Adolf Hitler's Secret Island Fortress In Jersey | Time Team | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there last year an amateur archaeologist was walking through these woods when he came across a load of lumps and bumps and they were very lumpy and bumpy he was told that this site played a crucial role in the defense of this island during the second world war and he realized that it needed to be looked at before it was lost forever so he talked to time team about it and they said that no one has ever dug a site like this before because although this is british soil these defenses aren't british they're german part of the vast complex of defenses built by hitler to turn jersey into an island fortress oh and by the way that amateur archaeologist was me so i'm going to be under quite a lot of pressure over the next few days i wonder how long before the archaeologist stopped talking to me [Music] in the early summer of 1940 the channel islands became the only part of the british isles to be invaded and occupied by the advancing forces of hitler's blitzkrieg for the islanders it was the beginning of five years of the cold reality of life under hostile occupying forces and even now 70 years later the islands are littered with the remains of that occupation during the occupation period 40 to 45 we're talking about some 65 000 plus mines being laid in the island and probably over 26 000 tons of other munitions and it means for the next three days our archaeologists are going to have to be rather careful when it comes to any small fines they uncover this is a 75 if you happen to attack one with your troll i suggest you stop tapping it and basically make your way away from it so are you still happy to go ahead with this i think i feel slightly more cautious so with the briefing over it's time to get our first trench in now you say don't hit it hard and then the first thing you do is you go and it's essential we're vigilant because our site at la jolette is a heavily fortified german anti-aircraft battery that overlooked the airport and dominated the surrounding landscape now hidden under a canopy of trees this rare wartime raf reconnaissance photograph shows the site in its prime and it suggests it once dripped with heavy artillery over the next three days we want to translate this grainy image into a three-dimensional recreation of that fortress [Music] we're seeing a lot more than's on the earth photo yeah which must be a real testament to the german camouflage guys and we've assembled our own army of experts to decipher all these lumps and bumps dr jilly carr who's pioneered the archaeology of the occupation if you look around the airfield in particular the military historian andy robertshaw we need to know what those are if they are and martin brown a ministry of defense archaeologist looks like a weapons pit doesn't it and it's the right size to put one of the 20 mil in rather than one big 88 yeah okay but for me it's a lot more than just learning about the position of flat guns it's about the archaeology of the only successful invasion and occupation of britain since 1066. it really is true that from the first moment i came into this forest it started to work its magic on me and i think that's probably something to do with the fact jersey was successfully occupied and it gives me an eerie feeling of what it might have been like if the mainland had been occupied by the germans as well but whatever it was it made me feel that i wanted our team to be the people who excavated here so that's the emotional stuff out of the way but prosaically you've got to dig it now i mean the point is about sites like this we don't have any complete wartime plans of it and just sort of looking around this morning there's an awful lot going on here the channel island occupation society since 1977 has been excavating or uncovering german bunkers but what we're looking at here there's different sorts of fortifications so this kind of excavation excavation that we're doing here is completely new what we want to have a look at is the entire layout of the base the ordinary gun pits the machine gun nest the slit trenches the whole layout of the camp and this is real cutting-edge archaeology it really is i mean this was meant to be one of the open areas i thought we could look at but i i mean it's just a non-starter unfortunately not everyone is quite so enthusiastic about my choice of sight i don't know what we're going to do [Music] so with geoff is somewhat kiboshed by the vegetation we're going for the old fashioned approach our first trench over a possible gun emplacement has gone in based on the aerial photograph and stuart surveying skills and he's already given us a position for a second trench there's a whole series of structures here that look as if they're buildings associated with the inflation that phil's working on and this might be where the crews look after the gun as it were this is where people might actually be living we're not expecting anything big and concrete it's not a bunker type of building it might even be just a timber building the way you're talking you've actually got very excited about this site i love it it's like just wandering into woodland and suddenly finding all these things above ground but if you've got that aerial photograph do we actually need to do a great deal of archaeology well we do because this was taken in 1944 they could have put all sorts of other things here which wouldn't even be on this aerial photograph in spite of being only 70 years old we hadn't been able to find any written records for this site they were probably destroyed by the germans before they surrendered but looking at a battery that was similar to ours it's obvious there was a lot going on is this our site no it isn't it's a similar position on the other side of the island it says here three slash one five six flack what does flack actually mean flak is an abbreviation for the the german full term which is flight cannon anti-aircraft gun is what it means that's all it means simple as that if we go