GUERNSEY’S war-time authorities and islanders have been cleared in a new book of collaboration and cooperation with their German occupiers. Author Hazel Knowles Smith, a postgraduate student at Southampton University, even put at risk her PhD by contradicting a common view of collaboration held by one of her examiners.

She carried out extensive research into her publication, The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation – Record, Memory and Myth, reading many personal diaries of islanders here from 1940 to 1945.

‘It soon became clear to me that more recent representations ‘of islanders’ activities during the Occupation’ were plainly wrong,’ she said.

Dr Knowles Smith, who holidayed in Guernsey as a child and had a local penfriend, was warned to expect controversy when she published because the book counters so many established ‘facts’ about collaboration.

Bailiff Geoffrey Rowland praises what he calls ‘a refreshingly new approach’ in the book.

‘In reality, islanders were British hostages with nowhere to run and hide.

‘This book is a very important contribution to the ongoing discussion on a range of very contentious subjects. By revisiting many issues from a balanced perspective of a professional historian, the author demonstrates that the island’s leaders and the population as a whole emerged with great credit from their ordeal.

‘I hope that those of you who were here and have been hurt by some of the publications of recent years will feel particular satisfaction from reading it.’

Distinguished historian Lord Asa Briggs also backs the book, on which he has prepared a report. He said that it did not make untenable claims, unlike other works.