‘I always felt we’d done our little bit. We didn’t do it out of patriotism, but out of defiance. There wasn’t much you could do here in the war by way of resistance. We knew the Germans shouldn’t have been here, but they were good and very gentlemanly.’
Jerseywoman Kathleen Whitley, imprisoned for painting ‘V for Victory’ signs
‘EVERY OCCUPIED COUNTRY in the Second World War had its resistance movement,’ said the French historian Henri Michel. Resistance fighters became the stuff of national legends, and their heroes and heroines became national icons. They were honoured with medals and pensions. Their actions spawned an industry of films and books. The importance of resistance was not in terms of military strategy; on only a few occasions, as historians now acknowledge, did it make a significant impact on the progress of the war in Europe. The resistance’s importance lay in terms of a more intangible quantity: a nation’s honour. The fact that people made huge sacrifices and gave their lives to resist German aggression is a consolation for the national humiliation of defeat. There was no famous resistance movement on the Channel Islands, and there are no heroes or heroines about whom films have been made and books written. Resistance is a sensitive subject, and islanders are defensive. They quickly provide explanations for the absence of a resistance movement by pointing to facts such as the high ratio of Germans to islanders, the lack of escape routes and the strategic irrelevance of the islands. Attempts to resist would have achieved nothing for the British war effort, and would have provoked terrible retaliation on the part of the Germans, they add, and demand of their questioner: ‘What would have been the point?’ Furthermore, islanders argue, ten thousand men and women from the Channel Islands served in the British Forces in the Second World War; they would have been the section of the population most likely to form the backbone of a resistance movement if they had remained on the islands. The resistance in France and the Low Countries was fuelled by young men forced underground to avoid labour drafts. The islands contributed one of the highest proportions of their population in the whole Empire to the war effort. The islands’ honour lay in their achievements, islanders claim. These young men and women were fighting the Nazis, and the role of those left at home was to endure and survive, not to indulge in ineffective and costly gestures of resistance.
It is an argument which has almost convinced islanders, but they are uneasy. They are quick to point to resistance activities, however petty, that they may have been involved in. They are anxious to demonstrate their defiance and bravado towards the Germans. Their defensiveness stems from a feeling that in a war which has passed into the popular imagination as one of extraordinary feats of heroism, their stock of brave exploits is meagre.
There is a further twist in the history of Channel Islands resistance. Most islanders are reluctant to mention that there were instances of significant resistance. They did not constitute a movement. They did not kill German soldiers. Unlike the European resistance movements they received no encouragement, support or supplies from Britain. They had little or no effect on the Germans’ fighting strength. But in disobeying or frustrating German orders, they saved some lives, and they were evidence of a bravely defiant spirit. The names of the Channel Islands resistance heroes and heroines have passed into local folklore, but they never received official national or island recognition for their bravery. There are no plaques or statues to the memory of women such as Louisa Gould and Marie Ozanne, who both paid for their compassion with their lives, nor men such as Canon Cohu and Harold Le Druillenec. No honours were handed out by the British or island governments at the end of the war to those who had printed illegal news leaflets or harboured escaped slave workers.
The history of the islands’ resistance has been neglected for two reasons. Firstly, the story of those men and women who sacrificed their lives is an embarrassment to the many islanders who could not match their courage. Secondly, many islanders who did make gestures of defiance paid dearly for them, and could not look to their government, for protection. Their stories show up the relationship the island governments had formed with the Germans, an integral part of which was that resistance would not be tolerated.
The island governments had to impress on islanders very quickly that the beginning of the Occupation marked a dramatic break between the sentiments of defiance and resistance towards the Germans peddled prior to July 1940, and the compliance and co-operation now demanded by the presence of the Germans on the islands. They had no time to lose if they were not going to endanger the smooth development of relations with the Feldkommandantur and the policy of Model Occupation.
In the first month of Occupation there were two cases in the island courts – one on Jersey, one on Guernsey – which made it very clear to islanders that resistance of any kind would incur not just the judgement of the German military courts, but also the full force of island law. Both cases were reported in detail by the newspapers.
Two days after the Germans arrived on Jersey, an Irishman who had served in the Guards entered a café in St Helier where some German officers were sitting at a table. One of the Germans knocked the Irishman’s hat off, saying he should take it off in front of a German officer. The Irishman responded by knocking him out. The next day, islanders were shocked to see the Irishman up in front of the Jersey – not German – courts, where he was given a sentence of six months’ imprisonment. The judge admonished him for jeopardising good relations with the Germans. Joe Miere was only a boy at the time, but he still remembers the case: ‘The Germans in the café were with two Englishmen who had collaborated pretty quickly. People didn’t like the Irish, and the authorities were trying to appease the Germans, so he got a prison sentence.’
The Guernsey case was even more telling. An assistant at the Le Riches store in St Peter Port was half-German, and would abandon any customer he was serving the minute a German soldier came into the shop, to act as interpreter. The manager considered this bad manners and forbade him from doing it. The assistant reported him to the Germans, and the manager was arrested and accused of spreading anti-German propaganda. Ambrose Sherwill, the President of the Controlling Committee, protested that the manager was much respected and in ill-health. The Feldkommandantur offered to let Guernsey’s local court try him instead of the German military court. Sherwill left a detailed account of the case in his memoirs: ‘I feared a stiffer sentence if the Germans tried him – so I hurried a law through the Royal Court, the effect of which would be to “make an offence any behaviour by a civilian likely to cause a deterioration in the relations between the occupying forces and the civilian population”, and this with retrospective effect back to the date of the German occupation. I drafted the ordinance and got Victor Carey’s agreement to it.’
Sherwill’s move was a remarkable piece of pragmatism. Retrospective legislation is anathema to the islands’ (and Britain’s) legal tradition. Furthermore, this ordinance ensured that it was now the Guernsey authorities’ responsibility to ensure that no civilians disrupted relations with the Germans.
This was an extraordinary turnaround, from the defiant, patriotic island governments of May 1940 to the frightened compliance of July 1940. It was eased by the development of a concept which could be described as ‘passive patriotism’, which both island officials and the Germans recognised would be a vital safety valve for frustrated nationalism
On the evening of the Germans’ arrival in July 1940, the first Kommandant, Dr Lanz, dictated the orders to Sir Ambrose Sherwill which were to be published in the Guernsey Evening Press the next day. Sherwill recalls in his memoirs that he suggested it be incorporated into the orders that prayers for the British Royal Family and the Empire could be said in church, and that islanders could listen to the National Anthem on the radio. Dr Lanz agreed. This was a shrewd move, because it reassured islanders that they could maintain this vital part of their identity – there are no stronger monarchists than Guernseymen and women. Dr Lanz had immediately recognised that loyalty to the British monarchy did not present any threat to the German supremacy on the islands. By tolerating the islanders’ allegiance to the Crown, one of the few issues which could have served as a rallying point for resistance was defused. Passive patriotism presented no threat to the Germans’ war effort, and it did a power of good for the morale of the islanders: cocking a snook at the Germans eased their sense of humiliation at being occupied.
There were two main expressions of passive patriotism. Firstly there was a myriad of tiny, individual actions which had little or no impact on the Germans. Secondly, there were a few public demonstrations of patriotism during the Occupation; they were spontaneous displays of emotion, not calculated to humiliate or defy the Germans.