into 3d we've got our anti-aircraft guns in this case 588s there's a couple of two centimeter anti-aircraft for close defense but it's not just a defensive structure it's where up to 200 soldiers living eating drinking going to toilet you know having recreation it's actually community saying martin what you got it looks like it's about three or four inches long and and sort of 20 millimeters in diameter and about 20 millimeters in diameter and back up in trench one phil's just turned up the sort of small find that suggests we're right in the middle of all that flack rule one was call you rule two was don't tamper with it you've got a prize i think that's it yes it's a two centimeter shell case is it gonna go bang it's not like i go bang but it does contain explosive propellant and a primer this is our first trench our first slice out of it and already we've discovered something which could blow up in our faces this could be a great dig or it could be really frustrating fingers crossed and you brought us here [Laughter] it's a sobering discovery we really will have to be careful over the next couple of days oh i think you've got precisely what we had before but these 20 millimeter diameter shells do suggest that trench one is the site of a 20 mil anti-aircraft gun and this gun would have been just one of thousands of german weapons that swamped jersey from 1940 onwards the channel islands had become a bit of an obsession for hitler it was the only british land he controlled and he threw troops and defenses at it out of all proportion to the population in france there was roughly one german soldier to every 100 frenchmen in jersey it was one german to every three [Music] islanders the propaganda opportunities for the nazis were obvious but for our historian there are also clear parallels with the ancient world this is the story that i see written through the whole of human civilization if you go centuries back or thousands of years back you have the same thing you have one megalomaniac individual and everybody else falling in line behind him to take over someone else's territories is it just me or do you find looking at this footage very chilling it's very sobering this is a propaganda film so it's almost a pastiche of itself and there is the bobby directing the trophy exactly and then there's a flower bed with a swastika in it but but that was the point really this was the nazis saying we have occupied this place and this is an ideal invasion did jersey know it was going to be invaded well it wasn't clear at all um because as late as march you've got the home office in the foreign office saying things like you know jersey it's an ideal destination for a family holiday you know take take your families there and i think that's the real issue that the islanders have no idea what's going on what happens is that the island is demilitarized and the islanders begin to hear about this on the 19th of june so that means that all the troops go the telephone cables are cut so the germans drop these terms of surrender on the first of july onto the airfield saying that you know as long as the islanders are peaceful then they'll get their liberty um and they have to put up white flags to show that they accept this and then people put up old vests and pillowcases outside their houses to show that they're not going to put up resistance um i'll tell you what is really interesting for me though about this is because if you work with the ancient past of course you haven't got any of the testimonies of the victims you hear from the conquerors point of view whereas here of course there are a thousand or so people living who remember all of this [Music] i was in the garden at home and i heard planes coming and you didn't see many planes so you looked to see what it was and there were the swastikas under the wings and then they dropped two bombs and i saw the bombs falling and shot inside like a square rabbit betany is in her element talking to people who witnessed world-changing events at first hand one officer had his head knocked off by some youths and some of those were caught and oh yes they were punished very severely some went to real concentration camps prison camps on the continent and some did not come back [Music] but although we've got shed loads of historical and first-hand evidence of the occupation our once heavily guarded site is still managing to keep its secrets from us well we have the platform for it but no evidence for the building which i guess might have been quite ephemeral light structure we've also now opened two more trenches this time over strange features that john's managed to identify from his severely curtailed geophys lovely and one of them has just thrown up a find that's got us completely stumped wondered whether it was part of a field kitchen but that's not going to work for filling it full of soup is it so it looks too fragile for something like a gun mounting doesn't it doesn't it just well here's our first mystery on this site you have two days left to find out what that is and pete will say why do you bother digging it you know what everything is but we have sorted out trench one it's not just a bank that's thrown up to go around a gun as phil's discovered that the defenses built on this hillside were engineered to last what we seem to get is this this inner stone-built revetment and then we've got this fine-grained material pushed against the outside of it to make the actual bank i mean that makes complete sense you don't want enemy shell fire or bullet striking stones so you put the soft stuff out there and that will absorb the energy of incoming ammunition from the enemy from the invention of gunpowder onwards that's the way you do it we're actually getting quite a few fines as well i don't know whether you may mean anything to you i like the look of that i really really do if you're going to build a position like this you're going to use riveting sticks pieces of timber that you hammer into the ground but if you put that and then put your wall against it it just caves in if you