The Small Army by Michael  Marshall was published in 1957 and it’s the true account of the evacuation of children from Guernsey in the Channel Islands during World War 2. Guernsey is just twenty miles from France and the Germans invaded early in the war.

The war-time home of the author’s Guernsey school Elizabeth College was at Whitehall House in Derbyshire. The boys had to get permission from their headmaster to visit the nearest town which was four miles away, and they had to walk. They made their own entertainment which mainly consisted of training to fight when they were older, intending to get back to Guernsey and fight the Germans and free the island. One of the boys was keen on science and he was able to make weapons, I don’t know how he managed to get a hold of the chemicals he needed, but he must have done so as there were plenty of explosions which the local farmers put up with. It was known locally that there were gangs of boys playing war games, but in such a rural area it was ignored for a long time.

By the end of the war some of the boys were as old as 17 and 18 and when they were able to get back to Guernsey their plans of hunting down collaborators more or less evaporated and they set about gathering as much of the weapons and ammunition which the Germans had left behind. The island was rammed full of stuff and the older boys set up a company to sell the equipment to companies who had arrived from the British mainland to buy up as much as they could. Nobody in authority stopped them from doing so! The boys made a lot of money with no questions asked about their right to ownership of the abandoned equipment including searchlights, compression pumps, radio sets, optical instruments, tool chests, field telephone sets and miles of cable. It was a very lucrative business operated by the two eldest boys who were by then young men.

The book has photographs of the rocket projector that they built as well as the lists of the members of the organisations, suitably decorated in a schoolboyish manner.

This was an interesting and at times amusing read about schoolboys who wanted to take on the German invaders on their own home ground instead of being sent to the relative safety of the British mainland. They certainly had that “we’ll fight them on the beaches”  mentality.