In retrospect the individual secret gestures of defiance can sometimes seem slightly ludicrous. For example, shortly after the Germans landed, Jersey teenager Audrey Anquetil watched her father strip a sheet of wallpaper from a wooden partition in the hall of the family home, nail a Union Jack up, then paper it over again. The flag remained unnoticed until Liberation on 9 May 1945. The Miere family on Jersey had a Union Jack hanging openly in their sitting room for the entire duration of the war, and no German ever commented. It was a cause of great delight to the Mansell family on Guernsey that they supplied the German soldiers billeted on them with red, white and blue tomato papers for toilet paper.
Guernsey teenager Dolly Joanknecht was typical of girls of her age in her range of ‘patriotic’ pranks, which included spitting in the Germans’ soup and stealing their clothes: ‘When the soldiers went swimming on the beach, we used to take their clothes and boots and put them in the water. I used to sew up the arms and legs of the underclothes they gave my aunt to wash, so that when there was an alarm, and they had to get out of bed quickly, they couldn’t get into their clothes.’ Dolly once even stitched up the underwear of Willi, the German soldier who was to become her boyfriend.
Jersey nurse Betty Thurban used to play ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ on the piano. She said, ‘It was my little bit of fighting the war.’ The Jerseyman who designed the island’s postage stamps put a minute letter ‘A’ in each corner, which he claimed stood for ‘Ad Avernum Adolfe Atrox’ – ‘To Hell with you, Atrocious Adolf’.
Most of this kind of resistance probably went completely unnoticed by the Germans. If they did notice, most of them realised they could safely ignore it. The second form of passive patriotism was potentially more serious. There were at least three occasions on which islanders gathered in sufficient numbers to warrant the description of a demonstration.
In June 1943 the bodies of two RAF men were washed ashore on Jersey, and a funeral was organised by Oberleutnant Zepernick, Adjutant to the Inselkommandant. Thousands of islanders attended, and they laid more than two hundred wreaths. H. and her friends in their mourning finery were jeered at and scorned as jerrybags by other mourners. Journalist Leslie Sinel commented in his diary: ‘A couple of ugly incidents were narrowly averted outside the cemetery during the day when some young men gave expression to their feelings to some women there who were known to be friendly with the enemy.’ According to the diarist Cecil Bazeley, Zepernick felt his arrangements had been hijacked by hostile elements and the event had turned into a demonstration. He vowed that in future such funerals would be held after curfew, so islanders could not attend.
In October 1943 a British light cruiser, HMS Charybdis, sank after being attacked not far from the Channel Islands, and the bodies of twenty-one Royal Navy sailors were washed up on the shores of Guernsey, twenty-nine on Jersey and over a hundred in France. It was a gruesome reminder of the thousands of Allied lives being lost in a war which had largely passed the islands by. Feelings were running high, so the Germans arranged the funeral themselves, rather than leave it in the hands of the island government. On 17 November the sailors in their Union Jack-draped coffins were buried with full naval honours – performed by the Germans. German marines formed the escort, Germans fired the salute, and the Inselkommandant, Graf von Schmettow, gave the funeral oration: ‘In the death which follows and results from duty done, the heart knows no frontier lines, and mourning becomes international.’
The Inselkommandant then laid a wreath on behalf of the German authorities. The Guernsey Bailiff followed suit on behalf of the island government. Four thousand islanders who came to pay their respects witnessed this German display of ‘international mourning’, and themselves laid over nine hundred wreaths, in the biggest floral tribute ever seen on the island. The event went off peacefully, but the scale of the crowds and the intensity of their emotion alarmed the Germans, and made them decide that the funerals of Allied servicemen should be conducted more quietly in future. Guernseyman Frank Falla commented in his memoirs: ‘The Germans were completely taken by surprise . . . they were almost lost in this great mass of passive demonstrators who were determined that they should be left in no doubt where our sympathies and true feelings lay.’
There was one other occasion which turned into a demonstration of defiance during the five years of occupation. When British-born islanders were deported to the German internment camps in September 1942, islanders gathered at the quaysides to see them off. Apart from a scuffle on the St Helier quayside in which fourteen teenage boys were arrested (they subsequently received short prison sentences) and a German soldier’s helmet was knocked off, the crowds were orderly. Jersey clerk Bob Le Sueur was there:
I don’t want to sound over-emotional, but perhaps for the first time in my life I felt rather proud to be British. Whatever scenes there had been at home, such as breaking down and tears, by the time they got to the quayside the stiff upper-lip was showing. It was almost as if it was a Bank Holiday, and the people who looked the glummest were the Germans. Everyone had put on their best, warmest clothes, and some were being deported in fur coats. There was an air of gaiety born of bravado – a ‘We’ll show them’ attitude. The crowd sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and the National Anthem as the deportees boarded the ships. It was a deeply emotional moment for many islanders as they watched them setting off on a difficult journey, with a very uncertain end.
Jersey clerk Arthur Kent remembered a similarly emotional scene as those who had served in the British Forces were deported:
The day the first batch left to go to Germany they had to pass my office, which was near the harbour. It was a sight to see. Many of the men were veterans of the First World War. They came wearing their war ribbons and red, white and blue rosettes. Many people had come in from the countryside in horse-drawn wagons to which they had attached ribbons and rosettes. It was a pity there was no camera to capture that. It was as if they were going to a great picnic. They were singing war songs. It was a splendid example of patriotism.
Islanders wanted ‘to do their bit’ – the very words were disparaging. They felt useless; they knew that across the Channel a massive effort was being made to defeat the Nazis, and it was frustrating to keep silent and hope that others would win the war. Passive patriotism shaded into defiance; what one German soldier might tolerate, even chuckle over, would lead to immediate arrest with another. It only needed one German officer who was particularly sensitive about his dignity, and an islander could find him or herself in front of a court. Some Germans enjoyed the small measure of power they had, and were quick to use it if challenged.
The Guernsey Feldkommandantur records reveal a long list of islanders given sentences for trivial offences. The most famous case was that of Winifrid Green, a hotel waitress, who when told to say ‘Heil Hitler’ when she received her rice pudding, said, ‘To hell with Hitler for a rice pudding – and one made of skim milk too!’ She was accused of spreading ‘anti-German information’ and imprisoned in Caen prison for six months, where she embroidered Churchill’s name on a handkerchief. She became a folk heroine.
A month after the start of the Occupation Ruby Langlois, a cook, was sentenced to fourteen days’ imprisonment for having, according to the German charge sheet, ‘publicly and repeatedly abused the German Reich and the German forces and maliciously, and with intent making them an object of contempt [by saying] “The Germans are all blackguards; they have occupied the islands; they fill their bellies and the islanders must starve. The Germans should leave the island.”’ She had also used the expression ‘shit-house’ of the Germans. She was denounced and admitted her guilt. Housemaid Mabel Gill and eighteen-year-old nurserymaid Leona Le Blond were each sentenced to seven months for treason; the records don’t reveal what kind of ‘treason’ the pair were concocting.
