Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (48 page)

On December 31, 1940, two Germans came to the Ingrouille home, took John aside into his room, and apparently searched thoroughly. That afternoon, they took John away with them. As he prepared to enter the Germans' car, John turned back to his mother and said, “So long Mum, I won't be long. I have not done anything or said anything.” It was the last his parents were to see of their son. John was tried in Jersey and sentenced to five years for treason and one month for stealing the knife and fork. Simply the structuring of the charge against him as “treason,” as opposed to a milder charge along the lines of “dangerous talking,” seems completely out of proportion with the incident. After all, there was no sign that the threat of having eight hundred armed men waiting to strike the Germans was anything but unbelievable talk.

It seems clear that a young man of fighting age was considered a particular threat, and the Germans were eager to send a message that such talk would not be tolerated. John's story would have a tragic end. He spent four years in French prisons before being transferred to Brandenburg Prison in Germany. When the British took Brandenburg in May 1945, John was discovered to be very ill. He was taken to a hospital in Brussels, where he died on June 13, 1945. His body was returned to Guernsey in 1946 and buried at the Domaille cemetery at St. Michael du Valle church.
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It could easily be claimed that John Ingrouille's case was an oddity and not representative of most of the resistant speech in the Island. It was, after all, a threat of violence, however unlikely, which in the German mind would heighten a desire to smother it in the crib. If we are seeking the most common form of confrontation, the kind Andrew Smith describes as “individual, often voluble engagements” where one of the powerless speaks “like a citizen rather than a subject,”
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then Mrs. Winifred Green might prove a better example. Different versions of the Winnie Green account appear in local histories of the Occupation, but the most complete may come from her cousin in an article written after the war. Winnie's children had been evacuated to Scotland, and “to fill the void,” she started work as a waitress at the
Royal Hotel. This hotel, of course, became the German headquarters in Guernsey, so Winnie was surrounded by Germans and their support staff, a situation that was ripe for possible missteps by someone as patriotic and outspoken as Mrs. Green.

The Swiss chef was a great admirer of Hitler, and to the same extent, Winifred Green was an ardent admirer of Winston Churchill. A “teasing” relationship developed between the two, with the chef greeting Mrs. Green each day with, “Good morning, Mrs. Green. Heil Hitler!” and with Winnie retorting, “Good Morning, Chef. Heil Churchill!” The staff lunches became a lively tit for tat, with the chef crowing over any positive German war news: “Have you hear the news Mrs. Green? Germany has taken Yugoslavia (or Greece, or Crete).” On one day, it was “We've got the battleship
Hood
!” to which Winnie came back days later with “Heard the news? We've got the
Bismarck
!”

The danger for those in a subjugated position of such “joking” exchanges is apparent. In this case, the chef and Mrs. Green were commenting in areas involving patriotism, war, and matters of life and death, all uneasy areas for humor. Any levity in the back and forth with the chef wore away quickly, and the comments became more bitter and freighted with meaning. Finally, one day the chef asked Winifred, “Would you like some rice pudding, Mrs. Green?” “Yes, please,” she replied. The chef baited her: “Only if you say Heil Hitler.” After a few seconds' silence, Winnie burst forth with, “To hell with Hitler for a rice pudding—and one made of skim milk at that!” For this exchange, one she defiantly verified at trial, Winnie Green would receive six months in the Caen prison. To relieve the boredom of her sentence, she secretly embroidered a bed sheet with “Heil Churchill, RAF, Caen Prison 1941, V,” smuggling it out in the lining of her coat.
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The response to this colorful but small incident in studies of the Occupation has been interesting. Most treat it simply in passing, and Madeleine Bunting appends a dry, “She became a folk heroine,” to further her argument that the dearth of true resistance made Islanders bolster even miniscule acts to prominence.
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Of course, upon her release from prison, Mrs. Green
was
quietly lauded by Islanders who teasingly called her “Mrs. Churchill,” and the bed sheet was displayed for many years in a guest house the Greens operated after the war. What the Islanders and the Germans understood, and what has largely been missed by later analysts, is the importance of such verbal eruptions as that of Winifred Green. It is little wonder that the Germans reacted harshly to such speech acts, for “when suddenly subservience evaporates and is replaced by open defiance, we encounter one of those rare and dangerous moments in power relations.”
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The Germans saw such incidents not as “pinpricks,” as so often they are described, but as serious disruptions to the seamless functioning of masterful domination. As long as insults are presented offstage or are disguised in such a way that they may be ignored, then no action is necessary. But clear, overt insubordination is “a dare” that calls into question the carefully constructed relationship between dominator and dominated.
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Power is sometimes illusory, and the “smooth surface” of the German display of control and the apparent consent of the governed could be readily challenged by public acts that erupted into view at odd moments.
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Some Guernseymen and women kept their performances right below the surface successfully, a mimetic display of apparent compliance but shadowed by an insubordination that was readily apparent only to those with the eyes to see it. Obviously, Miss Gaudin specialized in burlesque with double meaning, using the small stage of her bookshop to entertain her fellow Islanders with challenges to German dignity. In November 1940, a German officer came in to find an English storybook, a gift for his daughter who was taking English lessons. Did Miss
Gaudin have a good book that she would recommend? Instantly, Miss Gaudin pulled out a copy of the political parody “Adolf in Blunderland.” “Ah yes!” the officer said, looking it over. “I have heard it is a classic, but I do not read English well myself.”
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Such publicly performed humor is a type of verbal jiujitsu, using the weight of an opponent's dignity as an effective weapon and a means to neutralize power.
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The story of such an encounter would be told and retold, multiplying the effect as it passed from person to person.

