Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (53 page)

Pure stubborn refusal to comply was sometimes much admired and fit with the Guernsey Islanders' view of themselves as “Donkeys.” Elizabeth Doig, very afraid and condemning of most resistance early on, became gradually more radicalized over the course of the Occupation. When the Germans called in bicycles, the necessary form of transportation for Islanders, many complied, but others took no notice of the demand. One of Elizabeth's friends ignored the notice and was sent a letter asking the reason for her lack of compliance. She replied, “My reason is that I will do nothing to help my King's enemies.” Elizabeth wrote, “I admire her spirit.”
¹³⁴

The experiences of two women will serve as examples of overt and covert refusal to obey German orders. One woman has been recognized in subsequent years as a resister, her bravery and the consequences of her resistance honored. The second woman, although the hidden purpose of her actions has been acknowledged, is not generally considered as a resister. Her actions, however, are more in line with the special nature of resistance in the Island during Occupation. Marie Ozanne, a native Guernseywoman, was a major in the Salvation Army who had spent fifteen years with the organization's work in England, Belgium, and France. She had returned to the Island in March 1940 for what could be considered a working holiday and a visit to her parents, planning to return to the Continent in September. Events of the Occupation overtook her and forced her to remain in Guernsey. The Salvation Army was one of the first organizations singled out by the Germans, although it is difficult to know why they drew special attention. Coupled with their polemical nature, their church militant style may well have been the reason that the Germans immediately banned their wearing of uniforms and holding of open-air meetings. By January 1941, the Salvation Army was ordered to permanently suspend all meetings and to close their buildings: Clifton Hall, perched high and visibly over St. Peter Port; Nocq Road at St. Sampson; and L'Islet in Vale.

Marie Ozanne was devastated by this suppression and protested immediately in dramatic fashion. On the Sunday following the closing of the buildings, she stood outside against the door of one building as a silent protest. She also was seen often in town carrying around her Salvation Army bonnet in her hand in protest, and even appeared at Grange Lodge in full uniform with badges. At that point, Inspector Sculpher was ordered to confiscate her uniform and other articles symbolic of her Salvation Army work. Marie wrote several letters to the Feldkommandant in protest of the closure of the halls, threatening to open a new building in St. Sampson. Other letters followed in August 1942 protesting the mistreatment of Organization Todt workers near her home. These letters and Marie's continued efforts to preach in the streets were the tipping point for the German officials. Marie was arrested, and the Germans ordered that she be medically examined as to her sanity. While pronouncing her as “fully responsible,” they described her as a “religious maniac” seeking martyrdom.

In October, the proceedings against her were halted and she was released from prison. The ostensible reason was that she was delusional and in the thrall of “religious fantasies,” and the Germans were planning simply to ignore her in the future. This excuse for her early release is quite transparent. Marie's health had broken down under mistreatment in prison, and the Germans wanted neither the trouble to care for her nor to have a Christian martyr on their hands. She never regained her health and died in February 1943.
¹³⁵
Perhaps the only way for the Germans to understand Marie Ozanne's Christian efforts for others was through a frame of mental illness, or perhaps this was purely an attempt to nullify her resistant actions. Marie would be posthumously awarded the Salvation Army's Order of the Founder in 1947, and she provides a clear example of determined public resistance in Guernsey.

Now let us compare this overt resistance that called down immediate punishment by the Germans to a piece of covert action more in line with the overall nature of Channel Island resistance. The woman in question is, by now, very familiar to us in her attitude and actions. Winifred Harvey was an ardent leader of the Girl Guides (the British equivalent of the Girl Scouts), which was established in 1910. Rosemary Booth describes a photograph of Winnie taken in 1921, in which she is attired in the uniform of senior guiders, complete with its gauntlet gloves and the slouch hat of the day, accompanying a group of St. Martin's Brownies to an Island visit by Princess Mary. In the 1930s, she became camp advisor to the Island
Guides, and in 1939 became Island commissioner.
¹³⁶
Winnie believed in the Guides, devoted herself to the cause, and in the first fall of Occupation would have an opportunity to prove that devotion.

Winnie learned in late November that the main Guide room had been pillaged. She was primarily concerned for the colors of her troop and that of the Câtel company that were stored there. Winnie headed out on her bicycle to rescue the colors, but realized that she could not take the most direct route home with them. The order was out banning meetings, and specifically forbidding flags and badges. If she went past Government House with the sets of flags, and particularly the poles, she would likely be stopped and commanded to unfurl the Union Jacks right there in the road. She opted to go by King's Road, but almost ran straight into an armed guard at the end of Brock Road who was stopping cars and quizzing passersby. Like an escaping felon, she turned her bike around and mimed a casual walk away from him, seeking another route home and successfully completing her rescue mission.
¹³⁷
This emergency action was the one explicit move by this cagey woman who, from this point, led an underground effort to maintain the Guides leadership structure through the long years of Occupation.