Occupation licensed childish mischievousness and teenage delinquency and awarded it the grand accolade of ‘patriotic resistance’. While many adults had children and elderly parents to consider, the children themselves had little to lose, and a lot of fun to gain at the Germans’ expense. It was a temptation many could not resist. Their ‘resistance’ ranged from stealing German bicycles – which had to be dismantled and incorporated into island bone-shakers if they were to be concealed – and food from German stores, to defusing mines, cutting wires and petty sabotage. Jersey boy Maurice Green was particularly ambitious:
I used to go out on the cliffs to defuse mines. There was an air-raid shelter from the First World War under Government House’s driveway. I had two unfused landmines screwed to the roof of the shelter; I planned to blow up the Kommandant and two of his officers. At the time they were just the enemy, but I’m glad I never managed to do it now. There would have been reprisals.
Another time, four of us – the oldest was sixteen – cut the railway line. The Germans arrested six local citizens and threatened to shoot them. We tried to decide what to do; one of the kids pointed out that the people they were going to shoot were all over forty, while we were young enough to carry on the fight. In the end the hostages were released.
Once I walked into a German billet and took a rifle, a tin helmet and uniform and, dressed up in this, I marched down the road. I was grabbed by some Germans and taken back to their office where I was hung from a coathook by my braces for four hours. They kicked me and smashed all my front teeth in with their rifles.
One regulation they brought in was that everyone had to salute a German officer. So all the kids decided to salute everyone in uniform – the postman, the gasman and the bus driver. Little things like that kept morale up.
Rollo Sherwill and his brother Jolyon were eight and ten years old when they released the hand brake on a vehicle. It rolled downhill and they stole all its toolboxes. Such petty sabotage could cause considerable inconvenience. The boys were found out, but the Germans considered them too young to be arrested.
On Jersey, Oberstleutnant Knackfuss, the Feldkommandant, wrote to the island police in 1943 asking them to stop ‘the young people [who] congregate at St Ouen’s parish hall, and make disparaging remarks about the German forces’.
As the Occupation went on, the most unruly element of the population were boys in their late teens. Most of the children on Guernsey had been evacuated, but on Jersey the boys aged fifteen to twenty in 1944 had grown up under the Occupation. While their contemporaries in Britain were joining the forces or working in munitions factories, the Jersey teenagers were frustrated and restless, and a steady stream of them ended up in prison. Bernard Hassall was visited in prison by his schoolmaster, who remarked that so many boys were incarcerated that he had no class left.
Hassall was arrested after a woman informed the Germans that he had a cache of weapons, stolen from the German supply store where he worked. He and a few friends had been planning to fight with the Allies when they landed to liberate the islands. Sixteen-year-old Joe Miere was sentenced to two years in Jersey prison after daubing swastikas in tar on houses where Germans were billeted, so that when the British landed they would know where they were. Swastikas were also put on the houses of people who were collaborating: ‘Young gangs copied us,’ said Joe Miere, ‘and were painting any house. They painted a swastika on the house of a girlfriend of a German officer. The Germans searched my house and found some secret leaflets of BBC news digests and some ammunition I had stolen. It was half-patriotism and half-devilment. Today, they’d call me a delinquent.’
Eighteen-year-old Jersey boy Mike Le Cornu also painted swastikas on walls, and was involved in petty sabotage:
We put chisels in German car radiators when I was working as a mechanic in a garage. There was a little group of us called the Sab squad. Everyone of that age wanted to do something. When I was arrested and questioned, I just acted really stupid and dopey.
One night it was pouring with rain and there was a German car in the garage, so I borrowed it for the night to drive home, and drove it back early next morning. As I was driving along, I passed a German soldier, and he saluted me because the car had an insignia on the side. Maybe it belonged to some top chap. It was hilarious.
For some of the boys, the mischief turned to tragedy. James Houillebecq was seventeen when he was arrested for sabotage and possessing weapons; he died in Neuengamme concentration camp in 1945. Five other Jerseymen died in camps on the Continent while serving sentences for sabotage. A sixth was shot while trying to escape from the Germans sent to arrest him.
The great challenge for Jersey teenagers after D-Day and the liberation of the Normandy coast was to escape to France and smuggle out information on the German defences of the islands. From Jersey, the French coast is only fourteen miles away at its nearest point, and clearly visible. The little specks of houses across the narrow stretch of water represented freedom, and it was tantalisingly close. Between September 1944 and February 1945 eighty people – sixty-eight islanders, many of them teenagers, and twelve Dutch and French workers – tried to escape by boat. Forty-seven of the islanders were successful, but six were drowned, including a recently married couple, Madelaine and Ronald Bisson. Peter Crill, a future Bailiff of Jersey, was nineteen when he escaped in November 1944 with two other teenagers. Eight young men escaped in September 1944 with maps of the German fortifications. The maps eventually reached England, although three of the young men had to turn back.
Escaping required considerable ingenuity. The use of boats had been strictly regulated ever since eight people escaped in a fishing boat in September 1940. All beaches and cliffs were heavily mined and patrolled. It was difficult to steer at night without any light to see the compass by, and there were always the vagaries of the weather to deal with. An escape required months of patient planning and preparation. Peter Crill and his friends siphoned petrol from German cars until they had enough to power their boat’s motor.
Before the liberation of the French coast in the summer of 1944, the only place to escape to was England, which was a good twelve hours’ sailing away. An attempt in 1942 to escape from Jersey by Bernard Hassall’s younger brother ended in tragedy. Fifteen-year-old Peter Hassall was accompanied by two other boys, Dennis Audrain and Maurice Gould, and they had photographs of German fortifications. Their boat hit a rock and was swamped in a heavy sea not long after setting off; Audrain could not swim, and despite the efforts of his friends he drowned. Hassall and Gould made it back to the Jersey shore, where they were arrested. Bernard Hassall remembers: ‘The last time I saw my brother before he was sent to the Continent was in a street in St Helier. A German car roared past and I heard someone shout my name. There were two boys in the back of the car; it was the last time I saw him until 1945. I thought about him constantly, and I was sure he would survive. Maurice Gould died of tuberculosis at Wittlich on the Moselle. He was so emaciated you could have fitted him into a banana box. My brother was with him when he died.’
Peter Hassall was eighteen when he returned home in 1945; he did not speak to his brother about his imprisonment in two concentration camps and seven different prisons for more than forty years. Bernard says that one of the things that haunted him was the drowning of his friend Dennis Audrain.
One of the most extraordinary escape stories is that of a Jerseyman, Dennis Vibert, who in September 1941 ended up rowing to England after the two motors on his boat both failed. This was his second attempt – he had been defeated by a storm in November 1940, but managed to get back ashore without being detected. He was a friend of Bob Le Sueur, who remembers: ‘He had been very frustrated. He loathed the Nazis. I felt there was a difference between Germans and Nazis, but Dennis didn’t feel that way. He was two miles off Portland when he was at last picked up by a British boat; he hadn’t drunk water or eaten for several days. He then joined the RAF. There were a lot of islanders who admired those who had escaped, but more timid people felt there could be reprisals.’
