Did you know about the American war graves in the Channel Islands?

The Channel Islands, located west of Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula, are not normally considered an American battleground. These British Crown Dependencies were occupied by Germany in the summer of 1940 without a fight, and held until the end of the war. And yet, the local Commonwealth War Cemetery in Howard Davis Park holds a separate plot with 12 American graves – all of them empty.
 
Howard Davis Park, located in St. Helier, the capital of the island of Jersey, was gifted to the people of Jersey in 1939 by businessman T. B. Davis, in memory of his son Howard who suffered fatal wounds on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in World War I.

A war cemetery was created in the park in November 1943, during the German occupation, to provide a resting place for the bodies of Allied servicemen recovered in the region. Over the course of the war, 40 British servicemen were laid to rest in the cemetery: 30 from World War II, many of them from the destroyed HMS Charybdis which was sunk off the coast of Brittany shortly before the establishment of the cemetery, and one soldier from World War I. Unusually for Commonwealth war cemeteries, the graves are marked not by headstones made of Portland limestone, but by wooden crosses. The crosses were made from an oak tree donated by a local woman whose son died in World War I. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission planned to replace the crosses with standard headstones after the war, but local residents and the Jersey authorities asked that the cemetery’s unique look be preserved.

A separate plot inside the cemetery holds 12 crosses dedicated to American airmen and sailors, who all died near the Channel Islands. The first, an airman, perished when his plane came down nearby, and was buried with the initial 12 British sailors when the cemetery was established. The other 11 Americans were laid there in August and October 1944, after the loss of the patrol torpedo boat (The “devil boats” of America) PT509, and the downing of a C-47 (The C-47). The stories of these two groups will be detailed in future articles.
 
On a note of interest, all 12 of the American graves are now empty. The bodies were all either repatriated to the United States or moved to the Normandy American Cemetery maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission. (“Time will not dim the glory of their deeds”)
 
Join us on our London to Channel Islands Tour to visit the cemetery and learn more about the German occupation of the archipelago.