Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (67 page)

We are only at the beginning of understanding the nature and extent of Channel Island resistance, and more will be revealed as diaries and other contemporaneous documents make their way from attics and into the Island Archives. Physical artifacts, private writings, and personal memories all have something valuable to contribute when it comes to understanding this unique situation of a subjugated people and their quiet opposition to tyranny. As this study has revealed, one legacy of the Guernsey Occupation may be the lesson the wartime generation of Islanders has to teach us about the subtlety and persistence of rhetorical resistance.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1
. Diary of the Rev. R. Douglas Ord, vols. 1–7, 16 June 1940–12 May 1945, M0007066GY–M0007073GY, Priaulx Library, Guernsey [hereafter Ord], 176 (June 28, 1940).

2
. Diary of Kenneth G. Lewis, Guernsey Island Archives, G06/10 W, 1-1-8-10, AS/LC 16-01, June 28, 1940.

3
. Jack C. Sauvary,
Diary of the German Occupation of Guernsey, 1940–1945
(Upton-upon-Severn: Self Pub. Association, 1990), 25–26 (June 28, 1940).

4
. Diary of Elizabeth Doig, 298904, Priaulx Library, Guernsey [herafter Doig], June 28, 1940.

5
. Winifred Harvey,
The Battle of Newlands: The Wartime Diaries of Winifred Harvey
, ed. Rosemary Booth (Guernsey: Guernsey Press, 1995), 7–8 (June 27–28, 1940).

6
. Harvey,
Battle of Newlands
, 7–8;
“Press” Diary of Island Life during the German Occupation
(Guernsey: Guernsey Press, n.d.), 4.

7
. Harvey,
Battle of Newlands
, 7–8.

8
. Diary of Arthur Mauger, AQ 374/13 to 25 (23 April 1939–7 August 1940), ledger book 21, Guernsey Island Archives [hereafter Mauger], June 28–29, 1940.

9
. Frank Falla,
The Silent War
(London: Burbridge Ltd., 1994), 15. I am using the statistics for deaths and injuries provided by Falla and William M. Bell,
Guernsey Occupied but Never Conquered
(Exeter: Studio Publishing Services, 2002), 44. Some sources list 33 dead and a varying number of injured.

10
. Sauvary,
Diary
, 25 (June 28, 1940).

11
. See, for example, H. R. Kedward,
Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940–1944
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985); H. R. Kedward,
Resistance in Vichy France: A Study of Ideas and Motivation in the Southern Zone, 1940–1942
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin, eds.,
Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology
(London: Croom Helm, 1985); Christopher Lloyd,
Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France: Representing Treason and Sacrifice
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson, eds.,
Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France
(Oxford: Berg, 2005).

12
. François-Georges Dreyfus, ed.,
Unrecognized Resistance: The Franco-American Experience in World War Two
, trans. Paul Seaton (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004).

13
. Lloyd,
Collaboration and Resistance
, 29.

14
. Kedward,
Resistance in Vichy France
, 230.

15
. Václav Havel provides the classic analogy when he writes that “‘dissident movements’ or even ‘oppositions,’ emerge, like the proverbial one tenth of the iceberg visible above the water”; Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” trans. Paul Wilson, in
The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe
, ed. John Keane (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 65.

16
. Andrea Muhi Brighenti, “Resistance as Transformation,” in
Roots, Rites and Sites of Resistance: The Banality of Good
, ed. Leonidas K. Cheliotis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 101–2.

17
. Hazel R. Knowles Smith,
The Changing Face of the Channel Islands Occupation: Record, Memory, and Myth
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 187.

18
. Louise Willmot, “The Channel Islands,” in
Resistance in Western Europe
, ed. Bob Moore (London: Berg, 2000), 76.

19
. Gillian Carr and Richard Heaume, “Silent Resistance in Guernsey: The V-Sign Badges of Alf Williams and Roy Machon,” in
Channel Islands Occupation Review
, no. 32 (2004): 51.

20
. Sandra Wentworth Bradley, quoted in Knowles Smith,
The Changing Face
, 187.

21
. Willmot, “The Channel Islands,” 75.

22
. Douglas Ehninger,
Contemporary Rhetoric
(Chicago: Scott, Foresman, and Co., 1972), 3.

23
. In her study of early modern women's spiritual narratives, Gae Lyn Henderson describes rhetorical resistance as “the attempt to revise truth in opposition to a reigning regime of power”; Gae Lyn Henderson, “The ‘Parrhesiastic Game’: Textual Self-Justification in Spiritual Narratives of Early Modern Women,”
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
37 (2007): 425.

24
. Kerry Kathleen Riley,
Everyday Subversions: From Joking to Revolting in the German Democratic Republic
(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 22.

25
. See, for example, such studies as Kerran L. Sanger, “Slave Resistance and Rhetorical Self-Definition: Spirituals as a Strategy,”
Western Journal of Communication
59 (Summer 1995): 177–92. A variety of excellent studies may be found in Gary Y. Okihiro, ed.,
Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History
(Amherst: University Press of Massachusetts, 1986).

