If Britain Had Fallen (42 page)
To avoid embarrassing conflicts between their official duty, to carry out the orders of the German commandant, and their natural patriotism, this policeman and his colleagues relied on that most valuable part of any good policeman’s equipment, the blind eye. Often, he admits, they knew when people had secret radios, the commonest of Occupation offences in Jersey, but kept quiet about it, unless an informant compelled them to take action. They did their best, too, not to run into offenders engaged in another wartime crime, curfew-breaking. ‘Half the time we stayed in the police station’, he remembers, and if there were still fellow islanders illegally about ‘the Germans collared them, we didn’t’. People caught stealing presented a more difficult problem, though the police’s private rule was simple. ‘If people stole theirs’—i.e., property confiscated by the Germans—’we didn’t worry, if people stole ours, we jumped on them.’ It was not long before some local villains began to take advantage of this policy, as the same police officer discovered:
I met a chap coming along one morning with a sack on his back at daybreak, asked him what he had in the sack, he said he’d just broken into a German store and stolen some coke for his wife and children. I was about to let him go when I asked him to open the sack—and he’d got the sugar ration from a local shop. Of course he was off and I was after him but I picked him up eventually. But had he had coke from a German store … I’d have let him go.
Fortunately, perhaps, for the inhabitants there were no hidden stores of arms on the Channel Islands and no attempts to provide them, so the local resistance movement was, by the standards of neighbouring France, where both collaboration and opposition reached far greater extremes, a very mild affair. As in France, however, its inspiration was largely left-wing, its real founder in Jersey being a local man who had emigrated to Australia and returned to Europe to fight in the Spanish Civil War,
though it had ended by the time he arrived. The movement began with groups of half a dozen or so like-minded people meeting in each other’s homes and eventually had a network of contacts all over the island, providing information, food for people on the run, and vital supplies like paper for illicit publications. Its membership rose by the middle of the war to fifty or sixty and to around a hundred after D Day, being in the words of one of its earliest members, a seventeen-year-old who had just left the local grammar school, an instinctive response to the ‘tremendous almost physical shock’ at ‘the outrage of foreign occupation’. Like the governor and the police, they saw cutting telephone wires or destroying German signposts as ‘meaningless’, and apart from constantly urging a firmer stand against the Germans by the authorities and producing illegal leaflets, their main work lay in helping slave-labourers, especially the Russians, collecting food and clothing for them, and even providing places where they could hide. The results were striking. ‘You could go to 50% of people in this island and get an immediate response’, this man discovered, ‘even if they didn’t agree politically with you at all.’
Among those applied to for assistance on behalf of the Russians was the present Town Clerk of St Helier. ‘Two Russians escaped … from the prisoner-of-war camp,’ he remembers, ‘and a friend of mine got in touch with me and asked if I could take their photographs to put on identity cards to help them in their escape. I arranged to meet the two Russians and the man concerned in town; we took the photographs at my mother-in-law’s house, and I then took the photographs home, developed them, printed them and … stuck them on the identity card and matched up the German stamp … across the photograph with the new photograph that I put on.’ The cards themselves came from new ones issued by the Germans in replacement of those declared lost, or from those dropped in the street and found by sympathisers with the resistance. Some, ‘regrettably’, says Mr Marshall, were stolen for the purpose, for to be without one’s ‘papers’ in an occupied country was a serious matter, though the really dedicated resistance worker in any country was always willing to sacrifice his countrymen for an end which he believed to be right.
This same local government officer, then far more junior, also regularly engaged in another hazardous enterprise, listening to and circulating the news, or Churchill’s speeches, which he heard on an illicit radio. This involved taking the broadcast down in shorthand, typing it out, duplicating the copies on the Town Hall duplicator, and passing them to various trusted members of the staff, and the police, to distribute in their turn to ‘safe’ people known to them. On one occasion he bumped into a German officer while on his way to hand them over to the police sergeant,
who was one of the main ‘newsagents’ involved, and dropped all fifty copies on the Guard Room floor. The German, however, ‘bent down, picked them up, collected them, handed them back to me and apologised profusely for being so clumsy’. There were other narrow escapes. ‘I can remember cycling home in great worry at times and digging a hole in the garden and putting everything in it, including the radio set, which of course I dug up as quickly as I could in case the damp got to it.’
