Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (23 page)

Even if the woman who accosted Jack was somewhat overwrought in her desire to impose the proper attitude on others, this process of “identity construction” was actually a necessary forerunner to the establishment of resistance. Granting that all of us must construct a “performed self” that conforms to the expectations of our culture, for those in a position of powerlessness, this construction is less likely to reflect the truth of their beliefs and self-concept. In other words, those who are living or working under the thumb of others must often construct a believable mask of compliance that will avoid trouble. The more onerous the conditions, the more likely it is that the mask will be designed to be impenetrable by those in power.
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Simultaneously, the powerless develop their own subculture of beliefs and attitudes, sharing them in locations away from the surveillance of the powerful. This secondary culture carries its own normative pressures (as is clear from the women's exchange at the Bridge), but this is the level where true feelings are allowed to emerge and to be expressed. Such discourse, shared among the occupied population of Guernsey, provided a common page on which they could write their own hidden transcript. The remainder of this chapter will explore the British patriotism that Islanders tapped to form an ideological firewall during the Occupation. Easily and quickly shared, conventional symbols and slogans bound the Islanders together in a comfortable aura of mutual goals and beliefs, encouraging the trust necessary to develop a covert resistance.

Before the shock of the initial takeover had worn off, Kitty Bachmann looked back at the harrowing first three weeks, a period that seemed “more than three years” to her. The Occupation was “a heavy yoke for our British shoulders” and one that would need “a lot of
traditional grit, humour and dignity” for the Islanders to rise above it and carry on. It is telling that Kitty continued on to describe the largely symbolic intrusions that the Germans were quick to impose. It was “the metallic ring of jackboots in our little cobbled Town, Swastikas floating in the breeze over all the main buildings, the clipped, full-throated singing of their marching troops, the heel-clicking and arm-raising; and above all, the shattering din of the German Band” that gave proof of Guernsey's “change of fortune.” It was clear to the Islanders that the Germans felt they had actually secured the capture of Britain by their grasp on this small, triangular island. “If our little High Street were Whitehall,” wrote Kitty, “they could not look more triumphant.”
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No one reading these diaries, hearing the stories of the Occupation generation, or visiting Guernsey today can doubt the essential “Britishness” in lifestyle and identification, as well as fact, of the Channel Islanders. And Guernseymen and women did not keep their ties to Great Britain secret from their German captors. When Newlands was confiscated and Winifred Harvey in the process of being evicted, she had a polite but frank exchange with Professor Heinz Schlussrig, the German translator, who was overseeing her removal from her home. “Heinz” (Winnie's shorthand reference to him in her writing) turned their conversation to the task at hand of Winnie's eviction and the state of the house:

On the stairs he said,

“Madam, I hope we have not put you to too much trouble.”

“Trouble?” [I said], “well, if you call being turned out of your house no trouble, well, perhaps not.”

“Yes,” [he said], “it is not pleasant…aber es ist Krieg [but it is war]. I do not know but I think in one year the war will be over and you can return.”

“Yes, I too think that in a year or a year and a half the war will be over but not in the same way as you think.”

“But you are not English. If you are Guernsey, how can you be English?”

“I am Guernsey. My family have been here for two hundred years, but Guernsey has always belonged to England.”

“I do not know if the Germans will always be in Guernsey. If we are, what will you do?”

“Much as I love my home and my island I shall not stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have always been English and all the men of my family have been and are officers in the British army and you cannot expect me to be disloyal now.”

Heinz looked at me and said, “I would think as you do.”
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The average Islander shared Winifred Harvey's conventional patriotic feelings, but would find more covert means of expressing them.

What is doubtless clear is Guernsey's embrace of the “Myth of 1940” as it unfolded. By the term “myth,” I am not referring to something necessarily untrue, but using the term in Malcolm Smith's sense as “a widely held view of the past which has helped to shape and explain the present.”
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The important myths of our culture transform specific events into something broader and more lasting, providing unifying commonalities and lessons to be learned. Sometimes we are only aware of the power of a particular myth when it serves as a later touchstone for persuasive appeals. As Smith maintains, the vital aspect of cultural myths is not so much their factual precision in every detail, but “that these myths are implicitly believed and that they help people to make sense of their lives, that they offer a popular memory which explains
the past and the present and moulds expectations of the future.” A mythology held in common is a unifying necessity in a nation's collective sense of self.
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The Myth of 1940 is actually the interplay of three specific narratives of that signal year: the “miracle of the little boats” in the evacuation at Dunkirk in May, the Battle of Britain starting in July, and the “Blitz,” the bombing of civilian areas in Britain, stretching from September 1940 to May 1941. The Guernsey populace felt intimately involved in these events, and for good reason. It was the taking of France, culminating in the evacuation of Dunkirk, that had paved the way for their own captivity. They were unwilling spectators of part of the Battle of Britain, because as Winnie Harvey described it, they watched day after day of “roaring planes…in formations, wave after wave, ceaselessly backwards and forwards over the island, from the battles against England.”
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The Blitz formed the largest point of commonality and concern between Channel Islanders and England. Guernsey had, of course, experienced a small taste of the cruelty of civilian bombing in the June 28th attack on the harbor. When parts of London and other civilian areas were bombed so mercilessly beginning in September, the Islanders reacted out of a familiarity with that particular horror of war. Early on, they could follow the news on the wireless and often reported with concern the worst of the damage. Winnie Harvey described the massive raid on the docks and East End of London; she knew the details that the raid had lasted twelve hours and that four hundred had been killed (with thirteen hundred casualties). She wondered if this would be the “peak” of the air war in Britain, and she went with many others to church on the National Day of Prayer to pray for the safety of the nation.
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It is worth noting that these days of prayer for the nation, generally requested by the King, were imperative enough to lead some to churches they did not generally attend. When Kitty and Peter Bachmann attended St. John's Church in one such outpouring of common prayer, Kitty noted that it was their first appearance there since they were married in the church in 1928.
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But these moments of simultaneously joining together as a nation in common purpose were uplifting and unifying for Guernsey, providing an outlet if only for symbolic action.