Escaping bitterly divided the communities left behind, as successful escapes often led to punitive restrictions. In the summer of 1940 the Guernsey Controlling Committee, under the guidance of their President, Ambrose Sherwill, had strongly condemned sixty-three islanders who successfully escaped to England from Guernsey between July and September: ‘Any further such departures or attempts thereat can only result in further restrictions [on fishermen]. In other words any person who manages to get away, does so at the expense of those left behind. In these circumstances, to get away or to attempt to get away is a crime against the local population.’ The German and island authorities responded vigorously, and the island police were ordered to apprehend would-be escapers. Sherwill was scathing about escapers both publicly and in his private memoirs: ‘It was a selfish, unthinking act which could only result in retribution.’ After an escape from Guernsey in August 1943, all access to the beaches was banned and for a while all fishing was stopped.
Escapers may have been bitterly criticised, but they often had the most patriotic of motives. Many joined the services, and some served their islands by taking vital information to Britain. After D-Day they smuggled out details of the diminishing food supply, which found their way to the British government. British military intelligence questioned escapers closely for information about conditions on the islands, and they were feted as heroes in the British newspapers, earning large headlines and full-length interviews. The periodic appearances of islanders in London brought much-needed attention to the neglected islands’ plight.
Much of the information the escapers gave the British government originated from a group of former British officers on Jersey. Their leader was Major Crawford-Morrison, who as official Air Raids Controller had a perfect screen for his activities. Assisted by Majors Manley and L’Amy and a network of helpers who were working for the Germans, the group managed to put together a map of the military fortifications on Jersey which was filmed by Stanley Green, a cinema projectionist in St Helier. When Crawford-Morrison was deported to Germany in 1942 he smuggled the films with him, and they eventually reached Britain. L’Amy continued to collect information and pass it on to escapers until the end of the war.
The first instance of widespread resistance was the BBC’s ‘V for Victory’ campaign in the summer of 1941. As it did in the rest of Europe, the idea of painting ‘V signs on walls and doors as a gesture of defiance caught the islanders’ imagination. The concept originally came from the BBC’s Belgian Programme Organiser, Victor de Laveleye, who chose the letter ‘V because it stood for the French word for victory and the Flemish for freedom – victoire and vrijheid. The campaign was intended purely for the Radio Belgique service and the suggestion was first broadcast in January 1941. Before the end of the month ‘V’s had been noticed in occupied France. The ‘V campaign was extended to French broadcasts, and within weeks correspondents were reporting its successes to London: there was not a ‘single space’ without ‘V signs on the walls, pavements and doors of Marseilles; in the Marne department, ‘nothing but “V”s and still more “V”s everywhere on the walls, on the roads, telegraph posts etc.’.
The BBC, in co-operation with the Political Warfare Executive, had decided it was important to ‘give the French a feeling of conspiracy, a feeling that they were part of the show’, and the campaign was now extended to the whole of Occupied Europe as an outlet for the first stirrings of resistance. Douglas Ritchie, Assistant News Editor of the European Service, articulated the scheme’s aims: to mobilise an ‘underground army’. The Germans would be told about the campaign ‘in the hope of making their flesh creep’. In May 1941 the BBC set up a committee under Ritchie to develop the ‘V’ campaign and ‘create a frame of mind in which our listeners will feel themselves part of a great army’, and to ‘give instructions to this army that will be good for its morale and bad for the morale of the German garrisons’. Ritchie began broadcasting under the pseudonym of ‘Colonel Britton’, exhorting the European resistance movements to defy the Germans. In July the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, threw his authority behind the campaign: ‘The “V” sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the people of the occupied territories and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny. So long as the people of Europe continue to refuse all collaboration with the invader, it is sure that his cause will perish and that Europe will be liberated.’
On the Channel Islands, doors, gateposts and walls were chalked with ‘Vs. Young Maurice Green on Jersey devised Christmas cards which folded into a ‘V. Badges were cut out of old pennies to form a ‘V sign and pinned to the underside of lapels. ‘V signs were chalked on the German soldiers’ bicycle seats; after they had sat on them, the seats of their trousers were marked with the ‘V’.
In July 1941, when a rash of ‘V’ signs appeared around Câtel, Guernsey, the island police were asked to investigate. They discovered that the culprits were seven boys aged between six and twelve. The headmaster of Câtel school was told to reprimand them, and a report of the investigation was passed to John Leale, the President of the Controlling Committee, who in turn passed it on to the German authorities. A few days later Inspector Sculpher, the head of the island police, wrote to Leale asking him to pass on to the Germans the name of eleven-year-old Stanley Osborne, who had admitted to having put a ‘V’ on a signpost. After receiving the report, the Germans asked for the names and criminal records of the parents of the offending children in Câtel. Sculpher duly provided them. Fortunately, there the matter rested.
Children at Guernsey’s Intermediate School were also apprehended for putting up ‘V’ signs. Peter Girard, the headmaster, was asked by Leale to hand the offenders over to the Germans for questioning. He went to some length in his memoirs to explain his compliance with this request: ‘Leale insisted no child would come to harm because of his contacts with the Germans. The Germans had demanded hostages if the “V” sign writers were not apprehended. I felt bad but trusted Leale. The children were taken away for questioning and came back, having been fed with chocolates and cakes and covered in smiles.’ Leale’s promise appeared to have held good; there is no evidence that any of the children or their parents came to harm, but the reference to chocolates and cakes perhaps smacks of an uneasy conscience.
In July 1941, six cardboard sheets were found fastened together with crudely written abuse of Germany on both sides. The German authorities concluded it was the work of children and, unusually, decided it was ‘beneath their dignity to investigate’.
Adults also took up the ‘V’ campaign. Twenty-one-year-old Jersey factory girl Kathleen Whitley (née Norman) was one of those who was caught and served a prison sentence:
We found some ‘V’ signs cut out of newspaper on the ground down by the beach. I was with my sister and we were defiant. We stuck them up on the wooden fence right beside some Germans sunbathing. They saw us and chased us. We were taken down to Jersey prison. Four days later, we were court martialled and told that we had ‘insulted the German army’. I thought, how can two little women like us manage to do that?
We were in Caen prison for seven months; it was nerve-racking. You never knew whether someone would send you off to Germany, but the French were good to us and we had more food in prison than we had at home.
I never regretted putting the sign up; I always felt we’d done our little bit. There wasn’t much you could do here in the war by way of resistance. We didn’t do it out of patriotism, but out of defiance. We knew the Germans shouldn’t have been here, but they were good and very gentlemanly.
In July 1941 two islanders in Cobo, Guernsey, gave evidence against Xavier Louis de Guillebon, a French farm labourer, for having written ‘V’ signs in blue chalk in a public place, and the Guernsey police passed his name on to the Germans. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for an ‘anti-German demonstration’; he served eight months in Caen and was released early, in March 1942.
Not all the islanders swung behind the ‘V’ campaign; the punishments it provoked from the Germans caused some resentment. When Kathleen Whitley and her sister returned home safely, neighbours did not congratulate them for their defiance, but blamed them for a brief ban on radios. Some islanders were critical of what the ‘V’ signs were supposed to achieve. Guernsey shopgirl Vera Cochrane thought those who painted them ‘rather stupid’: ‘They were not in a position to do a great deal, only to make the Germans annoyed with them, which affected everyone else as well.’