One of the most depressing, and alarming, features of the occupation of the Channel Islands was the number of people who, whether from envy or sheer malice, anonymously denounced those of their compatriots who had managed to retain a radio. One Englishman, later deported to Germany, remembers a notorious informer who selected his victims by listening in food queues for anyone passing on up-to-date British news. When, later, he arrived in the deportation camp himself, he had to be kept shut up for his own protection. But if there were traitors in the Channel Islands (and it seems surprising that some blatant ones should have escaped unpunished at the end of the war) there were also many people in key positions quietly working to frustrate their efforts. One man still remembers with gratitude the postal employee who spotted a letter addressed to the Commandant in the heavy capitals favoured by one informer, and quietly appropriated it. It was, as he had suspected, denouncing another local resident for possessing a radio, but never reached its destination.
Although, for reasons already explained, it seems unlikely that the Germans would have confiscated all radio sets had they occupied Britain, if they had done so the population would no doubt have reacted with the same ingenuity as in Jersey. The physiotherapist mentioned in earlier chapters concealed his in electrical equipment used in his work, a screw turned one way energising the appliance, and the other turning on the radio. He recalls an occasion when he was treating a small boy and turned the screw the wrong way, causing the patient to remark suddenly, ‘You know I can hear my daddy’s voice’, his father in fact being in the garden at the time. Another family managed to satisfy the Germans by surrendering a small ‘car-type’ set, taken from their boat, but kept a small portable hidden under the floor connected to what appeared to be a power point in the room above, and a loudspeaker, normally kept hidden in a cupboard, could be plugged into this when it was safe. Possession of a loudspeaker was legal and less suspicious than earphones, which were widely used on the island linked to home-made crystal sets.
Many illegal news bulletins circulated on both Jersey and Guernsey and several of those concerned in preparing them, or found in possession of
them, were sent to gaol, but far more serious from the Germans’ point of view were leaflets urging resistance to any of their orders, such as one which was circulated advising people to hide their radio sets. This was one of the occasions when the Germans took hostages, selecting for the purpose local residents with a reputation for being uncooperative’. The sensations of one man, a hitherto law-abiding factory-owner, who found himself in this position were typical of those which many thousands of people in Europe must have experienced, though in their case the ending was usually less happy:
On Friday evening I’d had a tip that something was wrong and on the Saturday morning I arrived at my office and a German handed me a slip of paper and it said that I was under temporary arrest. I said, ‘What’s all this about?’ He said, ‘It’s because some pamphlets have been issued and we’ve taken some hostages.’ I said, ‘Is this going to be a long job?’, and he said, ‘I don’t know, it can be short.’ I said, ‘When will there be a trial?’ He said, ‘There’s no trial.’ … I was numbed, I didn’t know quite what had happened to me … . One minute to be out in the bright sunshine and the next minute to be in a cell … . One chap [a locally-born warder] used to pop in and see that we were all right and try and cheer us up and then he’d go off and throw pebbles at the window in our cell and say ‘That’s all right, chums, you’re going to be all right’. It was very nice, very cheering—but in actual fact I think we both felt a bit worse after.
Up to that time the Germans had not executed any hostages in Jersey and in fact they never did, but to this man, in June 1942, it seemed well on the cards’ that he would be the first. Recently he had, with other islanders, laughed at the Germans for talking of their opponents being ‘fuselated’, instead of ‘shot’. Now, he admits, he was ‘no longer very amused’. Happily, after a week in prison, he was released, the offending pamphlet’s authors having given themselves up.
