboard the ship for an hour, but didn’t have the power to sign and he had to be sent away with a note requesting the German Command aboard the island to make a new rendezvous.
An hour ago the German Command sent a signal that told us to be at this rendezvous just outside the harbour limits at midnight. At midnight the German emissary, .Major- General Heine, is coming aboard to put his signature to unconditional surrender.
For the first time for nearly six years, this British destroyer the Bulldog which has taken part in many fine actions at sea during the war, is lit. Around the gangway here, up which Major-General Heine will soon be coming, there’s a really magnificent cluster of lights. It really does do the sailors’ hearts good, I’m sure, to see so many. lights after so many years of total darkness.
They are just making the gangway secure, so that the launch can come alongside. The First Officer of the ship is standing by the gangway; he will receive the German Major-General with military honours as soon as he appears, and will try to do this thing with the dignity which we British normally accord to a beaten enemy. There’s no desire to treat him other than we should expect to be treated ourselves in similar circumstances.
There is a large armed German trawler standing away in the darkness. We can see her port and masthead lights and we have just called across on the loudspeaker, in German, to see whether they were sending a boat, We have turned on the port searchlight of this ship, a big twenty-inch searchlight, to give them enough light to come alongside on this pitch dark night. Here it is now. a row-boat packed with German seamen, and, sitting in the stem, the German Major-General and our old friend of this afternoon, Kapitan-Leutnant Zimmermann. Now the Major-General is coming up the gangway. You can hear him being piped aboard. He’s at the top of the gangway and. is being received with full salutes.
The Major-General is a very magnificent figure in full German army uniform with, red lapels and he is presenting his credentials, which are being very carefully examined by the army interpreter. He is going over them very carefully, and in a moment, after the credentials have been assured, the Major-General will be taken below to the wardroom where the ceremony of signing unconditional surrender will be conducted: I believe the first time during this war that a surrender has been signed aboard a British warship.
In the wardroom, the white-haired, stiff-backed old general, trying hard to stand to attention with the rolling of the ship, answered “Ja” to the questions put to him. He was told that he would sign the terms of unconditional surrender at 7 am on the quarter deck of the destroyer. Actually it was 7.14 am, in drizzling rain, before a naval guard with fixed bayonets, when Major-General Heine signed his name eight times, and so relinquished the iron grip of the Third Reich on the Channel Islands. His desk was an up-ended rum barrel. The Channel Islands, the only United Kingdom territory occupied by the Germans in this war, were free again.
I‘m almost worn out from the overwhelming welcome which these British people gave us when we came ashore at eight o’clock in the morning from the destroyer Bulldog which brought us into the harbour at St. Peter’s Port.
There are forty-three thousand people on the island, and from 4 o’clock, before daybreak, most of them had been making their way by cart, by bicycle, and on foot, from every part of the island.. It was no great military force with flags and bands that they welcomed, but twenty-two British soldiers led by a single officer. It was this tiny force which took over Guernsey from seven thousand German. naval, army and air force troops who had been garrisoning the island and they were still strolling the streets when we landed.
It was in a German armed trawler, manned by a German crew, that we went ashore. At 3 o’clock the day before, the German commander had given permission for British flags to be flown, and now every street, every house, every building even the cranes on the dock side; were covered with flags and streamers. Thousands of cheering, laughing people, and people standing speechless with tears running down their cheeks, surrounded our .little force; tearing at our clothes, embracing us, pumping our hands. They couldn’t say much, only, ‘We’ve waited so long for this. We’re so glad you’ve come’
A shopkeeper told me that he had seen nothing but marks for four years. The people have been drying blackberry leaves for pipe tobacco, or to use as tea. A packet of cigarettes made with 'locally‘ grown tobacco costs £2 8s. Cigarettes which cost £1 each were brought by the Swedish crew of the Red Cross ship Vega, which took food supplies to the island. Butter, bought on the Black Market, which flourished under German rule, cost £3 a pound, and until the Red Cross began to land supplies—one parcel per head for a month—a quarter of the population was starving, and many of than are little short of that now. A mother, a well-dressed woman, told me than for months she could provide nothing for her child and herself other than boiled cabbage for their main meal of the day.
But here in the Channel Islands, unlike devastated France and War-ravaged Italy or Greece, we have firm foundations to build on. The docks are undamaged, bridges and communications are intact, and the people will work with a will to help in the task of putting their own house in order. The electricity and water systems are intact, but because there is no coal or oil fuel, only the hospital has light and only one tap in a house can be used. But ships are standing ready in the British ports to carry cargoes of food, coal, oil and clothing across the narrow sea—Home Service.
This morning, May 8, we sailed from Plymouth. We are steaming now into Guernsey, into the harbour of St. Peter’s Port, and the time is one minute to midnight on VE-Day: just one minute left of this day for the German garrison aboard the island to surrender and to surrender the island which has been in their hands for nearly five years.
