Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (51 page)

One of the physical means of resistance for the otherwise powerless is simply flight. Leaving the onerous situation is a practical way to exempt oneself from the daily tyrannies and dangers, large and small, that constitute domination. Flight is also a rhetorical form of resistance because it speaks loudly to the truth of conditions under the power structure. In more mundane situations—office staff, fast-food workers, graduate students trapped in the petty dictatorship of a harshly enforced pecking order—leaving exists as the difficult final option. When a company or university begins to hemorrhage its people, it will be taken as an unmistakable sign that complaints about conditions were accurate. Yet escape to freedom, fleeing a situation of armed control despite the dangers of the passage, has still more to say to an external audience. The number of slaves willing to take their chances on the Underground Railroad, sometimes leaving family behind in a bid for freedom, belied the Southern rhetoric of contented slaves under the benign care of paternal owners. The missing person is a lacuna in the community landscape, whose very absence is read by the dominant, the dominated, and those external to the power situation.

For a fishing community adept at navigating the sea surrounding their Island home, Guernseymen could not help but be tempted to flee to a freedom that was so tantalizingly near. It would be a daunting passage. Managing to get past the mined beaches, eluding the armed guards watching those beaches, and navigating the treacherous tides and rocks was only part of the journey. The English Channel could be unforgiving of small craft, so it took an adept sailor and a good quantity of luck to make it all the way to England from Guernsey. Joe Mière conducted research on the number of escapees from the Channel Islands during Occupation. There were 225 total efforts to escape, with 156 of those making the attempt from Jersey. The higher number of escapees from Jersey makes considerable sense, not simply because of the larger population of that Island. During the final year following D-day, as food and fuel conditions worsened, Jersey Islanders had a great desire to reach the free coast of France, only 22 kilometers (or 12 nautical miles) away, and bring information about the dire conditions in the Channel Islands.
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The earliest escapes came in July 1940 immediately after the Occupation commenced in both Guernsey and Jersey, when events were still highly confused and before the Germans were fully in control of the beaches and waterways. Louise Willmot states that over half of the escapees from Guernsey slipped off the Island in the first two days. These were primarily family groups that included far more women than would be typical of later escapes. Although Willmot mentions that the Controlling Committee officially condemned these escapes,
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they were treated for the most part like post hoc evacuations, not meriting comment from the diarists or retaliation from the German officials. It took until early September of that year before an escape occurred that set the pattern for German response. This was the escape of eight men, described in the last chapter, whose success was detailed in British leaflets dropped by the RAF.
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The Germans immediately retaliated, forbidding fishing and publishing an edict that all boat owners had to take their boats to the St. Peter Port harbor within the next two days. Because boating was banned, the fishermen had to wheel, haul, or otherwise transport their boats over land through the narrow roads and the hilly terrain. Winnie described boats coming
from the north, the west, and from Torteval, the far southern tip of Guernsey, and wrote of the lorries and horse vans being used to help transport the very big boats. “Poor men,” Winnie sympathized, “their living is gone, also our fish.”
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The shortfall of food was problematic, but the follow-up edict by the Germans was potentially devastating. In the
Star
on September 28, a warning appeared from the Germans that a further escape might well result in all of the male population of Guernsey being deported to France.

