Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (52 page)

After attending an urgent States meeting where the food shortages were made clear, as were the demands by the Germans for more tons of potatoes than the States even had, Noyon decided to act. “This time,” as Kitty Bachmann put it, it was “with our blessing.”
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Ken Lewis called it “the best thing that could have happened,” and Bert Williams asserted, “They will be able to tell a tale when they reach the mainland.” Winnie Harvey simply stated, “Our hopes are fixed upon their mission.” Noyon and Endicott were picked up by an American patrol boat, taken to Cherbourg, and from there to London. The decision to send aid may already have been made, but the evidence of Noyon and Endicott combined with that of some intrepid Jersey escapees would have reinforced it.
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This Islanders' approbation extended to other escapees during the final desperate year, and when word of escapes came, many echoed Bert Williams's words, “Good luck to them.”
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Another aspect of the body in absence is the hiding of those sought by the authorities. We have already seen the efforts made by family and friends to shelter British commandos during the early period of Occupation, and the acknowledgment that such efforts could not be sustained indefinitely in an island the size of Guernsey. This difficulty was particularly true with the widespread billeting that interwove a German presence into the parishes and homes of the Island. However, we have indications that such efforts took place despite the dangers. Rev. Ord described in July 1943 that a friend had a set of buildings on his property pulled down by the Germans. In the ruins, the Germans found a young French boy who had managed to slip away from the Organization Todt. Of course, the farmer was immediately suspected of sheltering and feeding the boy. Ord followed this account with a story of another friend with a “similar experience.” In this case, the friend was approached by a Frenchman who had been brought to the Island by force but who was refusing to work for the Germans. For a considerable period of time, the Guernseyman fed and sheltered the Frenchman. Then an acquaintance, “whether deliberately or by lack of caution,” gave the game away, and at the time of Ord's writing, the benefactor was awaiting space to serve his time in prison. As Ord put it, “One is not allowed to be a Good Samaritan.”
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Another instance of hiding occurred in July 1944 and was publicly heralded by an order in the papers. Beside the photograph of Graham Buckingham, a well-known Guernseyman of St. Peter Port, was the news that Buckingham had escaped his guards at the harbor while on his way to serve a period of imprisonment on the Continent for theft. Reportedly, the word “theft” was really the pilfering of German supplies as an act of resistance. The order further stated that Buckingham was, in the quaint construction of German-written English, “holding himself in concealment,” and the public was admonished that giving him food and shelter would result in “the severest penalty.”

Of course, the entire Island already knew of this daring escape and how the authorities had already searched the house of Miss Cherry of Elm Grove, “his young lady,” and bullied even distant relatives of the man. Rev. Ord expressed the Island viewpoint: “We all wish him a successful hiding till we are released.” Despite the odds against him, Buckingham managed to remain concealed until January 1945 when, while staying with relatives, he was cut badly trying to uncork a bottle. Imprisonment on the Continent was not then an option, and after four weeks in the Emergency Hospital, he served his time in the Guernsey prison until Liberation. The Buckingham case was a rare exception to the near impossibility of secreting individuals in Guernsey for an extended period of time. With the food shortages and an Occupation that stretched on for years, it was a form of resistance that few could even attempt.
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The Germans were exquisitely sensitive not simply to physical absence, but to the dangers of mass physical presence. Many of their orders reveal a fear of possible group actions, combined with a need to keep the Islanders individuated and thus easier to surveil and control. These concerns are seen in the ban on organizations and meetings, and even in the regulations guiding response in the movie theaters. From the fall of 1940, notices were posted outside the Gaumont and other Island theaters that read, “Demonstrations of displeasure or applause will lead to the closure of this place of entertainment.”
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This German awareness that bodies en masse are less easily controlled makes the incident of the
Charybdis
funeral more surprising. On October 23, 1943, HMS
Charybdis
was sunk off the coast of Guernsey, resulting in the death of 464 men, the largest loss of life in the Channel during the entire war.
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The 107 survivors were rescued by other boats, but soon bodies of the sailors started to wash up on the Guernsey beaches.
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For whatever reason, the Germans decided to accord full military honors, with Union Jack–draped coffins and a firing squad, to these members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. Guernsey turned out in vast numbers to Foulon Cemetery for this rare opportunity to pay respect to their dead sailors, with Islander attendance estimated in excess of 5,000. The over nine hundred wreaths brought by the Guernsey populace were so remarkable that Islanders spent the next week going back to the cemetery to see them piled on the sailors' graves.
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Yet the most amazing scene was at the funeral itself. Bill Warry found it “strange to see the enemy there, and also the civilians, some of our retired Generals, etc., also to hear the German artillery firing away in the distance, a thrilling scene.”
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Ken Lewis, who attended with some other clerks from the office, could not see much because of the crowd. He did note that the German commander of the firing party said “Furs Vaterland gefallen” (For the fallen for the Fatherland) before giving the order to fire the three volleys in honor of the dead. Ken was disappointed in the attitude of the crowd, believing that “many treated it as a football match rather than as paying tribute to the dead.”
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What Ken sensed as the “us versus them” nature of a football match was the patriotic fervor that was being engendered in the crowd and that swirled on the edge of physical demonstration.
Restraint in making resistance public is often determined by “tactical prudence.” This discretion, however, may easily be lost when the subjugated are granted the sheltering anonymity of a crowd.
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It was a potentially dangerous moment to combine a crowd of that size, grief over the loss of the young men, bottled-up patriotism, and the enemy responsible for the deaths of the sailors within reach. If the Germans wanted to display their higher culture and receive respect from the civilian populace, they miscalculated the likely Islander response. It is notable that they subsequently banned the civilian populace from funerals for the twenty-nine sailors whose bodies later washed up on the Guernsey beaches.
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Finally, and perhaps oddly, the resistance of body rhetoric is not just the absence of the body in flight and in hiding, or the potential for bodily action en masse, but also the refusal of the body in compliance. Although the primary survival technique among the Island's subjugated population may have been the kind of overt compliance sheltering covert subversion described thus far, there was also a place for noncompliance in their repertoire of resistance. Just as silence may serve at times as a form of verbal criticism,
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both noncompliance and hypercompliance provide an unstated commentary on the actions demanded by the powerful. To decline to act in the face of an order to do so is as challenging to the structure of power as a refusal to speak when information is demanded. And it is just as dangerous.