26
. Just as a very brief sampling, see Aileen S. Kraditor, ed.,
Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968); Nan Johnson, “Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America,”
Philosophy & Rhetoric
33 (2000): 221–42; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell,
Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric
, vols. 1–2 (New York: Praeger, 1989); Lisa Gring-Pemble, “Writing Themselves into Consciousness: Creating a Rhetorical Bridge between the Public and Private Spheres,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech
84 (1998); Jacqueline Jones Royster,
Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

27
. See Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,”
Communication Monographs
62 (1995): 19–46; Barbara Biesecker, “Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric,”
Philosophy & Rhetoric
25 (1992): 351–64; Ronald F. Wendt, “Answers to the Gaze: A Genealogical Poaching of Resistances,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech
82 (1996): 251–73.

28
. Nathaniel Hong, “Down With the Murderer Hitler!: Illegal Communication Strategies during the First Period of the German Occupation of Denmark,”
Journalism Monographs
146 (August 1994): 1–46.

29
. Riley,
Everyday Subversions
, 22–27.

30
. I have chosen to follow the lead of those in the Channel Islands who capitalize Occupation when referring specifically to the German Occupation of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands. I will also capitalize Island and Islanders when referring to Guernsey and the populace during this time.

31
. Charles Cruikshank,
The German Occupation of the Channel Islands
(Guernsey: Guernsey Press, 1975).

32
. Madeleine Bunting,
The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940–1945
(London: Harper Collins, 1995).

33
. Unfortunately, there are also incredible errors, some simple but some that are dead wrong and provide fuel for faulty conclusions. A critical analysis of
The Model Occupation
with a list of these errors was published by Linda Holt and Ward Rutherford, “‘The Model Occupation’—Setting the Record Straight,”
Channel Islands Occupation Review
25 (1997): 49–72.

34
. Bunting,
The Model Occupation
, 192–93. Even this chapter, filled with instances of resistance—some of which resulted in grueling prison terms, torture, and death—is entitled “Resistance? What Resistance?” This seeming desire for controversy has morphed into some unconscious comedy and journalistic shell games. In an article for
Travel Intelligence
, an online travel website, Vitali Vitaliev wrote a scathing article entitled “Island Legacy.” Seeing in the Occupation museums, books about Occupation experiences, and work of the Channel Islands Occupation Society only a marketing strategy leading to “the trivialisation of human suffering” and “a certain glamourisation of the Nazis,” Vitaliev paints a picture of Islander collaborators still “obsessed” with their “nice, civilised and invariably ‘smartly dressed’” Nazi captors. And what does he put forth as proof of collaboration but a quote from the
Guernsey Evening Press
of November 15, 1944, lifted from an anti-Semitic diatribe against a “reptilian Hebrew,” written by “a certain William Joyce, a local ‘columnist’”; Vitali Vitaliev, “Island Legacy,”
Travel Intelligence
,
http://www.travelintelligence.com/travel-writing/island-legacy
. Vitaliev's lack of awareness that William Joyce was the infamous “Lord Haw-Haw,” the American-born but British-raised propaganda broadcaster transmitting from Germany and simply reprinted in the Nazi-controlled
Evening Press
, is simple ignorance. The fact that Vitaliev's article is reprinted on the
guardian.co.uk
website, renamed “Channel Islanders Showing Off Their Sites of Shame,” and with the telltale, embarrassing section on Joyce deftly deleted, points to the
Guardian
's desire for controversy; Vitali Vitaliev, “Channel Islanders Showing Off Their Sites of Shame,” Sunday, January 3, 1999 (
guardian.co.uk
).

35
. Bunting,
Model Occupation
, 321.

36
. Bunting,
Model Occupation
, 322. She does not give the frightened historian's name, although it was presumably Peter Toombs.

37
. Bunting,
Model Occupation
, 3.

38
. Bunting,
Model Occupation
, 316. Bunting follows this stunning condemnation with the peculiar revelation that an Australian journalist, Roland le Folet Hoffman, committed suicide in Guernsey shortly after Liberation in disgust that there had been “signs of outright collaboration.” She does not say what these signs were. This was truly a sensitive soul if, as an Australian, Hoffman killed himself because Channel Islanders let down mainland Britain.

39
. Louise Willmot, “The Channel Islands,” in
Resistance in Western Europe
, ed. Bob Moore (London: Berg, 2000), 83.

40
. Willmot, “The Channel Islands,” 84.

41
. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows,
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
(London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

42
. See Knowles Smith,
The Changing Face
; Paul Sanders,
The British Channel Islands under German Occupation, 1940–1945
(Jersey: Jersey Heritage Trust/Société Jersiaise, 2005); Barry Turner,
Outpost of Occupation: How the Channel Islands Survived Nazi Rule, 1940–45
(London: Aurum Press, 2010); Gillian Carr, “The Archaeology of Occupation, 1940–2009: A Case Study from the Channel Islands,” in
Antiquity
84 (2010): 161–74. All of these are excellent resources. Paul Sanders focuses primarily on Jersey, but provides an analysis of the entire Occupation, utilizing many recently released documents. Dr. Knowles Smith is the one historian who pays attention to diary accounts in her broad examination of all of the Channel Islands. She provides a general refutation of scandal and discovers material that “overwhelmingly support[s] an honourable narrative of occupation history, with a few blemishes” (254). Dr. Carr also brings new eyes to the analysis of Occupation artifacts from her perspective as an archaeologist, a very promising new line of research.