Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (57 page)

Of a similar nature was the story of the young Pearl Luff, who relied not on charm but on spirited refusal in her dealings with the German police. When ordered to empty her pockets during a house search, Pearl flung her tiny crystal set into the corner. Told to look for it, she replied, “That's what you were sent here to do. You'd better make sure what it was if you want to!” Threatened with prison, she said, “Very well, I accept responsibility. Take me now!” Such frankness seemed to startle the police, and they left the house without her. She was clearly the winner of this test of wills in Rev. Ord's eyes: “For sheer courage it would be hard to beat.”
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It is here that we can glimpse the protection of the private home as an “offstage social site” where resistance would find a place to flourish. Small battles over the right to receive information and to communicate this information to others seized the ground of an autonomous “social space,” as valuable to the Islanders as the battleground of a physical war. As Scott maintains, the maintenance of such spaces is “an achievement of resistance; they are won and defended in the teeth of power.”
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If such one-up tales could be expected, the third form of wireless narrative is more of a surprise. They tended to be comical or ironic stories of Islander misadventures in attempting to retain or hide a set. In one highly circulated story, a man was listening in to the news one evening when Germans pounded on his door. He quickly returned his set to its hiding place, opened his door, and was greeted with “You have a Vireless set!” “No,” the man returned, “I have no set.” “Then,” bellowed the German, “Vy are you vearing a headphone?” And off went the man to his date with prison. Kitty Bachmann followed the relating of this little story with the supposedly true incident of a mother and daughter visited by the Germans in a similar way one evening. While the daughter answered the door, the mother desperately tossed their crystal set into a pot of “pseudo soup” on the fire. As the search was going on, the daughter lifted the pot lid and stirred the soup. “What have you put in the soup?” the daughter asked. “Bones!” said the mother under her breath. “Bones?” asked the daughter. “Bones, you idiot!” hissed the mother. Luckily for the pair, the Germans did not pick up on the meaning behind their exchange.
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Although both of these stories have the feel of fiction, they would be the type of apocryphal tales told broadly to find the comedy in intimidating circumstances. They also capture the sense of gentle self-mockery that bolstered a communal identity more effectively than heroic posturing. In them is an acknowledgment that resistance in Guernsey would be private, improvisational, and attenuated rather than steeped in the sudden drama of arms and sabotage. As Jack Sauvary said to bolster the spirits of Eddie, the parish cross-bearer, facing three months in prison for possessing a wireless, “I tell people here that unless we can say that we went to prison we won't be heroes!”
²²⁸
Islanders knew intimately the risks that they ran and the level of resistance that made sense in their very particular circumstances. Heroism lay in private actions that did not endanger the larger community but thwarted in some small way the goals of the German occupiers.

GUNS AND GASP

Resistance by way of the wireless took on an organized form with the advent of GUNS (Guernsey Underground News Service) and GASP (Guernsey Active Secret Press). GUNS was the better-known of the two, and the story of the brave men who operated this service for their fellow Islanders is one of the generally acknowledged aspects of Guernsey resistance. It was Charlie Machon, a linotype operator for the
Star
, who developed the concept of operating a daily newssheet for Guernsey now that wireless sets were banned. Five men formed the core organization, including newspaperman Frank Falla, who came up with their acronymic name, plus Cecil Duquemin, Ernest Legg, and Joe Gillingham. The basic operation of GUNS involved listening to the 9
P
.
M
. BBC news broadcast and the 8
A
.
M
. news the following morning. The highlights would be typed on very thin 13½″ × 8″ tomato packing paper under a heading of a large V made up of smaller V's. Occasionally, the shorthand skills of Bill Taylor would be used to record verbatim an important speech by Churchill. Originally, there was a directive at the top, “Burn after reading,” but it was soon assumed that readers knew this and the typists could dispense with this admonition.

