Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (47 page)

A NEED FOR SUBTLETY

The need for wariness and a subtlety in resistance was driven home early to the occupied Islanders as their new German masters made their intentions to enforce the new reality unmistakably clear. Even without knowing about threats to hostages behind the scenes in the early days of the Occupation, the average Islander now was aware of the distinct possibility that resistance would lead to the murder of innocents. The general attitude about resistant acts came to resemble Kitty Bachmann's feelings, ones that she expressed during the “velvet glove” period of the fall of 1940. Worried by the failed landings of British servicemen on Guernsey and the reprisals against their families, Kitty wondered when the Germans' “august patience” might end. She further pondered:

There is always the risk that some fiery character might go berserk and carry out some of the things we all feel the urge to do at times. If such acts would assist our cause in particular, and the war effort in general, no doubt many attempts would have been made long ago, with the full blessing of us all. But one must be wary, even with the pen.
⁷

Kitty's concerns make a pretty fair summary of Islander attitudes when it came to resistant acts.

First, the spirit to resist was widespread and bubbled up in ways that were difficult to tamp down at times. The danger lay in the “fiery” among them who might throw caution to the wind and conduct an act on the spur of the moment, rather than with the cool calculation that resistance under armed occupation requires. Even so, despite the dangers and the possible reprisals against other civilians, any act that helped Guernsey, or could definitely help the war effort, would find support in the Island. But wariness was the watchword under the current conditions, and blatant or poorly calculated acts would be generally dismissed as foolish and unproductive. In a broad sense, these would remain the ground rules for acceptable resistance until the combination of desperate circumstances and renewed hopes for liberation changed the feelings of Guernseymen and women during the final year.

In addition to threats against nonparticipants, early punishments for resisters had an influence on the evolving form that resistance would take. In September 1940 one of the more notable of these warnings came with the news that “The mechanic,
MARCEL BROSSIER
of Rennes, has been sentenced to
DEATH
…for having cut German telephone cables…Brossier has been
FUSILATED
.”
⁸
This rather odd term (based on fusillade) for a firing-squad execution was marked as German phrasing and stuck in people's minds. In February 1941, Ambrose Robin learned that “Nelson Le Breton (probably drunk?) attempted to escape from the island on Saturday,” and Robin's first thought was “will he be fusilated?” As it turned out, this escape attempt simply amounted to Le Breton being found drunk and passed out in a boat moored in the town harbor. He would spend some extended time in prison rather than face a firing squad, but the repeat of German phrasing shows that the warnings of counter-resistance punishments in France took hold in Robin's mind.
⁹

It seems very likely that the François Scornet case also heightened the sense of threat for Guernsey. Scornet, along with fifteen fellow Frenchmen, had sailed from the Brittany Coast in early 1941 with the hope of joining the Free French Forces. The weather during the voyage was intensely rough, so after sailing for hours, they believed that they had reached the Isle of Wight. Instead, they sailed into Vazon Bay, Guernsey, triumphantly singing the “Marseillaise,” only to be immediately captured by the Germans. The young men were transferred to Jersey for trial, and three were given the death penalty (with the others given varying lengths of prison sentences). His two compatriots later had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment, but Scornet faced the firing squad at Saint Ouens Manor in Jersey during the early morning hours of March 17, 1941.

Touching words from his final letter to his parents (“I believe the end of my existence has come, I will die for France, bravely facing the enemy. In an hour it will be finished…be assured that I will die a good Christian…for the last time I embrace you”) are proudly displayed on websites to his honor. His stalwart demeanor at his execution and final words of “Vive Dieu! Vive La France!” revealed him to be an unusually brave twenty-one-year-old and made him a natural hero to the Channel Islanders.
¹⁰
Knowles Smith is correct when she describes news of this event as summoning up Islanders' emotions similar to ones experienced in the initial air raid, and diminishing their “trust in German standards of human justice, and of their respect for the Law.”
¹¹
It also drove home to all their need to tread
carefully and find means to resist that would lessen the opportunity for retaliation by their German captors.

TALKING BACK AND SIDEWAYS

The power of expression, whether embodied in speech, writing, or other symbolic forms, has not always been fully recognized for its “dynamic, creative, change-making, history altering” potential.
¹²
Andrew Smith makes the important point, one that has been apparent throughout this study thus far, that efforts against domination are more opaque than transparent. They travel, by necessity, in disguise and function by “foiling the dominant other's game in singular instances.”
¹³
In other words, only rarely is rhetorical resistance overt, group-organized, and unmistakable. It is for this reason that many analysts miss both the “human drive to counter injustices”
¹⁴
and the potential for a powerful collective effect in acts that seem individual and spur-of-the-moment. Nowhere is this underestimation of the power of rhetorical resistance more apparent than in discussions of individual verbal confrontations during the Occupation. Therefore, this is the first form of a more active rhetorical resistance to be considered: the many instances of verbal opposition to the enemy that became noteworthy parts of Island lore during and after the Occupation.

In his Berkeley lectures on “fearless speech,” Michel Foucault addressed the ancient concept of “parrhesia,” or in its English translation “free speech,” as a counter to power. In parrhesia, the speaker values frankness over safety and views the speaking of truth as a duty to the larger community. Two aspects of parrhesia link this concept to the verbal confrontations practiced by the Islanders as a means of resistance. First, the “parrhesiastic game” is played in a situation of unequal power: “The parrhesia comes from ‘below’ as it were, and is directed towards ‘above.’” Second, the exercise of parrhesia is “linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger.”
¹⁵
Both of these defining attributes of parrhesia were clearly present in the oppositional speech that emerged during the Occupation.