take a loop of cable or a loop of wire loop it round your upright right take it out there hammer in a stake put a piece of wood between the middle of it and turn it round it actually wind pushes the whole thing in and pulls it in tight and it acts as a straining wire taking the weight of all of the structure outside [Music] so our first trench can confirm that this earthwork is a 20 millimeter gun emplacement and it was strategically placed to shoot down low-flying aircraft phil's end placement up on the top here on the highest point that's a 20 millimeter gun that's designed to be quick moving it's got a rapid rate of fire and as we know this shape is a 20 millimeter gun we can confidently say that all these features are also 20 millimeter guns which isn't a bad result for one day's digging but as stewards discovered they were just part of a sophisticated setup to defend the airfield and the island against allied attack the 88s the bigger ones on this side of the hill they've got a dual purpose they've they've got 360 degree arc on the sky and shoot anything up in the sky as it were but they're also able to depress their barrels downwards so they can cover all that area by the airport and they can actually see right down to the bay at the south these larger 88 millimeter gun pits will be our main target for tomorrow as we begin to extend our investigation because it's now clear that this whole hillside operated as one big settlement and it is that wider landscape that's starting to prove really interesting if you come round the back of phil's trench you can see here we've just started to bring up this cache of small german finds but this one is my favorite at the moment it really is rather curious it looks like a german medal but in fact it's a fake german medal i'm relieved to say this site is starting to be really quite intriguing [Music] it's the start of day two in la jollette jersey right i think we've got another another bullet there oh yeah and we're beginning to get used to finding ammunition in our trenches that's another one of these german 7.92 cases it's uh standard small arms ammunition it's not surprising really as we're trying to piece together the complex layout of this world war ii german anti-aircraft battery by the end of yesterday we've made our first breakthrough and we now know what this earthwork was all about it was the sight of a 20 millimeter anti-aircraft gun so far so good but today we're going after the big stuff because if the 20 millimeter emplacements on this site were like the muskets of anti-aircraft warfare then it's these massive enclosures housing 88 millimeter guns that were the cannons that's what an 88 millimeter looks like with its crew it's got an eight-man crew it sits on a big tripod you need something about 12 meters wide and this is an incredibly powerful gun if if we had a gun here you see the the contrails in the sky people going on their holidays yeah they're at 20 000 feet they're about this gun will bring that down that's incredible gun is that where we gonna put the trench we're actually gonna excavate this quadrant here it's quite chunky so we're gonna get the mini digger in we actually want to see if we can find the tripod placement we should be in the middle just here so our next trench goes in over this potential 88 millimeter gun emplacement one of six we suspect once sat on this hillside and they'd have been the main focal points for the 200 plus troops that ate slept and lived in a state of permanent readiness on this fortified settlement including the area where we put in trench two yesterday so what do you think they're using this bit for well the big clue was what's in that tray there which looks like paint tubes so it's not paint it's actually toothpaste and with it we've got this which is a case from a razor and down there we've got a drain draining away water so this is an ablutions block and these guys are getting up in the morning they're coming down here getting cleaned up going to get their breakfast do their duty and it all has to be done in an organized way actually that's also what the islanders all say they say that they notice germans are incredibly regular in everything they do so you know they get up at the same time they'll go to the shops at the same time they'll clean their teeth at the same time they'll have their pines at the same hour of the day so we've now established another feature on our site and more evidence that the germans saw the occupation of jersey as a long-term investment i found a coin oh oh blimey but we're also discovering that having an occupying force control day-to-day life can lead to all sorts of unforeseen complications well it says 1924 here so this actually would have dated some way before the occupation back to the weimar republic and what's interesting about this is that there were actually as many as five different types of currency that circulated during the occupation it all got a bit complicated there were both these coins which dated to before the occupation there were occupation rush marks but there was also jersey coins that were circulating and british coins and even some old french coins that sort of entered circulation a little bit so a lot of things going on so far we've only been digging about a third of this battery and stuart feels it's about time to investigate another target at the other end of the site yeah from other flat batteries you know what to expect there's a guns and then there has to be a a fire and command control center close to the guns and sometimes have a shelter for the crew underneath like a bunker or something like that not necessarily concrete could be dug down into the rock or the earth well i mean the results don't necessarily suggest concrete bunker but certainly something that's going deep into the ground and appears to have collapsed and be full of rubble we need a trench across that anomaly don't we i mean there's no question about it very very interesting well we've already marked it oh using powers of prediction that's fantastic that's hard ground