Some of the scofflaw mentality in Guernsey concerned minor infractions and served more as an assertion of will than as anything effecting a physical change. Still, small refusals were vital to communal identity among the Islanders, a fact that the Germans acknowledged in their desire to crack down on even minor flouting of their orders. Some infringements allowed the Islanders to see themselves as superior to their masters and were designed to confound the Germans' understanding of their civilian possessions. For example, when the sirens went off one morning in November 1941, the civilians on the street in St. Peter Port simply went about their business unheeding. The Germans had ordered that whenever an alarm went off, the population was to take shelter immediately. The Islanders intuited that it was merely a drill, a “sham invasion” that the Germans were practicing, and refused en masse to play their role. In one sense, it disrupted the reality of the drill, and the presence of civilians in the streets of St. Peter Port and at the harbor could not help but impede the smooth running of the German rehearsal. On the other hand, it allowed the civilians to assert their lack of fear and willingness to take the consequences if the invasion had been real.

As with many of these small infractions, the symbolic value was greater than the practical outcome. The Germans were highly irritated by this lack of compliance and stopped people in St. Peter Port and on the Front up to St. Sampson to hand out fines of 2s. and 4s. 2d., to be paid on the spot. Those without money on them had their names taken down for later court action.
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This instant retaliation actually encouraged the Islanders to believe that they were having an effect. A year later, Ken Lewis described the sounding of the raid sirens, a replication of nonresponse by the civilian populace, and the satisfying common understanding that “the German authorities were annoyed.”
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This casual scofflaw mentality comes out in various accounts of public as well as private infractions. Young people had “cycle parties,” sometimes with as many as fifty in a group, casually violating the injunction forbidding riding two abreast, and simply taking the fines and court appearances in stride.
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“Defeating” the curfew was a common game. But being caught out after curfew was not a relatively benign affair. The lovely fictional account
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
uses as a plot device the quick-witted establishment of a literary society as an excuse by a group of people stopped by the Germans after curfew. In the
book, the group paid a small fine and listed their society membership at the commandant's office; with the commandant declaring himself “a lover of literature—might he, with a few like-minded officers, sometimes attend meetings?”
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What is perfectly acceptable to establish the plot in fiction may give a false concept of the seriousness of violating curfew, especially by a group of people during a time when societies were banned and nocturnal sabotage was a potential problem for the Germans.

The seriousness with which the Germans treated curfew violations did not prevent their occurrence when conditions permitted, particularly by young people. Following D-day, the Germans were kept very busy manning the gun positions on the coast of the Island, because they anticipated an invasion as the next step in the Allied plans. For the first time since the Occupation, the roads were relatively free of a German presence, and young people were quick to take advantage by walking or riding their bicycles to their homes after curfew, singing or laughing as if to court arrest.
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It was an enactment of a change in fortune, a short-lived but defiant expression of popular belief that the war had turned decisively in favor of the Allies, and their imprisonment must soon come to an end.

Individuals would test in more serious ways the power of refusal. In complying with an attic-cleaning order in 1941, Dr. Dick Gibson found a revolver and 150 rounds of ammunition, which he subsequently reported. As his reward for compliance, he was immediately arrested and questioned by the Germans, apparently miffed that such a stash of arms had evaded earlier detection: “You English have no discipline. You do not understand how to obey orders.” Before signing his statement detailing the discovery, Dr. Gibson noticed that there was a paragraph at the bottom stating that in the future he would be loyal to the Third Reich. Gibson flatly refused to sign. After considerable argument back and forth, the Germans relented and removed the paragraph, allowing Gibson to simply sign his account of finding the revolver and ammunition. Such refusal to sign the full statement by the average Islander would have brought down harsh punishment, but Winifred Harvey believed Gibson to be “too useful and clever a surgeon” for the Germans to incarcerate.
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Hypercompliance with the Germans' own orders was a form of resistance that is more impervious to punishment. It is difficult for those in power to publicly bring to task those who are complying with rules and regulations, even if that scrupulous compliance with the letter of the law rebounds against those who made the law in the first place.

Rev. Ord was good at such games in his gentle way. Hypercompliance provided a means of comical reprisal, as when Ord was fined a mark by a passing pair of German police for his home not being sufficiently blacked out. At the close of the interview, Ord sweetly told them that he would now be in complete compliance, turned out all the lights, shut the door, and allowed the pair “to stumble their way to the gates.” “Perhaps,” he mused, “they might get tangled up in the bed of roses that lined the pathway.”
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The greater satisfaction was in the subsequent relating of this story to others.