We actually arrived here about two o’clock this afternoon and the Germans sent out an emissary, but he was only a junior officer, a captain-lieutenant. His name was Arnim Zimmermann. He was aboard the ship for an hour, but didn’t have the power to sign and he had to be sent away with a note requesting the German Command aboard the island to make a new rendezvous.
An hour ago the German Command sent a signal that told us to be at this rendezvous just outside the harbour limits at midnight. At midnight the German emissary, .Major- General Heine, is coming aboard to put his signature to unconditional surrender.
For the first time for nearly six years, this British destroyer the Bulldog which has taken part in many fine actions at sea during the war, is lit. Around the gangway here, up which Major-General Heine will soon be coming, there’s a really magnificent cluster of lights. It really does do the sailors’ hearts good, I’m sure, to see so many. lights after so many years of total darkness.
They are just making the gangway secure, so that the launch can come alongside. The First Officer of the ship is standing by the gangway; he will receive the German Major-General with military honours as soon as he appears, and will try to do this thing with the dignity which we British normally accord to a beaten enemy. There’s no desire to treat him other than we should expect to be treated ourselves in similar circumstances.
There is a large armed German trawler standing away in the darkness. We can see her port and masthead lights and we have just called across on the loudspeaker, in German, to see whether they were sending a boat, We have turned on the port searchlight of this ship, a big twenty-inch searchlight, to give them enough light to come alongside on this pitch dark night. Here it is now. a row-boat packed with German seamen, and, sitting in the stem, the German Major-General and our old friend of this afternoon, Kapitan-Leutnant Zimmermann. Now the Major-General is coming up the gangway. You can hear him being piped aboard. He’s at the top of the gangway and. is being received with full salutes.
The Major-General is a very magnificent figure in full German army uniform with, red lapels and he is presenting his credentials, which are being very carefully examined by the army interpreter. He is going over them very carefully, and in a moment, after the credentials have been assured, the Major-General will be taken below to the wardroom where the ceremony of signing unconditional surrender will be conducted: I believe the first time during this war that a surrender has been signed aboard a British warship.
In the wardroom, the white-haired, stiff-backed old general, trying hard to stand to attention with the rolling of the ship, answered “Ja” to the questions put to him. He was told that he would sign the terms of unconditional surrender at 7 am on the quarter deck of the destroyer. Actually it was 7.14 am, in drizzling rain, before a naval guard with fixed bayonets, when Major-General Heine signed his name eight times, and so relinquished the iron grip of the Third Reich on the Channel Islands. His desk was an up-ended rum barrel. The Channel Islands, the only United Kingdom territory occupied by the Germans in this war, were free again.
I‘m almost worn out from the overwhelming welcome which these British people gave us when we came ashore at eight o’clock in the morning from the destroyer Bulldog which brought us into the harbour at St. Peter’s Port.
There are forty-three thousand people on the island, and from 4 o’clock, before daybreak, most of them had been making their way by cart, by bicycle, and on foot, from every part of the island.. It was no great military force with flags and bands that they welcomed, but twenty-two British soldiers led by a single officer. It was this tiny force which took over Guernsey from seven thousand German. naval, army and air force troops who had been garrisoning the island and they were still strolling the streets when we landed.
It was in a German armed trawler, manned by a German crew, that we went ashore. At 3 o’clock the day before, the German commander had given permission for British flags to be flown, and now every street, every house, every building even the cranes on the dock side; were covered with flags and streamers. Thousands of cheering, laughing people, and people standing speechless with tears running down their cheeks, surrounded our .little force; tearing at our clothes, embracing us, pumping our hands. They couldn’t say much, only, ‘We’ve waited so long for this. We’re so glad you’ve come’
A shopkeeper told me that he had seen nothing but marks for four years. The people have been drying blackberry leaves for pipe tobacco, or to use as tea. A packet of cigarettes made with 'locally‘ grown tobacco costs £2 8s. Cigarettes which cost £1 each were brought by the Swedish crew of the Red Cross ship Vega, which took food supplies to the island. Butter, bought on the Black Market, which flourished under German rule, cost £3 a pound, and until the Red Cross began to land supplies—one parcel per head for a month—a quarter of the population was starving, and many of than are little short of that now. A mother, a well-dressed woman, told me than for months she could provide nothing for her child and herself other than boiled cabbage for their main meal of the day.
But here in the Channel Islands, unlike devastated France and War-ravaged Italy or Greece, we have firm foundations to build on. The docks are undamaged, bridges and communications are intact, and the people will work with a will to help in the task of putting their own house in order. The electricity and water systems are intact, but because there is no coal or oil fuel, only the hospital has light and only one tap in a house can be used. But ships are standing ready in the British ports to carry cargoes of food, coal, oil and clothing across the narrow sea—Home Service.
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