Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (10 page)

In these early days of Occupation, we can see proof of the power of surveillance and the triumph of panopticism. The restriction of communication between Islanders and with the outside world was coupled with a reasonable belief that their words and actions were monitored by the controlling forces. The Guernsey civilians were thus placed in the position of panoptical prisoners, as “the object of information, never a subject in communication.”
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Ideally, from the viewpoint of those in power, control by surveillance becomes most efficient when it is a self-perpetuating mechanism. Once the prisoner internalizes the rules and expectations and functions under the fear of possible surveillance at any time, the prisoner serves effectively as his own guard.
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Of course, panopticism, or discipline by surveillance, was simply one aspect of German control and augmented the power relations already in place by force of arms. As Mark Andrejevic maintains, the panoptical prison created by constant monitoring “does not create the power relations,” although it “amplifies, extends, and automates this power.”
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Under a guise of the pleasant and “correct” relations that the Germans sought as the visible face of their occupation of Guernsey lay the “cruel ingenious cage”
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of panoptical surveillance. The Islanders had every reason to be literally
self
-conscious when simple and natural actions were now banned and could lead to arrest and imprisonment.

READING THE OTHER

The Guernsey Islanders were not without resources in countering panoptical surveillance and turned instinctively to the same techniques that are used to withstand monitoring today. In the twenty-first century, a time of heightened scrutiny due to fears of terrorism, the expanding surveillance by closed-circuit television and security oversight has been met by “undersight” on the part of those monitored. Steve Mann coined the neologism “sousveillance” to refer to “watchful vigilance from underneath,” a move where the ones being watched turn their own
gaze upward and monitor those in power.
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From the very beginning of the Occupation, the Islanders became adept at reading their captors while resisting the Germans' ability to understand the Islanders' actions and motivations. It was natural to observe the troops as they came into the town and spread out over the Island, because close contact became inevitable.

One shared observation of the young troops was their voraciousness. Even early on, the Islanders were well aware of their isolated position and the possible lack of new supplies. Articles were appearing in the local papers by the late summer of 1940 urging residents to economize in essentials and warning of shortages in fuel and food, particularly for the coming fall and winter. As the general populace tried to comply, Ambrose Robin reported with disgust that “German troops are buying the very articles we are short of.”
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Rev. Ord was particularly vivid in describing the first glimpse many Guernseymen had of the German occupiers. As buses brought the troops into St. Peter Port, the soldiers “stared open-mouthed at the well-dressed civilians, the clean freshly-painted houses and the shops with their windows invitingly full of good things.” Coming from war-torn areas to a land of seeming plenty, the Germans reacted like starving men:

Every strong point had been occupied immediately—particularly the cafes and confectionery shops! Germans are everywhere—eating, eating, eating. They prove their prowess as trenchermen, ordering omelettes made with eight eggs. From time to time they go out into the street to be sick and then valiantly resume their place at the festive board unless ousted by others.
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Observers felt they were gaining some insight into the extent of deprivation in the German army. As Ord maintained, “It was instructive to see Germans eating butter in half pound packets without bread as they went about the streets.”
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Ken Lewis would be a particularly fascinated observer of the German troops, and he recorded even minor encounters with young soldiers, most of them only a few years older than himself. In one account, he mentioned seeing “about 40 German soldiers in full equipment at the bottom of Saints Road, some even being in the Rector's Garden.” On that same morning he “had occassion [
sic
] to pass up Saints Road,” an occasion he apparently designed for himself to catch a closer look. He was rewarded for his initiative by having one soldier, standing with another beside the rector's back gate, “say good morning to me.”
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Each contact with German troops was clearly viewed as an adventure untainted by concerns that seemed to beset his elders. One of his great coups came very early in the Occupation in mid-July when, with his mate Ralph, he heard that a troop carrier had crashed near the airport. “Full of curiosity,” this Guernsey version of Tom and Huck set out that evening for a little “close investigation.” They discovered “a bomber of the Heinkel 111 type” and returned repeatedly over the following days, actually climbing inside the plane at one point: “It was quite a thrill to sit in the Pilot's seat of a German plane and to work the joy-stick and rudder-bar, on these occasions we brought home many souveniers which will prove interesting in the days to come.”
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Ken and his friends were not the only ones reading the troops and garnering what information they could from their presence—and sometimes their absence—in the Island. In September 1940, Winifred Harvey presented an entire series of observations and the conclusions drawn from them by the population. First, she wrote, “They say a great many Germans have left, there are only a few hundred as on the first days of the occupation. There are certainly fewer about.” This apparently positive sign was followed closely by her
observation that “the Sentries on the hotel were doubled,” and her reading of a German communiqué in the
Press
“that the Reichsmarschall is personally conducting operations in the north of France.” Could this mean the reports were true and an important personage (“Is it Goering himself?”) was in Guernsey to discuss giving up the Channel Islands?
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This type of report—a blend of personal observation, interpretive reading of the German troops, rumor, and factual knowledge—was the common model of civilian information-gathering for much of the Occupation.

