Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (24 page)

On the evening of August 9, ironically exactly six weeks after the deadly German raid on the harbor, Kitty and Peter heard anti-aircraft fire and the sound of RAF bombing in an attack on the airport. Kitty wrote wryly that “We now have a new ‘enemy’ from which to take cover.” Not that she could inveigle Peter into leaving the landing window and giving up his position as a spectator of the action.
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Although Kitty and others were “not enthusiastic about this sort of thing,” meaning the attack by their own forces, they were willing to welcome these potentially deadly “nuisance raids” if it made Guernsey a more difficult asset for the Germans to hold, and if the raids proved “a real headache to Hitler.”
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Bill Warry and his friends liked to watch from the windows at his club, which overlooked the Esplanade and the harbor in St. Peter Port, prime targets for RAF raiders. All calibers of guns “studded” the harbor front, and the Germans could be counted on to race to man them at the sound of the air-raid siren. “Yes,” mused Warry with great satisfaction, “we've seen some great clashes from our windows & not too many to suit us.”
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Islanders calculated their own nerve and bravery in the war effort by their attitude towards these RAF raids. It flies in the face of our common sense to heed the old military conceit to ride, or march, to the sound of the guns. In fact, much of military training is bent on retraining the natural impulse to respond to danger in a manner conducive to personal survival. It is surprising, therefore, to see through most of the diary narratives a willingness to chance being in the thick of battle, even as an unarmed civilian. The response to two relatively early RAF raids was notable, primarily because both involved civilian injuries and fatalities. The first came on Monday, December 16, 1940, in an attack on the new hangar recently completed at the airport. The hangar was disguised as a greenhouse, to blend into the actual greenhouses that surrounded it. The British seem not to have been fooled by such camouflage and made a direct hit on the hangar, turning it instantly into “a shambles.” One of the Guernsey workers, a “youngish” carpenter named Anderson, was killed outright, and one man of the Martel family was injured. Ken Lewis reported that Anderson was actually decapitated (“his head being blown right off”),
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the nature of his death making the friendly fire still more horrific. Winifred Harvey identified him as the only son of “Fuzzey's curtain and blind worker,” a young man who had been married only five months.
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Although Winnie described Anderson's death as “sad,” and Ken remarked that the incident “caused some regret in the Island,”
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it is fascinating how others shifted the blame in some measure to the victim. Jack had been told that the civilian workers were not supposed to be in the hangar during the dinner hour, most likely out of a German fear of sabotage. However, four men had gone in to play cards; the remaining fifty or sixty stayed in the actual greenhouses as ordered and thus “came out safely” when the raid was over.
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Dorothy Higgs gave Anderson even shorter shrift, calling the raid “marvellous,” and mentioning Anderson's death in a dismissive aside: “Unfortunately one worker was killed—he should not have been there. ‘They’ were
most
impressed.”
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And that was the bottom line: the impact of the raid on German plans and morale far outweighed the death of one Islander.

The second notable raid of the first half of the Occupation came during January 1942. Three Beauforts flew low over St. Sampson's Harbor, Belle Grève Bay, and past the gasworks, swooping down out of the clouds to hit the St. Peter Port Harbor and the ships being unloaded there. Then they were gone, as Jack Sauvary put it, “like a shot out of a gun.” Approximately sixty men were killed, most of them French and Belgian slave laborers. One
local man—Tucker, the crane driver—was killed, having both his legs blown off,
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and the unverified story went around that two horses that were in the crane crate in midair were obliterated so thoroughly that they vanished without a trace. The response to this raid, despite the casualties, was immediate and positive. Kitty called it “a very neat performance despite the tragic results for some local families.” And Winifred Harvey—who considered the raid “beautifully done”—described how, as she walked down the Grange soon after, with ambulances and fire engines still on the way to the harbor, all those she passed were “thrilled and beaming.” Thrilling, too, was the opportunity to listen to the BBC describe the raid that put Guernsey, however briefly, in the active war news. Winnie also maintained that it was more amusing than irritating to read the German account of the raid in the
Star
, with its entirely erroneous assessment of the Islanders' feelings.
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Many Islanders became inured to their own danger, sometimes responding like spectators at a sporting event. Rev. Ord described a group of youngsters at the La Vallette bathing pools, standing on the seawall and screaming to the pilots, “Give it to ‘em! Give it ‘em, Good old RAF!” as they watched a violent raid.
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Even in the 1942 harbor raid described previously, Winnie Harvey stepped out of the glass greenhouse she was in at her old home when the raid started. She stood under an ash tree, watching the Germans pour out of Newlands at the sound of the bombs (the young Lieutenant Eiger beaming and grinning at her). But then, because she did not want the Germans to see her sheltering under the tree, she walked down the garden in the open. A friend later took her to task, with the obvious thought that had the RAF pilots seen the German uniforms of those so close by her, they might have machine-gunned the lot, including Winnie.
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It seems that the excitement of seeing “their boys” in action, combined with a need to show fearlessness and defiance in the face of the enemy, erased even reasonable caution from the Islanders' minds. The street demonstrations of approval during the RAF raids became so pointed that a new order was published in the
Press
in September 1941 demanding that civilians stay indoors and refrain from acknowledging the attacking planes.
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This order was almost universally ignored. Perhaps this public response can be traced to the nonheroic nature of daily sacrifice demanded of the Channel Islanders during the Occupation. Standing tall in the face of guns and bombs, even if mainly that of friendly fire, was an opportunity to show visible courage and must have provided a satisfying feel of being part of the war effort.