isn't it so we're opening a new trench over a potential bunker and very quickly it becomes clear there's something rather interesting deep down but it's red here there's some tile all right it's a toilet a brick or something your line too and if we can work out what it is it'll help us build a picture of this hillside 70 years ago using all the cutting-edge technology we have at our fingertips there's tens of thousands of pounds worth of computers in here for the graphics the geo fears the gps it's our technological epicenter and over here is a grown man in a sand pit stuart what are you mucking about at i don't think i've ever been described as being a grown man before tonight what i'm trying to do is build up a model of this flat battery up on top of this hill and what we know at the moment is we've got a 20 millimeter gun battery and we've got the blast bank around what appears to be a building down here by the time we've finished we'll be able to plot all the buildings all the trenches all the earthworks and get a full impression of this site without that woodland that's there today the one thing that's really obvious to me here is that we've got all this war apparatus around this bit and you've got a load here as well but here in the middle you've got what is that a field of hay yeah it is it's bizarre isn't it because there's a shortage of food on the island gum batteries actually have to have their own farms inside to grab potatoes to grow hay for use horses a lot to transport things around they're actually acting as farmers as well as gunners one more question what did you do to your finger first casualty i'm afraid it's got a lot to do with that landscape surveying is obviously more dangerous than i thought as the archaeologists continue to grapple with the big stuff the small finds are starting to bring this site to life this tray is stuff connected with the occupation it doesn't look like much but that's the fastener from one of the ammunition boxes that would have serviced the 20 mil cannons this is the one that had us all in intrigued yesterday it seems to be like the replica of a medal well i had a word with one of the local collectors last night and he produced this this is a war merit badge second class with swords and i think they're obviously trying to have make a little homemade version of that here i love the idea of a trench's gag don't you oh yeah i mean are they sitting up here awarding each other huge decorations offer you auto iron cross first class [Music] and it's probably something conscripts posted a long way from home have done since the beginning of time back in raksha's trench a morning's industrial pruning has now revealed that we do have the site of an 88 millimeter gun can you see these metal bolts coming through here oh yeah i've also got this circular feature as well i'm wondering whether this is actually the gun placement i think you're on to something there and it's becoming clear that the gun was at the center of a substantial piece of engineering at the moment what we've got uncovered is what about a third of it something like that about a third because you can see the bank coming down that side it's actually really massive and just coming through there so i think we are pretty much in the middle i reckon then what we need to do is try and extend this and get at least a half of it open then that gives us some understanding of how the whole thing would have been laid out great better carry on a bit more digging slowly but surely we're getting a sense of the force once stationed here in fact it's turning out to be a rather enjoyable journey of discovery and then we discover the last thing we need ian i think that's perhaps where we stopped i think we've got some form of ordinance going on and this time it's not a stray bullet right here right behind us it looks like a very real very live artillery shell hi it's faye here um is anyone around to come and have a look at some potential ordnance in my trench please we'll get someone over brilliant thank you not very happy about this i don't want to get too close actually funnily enough strange it's the afternoon of day two at our german anti-aircraft gun emplacement in jersey and it looks like we've just found a very unwelcome reminder of what this site was all about well it's definitely the base of a shell case it's almost certainly an 88 what i don't know at the moment is whether it's the actual cases alive and whether there's a shell at the end of it which is the more hazardous part of the item the whole reason faze been digging this trench is to investigate some of the structures on this fortified hillside because we're discovering that although the anti-aircraft guns were at the heart of this site they didn't exist in isolation the communication cable comes from here and phil's now uncovered evidence that the gun crews were being coordinated by central command units if we got the cables coming in here and actually screwing past could they be coming to that 88 up there well i've been most logical there's nothing in between and stewart now believes he's found the location of one of these control centers looking at something sticking out to about this distance at the moment this on the balance of evidence is the best candidate we've seen for a command and control center it's the it's the biggest complex on the site it's central to all the anti-aircraft batteries and so on this would be a perfect target for a trench except for one small detail the best spuds in the world shame it's under potatoes eh so in this case it's jersey royals one time team nil this material here might very well be propellant so we still we are talking about quite a long case okay and potentially then unfired or fired definitely unfired back at phase trench we're now ready to lift our unwelcome find oh my gosh oh okay what's that it is 88 but it's what they call a drill round and they would use it for practice and drilling for the guns so it's not dangerous no ah that's a really [Music] i think this may need further investigation [Music] but