The raid on Sark

On the night of 3–4 October 1942 twelve British commandos landed on Sark, a small island in the Channel Islands, occupied by the Germans since the summer of 1940. The operation was code-named Basalt. It was meant as an offensive reconnaissance: the commandos were to gather information about the German garrison and the life of the islanders and to bring back prisoners for interrogation. Of the five soldiers they caught asleep, only one reached England. The others were killed or escaped in a scuffle after their hands had been tied. This essentially minor episode had disproportionately large consequences: it gave Adolf Hitler a pretext for reprisals against prisoners of war and contributed to the order, issued less than two weeks later, that captured commandos be shot.

Islands under occupation and the small war in the Channel

The Channel Islands, possessions of the British Crown, had been demilitarised and were occupied by the Germans without a fight at the turn of June and July 1940. They were the only scrap of British soil under German occupation, and Hitler, who attached great propaganda importance to them, had them turned into a heavily fortified part of the Atlantic Wall. Sark, an island without cars, governed on feudal lines by the Dame of Sark, Sibyl Hathaway, had a small German garrison.

From the outset the British tried to harass the occupiers. As early as July 1940 they carried out the unsuccessful Operation Ambassador on Guernsey, one of the first raids by the newly formed Commando units. In 1942, when the war in western Europe was being fought mainly in the air and at sea, raids became an important means of keeping the initiative, from the large St Nazaire raid in March to the bloody Dieppe Raid in August. Alongside them operated small groups that specialised in night forays against the French coast and the islands.

One of these was the Small Scale Raiding Force (officially No. 62 Commando), a unit a few dozen strong answering both to Combined Operations Headquarters and to the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It had been founded by Major Gus March-Phillipps. At the beginning of September 1942 his men raided the lighthouse on the Casquets rocks near Alderney and carried off its entire German crew. A few days later, on the night of 12–13 September, Operation Aquatint on the Normandy coast ended in disaster: March-Phillipps was killed and several of his men were captured. Command passed to his deputy, Major Geoffrey Appleyard.

Night on Sark

The first attempt to reach Sark, on the night of 19–20 September, failed: strong currents delayed the motor torpedo boat (PL) MTB 344 and the party had to turn back before dawn. The boat sailed from Portland a second time on the evening of 3 October. On board were twelve men of the Small Scale Raiding Force and No. 12 Commando under Appleyard, among them Captain Philip Pinckney and a Danish volunteer, Second Lieutenant Anders Lassen, later awarded the Victoria Cross.

The commandos came ashore in a folding boat on the rocks below the Hog’s Back ridge, between Dixcart and Derrible bays, and climbed the cliff unseen. Finding no sentries, they broke into an isolated house. Its occupant was Frances Noel Pittard. Frightened at first, she proved a valuable source of information: she told them about the island’s German garrison and pointed out that some twenty soldiers were billeted in the annexe of the nearby Dixcart Hotel. She gave the commandos copies of Guernsey newspapers. These showed that in September the Germans had deported about 2,000 British-born islanders to internment camps in Germany – the first news of these deportations to reach London. Pittard declined to be taken to England.

The hotel annexe turned out to be a single-storey hut with a corridor and several rooms. Five German soldiers were sleeping in it, none of them an officer. According to some accounts Lassen had earlier killed a sentry with a knife, but this detail, which appears in later retellings, is uncertain. The commandos brought the prisoners outside, intending also to check the main hotel building. To leave as few men as possible guarding the prisoners, they tied their hands with the cords each of them carried and made them hold up their trousers, which had no belts – a common way of making escape harder. One of the Germans, who had been taken from his bed naked, broke free and ran off shouting into the darkness. A scuffle broke out. Fearing that reinforcements would arrive, the commandos set off with the prisoners towards the cliff.

On the way three prisoners tried to escape. One was shot on the spot, the second was killed by a bullet or a knife, and the third, wounded, got away. It is not known whether they ran together or whether any of them had managed to free his hands. Accounts differ in detail, and the overall toll is given as two or three Germans killed. The commandos brought the only remaining prisoner, Obergefreiter (lance corporal) Hermann Weinreich, down to the shore and returned with him to the boat without loss. Interrogated in England, he provided useful information about the German forces on the islands.

Prisoners in shackles

The Germans were quick to exploit the raid for propaganda. In a communiqué issued a few days later they announced that on Sark British soldiers had tied the hands of defenceless prisoners and killed two of them when they resisted. The story fell on fertile ground. After the Dieppe Raid the Germans had found on the beach Allied operation orders that provided for tying the hands of men taken prisoner. Hitler declared both cases to be violations of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. The Wehrmacht High Command announced that from 8 October all prisoners taken at Dieppe, most of them Canadians – some 1,400 men – would be shackled or bound. The same communiqué declared that “terror and sabotage” units would henceforth be ruthlessly wiped out in combat.

The British government retaliated: from 10 October the same number of German prisoners were shackled in camps in Britain and Canada. At the Canadian camp at Bowmanville in Ontario, German prisoners, most of them officers, resisted for several days and fought with the guards before they could be manacled. Winston Churchill came under pressure from part of public opinion and from his own Cabinet, who felt that Britain should not imitate the enemy’s methods. Over the following months, with Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross mediating, both sides eased the practice until, by the end of 1943, it had become a pure formality and was abandoned.

Another of Hitler’s decisions, however, had the gravest consequences. According to historians, the Sark raid was one of the direct triggers for the secret Commando Order of 18 October 1942. It ordered that all members of Allied sabotage units caught in Europe and Africa be killed, even if in uniform and ready to surrender, and that any who had been taken prisoner be handed over to the Security Service (SD) for execution. The first victims were British commandos captured in Norway after Operation Musketoon, who were shot at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in October 1942.

Place in the war

For the island itself the raid meant reprisals. The Germans reinforced the garrison and laid well over ten thousand mines along Sark’s shores. In February 1943 they carried out a further deportation of Channel Islanders to internment camps in Germany, including several dozen people from Sark. Among them were Frances Pittard, who had already served three months in prison for her contact with the commandos, and Robert Hathaway, the American-born husband of the Dame of Sark. Sibyl Hathaway later remarked that it had been a high price to pay for one prisoner and a copy of a Guernsey newspaper. When in December 1943 an Anglo-French patrol tried to land on Sark by the same route, two of its members were killed by mines.

Militarily the raid on Sark was insignificant, but it showed how, in the war in western Europe, small commando actions could set off a chain reaction: from propaganda, through reprisals against prisoners, to an order that became the basis of war crimes tried after the war at Nuremberg. The Small Scale Raiding Force was disbanded at the beginning of 1943, and its men, such as Appleyard, Pinckney and Lassen, moved to the Special Air Service and to new special forces fighting in North Africa and Italy. None of the three survived the war. The Channel Islands remained in German hands until the surrender of the Reich in May 1945.