Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (41 page)

Dissecting narrative constructions is key to seeing the Occupation through the eyes of the occupied rather than through the official viewpoint of their captors. The most pressing need was to understand those in power over them. It is not that these stories told average people something new, for they had ample opportunity to experience German duplicity and strong-arm tactics. However, warning narratives served to heighten wariness as Islanders faced new situations, such as German billeting. Stories and jokes also provided a satisfying means to overcome an enemy who, in reality, held all the cards. Other stories gathered their humor from fellow Islanders who just did not get it, usually due to age or some other infirmity. And they defined their world in common through language that captured the barrenness, the danger, and the twisted new reality that they lived.

So it was in casual conversation—in sharing among themselves jokes and stories, small turns of phrase, colorful metaphors—that Islanders wrote their own account of the Occupation. Most of this narrative has been lost to history, although its echo exists in the stories of the Occupation generation, who at one point were very forthcoming in sharing narratives pulled from the hidden transcript. They quickly found that the far more vast remnants of the public transcript overwhelmed their simple story of courage and resourcefulness. This result, while frustrating to the Islanders, was hardly surprising, for it is the self-congratulatory narrative of those in power that is designed to live. The hidden transcript is neither structured for public consumption nor likely to survive its creators in its full form. In the final portion of this chapter, I will explore one small aspect of this hidden transcript, seeking contemporaneous perspectives on an Island leadership tasked with guiding Guernsey through five years as an occupied people.

BUFFERS

Following an evening service in St. Sampson on May 2, 1943, a very prominent States official sought a private word with Rev. Ord. The prospect of an impending cut to the already meager civilian rations was anticipated around the Island, and this official wanted to fill Ord in on the negotiations taking place behind the scenes. On the previous Friday, the Controlling Committee had a German order thrust before them that would reduce the bread ration to 2 lbs 5 oz. (from the current 4½ lbs.) per week. The meat ration would go from 4 oz. per week to 2 oz., and cooking fats would be reduced to 1¾ oz. The Germans insisted that this plan be placed in effect “
AT ONCE
.” The Controlling Committee was horrified, believing this to be tantamount to a death sentence for very many in the Island who were barely clinging to their physical health as it was. The Committee protested vehemently and began a process to “play for time.”

Telling the Germans that some parts of the order were unclear and implementation would take time, the Committee requested a conversation with their opposite numbers in Jersey to discuss how best to put the order into effect. To their great surprise, this request—made often but never previously allowed—was granted. Buoyed by contact with the “strong-minded Bailiff of Jersey,” the Committee decided to continue stalling and to submit an appeal through
the Swiss ambassador in Berlin. If the rations were cut to the extent ordered, the Committee insisted to the Germans, only the intervention of Red Cross supplies could prevent disaster. And now they had to wait to see how this move to bring in the protecting power (Switzerland) would play with the Germans.
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This conversation with Ord was not merely to provide information but also to solicit his aid. According to this States official, the Germans had refused to allow the papers to publish the States' position on this anticipated ration cut. What would likely appear would be the usual order and explanation that implied, or directly stated, that this cut came from the Controlling Committee, or at least was readily agreed to by them. This official wondered if Ord could “circulate the facts as discreetly as I might.”
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The actual story of a determined pushback against Nazi orders would never be allowed in the press, so the truth must be sent word of mouth among the civilian population. This account gives a clear description of the subtle battle for control between the dominant and the subordinate that occurred regularly during the Occupation. More important for the purposes of this study, it highlights the resistant role of the hidden transcript as a parallel construction to the public transcript.

When the Bread Rationing Order (1943) came out on May 7, it was a victory for the Controlling Committee. Male heavy workers would receive 4¾ lbs. of bread (female heavy workers would receive 4¼), and all other adults would be reduced to 3¾ lbs.
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According to Ambrose Robin, the Controlling Committee also managed to gain a cancellation of the fat and meat reduction at least temporarily.
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Ord lauded the grit of the Island authorities: “The courageous stand of the Controlling Committee has thus won for the Island a concession which may make all the difference.”
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Yet who would be privy to this story of playing for time in desperate circumstances? The public transcript of the newspapers and official documents—all controlled by the occupiers—would give an account of collaboration, or at least cooperation, between the Germans and Island authorities.

Although most later readers of the Guernsey newspapers could see through the propaganda that littered their pages, the same could not be said of the official documents. When many of the internal documents from the Occupation were released in the 1990s, they fueled a view of the States as at best weak-kneed, and at worst collaborative. A new frame needs to be introduced in reading these documents. Even a verbatim transcript of a meeting between the Controlling Committee and the German authorities would only record the carefully couched language that committee members used in negotiation. The true opinions and intent of the speaker, the steps taken behind the scenes, and the efforts to circumvent authority are not to be found in these official documents.

In the final portion of this chapter, I want to examine briefly the Islanders' view of their own Controlling Committee and some of the positive outcomes and identifiable shortcomings of its tenure. Knowles Smith's account of the Occupation, as well as the many books written by those in the Islands, has moved the historical discussion forward on this complicated question. When it comes to the particular controversy of the treatment of Jewish Islanders, especially the three women from Guernsey who lost their lives in German concentration camps, the combination of Knowles Smith's general account and Frederick Cohen's fair and detailed
The Jews in the Channel Islands during the German Occupation, 1940–1945
provides new understanding of the way these events unfolded.