Every morning except Sundays, three sets of eight typings would be prepared and then sent out for retyping and distribution. GUNS was a highly popular and well-read newssheet, with a copy read by a number of the States officials, including the Bailiff. It operated from May 1942 to February 1944, but its demise may have been inevitable. Reading Frank Falla's account in his excellent little book
The Silent War
makes clear that there were continuous near misses, and some risks that were inherent in trusting the discretion of the many distributors and readers.
²²⁹

On February 11, two Guernsey police constables came upon an Irishman named Peter “Paddy” Doyle in the company of a small group of Germans near Trinity Square. Because it was after curfew, the constables approached Doyle, who then hastened up the Bouillon Steps with the Germans while two more armed Germans blocked the constables' way. Because this was the evening when Cecil Duquemin and Charles Machon were arrested in their homes in Victoria Road, it was clear that Doyle was on his way to finger them for the police. Later would come the arrest of Frank Falla, Joe Gillingham, and Ernest Legg. But for the chance observance of the constables, Doyle's role in this betrayal might have never been more than speculation.
²³⁰
He had been considered a close friend by Charles Machon, who supplied him with GUNS newssheets, copies that would later be used against the five Guernseymen in court. The sentences to be served in German prisons were stiff: Charles Machon, 2 years and 4 months; Cecil Duquemin, 1 year and 11 months; Ernest Legg, 1 year and 10 months; Frank Falla, 1 year and 4 months; and Joe Gillingham, 10 months.
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There would be a ripple effect, as many Islanders were pulled in and given two- to three-month sentences for reading the GUNS newssheets.
²³²
Yet, it would be the five Guernseymen responsible for GUNS who suffered the most in their imprisonment in Germany, a tale of brutality at the hands of the Germans that is well documented by Frank Falla. Charles Machon, whose health was tenuous at best from an ulcerated stomach, died after five months of mistreatment and is buried in Wehl Cemetery in Hameln. Full details of the German experiences of the four remaining GUNS operators and that of the other Islanders removed to the Continent for resistant activities have only recently come to light. In the summer of 2010, Frank Falla's daughter gave to Cambridge University a file that had languished in the back of a wardrobe in her home since the 1960s. Roughly two hundred pages in length, this
compilation of testimony put together by Frank Falla contains first-person accounts of Islanders who served time in Germany for resistance activities.

Falla's desire was to guarantee that Islanders would receive compensation from the German government for the unspeakable treatment to which they had been subjected while in custody. Some of this material enlarges on Falla's own recollections in his book, but most is testimony unknown up to this point. Cecil Duquemin described, for example, how he was one of four hundred prisoners transferred in cattle trucks to another location when their prison was bombed near the close of the war: “We had no sanitation and though suffering from starvation and malnutrition, we were forced to bury the many prisoners who died in the trucks. This was a daily occurrence and we hardly had any strength left in us to dig the men's graves.” This file also contains testimony by Joe Gillingham's widow. She knew that he was “ill-treated, starved, and denied all the rights one would expect even from an enemy.” What she never learned was how her husband died or where he was buried. He was last seen February 2, 1945, after being released from Salle Prison, Nuremberg, and it was presumed that he was sent to a concentration camp or taken with the Germans as they moved ahead of the Allied advance.
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The GUNS compatriots were not the only ones to produce a newssheet to meet the demand for information from the BBC. A lesser-known but quite successful effort revolved around T. Moullin's cycle shop as its base of operations, allowing readers to pick up a newssheet by using the pretext of cycle repair. Edited by Ludovic E. Bertrand, the GASP newssheet also consisted of BBC news gleaned from hidden wireless sets to be summarized and typed out on tomato packing paper. Then, a number of “agents” served as distributors, including Madeleine Sims, who worked in the Bailiff's office, and Matron Finch, who supplied her patients at the Emergency Hospital with the sheets in order to raise their spirits. Despite some feeling that the cycle shop was a little too well known for safety, GASP continued to operate right up until Liberation.
²³⁴