On 9 July 1941, in one of the most controversial actions of the Guernsey government during the Occupation, Victor Carey, the Bailiff, offered £25 for information leading to the arrest of anyone painting ‘V signs. The sum was equivalent to more than three months’ wages, and was an indication of how seriously irritated the Germans were by the campaign. Islanders were shocked that Carey, who warned against ‘committing these foolish acts which accomplish nothing, but merely bring grave consequences in their train’, was in effect offering a reward to informers. Alexander Coutanche, the Bailiff of Jersey, urged islanders to avoid such ‘foolish actions’.
The ‘V’ sign campaign was a confusing experience for the islanders. On the one hand they were receiving, via their radios, stirring speeches from the BBC about resistance. On the other hand the island authorities were rounding up civilians – even children – and handing them over to the Germans for having acted on the BBC’s instructions. Whitehall was aware of this dilemma in the islands. ‘Colonel Britton’ was urging every European country to take up the struggle, but references to the Channel Islands were noticeably absent. When the possibility of a special Channel Islands radio service was broached in 1941, it was judged by the Political Warfare Executive that adopting the pro-resistance line of French channels would be suicidal for the islanders, and as they could not advocate no resistance, the idea was abandoned.
The Germans took the ‘V for Victory’ campaign very seriously, as if it were a nascent resistance movement, rather than merely a bit of persistent graffiti. Whenever they discovered a ‘V’ sign they issued an urgent demand to the island government to investigate and apprehend the offenders. When no culprits were found for ‘V’ signs in the vicinity of the Guernsey airport, all radios within a thousand metres of the offending site had to be handed in (they were returned a few months later). What irked the Germans about the ‘V signs on the Channel islands and throughout Europe was that they were tangible evidence of the hold of the BBC over the minds of millions of regular listeners. Goebbels described this as the ‘intellectual invasion of the Continent by British radio’. Finally, the Germans decided that the only way to undermine the campaign was to daub ‘V sign graffiti themselves – they claimed it stood for Viktoria, ‘the old German victory cry’. This proved highly effective, and by 1942 the ‘V campaign had lost its impetus.
In June 1942, the Germans decided that the BBC’s flood of anti-German material was not conducive to a peaceful Occupation, and all radios on the islands were confiscated. Possession of a radio would earn a three-month prison sentence. (Radios had been confiscated on Guernsey for three months in 1940 as a punishment for the islanders’ involvement in the Nicolle/Symes affair.) This was a violation of the Hague Convention, and was probably the most unpopular measure of the whole Occupation, but the Germans were immune to the islanders’ protests.
Julia Tremayne, a Sark housewife, commented that they only heard German news and ‘Haw-Haw stuff’.fn1 Rumours were rife, she said, and ‘if we believed them we should be in the depths of despair’. She felt cut off without a radio, and talked of the islanders’ ‘prison life’.
The nine o’clock radio news had become a focal point of the day for islanders; it was their only link with the outside world, the only way they could follow the progress of the war. The radio was also their main source of entertainment, and a tenuous link with relatives in Britain. It was too important in their lives for many islanders to countenance handing it in; many kept a set back, in secret hiding places under the floorboards or in the attic. Others managed to sneak into German quarters to listen to German radios. The greatest favour a German could extend to an islander was to let them listen to his set; the Dame of Sark, for example, was allowed to listen to a German officer’s radio. Another alternative was to make a crystal radio, or a ‘cat’s whisker’ set, according to instructions given on the BBC. A wire was attached to a telephone line, another wire was earthed, and a third was attached to head-phones or a telephone receiver. The telephone line wire touched a piece of crystal the size of a fingernail. It took a few seconds to find a sensitive spot, but the broadcast would then come very quietly through the telephone receiver. Most islanders listened to the BBC regularly, and this became the most widespread form of resistance in the islands.
Jersey housewife Dorothy Blackwell remembers: ‘It was very important to get the news; it was the only means of knowing anything. Churchill’s speeches had a wonderful effect on morale. We used to take down in shorthand books how many bombers had been lost. But you didn’t dare say anything to anyone. We didn’t even dare talk to our next-door neighbour – the lady there used to talk a lot. I didn’t even dare tell my son.’
There were numerous cases of islanders having to hide radios while their houses were being searched; they found their way into prams, manure heaps, beds, even into a washtub full of soapsuds. On Alderney, Daphne Pope had a near-miss:
There was a hammering on the door. We had been listening to Churchill on the radio which we kept hidden in the wall. This time the radio was behind the chair. It was the SS, who had come to search the house for a missing prisoner. They stripped back the bedding from the children, but they didn’t wake a single child – they were very quiet and very efficient.
I was sitting in the chair in front of the radio. One man had been left behind to guard my mother and me while the others did the search. I was winding up wool, and I had thread round the stool in front. I asked the soldier what insignia he had on his uniform, and he said it was the SS. ‘Isn’t that the elite troop?’ I asked, and he replied yes, and puffed up his chest. They’d done all that marvellous fighting in Poland, I said, and he beamed. Then the officer came back and he stiffened. Had he watched the women? demanded the officer.
Well, he had certainly watched me very closely. I was in my twenties then, and I could bat my eyelids if I had to. The officer asked him if he had searched the room. ‘Yes,’ he replied.
Not all islanders evaded detection, and many served prison sentences for radio offences. For a few, the punishment became even more serious. Father and son Clarence and Peter Painter were arrested for listening to the BBC news; a house search produced a First World War souvenir pistol they had not handed in to the Germans, and they were sent to Cherche-Midi prison near Paris. From there they were transferred to Natzweiler concentration camp, where they both died in 1944.
Canon Clifford Cohu of St Saviour’s, Jersey, used to visit the islands’ hospitals and give out the news to cheer the patients up. He was allegedly informed on, and was arrested along with Joseph Tierney, a cemetery worker, Tierney’s wife Eileen and two others. Cohu died at Spergau camp in Germany, Tierney at Celle, and a third man, John Nicolle, in a camp near Dortmund. After the war Premysl Polacek, a Czech prisoner who had been with Cohu in Spergau, wrote a letter in broken English to the Foreign Office in London, describing the canon’s arrival at the camp and his death:
He was a long time on prisoner transport . . . he arrived feeble and thin . . . The camp had in that time about five hundred prisoners, living in small, round paper tents (five metres in diameter), thirty men in each. In the tents were no beds, but a little straw on bare soil, and some torn and dirty covers.
At work, two days after arriving, the pastor was abused and beaten the whole day. The work was hard and he was already so feeble that he could not lift the shovel. He was abused as ‘Du Englische Sau, du wirst uns bombardieron, wir werden dir schon zeigen, du Krüppel’ [You English pig, if you are going to bomb us, we’ll bloody show you, you cripple].
I saw him that day in the evening on the return in the camp. Two prisoners must lead him, he could not go alone.
16 September [1944] he was going to work again, but that was the end of his force . . . 17 to 20 September, he could not already go, and so remained in the camp, lying in the tent without help, with some half-dead prisoners.
20 September I was also ill and so I work in camp. Suddenly we were called, three of us, to undress a dead body. I recognised the pastor . . . on the breast, I found a little bible which he probably cashed [hidden] before the SD men [who ran the camp]. It was forbidden to have any book.