In the early days of the Blitz, Guernsey had the comfort, if it can be called that, of following the raids and damage on the wireless. The wireless sets were returned from their first confiscation just in time for Jack to follow the devastating raid on London of December 29th, admitting that “it makes our blood run cold here, to listen to such news.”
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This December 29th raid, when fires raged in the City of London, produced the iconic image of the St. Paul's Cathedral dome rising undamaged above the billowing smoke of the surrounding flames. Islanders could not see this photograph, but hearing news of St. Paul's escape reinforced in their minds—as in other Britons—the special protection God seemed to be granting their country. Winifred Harvey considered part of that protection to be in the hands of the RAF, the British fighter pilots whose exploits were followed ardently by those counting on their success.
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Islanders would continue to listen closely to the wireless—what Winnie called “the greatest treasure”
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—for as long as they had it, and secretly once they were denied access. And they would follow the news of the air raids, torn between wanting to know and dreading the news they might hear. Jack Sauvary continued to fret about the ongoing Blitz in the spring of 1941, describing the reports as “too awful to be believed.”
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He was not alone in his sadness about the news in May 1941: “At last they have hit the Houses of Parliament, and how sad about the Abbey. All those beautiful carved stalls now, I suppose, in ruins.”
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These symbols not only of British history but also of the current church and state were considered by Islanders
as their own cultural landmarks and prized as much as local buildings and monuments. More worrisome, naturally, was the fate of the people in the bombed areas, a population that could include, as far as the Islanders knew, their own children, other relatives, and friends.

In 1943, Gertie Corbin mentioned with deep consternation the news that went the rounds that a school in London had been bombed and teachers and children killed.
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And that was often all the information that Guernsey heard, with little access to news of precisely which school was hit or the names of those who had died. A further twist of the knife came because Islanders had only spotty information about the location of their own children as the war continued. And so, Guernseymen and women listened as squadron after squadron of German planes flew overhead during the night. “We know,” wrote Gertie, “when we are warm in bed, that they are going to bomb places in England and it makes us unhappy.”
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Yet, all the airplanes overhead were not German, and following the exploits of the RAF in their occasional raids on the Island became part of occupied life. “How pleased we are to hear them overhead,” Winifred Harvey maintained. “It is a tonic.”
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This unalloyed joy at the appearance of the RAF was an attitude that had to be cultivated for some in Guernsey. As is true for all civilians in a war zone, especially those in occupied territories, their saviors could well turn out to be their destroyers. Rarely is it possible to see someone grapple with these conflicting emotions as honestly as Dorothy Higgs did during the earliest days of the Occupation. It seemed so incongruous to Dorothy to merely serve as a spectator, watching the Germans prepare for what seemed an early invasion of England. But what she could not understand was the clutch of fear she felt at the sight of an English airplane. She likened it to the children's game “Nuts in May,” where a child would be pulled over to a new team and suddenly feel conflicted over which side should win the game. This feeling of dread at the sight of the RAF, an emotion that flew in the face of conventional patriotism, seemed “inexplicable” to Dorothy. She pondered deeper meanings of having outgrown nationalism, or sensing the artificial nature of war and “taking sides” in an armed struggle, but finally she decided that it was the more “primitive” response of simple self-preservation.
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These conflicted feelings were very short-lived for Dorothy. By July 24, 1940, she had changed her lifetime attitude toward war in general, stating, “In fact, I have forgotten all about being a pacifist—I just want England not to be hurt.”
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And by September 24, a leaflet-dropping RAF “raid” drew an effusive gush of patriotic fervor: “Oh Phyll!!! We've had a raid—oh, and they dropped leaflets with a lovely message from the King. I could hug him! Before we knew about the leaflets we felt ten years younger—no, a hundred years younger!” More important than this excitement over the one-way contact with Great Britain was Dorothy's admission of a new sentimentality and more traditional patriotic feelings: “‘Sfunny how primitive one becomes at these times. I even get wet eyes when I hear ‘There'll always be an England’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ though I hated their sentiment before.”
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She was not done with exploring her own evolving attitudes and new willingness to sacrifice in war. There had been rumors that a German anti-aircraft gun would be located “on the Park,” making it an inviting target for RAF aircraft and one sure to cause civilian casualties if it drew fire. But, unlike in July, Dorothy's feelings in August about the danger were now clear and unmixed: “Somehow it would be much better to die in an English raid than a German one.”
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The last step in Dorothy Higgs's transformation from theoretical pacifist to self-sacrificial patriot came by November, when her stance on the war was finalized: “This ghastly Naziism has
got
to be wiped out before the world can be a decent place and I know now that England was right to fight.”
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Experience was a tough teacher, and Dorothy now
found her emotions (which were easily touched by injustice) leading her to embrace war and the British cause with a vigor that she had previously lacked.