During the same time as the colors rescue, Winnie held her first Guide “tea party.” This tea party and subsequent “socials” were actually Guide meetings, carefully designed to circumvent the order against meetings. Unlike other clubs and societies that tried to challenge the ban on meeting, the Guides adopted from the start a public pose of having totally dissolved. In January 1941, an order appeared demanding that all associations and clubs, particularly ones with their headquarters in England, send in a full listing of their membership and property along with three copies of their rules. Winnie was “perturbed about this as the guides have kept very quiet,” and despite friends' advice that she must comply, she took another tack. Going to the constables, Winnie claimed that the Guides were not meeting and had no desire to do so. The constables replied that since the Guides had not applied to meet originally, they were officially considered “washed out” and were not allowed to register now. This, Winnie wrote in her diary, “was exactly what we wanted.” Other groups who tried a more direct tactic failed to survive. For example, the British Legion had continued to meet in their hall as a social club and now wanted to petition for permission to carry on in this manner. The Bailiff refused to put forward what was so transparent an evasion, fearing the grimmest of consequences were it discovered. So, the British Legion was forced to close.
¹³⁸

Thus, while other clubs and organizations were forced to close, and the direct resistance of Marie Ozanne could not rescue the Salvation Army, Winifred Harvey and the Guides leadership simply carried on meeting under a guise of socials and tea parties. Because they were clever enough to have publicly disbanded and never sought permission to continue, the Guides flew under the radar of German surveillance. Guide members would show up at a “party/social” in discreet groupings of one and two, with their Guide badges pinned under their collars. Winnie did not give details of what went on in these meetings past playing “progressive games” and singing, but she described one such party: “It went with a swing.”
¹³⁹
More important, it kept the Guide structure alive and allowed the Guides to discuss the young girls in the Island who would normally be in their troops during these years.

These meetings were much like Winnie's musical parties, conducted with “one eye on the gate all the time,” but designed to skirt German restrictions without ever confronting them directly. As Winnie's friend Marie Louise said of one musical party, held despite mass evictions and the deportations to Germany, “It was a slap in the face of Hitler.”
¹⁴⁰
Winnie's efforts did not escape the Island Guides, who, toward the end of the Occupation, presented
her with a plaque in gratitude for her work. The Guide Movement would later honor Winnie with a Gold Cross.
¹⁴¹
However, the subtlety, and indeed the very success, of her efforts kept Winifred Harvey from joining the pantheon of Occupation resisters. This lack of widespread acknowledgment has been the fate of much resistance in the Island because of its low-key and sheltered nature, but such covert strategies under domination make up in effectiveness what they lack in notoriety.

In the efforts of Winifred Harvey and other Guernsey Islanders, it is possible to see how simple normality becomes a dissident act. The ability to carry on with life, as unhampered as possible by the demands of those in power, is also a means of “foiling the dominant other's game in singular instances.”
¹⁴²
These individual acts are generally uncoordinated with others and only rarely surface into the public transcript as acknowledged resistance. Even for those who plan and carry out efforts to avoid compliance with an authoritarian regime, the very improvisational nature of their acts gives them a prank-like quality. Although the penalties for being caught might be harsh, few conducting these scofflaw moves would accord them the grand accolade of “resistance.” But these dissidents were involved in a process of gradually regaining proprietorship over their own lives and slowly wresting back control from the dominant. It is not the drama of a flood, but simply the drip-by-drip wearing away of power, the most effective means to erode the control of the dominant over time. Such small acts of rebellion helped to structure the communal identity necessary for a heightened and overt opposition to power. Soon, however, resistance took on a more coordinated and semi-coordinated form, fashioned around the ethereal promptings of voices from out of the air.

RADIO GOES TO RESISTANCE

It was late November in 1943, and Ken Lewis came home from chapel to settle down by the fireside and read until nearly 9:00
P
.
M
. Rousing himself from his cozy roost before curfew began at 9:00, Ken went with his dad by way of the main roads to Uncle Ed's house. The point of the journey was not a familial visit, but to listen on a now-illegal wireless set to a speech by Churchill. Ken's Uncle Alf and Aunt Glad were already there for the same purpose, having planned to spend the night so as not to be caught violating curfew on their long way home. They were the only other people let in on the dangerous secret that Uncle Ed had retained his wireless.

Ken and his dad stayed long enough to listen to the evening news after the speech. Then, slipping out the back door, they made their way in the dark night through Ed's back garden, over three fields, and into their own garden in order to dodge the German patrols that walked up and down the roads all night long. Ken delighted in the fact that they could use this alternate route home any time that they wanted to listen to the wireless after curfew.
¹⁴³
But Uncle Ed was not the only source for illegal listening. Just over a month later, Ken went to hear the news at Herbie Taylor's house. On his way there, German patrols shone their lights on him twice, but never stopped him to ask where he was going. Ken considered it “quite a thrill” to sit with Mr. Taylor listening to the wireless “knowing full well the penalty for doing so, that is imprisonment and in some cases the death penalty.”
¹⁴⁴

C. J. Rolo's 1943 book,
Radio Goes to War
, claimed that radio had added “the ether” as a fourth front to the land, sea, and air fronts of the previous war.
¹⁴⁵
If the Nazis had pioneered
the concept that radio could be an effective form of aggression, an additional “instrument of conquest” in the war, then it behooved the Allied nations to develop similar weapons.
¹⁴⁶
In Rolo's view, the psychological battleground was finally entered on the evening of September 1, 1939, when the following words came over the airwaves, “This is the B.B.C. Home Service”—words that meant, Rolo dramatically continued, “that the B.B.C. had gone to war.”
¹⁴⁷
Radio became a vital instrument of rhetorical resistance during the Guernsey Occupation. Not only did broadcasts from the BBC inspire and coordinate individual acts of Island resistance, but secret retaining of wireless sets, listening to forbidden information, and the circulation of war news through newssheets passed hand to hand also became important resistant acts in themselves.

It is not overstating the case to claim that Guernsey resistance crystallized around the crystal sets that Islanders learned to build, and that the exchange of forbidden information established a permanent link between communication and resistance. In this section, I will first examine the V-campaign, the symbolic offensive inspired by British broadcasting, and the special twist two young Guernseymen gave to this campaign. Second, I will turn to the importance of wireless information itself, and the perilous steps that the Islanders would take to maintain their connection to the outside world. The stories of tricks to retain the wireless, and close calls in their detection; organized resistance groups that spread information from illegal sets; and anonymous letters exposing these sets to the Germans form the legacy of a micro-war waged behind the quiet façade of daily life.