Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (28 page)

This necessarily restrictive audience has sometimes led to deep frustration in the Channel Islands with modern interpretations of their history. Our rapidly dwindling survivors of the time of the Occupation, modest as that generation tends to be, have recently opened up and shared their best anecdotes of clever thwarting of the German will, only to have these efforts dismissed as minor and unremarkable, or worse yet, viewed as some cover for mass collaboration. This is not a unique interpretive problem. Subordinated populations know intimately the aggression behind symbolic and coded discourse, and the use of these subtle means to affect the conduct of the powerful.
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Those outside the situation of powerlessness often only see the “façade of the public transcript” and are unable to see through a discursive guise that was, after all, designed to be “cryptic and opaque.”
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It could be said that the public transcript of the Occupation was metaphorically written in German, just as the official story of American slavery and post–Civil War Reconstruction was for so many years only written by whites, many of them slaveholders and their descendants. The story of most corporations and large businesses is written not by the many lower-level workers, but by the few in the front office. Thus there is a tendency for the shadow discourse of those without power (the hidden and the coded) to be viewed not as true subversion, but as a simple popping off at the mouth, as pinpricks easily ignored by the powerful, or as “empty posturing” that takes the place of actual resistance.
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The concept of the “safety valve” is a potentially valid one that I will discuss later, but for now there is a basic rule of thumb that can be followed in assessing the subversive power of acts found in the hidden transcript. We should keep our eyes on the Germans. When they, the “elites” of the Occupation, view even small acts as important and react toward them with shows of force and with countermeasures, it is a sure sign that these acts possess some ability to undercut the power differential.
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By keeping German reactions in view, it will aid us in avoiding the key mistake of perceiving open resistance as the only resistance. As James Scott puts it so clearly, “Each realm of open resistance to domination is shadowed by an infrapolitical twin sister who aims at the same strategic goals but whose low profile is better adapted to resisting an opponent who could probably win any open confrontation.”
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The next three chapters will profile this “twin sister” as she emerged during the Occupation. The remainder of this study will show that rhetorical resistance took three primary forms: alternative discursive channels and the flow of information, narrative sense-making, and subversion of the dominant through acts of symbolic defiance.

Information was a nexus of power and a basic need for both the Germans and the Islanders.
Chapter 3
will examine the secondary channels of private discourse that ran parallel to the occupier-controlled public channels of information. Rumor and gossip, despite their reputations as problematic hindrances to communication, are actually effective means of control when exercised by the powerless. Although rumor and gossip have their own narrative content, which I will discuss, they also provided a stream of information that wended its own path around the Island.
Chapter 4
will present the mental game that was played through propaganda and counter-propaganda in the Island. The Germans were on a constant drive to control the narrative content of information, just as the Islanders were always on the alert for means to circumvent that control. In that chapter, too, I will discuss the way that narrative sense-making took place through common, and deceptively harmless forms of communication such as jokes and stories.
Chapter 5
then takes us to the heart of the matter with an examination of more active resistance during the Guernsey Occupation, acts that clustered around symbolic expression. I will seek common threads uniting the various covert means of standing up to German control, and the points where these means erupted into public view.

In this chapter, I will begin the examination of the first form of rhetorical resistance during the Occupation, with the role of rumor as a shadow means of discourse. Rumors, which swept the Island and were seemingly the least controlled by anyone, including the Islanders, actually served a distinct function of expressing the deepest hopes and anxieties of those passing them on. There were points where rumor transcended simple expression, and attempts were made to manipulate this informal channel for distinct purposes. On the other hand, gossip—rumor's fellow traveler—had a far stronger ability to check the actions of others. Gossip became the one method that the vast majority of patriotic Guernseymen and women had to protect themselves against the bad players in their midst. This chapter will consider the function of gossip as a rhetorical tool, one that instructed on acceptable norms and values at the same time that it sanctioned those outside the pale. Because of the natural connection with gossip, this chapter will also examine one of the points of controversy in the historical record of the Guernsey Occupation: the role of informants, collaborators, black-marketeers, and those willing to fraternize with the occupying forces. Just as hardship brought out the best in most of the Island, it brought out the worst in a certain part of the population. The Islanders were well aware and contemptuous of any quislings and rogues in their midst. A further complication arose from the fact that these were neighbors, with whom they often had interpersonal relationships before the Occupation.

There developed, particularly as the war moved toward its end, common fantasies of postwar retribution, when the guilty would receive their just desserts. This projection into the future provided an outlet for aggrieved feelings and prevented retaliation during the Occupation itself, actions that would have been dangerous for the entire population. Although appalled by those lacking basic morals and/or patriotism, some Islanders found themselves weighing the seriousness of offenses, discovering a measure of forgiveness for human weakness. Islanders also worried about the
appearance
of fraternization. Even setting the line dividing acceptable versus unacceptable behavior is difficult in unstable times, when situations are unfamiliar and the rules of the game are not always clear. Thus, these accounts provide an opportunity to explore self-concept and our justifications for personal behavior when the lines of honesty and proper action are not clearly drawn.

THAT LYING DAME

For such a familiar aspect of our communicative lives, rumor can be surprisingly elusive to define. Most researchers agree that rumor is unverified information, usually put forward as a claim intended to be believed, that passes from person to person and involves events and issues of public concern.
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Important in such definitions is that rumor, by its very nature, is unsubstantiated, although that does not mean that it will prove false as events unfold. The unreliable nature of rumor, its lack of solid grounding in fact, fuels the contempt most intelligent people have for rumors and for those who spread and believe them. In the introduction to his diary, written after Liberation, Ord refers to the traditional personification of rumor as “that lying Dame” and admits that any record of the Occupation would be incomplete without an account of the rumors that swept Guernsey. He also quotes E. F. Benson's view that a study of World War II could be composed simply from the wild rumors of the time, a psychological portrait of “the effect of jangled and excited nerves on our capacity for credulity.”
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All communities trade in rumor as part of their everyday currency of discourse, and rumor was not new to the Island as simply a product of the war or the Occupation. It did, however, take on a new importance as other means of obtaining information were restricted.