we've finally got to admit that one of our other discoveries will have to remain a mystery yesterday we found this buried about five foot down and no one knew what it was so everyone rushed back to their military textbooks last night and we still have no idea what it is have we if this was roman we'd say it was probably ritual of course we would mind you we don't have to know what every single find is do it's gonna have to remain a mystery it's not the only mystery in this section because that hole there we didn't just dig that in order to extricate that funnel thing did we this would have been here in the second world war why well what it is you've got the anti-aircraft positions up here doing their job yeah the germans are worried that they're actually going to be a target for the british so you put an infantry perimeter around as well and actually if you hop down in yeah right down into here yep that's right if you look that way i mean if we cut that cut the bushes out yeah you've got a gap in the hedge bank you can see through there yeah and your fritz in your foxhole waiting to see whether those british troops are going to be coming across to try and do damage to this gun battery there is one slight design flaw isn't there it's very difficult to get out of oh yes having established that this is a foxhole we can see there's a whole network of them around the edge of the site or infantry perimeter in military lingo and this is only one line of defense there are all sorts of other fortifications we've seen that domed shelter before this number of them round with the guns aren't they not one coming in at an angle like that and certainly not with this big earth work this is very different isn't it so we're going to dig out this bunker to see if there's anything in it that could add to our story and there are other defenses that stewart's now got his eye on that he thinks would dug very late in the war these are defensive trenches for to protect the battery itself they're not just communication trench well the other thing about this trench is we can actually date when it was constructed to some extent because this aerial photograph been using was taken in august 1944 as you know the trench that we're looking at comes off at an angle and you can see it's not shown at all on this photograph and to dig through solid rock to achieve these trenches i mean that's just incredible they must have been seriously concerned that invasion was a real possibility these rock cut trenches would appear to show the determination of the german troops here to defend their positions against allied attack but there could be a chance that the soldiers didn't do the digging themselves because our site overlooks the most impressive and most chilling monument to the german occupation about a hundred feet above my head phil and the rest of the team are excavating our german anti-aircraft battery but down here there's a much more tangible example of the german occupation this is the jersey war tunnels originally created as an artillery workshop and military hospital for the germans but if ever there's a statement that says we're powerful we're here and we're not going away this is it the war tunnels now house a museum chronicling the five increasingly desperate years of the occupation hewn out of solid rock the tunnels are a testament to german engineering but they're also a testimonial to the brutal nazi ethos that some people deserved to be treated as sub-human there is something phenomenally bleak about that unfinished tunnel isn't there there is it was built by people who worked for the organization tote and these were voluntary labor there's um coerced labor forced labor slave labor people from from russia from poland from belarus from ukraine people who in the the nazi racial hierarchy were right down there did many of them die yes yes hundreds in uh in alderney and um around about 100 in jersey how did the jersey people feel about what was going on here when you mentioned the slave labor here it's almost as if these are memories that are unbearable um so i've been talking to people and you see the tears come to their eyes when they remember it because i mean particularly as judy says the soviets particularly they were incredibly badly treated here um they were given no clothes so they were either naked or in rags the food rations that were meant to be getting to them for instance milk was sent over to the hospital and you find that the guards are just using it as whipped cream instead so they were starving and they were beaten many of them died so it was truly atrocious and that's why it's important to come here because this play you know it's a monument to the suffering of those slave workers but it's also a reminder of the absolute horror war like this one day the neighbor came to the door and said come and look there's something terrible we could see all these imported laborers who were brought in terrible state in rags they looked ashen grey and i thought good god the stories we've been hearing over our illegal radios are absolutely true they were interming they were sub-human therefore you could treat them how you liked it's a sobering reminder as we reach the end of day two that what we're digging had a real and lasting impact on the people of jersey steer this turned up earlier and we're still discovering yet more evidence of the force used to occupy this island what's an 88 shell case that's for sure well i think the the actual gain for the the primer of the shell case is still present so it's potentially dangerous and i think you just continue taping it off and we'll deal with it in due course disposing of it in due course basically means we're going to take it to a nearby beach tomorrow and blow it up back at the heart of the site the scale of the gun emplacements that fired those shells is now evident moment of triumph so have you finished far from it but i tell you what we do have at the moment we have this big massive base plate and that's where the gun would have sat on but you can see these two holes