If Britain Had Fallen (33 page)
The Englishman’s traditional refuge from his troubles had always been the ‘pub’, and the Germans did not plan to interfere with this hallowed institution, though it might have been threatened by a shortage of supplies, as grain was requisitioned and sugar ceased to arrive from the West Indies. Whisky and gin, though produced in Great Britain, rum, which came from the Caribbean, and British-brewed beer would all have become scarce, but wine might actually have been more plentiful as the
Germans encouraged trade with their vine-growing Mediterranean allies and satellites. With other types of alcohol unobtainable, cider, too, might have come back into its own, since apples were often plentiful. One Jersey man remembers without pleasure the spirits he distilled from home-made cider and, even less successful, those made from Algerian wine, the result being ‘pretty poisonous but warm’, though only the bravest topers tackled it neat. Overall the drinking history of the country in the years after 1940 would probably not have been very different, though with public houses opening even later and, due to curfew, closing even earlier, and the sad notice ‘No beer’ being displayed even more frequently.
Curiously enough, the Germans’ main anxiety over the sale of alcohol concerned their own forces. The details of control, the
Ordinances
laid down, were to be left to local commanders but anyone who sold a drink or even—a highly improbable event—gave one to any German soldier could be punished and, on a second offence, apart from any other penalty, the guilty establishment might be shut down for three months. But a far worse punishment was inflicted by the Germans on any of their own soldiers who made a nuisance of themselves in public. A Jersey policeman remembers complaining to the German field police after going to the rescue of a local girl being molested by a drunken soldier, who thereupon threatened him with a bayonet, though both escaped unhurt. Two days later, asking what had happened to the man, he was told simply, ‘He’s in Russia.’ This was the fate held over any German who misbehaved in the Channel Islands and it helps to explain why the general standard of conduct towards civilians was as ‘correct’ as the official
Guide
demanded.
Although in the Channel Islands to see a member of the occupying forces drunk in public was a rare event, some Germans could after a few drinks display an aggressive amiability almost as trying as truculence. One wartime member of the Jersey police force remembers calling with a friend in the course of duty on a German officer, who pressed his visitors to have a drink. They asked for coffee, a far greater treat than alcohol to most people in occupied Europe, explaining that they were teetotallers, but the German reacted, the policeman recalls, by declaring ‘ “Now you’re insulting the great German Reich and the German Führer. You will drink!” So he ordered three bottles of lager and three glasses, the lager was poured out and he said, “You will drink!” We didn’t show any signs of drinking, so he drew his automatic, pointed it at me, and said,” Gentlemen, you will drink!” and we drank. I’ve never seen three glasses of lager vanish so quickly.’
The main task of military government is to make full use of the country’s resources for the needs of the fighting troops and the requirements of German war economy.
Directive for Military Government in England,
1940
The ability to milk a cow had long been common in the Channel Islands, and with the arrival of the Germans a number of residents developed a new skill: the ‘milking’ of cars. The occupying troops had seized so much of the islands’ fuel supplies that the few people left with vehicles of their own were often forced to steal from the petrol tanks of enemy vehicles (frequently the former property of their neighbours) to keep their own on the road. A Jersey physiotherapist remembers how an acquaintance who worked at the Forum cinema ‘used to let me know when the Germans were coming down with their big bus’. While they were safe inside enjoying the film he would be busy in the car park, siphoning off some of their precious petrol. A local hotel used by German officers every night served as another ‘cowshed’, where on many occasions he would fill a two-gallon can—the maximum amount unlikely to be missed—sometimes paying two or three visits in the same evening. Although often offered money, he never sold the stolen petrol, preferring to share it out among local doctors with scattered practices.