This enlargement through retelling made stories of “back talk” into an important aspect of Islander understanding of their own resistance. In February 1944, Colonel Knackfuss attempted to crack down on increasingly offhand treatment of their German patrons by shop owners and assistants. These very public places were ideal venues to display a subtle contempt toward the occupier, and tensions were natural when the Germans were not treated with the respect, or the subservience, they expected. Thus, Knackfuss sent a letter on February 12, 1944, to the Bailiffs of Guernsey and Jersey stating that proprietors of retail shops, public houses, cinemas, hairdressers, etc., must attend and serve members of the German army “in preference.”

An incident in a Guernsey hair salon at this time pointed up the reason for the Knackfuss letter. A Guernseyman had entered the hairdresser's for a shave and haircut and was asked to have a seat. He was followed closely by a German naval officer, who fully expected to be attended to first. Adele Lainé recorded the exchange in her diary:

ASSISTANT TO GERMAN OFFICER: Excuse me sir but this gentleman was in first so I must attend to him first.

GERMAN OFFICER: If Mr. Anthony Eden came in would you ask him to wait?

ASSISTANT: It would not be necessary. He is too much of a gentleman to want to take anybody else's turn.

The assistant was fined 20 reichsmarks for his clever comeback, and shortly following this incident, on February 21, an order appeared in the paper detailing the new requirement for preferential treatment. According to Adele Lainé, the assistant became “quite a hero in the eyes of his compatriots.”
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Average people saw in his response the expression of a “communal identity,”
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a vital part of the flexing of a collective muscle.

Spontaneous outbursts that are simply an overflow of high spirits may have the same effect as humor that is more deftly wielded, or the simple belligerence of talking back. When word spread across Guernsey of the resignation of Mussolini in July 1943, the civilians in St. Peter Port were “full of unconcealed joy” that burst out in “jokes about macaroni, spaghetti and ice-cream.” When Rev. Ord reached the crowded Arcade, Rex Priaulx, a noted local vocalist, caught his eye. Priaulx swung up onto his bicycle, while singing loudly, “O…. h!
WHAT
a surprise for the Duce, the Duce! We've had no spaghetti for weeks.”
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The unexpected or comical verbal outburst is one that is effective in the weakest of hands, even those of children, drunks, and the mentally challenged. Gertie Corbin and some of her friends were kept laughing by the sight of Jean des Mares (“quite drunk”) in the Coudre, who was shouting, “Good old England” and “Buy British.” It seems that des Mares managed to avoid punishment for this boozy patriotism, leaving Gertie to ponder, “It's a wonder the Germans don't put him in prison.”
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When a civilian manages to pull off such blatant tweaking of the nose of the powerful, it only emboldens others among the dominated. Those in power must make constant decisions between coming down hard on such instances,
expending resources, straining whatever goodwill exists, and dissolving the illusion of complete control, or selectively ignoring them, gambling that such little sparks do not presage a wider conflagration.

Under the right circumstances, the smart remark or confrontational speech may be potent enough to trigger violence. In May 1943, Bill Warry watched out of the open windows of his club as an RAF raid attacked German vessels in the harbor. One of Bill's friends, Harley Guiton, was also busy looking out the club windows at the troops filling the streets, particularly at two German NCOs, and “said something rather loud.” Although Bill does not record what that “something” was, it had a galvanizing effect on the officers, one of whom instantly took out his revolver. Bill and his friend “quickly withdrew from the windows, till he cooled down.” Bill was fully expecting a shot through the window; “it never came, but it might have done so.” He was, of course, right that the heightened tensions of open warfare would make the Germans more sensitive and trigger-happy. This threat did not seem to stop the locals, who despite how “the Germans glared at them” milled around in groups, discussed the attack, and “had their say & laugh.”
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It is in such incidents that we see the cumulative effect of small acts of verbal insubordination and their ability to blossom into more widespread challenges to authority, even under threat of violence. The Germans had a particular stake in controlling who spoke to whom, and a significant portion of their surveillance was directed at preventing unauthorized conversations. If contemporaneous accounts are to be believed, this was particularly true when it came to conversations with prisoners. Stories and rumors swept through Guernsey of captured Allied forces and attempts made by the Islanders to talk to them. Many of these stories, as they made their way into private diaries, were quite fantastic, although they followed a common pattern: a battle over or near the Island, a downed Allied parachutist or captured sailors, successful attempts by Islanders to speak to them (before or after they were taken into custody), hopeful words from the men about the war—usually to the effect that Allied victory would not be long in coming—and steps by the Germans to prevent or punish such conversations.
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The story would come to the satisfying conclusion that the Germans did not want Islanders to “know the truth” of the coming end of the war. The past history of small verbal defiances made such stories, some undoubtedly more fiction than fact, believable and bolstered the Islanders' morale. One woman told Rev. Ord that she passed an RAF pilot, forced to bail out over the Island, as he was under guard and on his way to custody. He returned her cheerful “Good morning,” and the little exchange “did her a world of good,” despite her concerns for the young man's future.
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The simple act of breaking silence, to speak when forbidden or to reach out to those held incommunicado, is a distinct gesture of defiance. Rev. Ord also found his moments to make such moves, seeing them as part of his ministry to provide comfort. One May morning as he cycled back from a funeral at the cemetery in St. Martin, he happened upon a group of Russian prisoners waiting to be taken from their work detail back to their billet. The men were clustered in a semicircle around a giant of a man, but there did not appear to be any guards present for the moment. Ord stopped and gave them some encouraging words in his relatively “rusty” Russian, describing the response: “For a moment they were taken aback, then their faces lit up with delight, and the giant let out a mighty yell in which they all joined.” Then Ord heard the sound of heavy boots around the corner and swiftly pedaled around an opposite corner, darting into one of the narrow lanes in that area to avoid being followed. “But,” he concluded, “the joy of the Russians was worth seeing.”
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