Individuals and small groups of friends also took on the duty to spread what they had heard on the news, though in a more casual or spotty way. On August 31, 1943, Rev. Ord participated with a group to record Churchill's speech to the Canadians. This obviously was not the first time that Ord took part in such an activity, because he described it as “more and more of a strain” due to the need to have the volume set so low and always with the consciousness that they could be “caught red-handed” at any moment. He could “confess to a sense of relief when I have got everything taken down and the little party breaks up.” On this particular occasion, Ord only reached his home five minutes before curfew, to find Grae in an anxious state. She had watched the German police walking down the road in the direction of the house where Ord and the others were listening, and feared that they would be surprised in the act. “The next thing,” Ord wrote, “is to type out copies, and to see that the news gets out.”
²³⁵

The most exciting aspect of the recently found Falla file is its recognition by name of the many civilians who resisted during the Occupation and suffered for their acts against the Nazi occupier. The Channel Islanders have often been treated as if they were exempt in some way from Nazi brutality, even when imprisoned in Germany. The stories in this file of beatings, starvation, and other mistreatment, including the deaths of some of the brave Guernseymen who served as resisters, will do much to set the public record straight. Because some fifty of the Islanders whose stories are contained within its pages received compensation, it authenticates their suffering for those requiring some form of official confirmation. When all of the information in the file is publicly released, there will be some surprises, too, for individual families about their relatives' participation in resistance. The material in the file will not, however,
come as news to those Guernsey Islanders who have been privy to the echoes of the hidden transcript of the Occupation years, and who are sensitive to the nature of Islander resistance. This new information comes as confirmation of the narratives of Occupation—the stories, jokes, and contemporaneous accounts that form such a rich legacy of those years.

The genius of the three forms of rhetorical resistance detailed in this study lies in their ability to “nibble away”
²³⁶
at the resources and power of the dominant. I believe that Scott is correct when he admonishes us not to “overly romanticize the ‘weapons of the weak,’” for such actions are likely to be subtle, and the outcome of their use incapable of effecting the overthrow of an oppressive power structure.
²³⁷
Still, the practical aspects of this choice of resistance, as opposed to more dramatic forms of violence and sabotage, may be appreciated in two ways. Small and hidden acts designed around information flow, narrative, and the manipulation of symbols are perfectly designed to evade the surveillance that is the key component of systems based on panoptical power. The fact that such resistance is difficult to detect and sometimes even masquerades as cooperation means that its true significance becomes accessible to the powerless even as it is rendered invisible to the dominant.

Second, and perhaps most important, “everyday resistance is tenacious,”
²³⁸
and designed for the long haul. Thus, the acts of rhetorical resistance by the Guernsey Islanders, clustered as they were around symbolic communication and the flow of information, were sustainable during an Occupation lasting five years, and ideal for a situation where, in case the war was lost, current conditions could become permanent. Had the worst happened, resistance forms would have already been in place to maintain an ongoing culture of subversion. Liberation would come to the Channel Islands, but only after a final year that would sorely test the Islanders' physical and psychological resources. In the concluding chapter, I will discuss the end of Occupation, the complications when Liberation finally occurred, and the public memory of those years as Islanders have been embroiled in a second war to set the Occupation record straight and regain control of their own story.

Conclusion

R
EVEREND
O
RD AND
G
RAE WERE IN THE HABIT OF BEING IN BED NO LATER THAN
9
P.M.
on these June evenings. They found that their restricted diet made them tired enough, and despite the summer date, they were both feeling the cold more than in the past. On this night, they settled in to rest and read by the single small light at the head of the bed, turning if off at 11:00 to call it a night. But there would be precious little sleep on this June 5th/6th. Almost immediately, they heard planes flying over, unusual only because there was no echo of flak from German installations in the Island. Ord and Grae played the usual guessing game of where the planes were headed, and settled on the Loire Valley as the likely target for the raid. Yet this time the planes did not stop coming, and by 11:30, they filled the skies in increasing numbers. Soon, Grae said, “This is
IT
!” and the two of them threw on dressing gowns and went out on the balcony, which allowed a clear, wide view from Cobo Bay to Herm Island. Soon, flak came up from Alderney and from the French coast near Cherbourg, as bright flashes lit up the sky behind the thick white clouds that obscured the Ords' view of the passing planes.
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