Petrol was so sparingly dispensed that even the local lifeboat had difficulty in obtaining enough. One member of the crew who indented for twenty gallons after an hour-and-a-half trip—more than had actually been used—to make up for a previous occasion when none had been claimed, remembers how ‘next day I … found a German car in the drive of my house and my wife being bullied by a wretched German captain, revolver out, swinging it round’. After being questioned he managed to convince the visitor that the extra petrol had been properly used, ‘but all the time he was fiddling around with this revolver … and he said, “If I catch you or your crew stealing one half a pint of petrol, I’ll shoot you and all your family.” ‘ After that, this man admits, he ceased even ‘hunting around for any odd drops of diesel oil’ to eke out the household’s fuel supplies.
Conditions in the rest of the British Isles would have been no different, for one of the Germans’ first acts everywhere was to seize all the transport they needed, and the instructions to the Gestapo ‘Commando Groups’, as already mentioned, advised that in England a car should be acquired
without delay. Although most vehicles seized were put to practical use, often in carrying away other goods commandeered by the Germans, a secondary motive was to acquire a status symbol, for the German Army still relied to an astonishing extent on horse-drawn transport. The comparable sign of prestige for an ordinary soldier was a private bicycle, for though the Germans had bicycle battalions—indeed one, as mentioned earlier, was earmarked for the defence of each Lines of Communication area in England—they were always keen to acquire extra machines. The present Town Clerk of St Helier, Jersey, Mr W. H. Marshall, then a junior official, remembers once ‘they wanted fifty bicycles. We had therefore to work out some means of taking them away from the local people as fairly as possible. We tried to do this on the basis of whether a bicycle was necessary for one’s job. A fellow living in York Street, for instance, whose work was in town had less need for a bicycle than a man who was working on the new North Road.’ It was, Mr Marshall found, ‘a heartbreaking experience’ to have to persuade his fellow-citizens to give up this precious possession, ‘but we never had a case where somebody resented it … . I think the local people understood that it was better to deal with us than to deal with the Germans.’
This was one of the basic principles of German Occupation; that every demand, however unreasonable, was to be made through the civil authorities, and it would certainly have been applied in Great Britain where the Occupation
Ordinances
called upon the civil authority to take a wide-ranging census of the potential loot which its area offered, pride of place, as in the Channel Islands, being given to ‘carriages, motor-cars, motor-bicycles, horses, etc.’. The Germans also wanted details of ‘all stores of the kind which can be used for military purposes, factories or public or private undertakings which can be applied to the manufacture and repair of military stores’ and even ‘the personnel necessary for working any of the means which should be liable to be requisitioned’. It would not have been long before few British citizens were left in possession of their own car, though this would have caused less widespread ill-will in October 1940, when there were fewer than one and a half million private cars on the roads, than it would have done a generation later, when the number was nearly eight times as many. The effect on firms which lost their lorries and delivery vans would have been more serious and an even more drastic pooling of resources would have been necessary than actually occurred in wartime Britain, while, due to the impact of petrol rationing, bus services, as on the Channel Islands, would have been savagely curtailed, with no buses running at all on some days of the week. What, however, seems likely to have caused most ill-feeling was the
provision that anyone whose car was requisitioned had also to provide a driver and be responsible for its maintenance. ‘The driver must remain with the car and may have to stay away from the place to which he belongs for an indefinite period’, warned the relevant Regulation. ‘The driver will get no pay from the German authorities. The owners of the car or, in the case of motor-cabs, the firm or municipality is responsible for paying him and must make their own arrangements for forwarding pay to him wherever he may be’—a typical example of the German passion for covering every detail. To discourage any conscripted driver who might reasonably object to driving Germans about the countryside in his car and at his own expense, the
Ordinances
stressed that ‘for any neglect of his duty as driver he will be punished by a German summary court’. Nor did the Germans plan to stand any nonsense from dilatory garages, even though they would not be footing the bill. ‘Requisitioned cars will be sent for repairs … to the most convenient workshop’, they promised, ‘and such repairs must be promptly carried out and at the expense of the government of the occupied country’, which would later also pay for ‘petrol, oil and tyres’ supplied by the Germans, no doubt from stocks impounded from British garages.
