Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (38 page)

Guernseymen and women were undoubtedly aware of their propaganda value to the Germans, who lumped the stories of a welcoming populace together with the photographs taken of supposedly helpful citizens. A perennial favorite seems to have been a German soldier asking street directions of a uniformed Guernsey policeman. A photographer would be standing by to capture the policeman pointing the way or, failing that, merely standing listening to the soldier's request. Either type of photograph implied chumminess, but was unavoidable from the policeman's perspective. Still, the populace had to learn hard lessons of how the most innocent contact with the Germans could pull them into propaganda efforts against their will. The Reverend Hartley Jackson, vicar of St. Stephen's, was presented with an invitation to write an article on Christmas for the
Star.
He quite willingly accepted this opportunity to reach the Island with an encouraging Christian message at the holy season, only to find that the “press führer” had seen fit to improve his offering with a final ending that “The recognition that Christ was born into the world to save the world and to bring peace on earth is the need of Britain and her Bolshevist allies!”
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A propaganda piece from 1942 that Bill Warry appended in his diary shows the technique that helped install the perception of cozy familiarity between German and Islander into the public transcript. It took the form of a retrospective piece on the “German Occupation of Guernsey,” written from the vantage point of two years into Occupation. Written as if by a Guernseyman, it lauds the German soldiers who “are still with us” as “friendly and honest, generous and understanding.” Instead of the “arrogance which we had been led to expect,” the great surprise for the Islanders was “the fact that fundamentally the German is closely akin to themselves.” As to fears of atrocities, the soldiers had, since coming to Guernsey, “conducted themselves immaculately.” Although the wording, which is only slightly off from standard English (“immaculately” having the stilted formality that marks German English), gives a hint of foreign authorship, it is generally seamless to a modern reader. But in no way could it sucker contemporary Islanders such as Bill Warry for long, who wrote at the bottom of the article: “The above appeared on front page of our local paper today. Who wrote it? Not the Editor!”
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Islanders found some forms of German propaganda to be particularly amusing, especially those that substituted local pictures as scenes from London. One German newsreel had the caption “bread queues in London,” but showed a short queue for cakes early in the Occupation in front of the easily recognizable exterior of Maison Carré in Guernsey's Commercial Arcade. A German officer showed a local family a German periodical with another London bread queue, which was actually a photograph of the queue in Smith Street at Collins Sweet Shop, again from early in the Occupation. Reportedly, the German officer refused to believe that this was a picture from Guernsey until he went into town and could see for himself that the shops in the background were Cecile Shoes, Stonelakes the Chemist, and a small part of Lloyds Bank.
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Such silly propaganda attempts made Rev. Ord ponder the effort that went into their creation. Before English films were occasionally shown in the local cinemas, a German propaganda film would be aired. Islanders would delay arriving at the theater until this preliminary film was over, so the Germans added a caption that said, “See all or see nothing.” Despite the law against expressing criticism or emotions during such entertainments, it was impossible to sit through these propaganda offerings without laughter and response. One film, for example, showed scenes of the Grand National, with the commentator saying it was “held this year in Paris,
AS USUAL
, under the patronage of the German authorities.” Yet the crowds were togged out in “the very tip-top of pre-war fashion, but
NOT A GERMAN OFFICER TO BE SEEN
!”
The audience simply roared with laughter. To Ord, it was “a mystery that so much German intelligence or cunning should be put at the disposal of this futile propaganda which even the bairns see through.”
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The young, anti-Party Germans that Ord came to know well during the Occupation gave intriguing insights into German disgust with Goebbels's form of propaganda. Ord barely knew the young German minister Heinrich Bödeker before Heinrich was talking about his father's habit of listening to London on the wireless. At Heinrich's battery in Guernsey as well, all of his messmates listened to the news from London (broadcast in German). Each new soldier posted to the billet was “sounded out” to see if he was genuine in his desire to subvert the ban on listening to the British news. It was “as good as a play” to watch the process of testing that each new man went through “before being admitted to this ‘wireless fellowship.’” But even after one and all had passed the test, the entire group listened at the same time, so that a spy or turncoat would also have violated regulations and could not slip away to report them in the act. This move brought out the Shakespeare in Ord, who sarcastically added, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!”
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Ord's other close German friend, Reinhold, told him that his father in Germany also listened to the BBC every night at 9
P
.
M
., feeling safe from spying eyes simply because of the isolation of his home. A friend of advanced years visited Reinhold and his family and related to them all the actual news, which they had already heard in the British broadcast. Reinhold confronted the man with “You heard that from London,” and lectured him on the danger of talking about the news, for “even good friends may make a mistake.” Still, Reinhold gave an indication of the increasing desire for accurate information among the Germans, particularly among workers and soldiers who bore the brunt of the war.
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On the Islanders' part, being subjected to an ongoing twisting of information did little but depress them and add to the monotony of a seemingly endless situation. So, Guernsey was a willing and eager recipient of the counterpropaganda provided by RAF leaflet drops. An early drop in September 1940, “No. 1 English News Leaflet,” contained photographs of the King and Queen (Winnie Harvey reported it as the iconic photo of the King and Queen examining the Blitz damage at Buckingham Palace),
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the King's speech, and miscellaneous other news.
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This first drop appeared to be targeted toward the morale of Guernseymen, although the second leaflet, titled “News From England, No. 2, September 30, 1940, Distributed by R.A.F., Leaves and News,” had a more blended purpose.

