APROPERCHARMER
Tiny Alderney has a big history and is glorious for all the family
AFTER 20 minutes flying across the Channel in a 19- seater Dornier, I catch the glimmer of a coastline to our left and, above the din of the propellers, mouth to a fellow passenger: ‘Is that Alderney?’
He shakes his head. ‘ No, that’s France,’ and points to the tiniest of dots on the other side. ‘ That’s Alderney,’ he says, and I gulp.
It seems hardly big enough for us to land on. But land we do, coasting in to a breezy cliff-top runway, and step into a place where the clocks stopped in 1954.
Alderney is one of the smallest of the Channel Islands and the closest to England. It’s so tiny — three miles long and a mileand-a-half wide — you can easily walk its coastal path in a day.
There are sandy beaches that are ideal for grandchildren, headlands with spectacular views, and offshore rocks teeming with squawking, quarrelsome gannets. With the heather and gorse and a bright sun in a cloudless sky, it’s heaven on earth.
But Alderney has a hellish past, which is what draws a history buff like me.
In June 1940, 1,500 of the islanders were evacuated before the German army invaded. From then until its liberation in May 1945, it was a Nazi enclave, a secret fortress where all sorts of dark deeds took place away from prying eyes.
It is said that all the birds also left, their song replaced by the clank of weaponry, the bark of orders and the crack of gunshot and whiplash.
Slave labourers were shipped in by the thousands to build massive concrete defensive barriers as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall against attack. There were forts and look- out posts, gun emplacements, and Nazi concentration camps too, the only ones on British soil. Discipline was merciless. Unknown numbers of inmates died, their bodies thrown n into the sea.
There were also miles of f underground tunnels carved out of the rock by those slaves with primitive tools and even bare hands.
What exactly they were for is still unknown. One local military expert argues controversially, but convincingly, that the tunnels housed V-2 rockets intended to target mainland land England 60 miles away.
The remnants of those five years when Alderney became as much part of the Third Reich as the bunker in Berlin are still there to be seen, as awesome and as menacing as ever — monuments to evil and reminders of the darkness that awaited Britain if we’d lost the war.
Islanders seem split on what to make of this unique history — so different from the other occupied Channel Islands, where many inhabitants had to live alongside Germans. Is it so grim that it deters tourists? Better to concentrate on the golden sands, the bracing walks, the lush scenery?
Alderney certainly has all those delights in its compact space, along with yachts filling the port, a boutique hotel, called Braye Beach, overlooking the bay, and even a railway to ride. Forget the past. Concentrate on present leisure and pleasure.
But for me, that’s missing the point. In most of Europe, signs of the war have been erased, built over, consigned to museums, sanitised, made remote. But the crowded c cinemas for films such as Dunkirk and Darkest Hour suggest there is still a y yearning to know and to feel again those terrible but also u uplifting times.
I gaze up at the fortifications t on Alderney and imagine the slaves who sweated and died building them; scuff the surface of a field and see the fo foundations of a labour camp; tr trace the outline of a rocket ra ramp on a hill; run my finger a across a brick wall pockmarked m with bullet holes.
T This is the authentic World W War II experience, not in a textbook bo but at your feet and within yo your grasp. And the fact that yo you can fly there and back in a Do Dornier, a plane from a German co company that once made bombers ers to blitz Britain, adds to the d drama of history in the raw.