Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (3 page)

In conditions of military occupation where the overt actions of a full resistance movement are unlikely to be cultivated, is there a distinct pattern to a covert resistance that can be identified? While granting that all military occupations are unique, are there conditions that encourage the development of a resistance that is primarily discursive and symbolic? Can we further detail the components of this rhetorical resistance, cultivated around the manipulation of discourse and the control of information? Finally, does the pattern of rhetorical resistance extend to other situations where there is an extreme power differential and where a community finds itself in a condition of powerlessness? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is yes. It is a search for the outline of a rhetorical resistance that led me to the five years of the Guernsey Occupation, which will serve as the focus of this book.
³⁰

There are multiple reasons for the choice of the Guernsey Occupation as the means to identify the pattern of rhetorical resistance, not the least of which is the recent controversy that has sprung up over the nature of resistance versus collaboration in the Channel Islands during World War II. Although historians have examined the Occupation, until recently there were fewer studies than such an intriguing episode would warrant. Most of the early studies were published by Channel Island presses and are not readily available outside the Channel
Islands, with the exception of Charles Cruikshank's scholarly 1975 study,
The German Occupation of the Channel Islands
.
³¹
Until 2007, the one book widely circulated on the Occupation had been Madeleine Bunting's
The Model Occupation
.
³²
Bunting has an undergraduate degree in history, having taken part also in a prestigious postgraduate fellowship, but her career has been as a polemical journalist, writing opinion columns for the London-based
Guardian.
This background actually held promise for attaining interviews that would add depth to what has tended to be dry recitations of Nazi emplacements, or tales of starving Islanders making jelly from carrageen moss. Thus, I looked forward to reading her book when it was published in 1995, but came away deeply disappointed. The interesting interviews, the nuggets of previously unknown information, the focus on lesser-known stories of the Occupation (such as the experience of liberated Russian slave laborers, or Dolly Joanknecht, a young Guernsey girl who fell in love with and subsequently married a German soldier) are all there.
³³
Yet, imposed throughout are Bunting's conclusions, ones that do not seem to match her own evidence.

Just an example or two will point up this problem and give insight into the impact her study has had on Occupation scholarship. It will also reveal the difficulties in understanding resistance when only the overt and forceful are identified as resistant acts. In her chapter on Channel Island resistance, Bunting acknowledges that, of the entire Empire, the islands had given one of the highest percentages based on population of young men and women to the war effort. The population that remained, often too old or too young for active war duty, had different tasks: “to endure and survive, not to indulge in ineffective and costly gestures of resistance.” Indeed, she lays out the excellent Island reasons why a traditional resistance would have been foolish. Bunting then follows up with her conclusion that this argument makes Islanders “uneasy.” She intuits their discomfort because they are “quick to point to resistance activities, however petty, that they may have been involved in.” What she repeatedly in the book calls their “defensiveness” over the issue comes, she claims, from their unexpressed belief that “their stock of brave exploits is meagre.”

Yet, in the very next paragraph the reader learns the “further twist” about Island resistance: “Most islanders are reluctant to mention that there were instances of significant resistance.” The emotion she assigns to the Islanders this time is “embarrassment” because they could not approximate the courage of their greatest resisters. The reader cannot help but be puzzled. Are the Islanders defensive because there was
no
effective resistance, proven by the quickness with which they gave Bunting personal examples of attempts to resist? Or are they embarrassed because there
was
substantial resistance to which their own personal attempts could not measure up? Either way, Bunting's style of analysis takes all evidence—positive, negative, or neutral—and reads it as proof of Islander failure.
³⁴

Bunting's description of defensive Islanders whitewashing a dark secret would come as a surprise to those who have visited Guernsey, the island that is the specific focus of this study. Bunting dismisses any counters to her own reading as part of a “sanitised collective memory.”
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Apparently Channel Islanders are not only self-delusional but also dangerous. Bunting claims, “The islanders succeeded in frightening off the last historian to publish a book on the Occupation; he admitted that he had never set foot on the islands for fear of the controversy he may have found.”
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Invariably, I have encountered in Guernsey Islanders an open perspective, and a clear-eyed view that the Occupation is history, a five-year period that needs to be examined in all its facets. They are frank, and Guernsey wry, about the minority rogues gallery willing to throw ethics aside in their bid personally to survive, or financially to thrive, in the Occupation atmosphere. More, they are fascinated by what they see as the vast majority of Guernseymen
and women who resourcefully walked the ethical tightrope of the Occupation, emerging with their lives, self-respect, and British patriotism intact. In Islander eagerness to share their best Occupation stories with her, Bunting senses only deceit and shame. Rather, it is in just such apparently mundane accounts that new understandings of the Occupation and the nature of rhetorical resistance lie waiting.