As the old saying has it, increasing familiarity did seem to breed a level of contempt and, more important, distrust in this first half-year of Occupation. For one thing, the always acute British tendency to puncture inflated egos kicked in when observing German display. Rev. Ord, in observing the August 16 military band review, found it “hard not to laugh at the ‘goose step’ which was performed with excessive zeal and solemnity. A fitting symbol of a system we instinctively hate. The Germans…resent our nickname for it.”
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For the most part, however, any comical take on the visible German culture ran a distant second to unease about hidden German intentions and actions. Kitty Bachmann had heard “many lurid stories of atrocities in Poland and elsewhere.” Although she was not prepared to view these stories as untrue, she did think that, at least as she wrote in August 1940, “they seem fantastic in the light of the Germans' present conduct here.” Kitty shared with much of the rest of the world a belief that the tales of Nazi atrocities were so outrageous as to beg belief. The Islanders were also hearing that “they usually begin by ingratiating themselves with their victims, in order to get away to a smooth start gradually giving less and less sugar with the pill.”
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The Reverend Ord was a step ahead of her in his reservations, believing from the very beginning that “In what is bound to be a long-drawn-out affair men chosen for the initial period are undoubtedly a picked lot.”
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Ord was willing to act on his concerns that the Germans' velvet-glove behavior could not last. The minister of information had suggested that because of his knowledge of German, the reverend might serve as a possible interpreter for the German command. He “refused categorically.” Ord's reasoning was that “when their ‘courtesy’ wears thin and they wish to pick their inevitable quarrel for reasons best known to themselves, the Germans might well allege mistranslation with intent to embarrass their administration.”
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Yet, if individuals were conducting a
sousveillance
by reading the Germans in their midst, the Islanders prided themselves on thwarting the occupiers' ability to read them in return. Winnie relished the rumor that the Germans considered the Guernsey population “the bad boys.” Supposedly, the Germans called the Guernsey attitude “dumb insolence” and resented the way the civilians looked “right through them.”
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Most rewarding of all was the knowledge that “
they
can't understand us at all. They have stolen our boats, our cars, our leaders and now our wirelesses and we are as gay, or more so, as ever. It puzzles them awfully.”
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The strongest challenge to panoptical power is to thwart surveillance while simultaneously observing those in power, reading their intentions and (ideally) countering their plans. This sophisticated game of hide-and-seek developed during the early, easier period of Occupation would serve the Islanders well in the difficult years to come.

THE GRIP TIGHTENS

The transition from 1941 to 1942 put the Reverend Douglas Ord in a contemplative mood. “The Year End!” he wrote. “Twelve months ago today I wrote in this diary: I wonder if the New Year will see the wearing out of the ‘courtesy’ with which the Germans began their regime here.’ We have no doubt of the answer now.” In fact, Ord continued, it was barely six months from the start of the Occupation before the Germans had managed to alienate “any unhostile disposition” a Guernseyman might briefly have maintained. In the twelve months past, the occupiers had only built on this hostility by bringing “loss and misery and heartbreak” through orders that had “swollen to a mighty flood.”
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This end of the false and tenuous honeymoon between occupier and occupied is a revealing story of German treachery, well-meaning British blunders, and compensatory attempts by Island authorities to avert disaster.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will detail some of the primary events stretching from the start of 1941 until the D-day Invasion in June 1944. The structuring of rhetorical resistance would depend on an accurate understanding of the dark heart of the occupiers. As their grip tightened around the Island, key moves were made by the Germans to heighten control, including the final confiscation of wireless sets, the billeting of soldiers and confiscation of Islanders' homes, and the sudden deportations of many Islanders to German internment camps. I will also examine the way the Guernsey residents reread the Germans in their midst, confirming their earlier belief that there was dark malevolence beneath the polite mask. They quickly developed a series of animalistic metaphors to capture an authoritarian and cruel nature as they found it in the occupiers, an initial synchronizing of perception among the civilian population that would blossom into a counter-ideology fueling resistance. Finally, I will discuss one of the major lessons of the Occupation: that the quality of the individual outweighed group membership and that there were good men within the German forces. Some of these were true anti-Party Germans who opposed Hitler but were caught up in the military for fear of reprisals against their families and charges of treason. There were also those men whose simple humanity transcended the dark times and their role in the German military. Over time, the Islanders developed a means to respond to (and encourage) good when they saw it in the German forces, without compromising their general wariness and their unalloyed opposition to all the Nazi Occupation represented.

“The velvet glove has gone.” Winifred Harvey's grim assessment of the evolving Occupation was recorded in late October 1940.
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Although she was directly describing the imposition of trial by military law, already in force in occupied France, there was a more general meaning to her words. An unmistakable pall had fallen over the tentative understanding established between German occupier and Guernsey citizenry. But what could have caused such a tipping of this delicate balance not even four months into the Occupation? Granting that the apparent bonhomie of early days was more strategic than real on both sides, its premature end could be partially traced to two young men left waiting on a dark beach.

It was on the sands of Petit Port Bay where Lt. Hubert Nicolle and Lt. James Symes stood on September 7, 1940, for three hours at a stretch, repeatedly signaling a Morse “R” with their flashlight out toward the Channel. Despite three nights' effort, the prearranged signal brought no response from the English craft scheduled to pick up the information-gathering team. Nicolle and Symes reluctantly concluded that they were stranded. This was not the first British reconnaissance mission to Guernsey for the twenty-year-old Nicolle.
On the 8th of July, he had been deposited at Le Jaonnet Bay as a part of Operation “Anger,” a British attempt to determine the “strength and disposition of the Germans, their attitude to Islanders, and the Islanders view of Germans.” It took a particular courage for Nicolle to don civilian clothes and return to his Guernsey home. If caught, he would be disavowed by England and, being out of uniform, most likely shot as a common spy. This initial mission went smoothly mainly because Nicolle's father lived next door to H. H. Collins, the managing director of Le Riches grocery company. Without having to move from his father's house and risk capture, Nicolle had ample information at hand about troop strength and food supplies of the Island.
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