I am interested in related questions that seek an understanding of the Committee's actions from the perspective of rhetorical theory. How did average Islanders read the actions of their leaders, and was the Committee's mask of outward compliance understood by those whom
they represented? At what point did this tactic—the most common and perhaps the only option for a subordinate population—break down, leaving the Committee unable to protect its people and subject to the condemnation of a history based on the public transcript? What do the discursive games played by the Committee with their German masters tell us of narrative as the second form of rhetorical resistance?

An overall examination of the workings of the Controlling Committee supports the contention that they took a “utilitarian approach” to their work, attempting to gain “the greatest good for the greatest number of Islanders.”
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This was a reasonable general perspective for men thrown suddenly into the task of ruling without power, under the watchful gaze of a ruthless master. However, there is no evidence that the States officials consciously made a choice to “sacrifice the few to save the many.”
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The members of the Controlling Committee spent the five years of Occupation playing it by ear. None of them were trained for anything even slightly representing their new situation; indeed, what type of training could there be? John Leale, who stepped into Sherwill's position as president of the Controlling Committee, after Sherwill's early ouster, later accurately said that they were merely “pitchforked” into their new roles.
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Once formed and operating as the only voice for the people of Guernsey, they adopted a common perspective of how best to play the hand that they were dealt. In doing so, they came to the same conclusion that other subordinate groups have reached: that a “blanket rejection of compliance seems poorly reasoned and potentially harmful.”
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They already saw that even a crack in the mask of compliance had led to the removal of Sherwill, giving them reason to fear that the entire Committee could just as easily be dissolved, and the Island run directly by the Germans as an enlarged prison camp. Piecing together hints from insider views and fragments from the hidden transcript with an examination of the Committee's actions, it seems clear that the States in general worked to perfect their “performance of deference and consent.”
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It might fairly be asked when we can know that such deference is a performance and not an expression of wholehearted collaboration. Those who adopt this strategy are at a distinct disadvantage in proving that their mask of compliance does not reflect the actual contours of their own faces. We have such documents as Sherwill's memoirs and the report of John Leale made during May 1945, but any documents made after the fact are easily dismissed as justifications or window dressing to disguise collaboration. Even during the time that the strategy is unfolding, those who take this stance run the risk of alienating their peers if the mask is too impenetrable, or if there is no alternative means regularly to reveal their true intentions and feelings. According to John Jordan, those who take the stance of performed compliance, being privy to their own intent, often find it “liberating” and see it as “a different means of resistance…the performance of a role rather than a crystallized identity.”
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They are often frustrated to find that they are misunderstood by their fellows and condemned by history for their compliance.

Despite the risks inherent in such a stance, and the unlikelihood that it is, in any sense, a cure for powerlessness or some ticket to a “utopian existence,” it may allow not only survival but also a subtle means to subvert the most onerous of situations.
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On both sides of the power divide, we can see how the Germans and the Islanders, especially the Controlling Committee, engaged in a “dialectic of disguise and surveillance,” both trying to maintain a mask of competence and command while attempting “to peer behind the mask” of the other.
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One clear purview of the powerful is the ability to maintain their own privacy while stripping away the privacy of those under their control. In an Occupation structured on panopticism, thwarting
the penetrating gaze of the Germans was an initial step towards regaining some measure of secrecy for the States officials. Few masks are as impenetrable as that of ostensible compliance, or a better disguise for the covert manipulation of the powerful.
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As practiced by the States of Guernsey, it was a tactic that yielded both gratifying success and unintended, sometimes devastating, failure.

Although we can never penetrate the States offices and listen in on the opposition and negotiations made by the Controlling Committee, there are hints as to what took place. Leale, in his overview of the Occupation provided in his May 23, 1945, address, mentioned that it was unfortunate that there was no record in the early period of the Committee's protests, which were limited “to those of a verbal nature.” It was only as time passed, as the strain of governing and limited nutrition began to take its toll, that the Committee members realized that they would no longer be able to trust their memories of what had been said in these negotiations. At the time, they were not focused on postwar justification of their actions, but on proof in later dealings with the occupiers that certain opinions had been expressed, specific representations had been made, and precise agreements had been reached. Increasingly, the Committee began to write more letters and to have Mr. Guillemette take notes if an interview with the Germans seemed particularly important. The Committee members would immediately read and sign his minutes before fading memories could muddle a perception of what had happened.
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Fortunately, there are two contemporaneous reports that give hints of the functioning of the States officials in their role as buffers between the Germans and the Guernsey populace. In October 1940, Ken Lewis had an informal interview with Mr. Sherwill and started to work in his office, remaining as a clerk in the States offices throughout the war, doing all sorts of jobs. He spent considerable time, it seems, typing in German, a difficult job until he got the hang of it.
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He gives a good sense that any and everything fell to the lot of Sherwill (and later Leale) to be examined and negotiated with the Germans. For example, a letter came through the office from a POW named Beresford Pezet addressed to his parents in St. Peter Port. Amid the chat about family and friends came these lines: “I don't suppose I will see you again…You know how quick tempered I am well I got myself into a mess and now I got to take the punishment for it, so will understand what I mean, you can't live forever. So goodbye my sweet lots of love and kisses.” This information slid blandly between the lines (likely to foil the censors) must have terrified his parents. Ken mentioned that Leale was taking the matter up with the Germans to find out the nature of the crime and punishment and to try to intervene at a distance.
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