This man, who had done much in a quiet way to obstruct the Germans, does not believe that on the Channel Islands more active resistance would have been possible. ‘It had to be of a passive nature and I think that Jersey did that’ is his verdict. ‘The things that hurt the Germans most was being ignored and they had a fair dose of that.’ He contributed his own share of the ‘dose’ so effectively that, as he still remembers with amusement, he was formally, if not very convincingly, admonished for his attitude by the Governor in person:
He was called to College House [i.e. German headquarters] and I met him on the road coming back. He stopped and said, ‘Tony, I’ve been called to College House and they’ve been complaining about you not being co-operative. You’ll try and be a better chap, will you?’ And I said, ‘Yes’, and I winked back and that was it. It didn’t make much difference to my attitude and I’m sure it didn’t make any difference to his.
Many Channel Islanders, like this man, automatically made life difficult for the Germans whenever they got the chance. The physiotherapist previously quoted told a German soldier who came to him for treatment that he was ‘full up’ with civilian patients, and was as a result called before the Commandant, who had the effrontery ‘to read me the Geneva Convention and told me that I had to work for them or be deported’. Knowing that his other patients needed his services, he eventually agreed ‘to do so many patients a day’ from the German garrison, but drove the toughest bargain he could. In many shops the assistants ignored German customers, but after one barber had pointedly not cut the hair of a waiting German, an order was issued that Germans must be attended to first—the sort of unwelcome reaction that resistance was always liable to produce. Many firms made the most of all the difficulties involved when ordered to supply the Germans, and on Guernsey two which were ordered to supply German flags managed to misunderstand the simple instructions they were given so that the first Swastikas they produced had to be scrapped. Such gestures made, of course, not the slightest difference to the course of the war, but they did help to sustain morale among everyone who heard about them.
In the Channel Islands no one was shot for resisting the Germans, though a sizeable number were imprisoned, mostly for two or three months, their gaolers sometimes managing to make ‘mistakes’ over the release date and letting them out early, another useful method of passive resistance. There could have been a blood-bath at the very end, for after D Day the left-wing extremists in the resistance movement, one remembers, ‘contacted a committee of German Socialists and Communists, who were organising a mutiny of the garrison, to hand the island over to the allied forces’, though this came to nothing. This was fortunate, perhaps, for the German Commandant in the closing stages of the Occupation was a fanatical Nazi admiral, very different from his comparatively easy-going military predecessor, and only too eager to call out the firing squads as a prelude to fighting to the last man. Life in the resistance did, however, have its effects upon those involved in it, providing, as in other countries, a unique political education. When the Occupation began one member of it was, in his own words, ‘a very starry-eyed Communist of seventeen’. When it ended he was a man of almost twenty-three. It turned him, he believes, ‘from a very green sort of youngster with lots of high ideals and illusions into a rather cold, calculating politician’.
And most British people on the Channel Islands came out of their five years’ ordeal with their self-respect unscathed, if not a little raised. Besides the thousands who chalked up V signs or wore hidden badges, often made from British coins, with V inscribed on them, there were many who made more public protests, which helped to keep hope alive even if they did the Germans no harm. A young girl employee in Boots the Chemists ‘just didn’t seem to care’, one of her colleagues remembers. ‘She always made sure that the German customer knew no English at all and then with a smile on her face proceeded to call him all sorts of names. She never got caught.’ Nor did a kindred spirit of an older generation, an elderly retired colonel who, punctually at nine o’clock every morning, would march with soldierly stride down the main street of St Helier to a shop which contained a huge portrait of Hitler in the window. He would then halt smartly, ‘stand rigidly to attention in the middle of the road and spit’.
The following have been named as persons and firms of a friendly disposition towards Germany.
Memorandum of the German Security Service,
11 November 1940
‘No one knows how he will behave during an Occupation until it happens.’ This is the verdict of many of those British people who endured five years under German rule in the Channel Islands and it commands respect. ‘There were’, one man who himself spent a period in gaol as a hostage believes, ‘people who were a bit over-friendly, but in the circumstances it’s difficult to judge. There are people with stronger wills than others. The stronger wills were able to resist, the weaker wills gave way a little.’
