11. Operation Ambassador Attempted to Infiltrate the Islands
In June of 1940, the Germans officially occupied the Channel Islands, and the British gave them up without a fight. Secretly, behind the scenes, Winston Churchill was planning to send some of his new secret agent commandos to the Channel Islands. The original plan was to raid the island, but after they learned that the Germans had already fortified the island, it made their plan a little more complicated. From the 14th to the 15th of July in 1940, men from the newly formed British Commandos planned an attack on the German airplanes in the Guernsey airport.
Lieutenant Hubert Nicolle was a Guernsey native who wanted to be one of the first commandos on the scene. They arrived in a submarine, and Nicolle was able to discover that there were only 469 German soldiers occupying the island. Even though multiple groups of commandos, there were a lot of mishaps that made their mission a total flop. One of the groups accidentally landed on the island of Sark, instead of Guernsey. At 12:30 AM, only 40 men were able to actually get onto the island of Guernsey, but they could not find any German soldiers at all. Many of the men had to swim back to the submarine in order to get back to their rendezvous point on time, but some of the soldiers were left behind, because they did not know how to swim. The raid was a total failure, because none of the goals were actually achieved. The Germans did not even know that it had happened until after the war was over.