It is no mystery why rumors grew in number, and the tendency to pay heed to them also increased during the Occupation years. In recent years, Ralph Rosnow predicted the construction and transmission of rumors based on four conditions: an overall sense of uncertainty, the importance of the rumor topic (“outcome-relevant involvement”) to those involved in transmission, a state of individual anxiety, and credulity (whether the rumor appears trustworthy).
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It is easy to see how the first three of these factors were in almost continuous play during the Occupation, simply based on conditions already discussed in this study. What is particularly interesting is the contemporaneous viewpoint concerning the last factor: the level of believability when it came to the many rumors racing from person to person across the Island.

Kitty Bachmann remembered that the “first of a record crop of rumours” came to her hearing before the Occupation was even under way, when Miss Ross came to tell her that ocean liners were coming to take the entire population to Canada.
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The uncertainty of the evacuation period meant that rumors of highly questionable origin were given credence as people sought any information that would help them to decide whether to stay or go. But rumor never settled back down to the typical level of normal Island life, and Ambrose Robin shared Kitty's metaphor when he described the “tremendous crop of rumors that circulate from day to day.” His theory for this harvest of questionable information had to do with the “meagre” quantity of local news in the papers and the “official German Communique” that passed for news of the outside world. No one knew what was happening even on the other side of the Island, so there was considerable room for speculation to grow.
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Our diarists, as a whole, might have been less credulous than the average Islander, simply because the process of keeping a diary reveals some verbal ability and a mind that sifts through experiences. Sometimes Kitty became exasperated with the Guernsey populace, as when the “alluring fable” went around that a BBC broadcast was planned with some Guernsey schoolteachers. What could be more desirable to parents than word of their evacuated children? When this broadcast turned out to be a discussion of the Alderney evacuation, Kitty expostulated, “Alas! Just how gullible can we be?” She believed that it was “wishful thinking” that made the populace naive, and it was wiser “to leave truth and rumour to do their own winnowing.”
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The person apparently most interested in rumor as an Occupation phenomenon was Rev. Ord. Part of this fascination was simply the wry viewpoint of a highly educated and perceptive man now in the position of leading a flock that was far more gullible. Occasionally, he would record some of the more outlandish stories making the rounds, and simply appended, “O sancta simplicitas!”
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as a passing assessment of those likely to believe such tales. Other times, he was drawn unwillingly into the rumor itself, as with the report of his “arrest” that opened this chapter. The combination of these factors was irresistible to Ord's sense of the comic. In that first Occupation July, a woman, “one of the more simple type” of his congregation, passed along a rumor about the war to another lady. The story was improbable enough that the hearer expressed doubt about the tale in no uncertain terms. Whereupon the first woman responded, “Oh, but it's perfectly true. I have it
ON THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY
. In fact I don't mind telling you it came from the Reverend Ord.” Ord related this little event with relish, calling his role in this rumor “pure imagination,” but rather “pleasant to be thought to be in the know.”
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Ord's true interest in rumor and its attribution was based in the psychological impact that he could see in his congregation. An elderly man stopped Ord on the street in September 1940: “Just hear—nasty bit of news from a most reliable source!” (“Always a reliable source,” dryly observed Ord to his diary.)
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That same fall, Ord described the considerable distress caused by a “petty official” (he does not say which one) indulging in some “idle chatter” that all church services were soon to be canceled. This casual prophecy was merely this particular official's interpretation of the newly imposed ban on meetings, but “one old lady wept inconsolably when she heard it.” With a rare display of anger, Ord considered it “intolerable” that this official, “with the glint of superior information in his eye,” should add to the fears of an innocent population trying to be brave in the face of uncertainty.
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What prevented the dismissal of even absurd stories were the times that rumor preceded reality. Although Rev. Ord bemoaned the fact that they were “beaten from pillar to post in this land of rumour,” he also had to grant that few could afford to reject such tales wholesale when “so many have turned out to contain a modicum of truth.” Ord seems embarrassed by this need to rely on unsubstantiated stories, noting that “outsiders may laugh,” but under the current conditions “this is the air we breathe.”
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Indeed, many of the rumors reported by the diarists turned out later to be true, at least in part, and these “hits” more than justified closer attention to rumors despite the many “misses” when they proved false. At times rumors preceded reality because they were based on hidden facts.

In September 1941, a “vile rumour” swept through the Island, upsetting everyone. It was said that in reprisal for the Nazi agents being seized in Iran, all non-Guernsey men (some said between eighteen and forty-five, and some all the way up to age sixty) would be deported. The basis for the rumor had been the request German authorities had made for detailed reports concerning anyone not born in Guernsey. According to Rev. Ord, it was “indiscreet chatter” by States clerks complying with this request for information that had launched the rumor. Once under way, it started to grow as rumors do, and soon came to encompass women and children.
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But a glance behind the scenes proved this rumor to be based on a very real threat. It was true that British authorities had interned a group of German nationals in Iran, suspecting them of illegal, subversive activities. Hitler was furious and, seeking a means of reprisal, ordered ten British subjects deported from the Channel Islands for every German detained in Iran.
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Ken Lewis, who might have been one of the clerks responsible for a little “indiscreet chatter” about the German plans, “heard the Germans wanted 700 men to take away. As a result I worked all Thursday afternoon till 8:30 all day Friday till 7:15pm” compiling the demanded lists.
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