The lead story spoke of autumn leaves falling (as well as the copies of the leaflet) and put this forward as “far more ominous” to the Germans. The leaflet reminded the reader of Kaiser Wilhelm's promise to the German troops in 1914, “You will be back before the leaves fall,” and Hitler's promise of a victory parade through London in August—both promises, of course, now unfulfilled. The leaflet predicted that Germans huddled “in air raid shelters through the coming winter nights” would realize that conquest was a fleeting dream and that the reign of “Nazi gangsters” would be brief. And this article ended with a simple “Cheer up.” Although purportedly directed towards the morale of the captive Guernsey civilians, this general message appeared aimed at the German soldiers who would gather the leaflets and read them, or have them translated by friends. As it boosted hope for Islanders, it was designed to make German soldiers consider their families at home and question the promises of Hitler.

This secondary German audience makes the follow-up article on the leaflet all the more inexplicable. It detailed the escape from Guernsey to England of eight men in a 20-foot boat. It was an exciting account of German flares dropping close to the boat, which somehow
remained unseen, and engine breakdown that took four hours to repair. All well and good in that it told friends and family back home that their escapees had made it to England safely. But this easing of anxiety had to be weighed against the possibility that the Germans did not know of the escape, and that this knowledge could easily trigger reprisals. But then the British did something that is difficult to fathom in that they identified each of the escapees by name and position: “Mr. Frederick Hockey, 47, a signalman employed by the harbour administration at St. Peter Port, three of his sons Frederick 25, George 21 and Harold 16, who were engaged in tomato growing and Mssrs. William Mahy, Percy du Port, William Dorey and Herbert Bichard, independent growers.”
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This giving of names was completely gratuitous, considering that family and friends would know of the escapees' absence already. Indeed, word had been out among civilians about the escape since early in September. Winnie noted that nine men had escaped (although the leaflet said eight and gave the names of seven), that they had taken donations with them for the Spitfire Fund, and that they were going to inform the British government about conditions in Guernsey.
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The plan, according to Winnie, was that the BBC would simply note a large contribution to the Spitfire Fund as a means to let those left behind in Guernsey know that the escapees had arrived safely. The changed plan shows questionable judgment by the BBC and British government. They could not know whether hostages would be shot in reprisal for the escape, and by giving up the names of the escaped fishermen, they made the escapees' family members a convenient target for reprisals. Indeed, it was tantamount to taunting the Germans to note that Frederick Hockey was part of the harbor administration, a move so mocking as to court a response. As it turns out, reprisals did occur, to be discussed in the next chapter.

