Defences ‘mind-boggling in scale and waste of effort and lives’
A ‘PLANETARY alignment’ afforded Second World War history buff Al Murray an opportunity to visit some unique Guernsey sites this week.
The award-winning comedian appeared in a series of sold-out shows at St James, as his alter-ego the Pub Landlord, as part of his latest stand-up tour.
And this visit to Guernsey therefore gave him a chance to do more justice to the story of the occupation of the Channel Islands in his long-running historical podcast series We Have Ways of Making You Talk.
He said that he and fellow presenter James Holland had simply ‘not got round to telling the story’ of the German Occupation – ‘you get bogged down in Stalingrad and the Battle of Arnhem’ – but the podcast’s producers contacted VisitGuernsey and visits to the Batterie Mirus and the German Underground Hospital were quickly arranged.
‘It’s been an absolutely brilliant trip,’ he said.
He said the most surprising aspect of seeing the Mirus site was the realisation of what a folly it had been to construct it in the first place.
Mr Murray visited Second World War defensive positions at Manly Head last year, on the north shore of the opening of Sydney Harbour in Australia – ‘an incredibly important strategic location with a ship repair yard and everything’.
‘But those defences are absolutely tiny beer compared to what you have here in Guernsey,’ he said.
‘The defences here are mind-boggling in their scale and a sheer waste of effort and lives.’
He described as ‘wildly stupid’ the fact that – under Hitler’s direct orders – fully 10% of the budget of the entire Atlantic Wall, stretching from Norway to Spain, was spent on defending the Channel Islands, the majority of which was spent in Guernsey.
‘People often criticise the Allies for being slow or ponderous,’ he said, ‘but you can’t pin a thing on them like what happened here.’
He said the ultimate reward for the Allies in this profligacy had been that those efforts to strengthen had not instead been deployed in Normandy, where they may have slowed the D-Day landings that ultimately led to the re-invasion of Europe and the fall of Berlin.
The material and information gathered during his visit will be used in a new, three-part podcast.