Stanley Green, the cinema projectionist, was also arrested for a radio offence. Green was involved in a range of resistance activities. He was a good photographer, and had photographed the maps of the German fortifications for Major Crawford-Morrison. His son Maurice also says his father had built a transmitter. The Germans did not find either the photographs or the transmitter, but they did find a radio hidden in the roof of the cinema. Maurice claims his father was informed on and that the informants were paid, but the two men alleged to have been the informers were themselves imprisoned, and it is possible that they gave information under duress after their arrest. Stanley Green was first sent to Paris, where he was tortured at Gestapo headquarters; his fingernails were ripped out. He was then sent to a French prison at Fresnes, from which he was transferred to Buchenwald. He spent seven and a half months there, and it nearly killed him. He was never to recover from the searing experience of what he saw in Buchenwald, which he later described in detail to his son Maurice:
Dad was put on the job of picking up bodies from the pile of bodies and putting them on a cart and taking the cart to the crematorium and dropping them down a chute. Many of the bodies were still just living, although they were passed as dead because they had typhus and other diseases. Some were being eaten by rats. The piles of bodies stretched for as far as you could see.
Every second week, he was stripped off to the waist and he went down to the boilers with buckets and a shovel and he scraped the fat off the walls and floors. He had to make sure each bucket was levelled off like he was filling it with cement. If he didn’t do that, he was beaten by the Ukrainian guard with a club covered with nails. One guard put a bayonet through Dad’s foot for no reason; a doctor got some charcoal and cauterised it.
Green managed to smuggle a letter written on cement paper sacking to his other son, who had been deported to Laufen internment camp in southern Germany. The son contacted the Red Cross, who succeeded in getting Green released from Buchenwald. He was taken to Munich, where he was caught in a terrible bombing raid. His SS guards locked him in a shed and retreated to a bomb shelter. Two prisoners with Green were killed when a bomb fell nearby, and everything he was wearing was burnt in the blast. He managed to walk from Munich to Laufen – a distance of over a hundred miles. When he arrived, his son didn’t recognise the bowed, skeletal figure as his father; Green’s weight had dropped from thirteen stone to five.
Green survived; he was the only inmate of Buchenwald to smuggle photographs out of the camp, and his evidence was used at the Nuremberg trials. He returned to Jersey, where he died at the age of seventy-four, but he never fully recovered from the horrors he had witnessed.
Information from the outside world was highly valued, and one form of resistance that many islanders appreciated was leaflets printed with digests of the BBC news. This required a certain degree of organisation: shorthand writers, typists and printers had to be recruited, and a distribution network had to be set up. Paper, ink and printing machinery were needed when all were in great demand. It was difficult and dangerous work. The Germans recognised the existence of these news leaflets for what it was – organised resistance. There were several underground news services on Jersey and Guernsey; some only lasted a couple of issues, some several years.
The ‘Guernsey Underground News Service’ (GUNS) was one of the most successful leafleting operations, publishing daily editions from May 1942 to February 1944. It was run by a former journalist, Charles Machon, with the help of Frank Falla and three other men. The members of the team didn’t know who else was involved, and worked only with Machon. The leaflet carried a seven hundred-word précis of that day’s BBC broadcasts, and it was calculated that it had a circulation of three hundred on all the islands; it was passed secretly from reader to reader. Unfortunately, in February 1944 a copy fell into the hands of an informer, an Irishman called Paddy according to Falla. Machon and another team member were arrested, and under interrogation and threats to ill-treat his mother, Machon cracked. A total of five men were arrested and sentenced to prison on the Continent. Two died, including Machon, but the other three returned alive.
On Jersey, the ‘Bulletin of British Patriots’ was produced by two brothers, Herbert and George Gallichan. Nineteen-year-old Mike Le Cornu was one of those enlisted to distribute it: ‘We tried to expose collaboration. We called on people not to give up their radio sets. I was given these leaflets to distribute by Herbert Gallichan. I never knew who had printed them. I put the leaflets in people’s doors and scattered them on the road. I didn’t worry at the time, but looking back on it, I don’t know how the heck I did it.’ In June 1942 the Germans took ten islanders hostage until the leafleteers surrendered, and the brothers gave themselves in. George was sent to Dijon prison for a year, but his brother was in Wolfenbüttel concentration camp until the end of the war.
A less well-known leaflet operation was run by the Jersey Communist Party. Clerk Norman Le Brocq had been a scholarship boy, and became a Communist in his teens. His resistance activities sprang from his political convictions (which have lasted to this day – he is the only Communist ever to have been elected as a Deputy to the Jersey States):
Prior to the war, I had joined the Transport and General Workers’ Union. When the Nazis occupied Jersey, they declared all trade unions illegal, and the T&G went underground. The Communist Party had fallen apart after the evacuation; it only had six members and half of them left for England, but Les Huelin, the secretary, had stayed on. We managed to hide away the CP duplicator – at one time it was in my great-aunt’s attic. The first leaflets we made were for the illegal T&G. In 1942 we re-formed the CP, and by the end of 1941 we had set up the Jersey Democratic Movement (JDM), which was a group of left-wing and Labour sympathisers, to campaign for reform after the war. We produced leaflets for all three organisations in printruns of three to four hundred. We did the T&G leaflets every six months except for the last year when there was a regular monthly review. We published JDM leaflets three or four times a year, and we published a CP news bulletin every month from late 1942 to the end of the war.
We also did news bulletins in French, Spanish and Russian for distribution in the labour camps. We couldn’t type the Cyrillic alphabet, so a Russian slave labourer who had escaped wrote it out, and we then duplicated that. We used Spanish medical orderlies to distribute the bulletins in the slave workers’ camps.
The leaflets and bulletins were mostly composed of news but the JDM leaflets carried ‘atrocity stories’ about corruption and mismanagement on the part of the Jersey government. There was a story of two States officials getting two years’ rations of coke. I had been seconded to the fuel control department as a junior clerk, and when that issue came out, the blame fell on me and I was dismissed.
We managed to get paper, stencils and ink. At one point we had more paper than the States; we had friends who passed it on to us from the Town Hall. The duplicator was very slow and laborious, and the ink had run out by 1944. One of our members had a chemistry A level, and he was set to adapt some printing ink to use on the duplicator. What he produced was oil-based, so each leaflet took several minutes to dry. I spent all my evenings doing this work. It took hours, sitting there surrounded by leaflets drying.
We operated on a ‘need to know’ basis. You only told anyone if they needed to know; you didn’t gossip and you didn’t ask. Les Huelin just told me what to do, it wasn’t very democratic. We were very careful, but we were also very lucky.