It was not just specially designed leaflets that were dropped on the Channel Islands by the RAF. In September 1941, a bundle of newspapers, including the
Times
,
Sketch
, and
Daily Mirror
, was dropped at Vazon, to the delight of Guernsey. Because the papers were plainly marked “Not to be taken away from the messroom,” this drop appeared to be a spontaneous “free gift” courtesy of the pilot. But it was quite a pleasure for a print-oriented people to see actual British newspapers rather than to read a recap or to hear an account from the wireless. Rev. Ord was one who had the opportunity to see one of the papers, having been summoned to a banker's private “sanctum” to take a look.
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It would only be a matter of time before the Germans decided to use these leaflet drops as part of their own propaganda efforts. Goebbels functioned on the notion that anything genuine could also be faked as a form of disinformation. Ambrose Robin described one of these efforts that furthered an ongoing Nazi theme of supposed dissension between the United States and Britain. In Jersey, the Germans sent around a story of a drop of leaflets by an American airplane over the town. In Robin's view, the authors of this piece of propaganda gave the game away in two substantial ways. First, the leaflets strangely enough only “landed” on the right-hand side of Queen and King Streets, somehow avoiding even one falling on a roof or into a backyard. This evidence was augmented by eyewitness reports that a German staff car was observed “disgorging” the leaflets at dawn. But Robin believed that the simple fact that so many leaflets were found in a restricted area would be enough to make the public say, “I am not deceived.” Second, the discourse found in the leaflets was a dead giveaway of the source for a people now well-attuned to Nazi rhetoric. Clearly, in Robin's estimation, there did not exist an American printing press anywhere, especially in the government or military service, likely to “use such crude and filthy adjectives againt [
sic
] the British.
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The occupied population of Guernsey navigated past the German propaganda that was intended to function in multiple ways. Some was designed to plant doubts about the veracity of British information, and thus to foster the conclusion that
all
information is slanted and not to be trusted. If, as Ted Smith frames it, “a lie and the truth are equally probable, or that all parties to the discussion are lying,” the result can be paralyzing for the audience. Lessening belief in British information—planting that kernel of misgiving—could slow the response to any call to action that might come.
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Primarily, of course, the German propaganda that filled the Island newspapers was calculated to influence the emotional perspective of local readers. Over time, the drumbeat of German self-congratulation and the constant reiteration of the Nazi worldview were meant to seep into the reader's consciousness. One of the key concepts to differentiate legitimate advocacy from propaganda is rationality, because the tendency of propaganda is to function solely on a gut level. However, when reasonable people can, as the Islanders did, approach propaganda with a degree of “critical scrutiny,” its persuasive force evaporates.
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Guernseymen and women developed a fine contempt for German propaganda. And, as will be discussed next, tales about propaganda would form part of the hidden transcript of stories, jokes, and metaphors used by the Islanders to make sense of their Occupation experience.

A TALE TO TELL

The theory of symbolic convergence provides a useful means of dissecting the rich legacy of stories, jokes, and metaphors that remain from the Occupation years, and provides a window into how such discourse has a purpose in resistance. According to this concept, during communication with others, our “private symbolic worlds” begin to converge, providing a common vocabulary by which we share our experiences and give meaning to our existence.
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In other words, we construct our reality through the symbols we use and the stories we tell.
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Although Symbolic Convergence Theory is useful in understanding some rather bizarre groups whose common narrative worldview does not always seem to comport with reality, its general purpose is more prosaic and thus more helpful. It focuses upon actual messages to discover the “common perspective” unique to any particular group,
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the “meeting of the minds” achieved as group members “chain out” an account of their experiences in narratives (stories, jokes) and word play.
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