in this circular dip here they're actually for that the cables for the gun so what else for tomorrow ben well what we've been doing is looking at the different types of earthwork characterizing them you know working out what they are tomorrow what we want to do is try and put it all together and really sort of understand this complex as a whole so even though it's just brambles and briars here now by the end of tomorrow you'll be able to give us a vivid picture of what life would have been like here in the night absolutely beginning of day three here at la jollette my little forest deep in the heart of jersey where we're trying to piece together the story of a world war ii german anti-aircraft battery and although we've done pretty well we've only managed to identify four features so far which is a bit worrying because we've only got one day left and i've got an awful lot of these cards still to put up but the features we have identified an ablution heart a fox hole and 20 millimeter and 88 millimeter gun emplacements have allowed stewart to start identifying similar features in the 1944 aerial photograph another 88 emplacement here and another 88 there and that in turn has given us other potential targets so you should have a rangefinder it's like a pair of binoculars but the one lens is out there and one lens is out there to get the range of the aircraft as they come and send instructions to the to the big guns but we're also picking up other archaeological features that suggest that as the war progressed this fortified hillside was redeveloped we've got a concrete crew shelter but it's different to the ones we see here because it's got an emplacement in front of it so our final trenches go in over these intriguing features around the perimeter of the site so faith this looks like a big hole with a lot of demolition rubble pushed in the base of it over on the other side of the site faye having recovered from her shell shop is trying to resolve the mysterious potential bunker so at the back there we've got what looks like a dividing wall or something and then we've got all these cables coming in as well and it was this trench that produced one of the weirdest looking finds i've seen in a long time yesterday afternoon our entire dig ground to a halt for a bit when we found this shell in amongst the archaeology except that when our bomb disposal bloke looked at it he said that it wasn't a shell like this it was in fact a pretend shell which was all a bit of an anti-climax wasn't it no i think it's fantastic we thought we'd find lots of these that the live ones but this is a really rare it's a practice shell why do you need to practice putting a big bullet and a big gun well if it was just one person working not a problem but if you've got eight of you you've got one guy opening the breach another man putting the shell in then breach is closed on the right hand side you've got men operating elevation and traverse and the other is running up one every four seconds with a new shelter fire i think it was our stuart who said that when you fire one of these things it can bring down an aircraft thousands of feet away how does it manage to hit the aircraft so accurately it doesn't what it actually has is a timer set into the fuse at that end and that's set electronically and that predetermines when it'll explode you don't actually try and make a hole in the airplane and then the gulf bang it goes off near the aeroplane underneath it above it and it's the fragments that then do the damage once the wall finished there was a concerted effort to defuse and remove all the shells from the island but even now they do surface stuart so this is the offending 88 that we've got to get rid of it is indeed phil we found one of our own yesterday and apparently the best way to dispose of it is to blow it up it's just not worth trying to open it up manually to try and preserve it you're placing yourself at great risk doing that the best thing to do is we'll put a little charge on this this item and then we're going to proceed down the beach dig a hole ah that's where i come in i wonder why i was invited and i wondered why i was given a shovel i know now while phil gets used to the idea of burying something as opposed to digging it up matt's now got to the bottom of his bunker it's obvious it started off as an ammunition store for the 88 millimeter gun rakshas digging they've been really shifting some heavy stuff around the scratches going down there and down there ammunition boxes things like that perhaps yeah i guess so but the defenses thrown up around it suggest that it changed use as the war progressed that looks a bit like a firing step there well that's what we think um this one's different to all these other shelters in that it's got that out there now if you if you look through actually what you've got is a field of fire down that trench system and covering that area out in the woodland beyond so it makes sense to have a sort of secondary defense line here defending this hill from a land-based attack appears to have become more important in the latter years of the war and we're now confident another one of our trenches is also part of this re-fortification it's a machine gun post heck of a lot of hard work you can see it was cut out of the solid rock and it's part of the network of defenses that we can see pretty clearly on the 1944 aerial photo but intriguingly we're starting to find things that aren't on that photo like this big structure behind you martin what is it right well it begins life you can see it on there it's the same sort of position as that first trench phil did but they've dished in one side of it here to create this big bank there so it's stopped being about anti-aircraft defense and actually it's become part of this system and it's providing extra fire support for the guys who are down there in your machine gun so is it shifting from attack to defense quite right yes how does that tie with the history well this photo was taken in august i think 1944 and if you think june 1944 everything has