"History is all around us!"

Lihou

Having just returned from a wonderful holiday to Guernsey, I thought I would share one of its many incredible World War II  stories and the photographs I took, standing at the very same location where it all happened on the night of 11-12 April 1941.

Sergeant Robert Sterling, flying  a Hurricane in 87 Squadron had been pursuing a German bomber towards France when he realised that he was running low on fuel. The twenty-three year old turned round to return to his airfield at Exeter but with a compass that had become unserviceable, he mistakenly took the reflection from glass houses on the ground to be the white chalk cliffs lining the south coast of England. Sterling bailed out, in the belief that he would be landing on safe ground . . . but he was wrong. What was below him was Lihou, a spit of land off the German occupied island of Guernsey.

He was lucky to land on a small piece of grass  and not the jagged rocks all around, or worse still in the water surrounding it. He was luckier still to find in the darkness, a narrow piece of land temporarily exposed by the outgoing tide, linking Lihou with Guernsey.  Sterling  walked along it and then unknowingly crossed a minefield before reaching a home belonging to the Brouard family.

At the same time, local fisherman George Le Couteur was woken by armed soldiers and ordered to take them in his boat to try and find an aeroplane they believed to have crashed somewhere off Lihou.

The Brouard’s fed Sterling and kept him in their home until the morning as he would have been shot on sight during the night-time curfew. As agreed, they contacted the police in the morning, and the downed pilot was taken into custody by the Germans who incarcerated him in Stalag Luft IX Prisoner of War Camp for the remainder of the war.

Sterling returned to the Brouard family home in peacetime and kept in touch with his saviours who had helped keep him safe on that ominous night in the Spring of 1941 when the dark shadow of Nazism loomed over the beautiful island I had just visited . . . history is all around us, just waiting to be discovered.

Robert Sterling