Recent accounts of the Occupation are sometimes mired in the conceptual frame that this was the only part of Britain occupied by the Nazis. In fact, the opening sentence of Bunting's book is “What if Hitler had invaded Britain?”
³⁷
An undertone of “See, you weren't so perfect” versus “Well, do you think you could have done half so good?” colors discourse between some mainland British writers and Islanders, and fuels a tabloid-exposé mentality bent on uncovering the “real” story. For example, in her final chapter, Bunting devolves into manufactured outrage, predicated on the blanket charge that Islanders failed as British subjects. Following passing references to Churchill's “fight them on the beaches” speech, and claims from Leonard Woolf that some of the Bloomsbury group had purchased poison to commit suicide if Hitler invaded, Bunting continues: “But Channel Islanders did not fight on the beaches, in the fields, or in the streets. They did not commit suicide, and they did not kill any Germans…the islanders had not lived up to Britain's wartime ideals. Indeed, they had dismally failed them.”
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Imagine the surprise of Islanders when they read these lines. Only by flinging themselves willy-nilly off a local cliff en masse, or an equally suicidal attack—armed with broom handles and saucepans—on German forces could they meet Bunting's (or her projection of wartime Britain's) high standards for British patriotism. Through such dramatic and extreme conclusions, Bunting changed the dynamic of open inquiry and reasonable argument in Occupation studies. She also confines resistance to those explicit acts that provide counterforce to the German occupiers, treating other forms of defiance as unimportant or vaguely collaborative.

As Louise Willmot writes, in reference to the controversy engendered by Bunting, “None of this encourages an objective assessment of island resistance.”
³⁹
Willmot believes that such resistance is underestimated because it was largely “unorganized” rather than falling neatly into “a resistance ‘movement’ akin to those which existed on the continent.” Negative judgments based on such a comparison, in Willmot's words, “fail to do justice either to the conditions the islanders faced, or to the resistance they did offer,” and she urges researchers to “move beyond what has become a sterile debate.”
⁴⁰
Although Willmot had in mind academic studies, in an interesting turn of events, the charming fictional account
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
, published in 2007, may have done the most thus far to capture the unique flavor of that particular time and place and introduce it to a wider audience.
⁴¹

Although academics and journalists are now slowly approaching the Islanders' history with new appreciation,
⁴²
there is an underlying structure to the Guernsey Occupation that has never been examined in depth. As a rhetorician, I will view this time through the frame provided by my own field, and an interest in persuasive discourse and the ebb and flow of communication. This study seeks an understanding not just of
what
happened during the Occupation, but
why
resistance took the very specific form that it did. When information is restricted through the fiat of occupiers' control and through the physical remoteness of an island location, information itself becomes a nexus of power and resistance. As new orders came down from the German occupying forces forbidding access to outside information by confiscating wireless sets and censoring the press, the Islanders immediately undertook countermoves, sometimes at great personal risk. The verbal and symbolic defiance of the Islanders, such a notable aspect of the Occupation, was neither simple “smarting off” nor a harmless
means to blow off steam, as sometimes portrayed. There appeared to be a tacit understanding between occupier and occupied that this struggle for control of information and limits on acceptable expression were important aspects of domination. These discursive and symbolic elements would construct an Occupation resistance of subtlety, depth, and complexity.

A desire to step outside past debates about the Occupation and to uncover a broader sense of rhetorical resistance that could be applied to other situations led me to the Guernsey Archives, the Priaulx Library, and the Imperial War Museum. In order to study discourse contemporaneous with the Occupation and thus avoid the unconscious structuring of memory that comes in the wake of historical controversy, I decided to focus on private diaries kept in Guernsey from June 1940 to May 1945.
⁴³
By examining diaries written during the Occupation of Guernsey, I am seeking the larger story of discourse and rhetorical resistance during those five years. Within these diaries lies the largely unexamined “hidden transcript” of the Guernsey Occupation. James C. Scott, in his book
Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
, poses the question “How do we study power relations when the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic pose in the presence of the powerful and when the powerful may have an interest in overdramatizing their reputation and mastery?”
⁴⁴
Scott argues that the dominated develop a “hidden transcript,” one that offers an appraisal of power that may only be safely uttered in private, “behind the back of the dominant.”
⁴⁵
In fact, both the dominated
and
the dominant in a power situation develop hidden transcripts, and an understanding of these discourses is vital to an accurate reading of the public transcript, and to the recognition of resistance when it appears.
⁴⁶

Although aspects of the hidden transcript of the powerless may leak into public view, they appear in disguise and in a coded form designed to shelter the weak from peril.
⁴⁷
Scott argues that the more dangerous the situation for the powerless, the richer will be their attending hidden transcript.
⁴⁸
When those who experienced the Occupation revel in stories of small defiances, coded insults, and the deft turning of tables on their occupiers, it is not “defensiveness,” but the recognition and appreciation of this hidden transcript. As Scott puts it, to read a hidden transcript of the powerless,

we enter the world of rumor, gossip, disguises, linguistic tricks, metaphors, euphemisms, folktales, ritual gestures, anonymity. For good reason, nothing is entirely straightforward here; the realities of power for subordinate groups mean that much of their political action requires interpretation precisely because it is intended to be cryptic and opaque.
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The Guernsey diarists of this study are my guides in discovering this world of coded discourse and disguised subversion.

Generally this hidden transcript is lost to history, or the ability to decode it is challenged by its incomplete and sheltered nature. We are left with the documents and performances of a public transcript that is little more than “the
self
-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen.”
⁵⁰
Part of the problem in the more controversial studies of the Occupation has been a naive reading of a public transcript (the “open interaction”
⁵¹
between the occupier and occupied) that was largely a fiction of power. It behooves the dominant to portray resistance as easily controlled “pinpricks,” to amplify their mastery and control of the dominated. When historians privilege the public transcript, bolstered by only certain aspects of the hidden transcript of the powerful, they complete the work that the dominant hoped to achieve through a structuring of image and history.