The Germans (and we must always, as suggested earlier, look to them to gauge the impact of resistance) were well aware of the danger if they allowed verbal confrontations to go unremarked and unpunished. It is to be remembered that one of the very first concerns of the Occupation, as early as July 1940, was the need to curb speech viewed as insulting by the Germans. Part of the concern was that an interpersonal confrontation might cause simmering resentments and a natural antipathy for the enemy occupier to explode into violence.
¹⁶

The tendency to verbally confront the German forces in Guernsey was apparently shared across gender, although men seemed to be also on the edge of a more physical opposition. Frank Mallett, who specialized in automotive repairs, had been kept busy building and repairing German lorries. But according to Jack Sauvary, one day at his works on the Banques, he “had a few words with one of them and showed his fists.” He was summarily arrested.
¹⁷
Because reports of arrests for various confrontations are so common in the contemporaneous accounts, details are often omitted. It is difficult to know, for example, what was the exact nature of the term “insult” that accompanied Gertie Corbin's terse entry that Nico Le Prevost and Bill Russel were “in prison because they insulted soldiers.”
¹⁸
It is not always apparent
whether such insults were verbal, a matter of offensive look and manner, or blended with a more physical confrontation. After all, some Germans considered it insulting not to be given preferential treatment in a store, or for a civilian not to yield the sidewalk. Thus, the type or level of “insult” could be fairly wide-ranging.

Some descriptions of arrests are more definitely for speech, and they begin very early and extend to quite late in the Occupation. So, for example, Rev. Ord mentions in August 1940 that two girls were sentenced (one to six months and the other to nine months in prison) for “unguarded speech.”
¹⁹
Only three days later, Winnie Harvey records that the still-room maid at the Royal Hotel (the German headquarters) had been interned for “speaking against the German troops.” For working-class women who needed to earn their living, positions working for and around the German troops were almost inevitable.
²⁰
The dangers of juxtaposing plain-spoken Guernsey women, who did not suffer fools gladly, with young German troops seems clear. The inevitable result of enemies living side by side continued, and Bert Williams could say of the prisons in May 1944, “One has only to say anything a little out of the way, and in you go.”
²¹

Of course, the ability to express an opinion without reprisal varied based on the position of the speaker and the context of the exchange. Winnie Harvey had the standing, as a member of the upper class, that appealed to the snobbish Germans now in possession of Newlands. In her contact with the lesser members of the contingent ensconced in her home, such as Eitel the interpreter and Paul the batman, she could slyly get her point across. One afternoon in the spring of 1942, she was in the Newlands back lawn, despite the presence of some of the men who liked to sunbathe there whenever the officers were away. Winnie found this to be “a nuisance,” but as the men were “very civil and polite,” she could use the absence of the officers to check on her property.

On this day Eitel (and Winnie puts in parentheses “I don't like him”) was chatting about the beautiful spring weather, how much rain was needed, and asking about the Guernsey summers. Eitel said, “I tink it is so beautiful for us, everything is always just right for
us.
” To that, Winnie looked up and replied, “Perhaps, yes, for now, but I think a
change
is coming soon.” Winnie added in her diary, “He understood what I meant.”
²²
A similar exchange occurred when Paul, the batman, gave Winnie the war news following the battle of Dieppe. He happily came “dancing down the garden” to tell her that there were 1,500 British prisoners and ninety planes shot down. “And how many German?” asked Winnie to the suddenly “crestfallen” Paul, who replied, “Ach, I do not know. Perhaps twenty.” “Perhaps twenty thousand!” responded Winnie.
²³

There were several elements that protected speakers who shared opinions counter to the German perspective, and we can see them operating in Winnie's exchange. First, the relative standing of the speaker mattered. Winnie seemed to carry with her the sense of being mistress of the manor, even when she was dispossessed of the property. The German officers treated her with a respect that her bearing demanded, and lower-ranking Germans, serving as support staff for those officers, were unlikely to report her regardless of what she said. This was not always the case, of course. So, second, Winnie was careful to shelter what she was saying, so as to give no opportunity for trouble. Eitel would have been hard pressed to report any insult in her words, and even the words with Paul, while a little closer to the line, could have been easily defended. But third, and most important, was the private nature of the exchange. A speech act that seems wholly interpersonal—a private exchange between a specific Islander and a German—takes on symbolic weight as it is observed or discussed by others. Much of
the power of spontaneous verbal insults and challenges comes from the collective effect these confrontations can trigger.
²⁴

The difference in what could safely be said, and who could say it, may be seen in the sad case of John Ingrouille. John was born in Vale, Guernsey, in 1920, an only child who worked as a laborer like his father. He was working on a farm in Jersey at the start of the Occupation and returned to Guernsey soon thereafter. Because work was difficult to obtain, John started work as a cook for a group of Luftwaffe air-sea rescue signalers who conducted their observations from the top of Vale Mill and lived in an adjoining house. For a short time, the position went well, but then John—with the bravado of young men—started talking about having eight hundred men ready and willing to shoot the Germans. He also took home a knife and fork belonging to an officer.

At this point, the account is somewhat muddy. His mother clearly believed, and gave a postwar deposition to the effect, that John was denounced by a woman, who along with her daughter worked in the same place. According to Mrs. Ingrouille, when the Germans came to the Ingrouilles' house searching for guns, this woman accompanied them on one occasion. Then again, Mrs. Ingrouille also claimed that John brought the knife and fork home for safekeeping while the officer was away. By other estimations, John, who had a “quick temper,” may have done a little boasting about his threat against the Germans and this tiny bit of resistant pilfering. Whether denounced or overheard by the Germans, John's actions were taken very seriously.