Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (5 page)

This writing also seems to have been therapeutic, for the diary functions as the “invisible shoulder” for the writer.
⁷¹
Dorothy Higgs stated quite frankly that she mostly wrote when depressed, and long intervals between entries marked a better frame of mind rather than a lack of interesting events.
⁷²
This was not consistent with Dorothy, because the sudden starvation death of her gardener triggered such emotions that she had “not had the heart to write lately.”
⁷³
The therapeutic aspect of writing out events is particularly apparent with Winnie Harvey. Her first diary entry was written in August of 1940, although it details the week of June 16 to June 25 of that year. Her diary begins:

It is extremely difficult to write now in August, about this week, the worst I have lived through. I have been putting it off and off but chiefly because I dreaded to write of the 19th, the death of my Rolfie; but if I write it now perhaps I shall get it over and feel better.
⁷⁴

Her desire to come to grips with the death of her little dog, discussed in
chapter 1
, was the trigger for her recording of the entire Occupation experience. Whatever Winnie anticipated about the healing power of writing, she would return to Rolfie's death repeatedly over the years, like a tongue touching a sore tooth.

As is typical of our human condition, the diarists were blind to the future and knew only what their current position allowed them to see. The judgments of history are often based in hindsight: on our perfect knowledge that Germany would lose the war, that the Occupation would end in five years, that something incredibly dark was happening in those German
concentration camps. Reading these accounts reminds us that for the diarists, the future was a closed book. Despite their hopes and belief in the Allied forces, they could not know whether their position in thrall to Germany would be permanent. They were also blind to their own fates, and one of the diarists would not survive for the long-anticipated liberation and reunion with family. Others wrote longingly of family and friends they would see again, only to find later that these loved ones had been dead for many months. They were wary (and condemning) of any “bad players” among their neighbors; they were supportive of their local Guernsey officials, but impatient with their mistakes. In these diaries, they complain and they worry and they dream, as all people do. They provide an excellent, uncensored window on the Occupation, and one that does not fall prey to anachronistic thinking. And, without any intention of doing so, they reveal the structure of rhetorical resistance as it develops under conditions of domination.

Now, when I say that these diaries are uncensored, I must separate the published accounts from those that are only available in archives as unpublished manuscripts. Both Rev. Ord's and Ken Lewis's diaries remain unpublished, although they are the most fascinating and detailed accounts of the period. Unpublished also are the diaries of Arthur Mauger, Bert Williams, Gertie Corbin, Ambrose Robin, William Arthur Warry, and Elizabeth Doig. The other four diaries have been published: Dorothy Higgs's as
Life in Guernsey under the Nazis, 1940–45
in 1947, Kitty Bachmann's as
The Prey of an Eagle
in 1972, Jack Sauvary's as
Diary of the German Occupation of Guernsey, 1940—1945
in 1990, and Winifred Harvey's as
The Battle of Newlands
in 1995. The problem with a published diary is the possibility that editors, often family, will “clean up” the diary and remove the very immediacy and frankness that make the diary useful to begin with. Because these four diaries were published prior to Bunting's book (or in Harvey's case, during the same year) and thus prior to any extensive revisions of history, they are unlikely to be cleansed of controversial material. I find the published diaries to be consistent with the tone and information in the unpublished accounts, and I have not hesitated to utilize them. However, the reader may assign different weight to the published diaries at his or her discretion.

It is also important to note that these diaries, for all their frank directness, were censored to some degree by the authors as they wrote. There was a certain level of danger involved in keeping these secret accounts of the Occupation. On March 14, 1943, Rev. Ord recorded in his diary and underlined for its ironic importance: “
Someone in Jersey has been imprisoned for keeping a diary!
”
⁷⁵
More often, the writers were concerned that the information recorded could get themselves or their neighbors into trouble. Thus, some are politic in what they record and give hints of interesting stories untold. Kitty Bachmann put it this way: “There are many things which could be recorded if caution were not the constant watchword. The subjects exempted from these pages reduce the rest to trivialities.”
⁷⁶
It was her opinion that “the pen is more dangerous than the sword,”
⁷⁷
although this belief did not seem to hamper her recording the more comical foibles of herself and others.

What appear to be withheld in these instances are accounts of activities incompatible with the goals of the occupiers. It is only the resistant that needed protecting from German officials, and there seemed to be little hesitation in outing collaborators, sexual dalliers, or black-marketeers. Some, like Dorothy Higgs, use easily deciphered code for their own illegal activities, such as listening to the BBC over wireless sets. Thus, there are references to how they needed to “sort the beans” in the attic at a given time.
⁷⁸
Despite concerns that they, or their neighbors, might be condemned by their own writing, some diarists (Rev. Ord and Ken
Lewis, notably) are shockingly frank and detailed. It is disturbing to imagine the repercussions had these two diaries fallen into German hands.

An objective study of this period has its difficulties because World War II is a period of high drama. Those heroic figures that risked all for those in peril, those unique souls who have been designated “righteous among the nations,” deserve to have their stories told and retold. So, too, do the resistance fighters throughout Europe, and the common Allied soldiers who faced uncommon dangers in prosecuting the war. It should in no way lessen our admiration of the extraordinary to acknowledge the quieter efforts of the ordinary. Not everyone has the presentiment to anticipate coming dangers for self or others, not everyone is composed of the steel needed for incredible deeds, and not everyone is in a position where such deeds are even possible. This is a study of average people trapped in a situation that would challenge their resourcefulness, sometimes on a daily basis, for five long years.