In fact on the Channel Islands the Germans seem to have driven their own vehicles, or paid direct, like other locally hired labour, the civilian drivers they employed. What was totally indefensible was the ludicrous valuation they placed on the vehicles they impounded. Though bicycles and horse-drawn carriages and wagons had, with the petrol situation so uncertain, appreciated more in price than cars, transport of all kinds was at a premium and the prices paid by the Germans were hopelessly inadequate. The owner of one van costing £300, and now irreplaceable, received in the early days £165, but he was fortunate compared to later sufferers, where the Germans paid only scrap value for the stolen vehicles. A company owning a new £1000 bus received £1 for it, a private-car owner £5 for a car which had cost him £381 in 1939, and some people were given nothing more substantial than promissory notes, still unhonoured. A year after the Occupation had begun there were on Guernsey fewer than fifty private cars and commercial vehicles to serve a population of 23,000.
Up to the very end of the war the Germans were rounding up vehicles, though they no longer had any petrol for them. One Jersey woman remembers how, after she and her husband had been deported to France, the Germans not merely enticed away their much-loved terrier, left in the care of her brother, and ate him—this was the ‘starvation Christmas’ of 1944—but also seized their car, though they had to push it to their park,
for her brother had removed the battery and stripped from it everything movable. The car was among the last consignment sent from Jersey, but they never succeeded in recovering it. For much of the war, though with little other work to do, the garages on Guernsey were kept busy spraying requisitioned vehicles ‘battleship grey’ for military use, and later, when this colour ran out, painting them in the African desert camouflage, of which the Germans had unlimited stocks.
Even families who did not own a car did not escape making some contribution to the Germans’ war effort, or comfort. ‘It sometimes seemed to me that we were always handing something over’, one Guernseyman has written, recalling the calling in of all cameras and photographic apparatus to enable the Germans to speed up the issue of identity cards, and a house-to-house collection of mattresses ‘for which chits were duly issued, supposedly for payment at some future date’. The Germans also raided the safe-deposit boxes in the local banks in search of bullion, but went away empty-handed, and even removed the swords which, according to local custom, were hung under memorial tablets in local churches, though most of these were returned after the war. The regimental plate of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, left on the island when they were recalled to England, was also taken, though later retrieved. By German standards these were all, of course, trivial achievements, but they indicate what the Germans might have accomplished on a far vaster scale if they had managed to hoist the Swastika over Buckingham Palace and Holyrood House.
The Germans had in fact prepared even more far-reaching plans for removing everything they wanted from the rest of the British Isles than they applied in the Channel Islands and here, too, they planned to use the local authorities as the collecting agents, the only exception being military equipment, which had to be handed over direct to the Germans, though ‘the mayors, or senior local authorities’, warned the relevant
Order
•, ‘will be made responsible’. The proclamation itself was, by German standards, very brief:
All fire-arms, including sporting guns, ammunition, hand-grenades, explosives and other war material are to be surrendered. The surrender must be effected within 24 hours at the nearest German administrative sub-area or local headquarters … Anyone who, contrary to the above order, retains possession of fire-arms, including sporting guns, ammunition, hand-grenades, explosives or other war material will be condemned to death, in less serious cases to penal servitude or imprisonment.
The Occupation
Ordinances
went into a great deal more detail, attempting in the German way to cover every possible article, the list of Army
stores running to thirty-two separate categories and that of Naval stores to sixteen. Every citizen in possession of any of these was enjoined to disclose them, though it seems in any case unlikely that anyone in possession of a battleship’, ‘armoured train’ or ‘field bakery’, which were among the items mentioned, would be able to keep it hidden very long. The Germans also drew up regulations providing in detail for the destruction of any half-finished munitions or, where this task was beyond the factory concerned, it had ‘to report amounts in triplicate to the nearest area commandant’. Later, some relaxation of the ban on sporting guns seems to have been contemplated, for it was laid down that members of bona fide shooting clubs could, under strict conditions, possess rifles and even pistols.