changed because you've had the allied landings in normandy so suddenly the allies they're only 14 miles away in france so it's a completely different game they're suddenly having to play here they are now cut off not just from britain they're also cut off from france so the irony is that the germans here who were the procedures had now suddenly become the besieged completely so we always think of d-day as this big moment when the war turned but things just got worse for everybody here [Music] after d-day the germans dug in preparing for an imminent allied invasion but the channel islands were so heavily fortified the churchill decided that any attack would result in unacceptable losses [Music] in fact the island wasn't liberated until the day after ve day in may 1945 and the long harsh winter of 1944 was the lowest point in the island's occupation and the small fines we've uncovered in phase trench help paint a picture of the final starving months of german rule you can still make out some of the lettering on this particular one and you can i think it says new zealand and a little bit of the anchor i reckon this is this is new zealand anchor butter it is and this is completely recognizable yeah what i think this is i wonder if this came in one of the red cross parcels from the red red cross ship the vega came in december 1944 and every month thereafter pretty much saved the islanders from starvation and how are the germans getting it because it wasn't intended for the journey no the germans did not get any parcels at all but some islanders felt sorry for the germans and shared their food with them yeah i've read that and there's an account of this particular family that when the food packages arrive the first thing they do is they invite in the local germans and they give them a cup of tea and a square of cadburys chocolate really i mean it seems so generous doesn't it you're in the situation yes now we're ready firing one two three that's amazing well it was a complete success because of your digging it was it absolutely absolutely so with our shells successfully disposed of we can now concentrate on working out what we've actually uncovered on site and it's clear that by the end of the war the germans had built a sophisticated complex of trenches against ground attack i just can't believe how big this thing is meanwhile raksha and phil fresh from the beach have revealed an 88 millimeter emplacement as robust as any roman archaeology we've ever uncovered we've got that little bunker area over there we can actually see now where all the timber revampment is but the main thing is this is a seriously big piece of engineering for a seriously big gun while over in phase trench we've also got something equally robust but this time it's underground well down at the bottom now we've actually got the base of this structure and what we think we've got you see the depth of it some from a bunker and we've got all these cables and wires coming in so i think we've got a communication bunker could this be the brains of the whole operation i don't think it's big enough to be the brains of the whole operation but potentially some of it yes this building here is a command and control center that's where phase dig in yes down there yeah so with all this information what does our man in the sand pit think because we've excavated around 20 millimeter battery not that sick we can see others on the aerial photograph and we've got a number of them ringing around the site the 88 millimeter ones are square they're very different to the 20 millimeter ones there's a nice triangular pattern of three there yeah and over in where we're standing nice triangle geometric pattern so you can imagine if they're firing at 15 rounds a minute that's 45 rounds from each of these batteries a minute times two 90 rounds a minute these batteries can pump up into the sky that's serious serious air defense is that but you can see how they just went from being an anti-aircraft battery suddenly to having to think almost in infantry mode this is the weakest side they're expecting attacks up here and you can see they're also in this trench system they're digging a trench along the back of the hedge line now and they're going to use the hedge and the bank underneath it as part of the defenses against any attack here it's not just anti-aircraft it's about controlling the airfield and it's an anti-invasion defense at the same time so we've got a fortified enclosure as sophisticated as any iron age hill fort with six massive guns capable of throwing up a barrage of exploding shells while 20 millimeter gun emplacements dealt with lower flying aircraft by the end it was a fortress where starving troops lived in fear of invasion and the 88 millimeter guns including the one in phil's trench were now lowered to overlook the island below well basically we've got a sort of uh what i like to think of as a cross between a roman fort and a and a wooden box the roman fort bit is the bank that goes all the way around that gives you your protection the wooden box bit is the fact that all these edges would have been reveted with timber and in fact when you'd have come in here you'd have seen wooden sides and wooden flooring and in each corner you'd have had an ammunition box there and an ammunition box there and probably one over there but the central part is really what strikes you it is an enormous hole that is filled up with concrete yeah and right in the middle of it there's the one thing that's missing which is that enormous metal killing machine absolutely but you can just see the imprint of where it once stood you've got these bolts here where it's actually been fixed to the concrete and clearly at the end of the war they cut them all off except one and they lifted the gun away and thank god took it away yeah glad it's not here anymore you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 333,770

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history

Id: i3EmNuhPHmE

Length: 47min 54sec (2874 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020