In late 1944, after D-Day and the liberation of France had cut links with the Continent, Le Brocq’s remarkable duplicator was called into service for the most ambitious resistance scheme on the Channel Islands during the war. The German forces were becoming increasingly demoralised; supplies were running out, there was little fighting for them to do on the islands, while the radio reported heavy bombing of the cities back home and the approach of the Soviet armies on Berlin. A German soldier, Paul Mülbach, managed to make contact with Huelin and Le Brocq, claiming to represent a Soldiers’ Committee which was planning a mutiny. After initial suspicion, Huelin and Le Brocq were convinced. Mülbach was a socialist; his father, a socialist trade union official from the Coblenz-Rhein region, had been sent to Dachau, where he died in 1934. Mülbach wanted to organise a mutiny, with the aim of handing over Jersey to the Allies. Le Brocq was made liaison officer:
Paul’s committee decided he would be more effective if he was out of uniform, so he came to me with a list of everything he wanted: a civilian suit, a bicycle, a cottage to live in, a bolt-hole for the first night, and a lorry to collect a hundredweight of quality dripping which he intended to sell on the black market to get money. We thought, what on earth did he think we were? Magicians? Those kind of things were impossible to get hold of then. My wife Rosalie sacrificed her bicycle. We found a suit, and Les took charge of the dripping, and became a black-market king.
Mülbach was disguised; his hair was cut and dyed. The Germans never found him, despite mounting a large search:
The Soldiers’ Committee was planning the mutiny. Their idea was to march on the town headquarters wearing white armbands. They were amazingly confident. They had plenty of arms loyal to them, and enough anti-tank weapons; the real enemy was the navy, so they were expecting the fighting to be heaviest around the docks. I thought at the time we were dealing with an isolated bunch of soldiers, but I think they were part of a bigger German resistance network. They used the same slogans and listened to the broadcasts.
The mutiny was planned for i May 1945, but a couple of Catholic officers who had gone over to Paul’s side insisted it should be postponed two weeks so that it wasn’t on Red Labour Day. The island was liberated on 9 May.
I was a nervous wreck by the time of the Liberation – it was only then that I realised what a mental state I’d been through in the last few months of the Occupation.
A few days after Liberation, Mülbach wrote an emotional thank-you letter to the Jersey Communist Party. He said that his committee had initially tried to make contact with ‘English patriots’, but they ‘wished to remain a safe distance from all trouble, sitting on their money and waving the Union Jack behind closed doors’. Then he found the Communist Party: ‘I cannot express in words what I owe to these men. We have shown an example of international solidarity only possible among socialists, and as it should exist amongst all socialists and Communist Party members throughout the world.’
Norman Le Brocq: ‘After the British had landed, Les made a statement to British military intelligence about Paul. They used him as an interpreter and he was repatriated to Germany.’ In 1948, Le Brocq was astonished to hear from Mülbach that he was about to be put on trial for desertion from the German army in 1945. He never heard from him again.
The activities of two well-heeled middle-aged French ladies, Lucille Schwab and Suzanne Malherbe, were not on the same scale as those of Le Brocq and Mülbach, but were to the same end. They tried to incite mutiny on Jersey by typing little notes which poured scorn on Hitler and the German war effort, and encouraged German soldiers to resist. They signed the notes ‘The soldier with no name’, and slipped them into the Germans’ coat pockets, or left them in public places such as cafés where they might be found by German soldiers.
The two women were half-sisters from a wealthy publishing family in Nantes, and made an unusual pair. Lucille Schwab, under the pseudonym of Claude Cahun, was an essayist and photographer, while Suzanne Malherbe, known as Marcel Moore, was a graphic artist. They had become members of ‘Centre Attaque’, a left-wing group of surrealists closely associated with André Breton, and had dabbled in experimental theatre and the Parisian arts scene of the thirties until, in 1937, they retired to the place of their childhood holidays, Jersey.
They were arrested in July 1944, and held in solitary confinement for six months. A search of their house uncovered a remarkable art collection which included paintings by Picasso and Miró. In his diary, Baron von Aufsess described the pictures as degraded and obscene; they have never been found, and were allegedly burnt by the Germans. The women were sentenced to death early in 1945, but after a plea from the Jersey Bailiff, Alexander Coutanche, that the sentence might provoke the islanders, it was commuted to life imprisonment. Liberation came five months later, but the year on prison rations left the fifty-year-old Lucille infirm.
There is one final aspect of Channel Islands resistance to consider. The Germans had ordered that no islanders should feed or harbour slave workers, but many disregarded these injunctions, and it was quite common for housewives to leave out a few hard-to-spare leftovers, or an old piece of clothing for the foreigners. Very few islanders were prepared to risk dire punishment (and possible exposure to infectious diseases) by taking escaped slave workers into their homes. The story of those islanders who did take that risk warrants only four lines in the official history of the Channel Islands’ Occupation, yet it is one of its most moving and poignant episodes.
Guernsey boy Herbert Nichols watched the slave labourers at work day and night building bunkers near his grandmother’s house. The concrete would be poured for thirty-six hours without stopping. Nichols saw the slave labourers marching down in their hundreds from the camp, which was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers:
When they built the bunkers, it was close to Christmas. I was living with my grandmother, and we were huddled around the fire with a little light which was made from diesel in a salad bottle with a shoelace threaded through the cap for a wick. It was early evening and the weather was terrible. We suddenly heard a noise on the porch, and my grandmother went to look. It was a young Frenchman of about my age. He was absolutely frozen and completely exhausted. He had come to the porch for shelter. He was very scared, because you weren’t allowed to mix with locals. My grandmother brought him to the fire to get warm and rubbed his hands. She got him some old clothing and gave him a drop of soup, and told him to come back the next day. He came every night for about a week on his way home, and she would keep a little bit of food, and he’d gobble it up. He never said much.
On the last time he came, he gave my grandmother a present. It was wrapped in newspaper. She kissed him on the cheek. When she opened it, it was a piece of soap which wasn’t much thicker than the newspaper. It was so thin, it was transparent. He promised to come back after the war. He was the kind that would have done. I think he must have died.
Also on Guernsey, a Salvation Army member, Marie Ozanne, bravely protested to the Germans about their maltreatment of slave labourers. She was arrested by the Germans, and died in 1943, a few months after being released.
On Jersey there was an informal network of families who hid escaped slave workers. By the end of the Occupation there were at least twenty in hiding, some of whom had been concealed by islanders for nearly two years. One of the key figures in this network was Bob Le Sueur. He spoke Spanish and had become friends with several Spanish forced labourers, and he also got to know most of the escaped Russians. His role was largely ferrying people about and finding hideaways; his own home was too dangerous for hiding people because of a large German blockhouse opposite.
One of Le Sueur’s closest friends was Feodor Burryiy, who was known as ‘Bill’; their friendship has lasted over fifty years, and Le Sueur recently visited Burryiy in Tomsk, Siberia, where he now lives. Burryiy was a Russian prisoner of war who tried to escape within a few weeks of arriving on Jersey in 1942. He was recaptured and was stripped naked, put in a freezing bath, and had to run around the camp with a wheelbarrow full of stones as guards whipped him. Then he was left outside, still naked, for the night. A few days later he escaped again. He was discovered on the road by a baker, who took him to a hut where two other Russians were hiding. Le Sueur remembers:
I got to know him when a tenant farmer with five children was sheltering him. This farmer had a Russian in the barn, another in the attic, and Bill out in a shed. Then the farmer found him a place with a widow who ran a small shop in the parish of St Ouen’s. This woman, Louisa Gould, had just received a Red Cross message that her son had been killed serving in the Navy; he had been very bright and had got a scholarship from the village school to Victoria College [the best school on Jersey] and then another scholarship to Oxford. She took Bill in, she said, because ‘I have to do something for another woman’s son.’