The response to this escape and the resulting reprisals varied, but was generally negative. Kitty considered the loss of fish (and, for the fishermen, the loss of a livelihood) to be a “blot on the name” of the escapees. She understood that they had received quite the reception in England, but anticipated that their reception in the Island following the war might be another matter. In light of the potential impact to her Island home, Kitty only hoped that no one else was “contemplating such an unpatriotic move.” Patriotism was thus characterized as choosing loyalty to the States and the Island population over a grandiose move that might seem patriotic and resistant to some, but achieved little past the self-interest of the men who escaped.
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Commentary on this first major escape was overwhelmingly negative, most agreeing with a letter from Sherwill in the paper that it was a “crime against Guernsey.”
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Elizabeth Doig wrote in her prim way that “It seems such a pity when so far we have had the reputation of behaving well.”
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Jack Sauvary took a more light-hearted approach to the disturbing possibility that all men would be deported if there was a repeat occurrence: “The women would get a grand time looking after things here!”
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For all of Jack's whistling past the graveyard, the situation was hardly humorous now that there was a threat of mass deportation as retaliation for future escapes. The Islanders held their collective breath whenever it appeared that someone had slipped off the Island for England. Rumor went around in June 1942 that some men had left in a fishing boat. Simply the rumor was enough to shut down fishing while the Germans investigated. “Happily for us,” Bert Williams reported, “there was only a punt missing.”
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Guernseymen and women still faced retaliation during this same time for the young men who had attempted an escape from Jersey with photographs of some military interest. One boy drowned in the attempt and the other two were arrested.
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At this point, all cameras and photographic equipment were called in for all of the Islands, although Ken Lewis bluntly wrote, “However I have resolved that my camera will not be given in on any account.”
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Bert Williams was tart about the need for everyone to suffer for “some silly fools.”
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But if Guernsey Islanders were not happy about the subsequent punishment, it does not mean that they would cooperate with the authorities to prevent escapes. Gertie Corbin mentions that George Le Couteur had been ordered to take a boat and pursue the men who had supposedly sailed from Guernsey at this time. To which news, she appended a telling “No fear.”
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The escapees also were dangerous to the Islanders left behind because they became a source of “leaks” of the hidden transcript. As a former part of the general populace, they were privy to all of the tricks and methods used to circumvent and undercut authority. This unveiling of disguised resistance occurred with two Guernseymen, named Lawrence and Bichard, who escaped in fall of 1942, picking up two French girls standing in wait for them on the rocks at the north shore of the Island. They only had a 17-foot boat, so it was assumed for some time that they had drowned. However, after drifting for fifteen hours, they were sighted by an RAF aircraft and picked up. Guernsey learned of their safety when the BBC broadcast an interview with the four escapees. Some of the material divulged in this interview was benign enough. One girl told of the lack of food and secondhand nature of the clothing, of her opinion that German morale was low, and that wireless sets were confiscated, adding—with some
drama—that the death penalty was imposed for listening to English news.
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Then, one girl heedlessly gave an important game away by mentioning that billeted Germans were allowing their civilian hosts to listen to London. Rev. Ord described this as a “wretched blunder on the part of the B.B.C.,” because Müller would now be eager to end this particular leak of outside information. Ord could not understand why news of the escape was broadcast at all, because the Germans might well have considered those involved to have perished in transit. Knowing of their success at reaching England could only bring reprisals to prevent similar attempts. But it was far worse to have news of secret listening ploys broadcast for the Germans to hear. Ten days later, Ord found out just how devastating such revelations could be when he rang up the Chilcotts asking to hear a Churchill speech on the set belonging to Eduard, the friendly German boy billeted with them. Trixie Chilcott replied with the news, “It's
DEAD
!” Eduard had been forced to remove the wireless from his billet now that the Germans knew that such sets were potential sources of information for civilians. “So much,” wrote Ord, “for the pundits of the B.B.C. who divulged the remarks of that fool of a French girl.”
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Perhaps the BBC was given some feedback as to the effect they were having by their broadcasts, because one year later, when two men and three women escaped from Guernsey, Dorothy Higgs did not expect to hear of their safe arrival through the wireless. This escape was conducted by two fishermen, Courbet and Le Page, who picked up their wives and a male friend from the rocks at Bordeaux and took advantage of thick fog and a favorable tide to make a run for it. Winifred Harvey said that little was discussed in the Island except this escape for several days, with two highly divided opinions emerging. Some felt that this was a “brave and courageous act,” and that it was the duty of those imprisoned in Guernsey to take whatever important information they might have to the government. On the other hand, many believed it to be “disgracefully selfish” for those with an opportunity to flee and “save their own skins” to do so at the cost of greater peril for the 23,000-plus Islanders left behind. Winnie counted herself in the second category, especially after learning that all the relatives of the escapees, including elderly parents, had been thrown in jail. Stanley Noel, the manager of Bougourd's Garage, had also been seized for aiding and abetting the escape. Of course, the usual curtailment of fishing occurred, and the beaches were closed off.
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Most people seem to have agreed with Winnie's reluctant condemnation of the escapees. Bert Williams was quite simply livid. The escapees “should be shot for doing it.” The closing of the beaches would be a blow for the children, but the loss of fish for a community with only a fortnightly meat ration was serious business. Bert declared that the Islanders were all afraid to look in the papers for fear of the next order of retaliation, and “those people [the escapees] are no heros [
sic
] anyway, they have done nothing to be proud of.”
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For Peter and Kitty Bachmann, who spent a sad evening with Stan Noel before he was sent for internment in a German camp—the authorities not accepting his denials that he overhauled the engine of the boat—the personal consequences of escape were very real. Stan was weak and demoralized, having already been severely treated during inquisition, and it was with deep concern that the Bachmanns parted with him in the morning. Little wonder, then, that Kitty viewed the “escapade” of the five escapees to be “daring but thoughtless.”
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The value of the escapees' information seems to have been the major determinant of Islander support, or lack thereof, for escapes.
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Ken Lewis applied this same standard in assessing the escape, believing it to be “a selfish act” of little importance, and noting that the Secret Service “were probably as much aware of the fortifications as the ones that got away.” Thus, it was with some satisfaction that Ken reported news from England that this particular
group received a “cold reception” when they landed, that they regretted their actions, and “would return tomorrow if at all possible.” Ken is not clear about his source of information, and this ending to the story of escape resembles the type of rumor meant to warn others and influence their actions. Quite likely, this tale of the regretful escapees grew as it provided a norming device, designed to discourage acts that endangered the community.
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Escapes are active and dramatic, falling in more decidedly with notions of what constitutes resistance.
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Most Islanders were willing to suffer the consequences if the escape served a good enough purpose. And we can see a distinct shift in attitudes toward escape during the final year, when conditions had deteriorated and it was unclear whether England knew the full extent of Guernsey's plight. In November 1944, pilot Fred Noyon and a younger man named Endicott had a permit to go ormering and they simply did not return. Pilot Noyon lived in St. Sampson and had spent the war years as a fisherman. He was also one of the oldest and most adept of the Guernsey pilots and for many years had ferried the
Island Queen
, trading to London twice a week from Guernsey. Winnie Harvey described him as knowing “every tide, rock, and passage of these waters.” This knowledge meant, of course, that Noyon had every opportunity to leave whenever it suited him, but he resisted the impulse. He made clear over the course of the Occupation that he would only leave when the situation was desperate and his escape could do some good. As food and fuel were dangerously low and winter approaching, now was the time to take the information about conditions to London.
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