Much of the scholarship on the Occupation attempts in some way to evaluate the patriotism of the civilians caught up in the situation. Given the apparent tensions with mainland Britain over the Occupation, it is important to state that I do not seek to compare the residents of Guernsey to other people in other situations during the war. In fact, I am only examining the experience of this one Channel Island, as I believe that even the experience of the larger Island of Jersey had its own particular ethos. By examining accounts written at the very time that the people of Guernsey were living this experience, I hope to avoid both the vagaries of memory and the emphasis on controversy that seems to follow modern historical analysis of civilians during the war. It is only through a close reading of one particular instance of Occupation that a detailed understanding of rhetorical resistance is likely to emerge, and Guernsey's experience of Occupation will provide us with that text.

A common metaphor in the communication discipline speaks of the control of information as being like a dam: information will still flow, but by carving its way in new courses around the obstacle. Thus, to understand the type of resistance that emerged in Guernsey, the situation under which the Islanders lived must also be understood.
Chapter 1
introduces the panoptical nature of an Occupation that took place in this small island in the English Channel. Counter-surveillance and the “reading” of the occupier developed quickly, and a discussion of these elements provides a frame for the key events that occurred during the five years of Occupation.
Chapter 2
introduces the two foundational elements that are prerequisite to the development of rhetorical resistance. The story of the Guernsey Occupation involves interpersonal communication: with family and friends who remained in Guernsey, with evacuated family and neighbors, and with the occupying forces in their midst. Through communication and the everyday handling of the deprivations of Occupation, Islanders developed, first, the sense of support necessary to community action. The second vital element is a sense of trust and commonality, a belief in shared community values, and support for a counter-ideology to that of the dominant.

These foundational aspects of support and trust build to a study in chapters
3
,
4
, and
5
of the three-pronged approach to resistance undertaken by the Guernsey Islanders during the war years. In detailing a rhetorical resistance, this study examines the secondary discourse that undercut official methods of communication. Specifically, I examine the functioning of rumor and gossip, by which discourse moved in its own path around the Island, and which served as a means of manipulation and control (
chapter 3
); the implications of common narratives—of propaganda and counterpropaganda, of jokes and stories and other unofficial discourse (
chapter 4
); and the structure of acts of symbolic resistance, many of them clustered
around coded discourse and the illegal wireless sets retained by Islanders at great personal risk (
chapter 5
). The conclusion examines the final year of Occupation, the Liberation of Guernsey, and certain instances of public memory as structured immediately after the Occupation and over time. It brings together the many elements discussed in this study to pose an outline for rhetorical resistance applicable to other instances of prolonged military occupation and to other situations of domination.

This study will show that the Germans viewed the occupation of the Channel Islands in different terms than they did the occupation of Europe. Despite the brutal and in some ways inexplicable air raid, the Germans initially viewed the Islanders as potential allies, with many of the troops convinced that they would be greeted as liberators when they “freed” the Islands from England. Even though they were quickly relieved of that misconception, German officials were correct in anticipating that the Island situation was not analogous to that in Europe. Guernsey was an island far closer to then-occupied France than to free England. It was actually considered so strategically unimportant by the British that an invasion and retaking of the Island did not occur even after D-Day.

As I will discuss later, the Germans knew they were unlikely to face the equivalent of European young men who grabbed guns, attacked with subversive skill, and disappeared into the mountains. As Norman Le Brocq, a Jersey resister, said in a postwar interview, “You couldn't take to the mountains in Jersey with arms in hand. First we've got no mountains and second we had no arms.”
⁷⁹
What was true of the larger Island of Jersey was certainly the case in Guernsey, with its 24.3 square miles and minimal places to hide. In fact, this study will attempt to replace comparisons to the French Resistance with more accurate analogies that better match the isolated situation of the Channel Islands. Once freed from cinematic notions that violence is the only means to confront evil, we can then appreciate the rationale behind a nonviolent resistance based on the manipulation of information. It would be primarily individuals fighting this battle for psychological control during the Occupation, and the struggle took place in an atmosphere where superior knowledge served as the counter to power, and communication became the means of command.

The German occupiers clearly had as part of their agenda the desire to control the mental universe of the occupied. To counter this control, the Islanders became adroit inventors of new psychological resources to help them navigate the shifting ground they found all around them. In some instances, they designed labyrinthine community networks of information as protection for their fellow citizens and impediments to the occupation forces. This study will show that the Germans were well aware of the special nature of this resistance and took countermeasures along the same lines. Thus, the five-year Occupation of Guernsey becomes a story of new channels circumventing the control of information, and of a subjugated people devising methods of sufferance and endurance to buy the time needed to survive with their spirits intact. Rather than the received view of a simple passivity in average Islanders that bordered on collaboration, this study of the German Occupation of Guernsey reveals a quiet defiance and a rhetorical insurgence of depth and nuance. For the occupied population of Guernsey, it would be a subtle resistance.

CHAPTER ONE

The Panoptical Occupation

E
VERYONE SEEMS TO BE IN A DREADFUL HURRY
. I
F YOU WANDER TODAY THROUGH THE
narrow, winding streets of St. Peter Port, you may hear rapid footsteps behind you as young and not so young Islanders walk briskly past. I once felt the light, sharp rap of a woman's cane on my leg (eighty, if she was a day) to urge me out of the way as I lollygagged through the Pollet, the extension of High Street that curves gently down toward the harbor. It almost seems that these busy people will run out of room and continue walking purposefully right off the Island and into the English Channel. But there has always been an energy here that runs counter to expectations of sleepy island life.