She was a saintly soul, but not as discreet as she should have been. Word got round. She altered her son’s clothing and Bill rode her son’s bicycle and they cycled into St Helier together. Everybody asked who she was with, and eventually she was denounced. She got a warning that the Germans were coming to search her house. She and Bill stayed up all night destroying evidence. Bill was moved to my office’s lavatory then to another house.
Louisa’s sister, Ivy Forster, was also sheltering a Russian, and he had to be hidden above a shop. Bill wanted some drawing materialsfn2 which had been left in Louisa’s house. We wouldn’t let him out of the house, so he irresponsibly gave a message to the milkman. He had to be got out of that house quickly; the owner of the house was a woman with four children. I took him to two conscientious objectors who had come to Jersey in 1940. I had to persuade them to take Bill in, and it wasn’t easy. You had to warn them that he had been irresponsible. They took him in, even though in the flat below was a woman with a German boyfriend.
When the Germans searched Louisa Gould’s house in June 1944, they found a scrap of paper on which Bill had been practising his English. Louisa Gould was arrested and sent to prison on the Continent; she died in Ravensbruck at the age of fifty-three. The homes of her sister Ivy Forster and her brother Harold Le Druillenec were also searched, and illegal radios were found. The Germans found no trace of Georgio Kozloff, the Russian who had been hiding with Ivy Forster, and she only had to serve a prison sentence on the island. Le Druillenec was sent to the Continent for his prison sentence, and ended up in Belsen, which he was one of the few British inmates to survive. The Germans never found Bill; he assumed the identity of Oscar Le Breuilly, learned English, and stayed on the island until Liberation.
The network helping the escapees was never formalised; contacts were passed on by word of mouth in the camps and in the hideaways. Many of those involved did not know what each other had been doing until after the war. Bob Le Sueur knew of some most unlikely sympathisers who were prepared to help the Russians:
I knew one hotelier who was married to an Austrian woman. They ran a hotel called the Mayfair which was taken over by the Germans as a Soldatenheim [for recreation], and they kept a flat upstairs. Everyone presumed she was hand-in-glove with the Germans. But in fact her father and brother were Social Democrats and had been arrested and sent to Mauthausen; her father came out a gibbering idiot and her brother died. She hated Nazis. She hid two Russians in the attic during the Occupation. She would go down to the German kitchens and beg for food, and then take the scraps to the Russians. Bill used to eat there; he would never tell us at the time where he had been, but he boasted about the meals. Most of us would have had our nerves in shreds after half an hour, but they lived like that for two years.
The Le Cornu family lived in L’Etacq, Jersey, not far from a slave labour camp. Mike Le Cornu used to sneak into the Spanish camp and listen to the songs around the campfire; there were several talented musicians. His family helped several escaped forced labourers; his fifteen-year-old sister Alice became pregnant and married one of them, Christobal Lopez-Rubio, who remained in hiding until the end of the war. The Germans published notices in the press asking for information on the whereabouts of Lopez-Rubio without success. Mike Le Cornu:
There was a Russian once who came to our house at dinnertime. We scraped up what we had left, and gave it to him to eat. After Liberation, he came and thanked us for the food. Then there was Peter Botatenko, who came and stayed with us twice. He was a big fellow who looked very Ukrainian. At one point, when the house was going to be searched, I had to take him in a hurry to a chap in St Brelade’s. I had my bicycle saddlebags full of food and this Ukrainian chap on the crossbar, and I went through a German emplacement. I don’t know what I would have done if they’d stopped me.
One night after curfew, there was Botatenko at the door. He was supposedly disguised, but he looked more obvious than ever. He’d been chased from some farm, and he’d had to roll down a bank of brambles and was in a terrible state, so we had to take him in again.
Jerseyman Leonard Perkins used to drop bread at a designated spot for Russians on the run. Various huts and sheds on remote farms were known to be relatively safe, and the Russians developed a system of marking gates or walls to designate a friendly or unfriendly house. Jerseyman Dr McKinstry was a vital link, supplying false papers, ration cards and medical attention for those escapees who needed them. Thanks to him, a few Russians such as ‘Bill’ and Georgio Kozloff were living independent lives by the end of the Occupation, having been able to find jobs and get food on their false papers.
One of the hubs of the escapee network was the flat of Stella Perkins’s family in the centre of St Helier. Her mother, Augusta Metcalfe, and her aunt, Claudia Dimitrieva, were Russian. They had met Stella’s father when he was a member of the ill-fated British expedition to Archangel in 1919, part of the Allied intervention intended to defeat the Bolsheviks. He brought them back to England, and eventually moved to Jersey. The arrival of their compatriots in 1942 moved them to pity; it was also their first chance of meeting and talking to Russians since they had left their country twenty-three years before. Regardless of the danger to Stella and her three brothers, and despite their poverty, the family’s flat became a meeting place for the escaped Russians; some stayed only for a meal, others stayed several months. Stella Perkins recalls:
These two ladies were known as Russian around the countryside, so the Jersey farmers would send the escaped Russians to us. We shared our food with them as best we could. You could not but help the slave labourers. My mother was a very generous person as well as being very artistic and well educated. There was no discussion about whether to help the escaped labourers or not, they just couldn’t help themselves. Besides, it was one in the eye of the Germans.
My mother and aunt talked to them about the Soviet Union; much of the time we all had a jolly good laugh while the Germans would march past in the street just below. Our flat was over the shop and the shop was on one of the main roads to the harbour, so Germans were always coming and going. Neither I nor my younger brothers (the youngest was two and half) ever said a word about the Russians to anyone.
Once there was a very near-miss. We had a Russian staying with us who was learning English, and the Germans suddenly arrived. He had to hide his books quickly and slip into the bedroom while the Germans went into the sitting room and talked to my mother. The Russian crept out of the bedroom when their backs were turned and down the stairs and out of the front door. There was no German at the foot of the stairs, and the floorboards didn’t creak. If they had, I wouldn’t be here today.
Mikhail Krokhin was with us for six months in 1943 before he moved on. The escapees never said where they had come from or where they were going. Mikhail was very friendly and fun to have around. A lot of the other escaped slave workers used to visit for a chat and a laugh. Georgio Kozloff was a gymnast. I made him a pair of swimming trunks out of a sleeveless pullover.
Kozloff gave his minders several headaches with his daredevilry. He was a great diver, and on one occasion he did a spectacular series of stunts in the open-air swimming pool in St Helier, despite the fact that the headquarters of the Feldpolizei at Silvertide guest house backed onto the pool, and he could be clearly seen from its windows. Stella was with him, and was petrified that the Germans would look out of their windows and see this amazing man: ‘Kozloff took too many risks. Most of the others were very careful, except for one occasion, when Norman Le Brocq found two of them on the street having an argument – in Russian.’
fn1 Lord Haw-Haw, the Irish-American William Joyce, broadcast German propaganda to Britain throughout the war. He was tried and executed for treason in 1946.
fn2 Bill was a very good artist, and Stella Perkins remembers that he became one of her favourites amongst the escaped Russians because he was very clever with his hands, and made lovely cards out of scraps of silk and bits of paint.