What is also telling was the response to the news that the RAF had sunk supply ships coming from France. Most, like Rev. Ord, while acknowledging that British blockades were a primary factor in a spate of starvation deaths, described the widespread stoic attitude that “we would rather starve than see it relaxed.”
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If some Islanders secretly wished that Whitehall would act protectively toward their countrymen held hostage in the Channel Islands, most took Dorothy Higgs's attitude: “I don't mind being a lot more hungry if it helps Britain.”
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It is Dorothy who reveals the important point about the Islanders' view of English attacks. She maintained that personal danger was not on their minds, and everyone was “miles more cheerful” following the RAF strikes:
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“Oh, it is such a lovely feeling that England is still interested in us. I bet the Jerries are jealous!”
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Being abandoned by Britain was a not unreasonable concern of the Guernsey civilians. When supply ships were hit in raids, there was no rationale provided by the British government for their actions. This only enhanced feelings that Whitehall viewed the Islanders as mere pawns in a game. Most were willing to play that role, although, as Dorothy Higgs noted, “If only Churchill would send us some kind of message explaining things, it would hearten
people no end.”
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With such uncertainty and little means to obtain information, Guernsey clung to recognition from any quarter. When captured British airmen assured them that the Channel Islands' plight was known and that they were not forgotten, they embraced the information as true and comforting.
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It became apparent to Guernseymen and women that other Britons had little concept of the conditions of the Occupation. Sometimes this came through in the Red Cross messages, as it did in one message to Winnie Harvey. These messages were necessarily brief, and in the sign-off, a friend concluded with “Hope you flourish.” This struck Winnie as particularly inappropriate, writing that “survive” would be a better term than “flourish”: “The Town is tragic and the harbour desolation and we ourselves living, not knowing if, in an hour's time we may be turned out of our homes and lose all.” Warming to her indignation, Winnie decided that her friend in England “must still be living in the Cloud Cuckoo Land of the pacifists. As Marie Louise said, ‘Flourish! Our life is hell!’”
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At other times, the sense of disconnect was felt in the BBC programming. When wireless was available, the Islanders listened avidly for any sign that they were still remembered, and for any clue concerning the well-being of their evacuees. Yet, when a program was broadcast that spoke about the evacuated schoolchildren, much of the time was spent talking about Channel Islands produce and holidays. Still worse was a later broadcast that Guernsey widely considered “a travesty.” Kitty Bachmann found it “provoking” that any mention of Guernsey portrayed them as a “nation of nitwits,” still wearing poke bonnets, speaking patois, and mounted on donkeys riding to town. The BBC would drag out old Guernsey-French songs that no one recognized, when what the Islanders needed was current information about their loved ones and to hear the voices of friends and family. The one song universally recognized was “Sarnia Chérie,” used widely as Guernsey's anthem from the time it was written in 1911. But that rendering struck a bit close to home, being in Kitty's opinion “a trifle too evocative for our good, if we are to tackle the job at hand in philosophical manner.”
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The seeming insensitivity of the BBC had deeper consequences for those attempting to listen secretly once the wireless sets had been confiscated. Rev. Ord wondered at the judgment of the BBC, as they continued to introduce their stories with martial music such as Purcell's “Trumpet Voluntary.” It seemed as though the BBC believed the world to have unfettered access to their broadcasts, and the notion of people listening in secret, and at great peril, had never occurred to them. Loud martial music that could be overheard was an unnecessary story enhancement in Ord's opinion, because “it wastes precious time and no one could doubt it was British music.” He pondered on how many secret listeners had been given away not only in occupied territories but also in the Reich itself. It made him want to write to the BBC or the
Times
to “remind them that we no longer live in a civilized world of liberty.”
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This seemingly small issue, though of great importance in some quarters, illustrates a continued disconnect between the lived experience of Occupation and perceptions of that experience from the outside.

THUMBS UP!

Like any occupied people, individual Islanders would fight an internal war to maintain their spirits. Stephen Ash, writing of the occupation of the American South during the Civil War, described the common attitude of Southern civilians: “Until their liberators arrived, the people
were determined to uphold the faith.” Ash continues on to describe the communal nature of this mental attitude, and how both morale and the ability to resist, in ways large and small, “were not just matters of private faith and individual conscience.” Instead, the internal moral compass that gave guidance as to right versus wrong actions, and provided powerless individuals with a sense of their own intrinsic worth had much to do with community beliefs.
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Resistance cannot flourish in an atmosphere of individual and collective despair.

There was much to drag down the spirits of Guernseymen and women over the five years of Occupation, and by the middle point in May of 1943, Elizabeth Doig could describe the general feeling as “war weary,” worn down by hunger, evictions from their homes, and most especially by isolation from their family and friends.
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As early as the week of October 21, 1940, Jack Sauvary was so down over his late wife's birthday and some recent deaths that “even the sea and the islands don't seem the same. I hardly look at them now.”
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Jack chalked up this early depression to a sense of isolation, something that would only grow over time and made even a beautiful prison unbearable. Dorothy Higgs felt this constraint acutely. It was “depressing to have no control,” because their efforts to maintain the health and welfare of the Island did nothing to move them toward freedom.
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In fact, all the heartfelt work to ensure the survival of their Island, neighbors, and way of life for the day of freedom seemed “only to help the wrong side,” because it did nothing to dislodge the enemy.
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In May 1943, the same time when Elizabeth and Jack wrote of their depression, Dorothy also described her own “claustrophobia from being shut in physically and from spiritual isolation.” Although she believed the first year was the most difficult adjustment, she found “so little joy in this perpetual scrounging existence.”
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