‘Newspapers write about the Channel Islands’ Occupation in the way they do because this was the only bit of the British Isles which was occupied, and we’re supposed to have reacted like the British would. But we didn’t behave as British people should. Since the war we have felt like a woman must feel in a rape trial. People accuse her of having led the rapist on. But just as a woman might cooperate for fear of not surviving, so did we.’
Guernseyman Rollo Sherwill, a boy during the Occupation
WHAT IF HITLER had invaded Britain? Who would have plotted resistance? Who would have made a handsome profit selling guns and uniform cloth to the Germans and trading in black market whisky? How would the majority of the British people have muddled their way through? A German invasion so nearly came to pass that such questions have intrigued every generation since the war. The Channel Islands were as close as Hitler got; they were the one bit of British soil he conquered. That is why those blurred black-and-white photos of the Channel Islands’ Occupation are so riveting: German soldiers marching past Lloyds Bank or flirting with island girls outside Boots the Chemists, or getting directions from a smiling British bobby. This is what life could have been like in Britain, with Germans on British streets and in British shops. What happened on the Channel Islands could have happened in the rest of Britain.
The Channel Islands’ occupation, Hitler decided, was to be a model of Anglo–German co-operation. This was to be the testing ground for the occupation of Britain. For very different reasons, the islanders also wanted a model occupation. They wanted peace, a semblance of normal life, and the continuation of their own governments. It was an uneasy convergence of interests. But over the course of five years, the islanders were painfully to learn that there was no such thing as a model occupation under the Nazis.
In the scale of the history of the Second World War, the Channel Islands, with a total population of just under a hundred thousand, are little more than a footnote. But their fate warrants attention. Here, British communities lived under Nazi occupation, and their social fabric was stretched to breaking point. Since the war, that fabric has been darned and patched, and its unity has been reconstituted by the development of a collective memory which erases divisions, and formulates a past most can accept.
This book is a study of how small, tightly-knit communities cope with a traumatic event like occupation, and how such a divisive event is then defined in the communal memory. Islanders have sifted – and are still sifting – through the facts of the Occupation, and selected those which support their current understanding of it. Collective memory is not static, and this history is not finished. The islanders themselves have been the richest source of information for this book; as they spoke to me over the course of 1992 and 1993 they revealed both the memories they celebrated and the memories they had denied. Interviewing them was like an archaeological investigation into collective memory; digging down into the recesses of individual recollections, piecing fragments together with diaries and documents to build a history which had never been recorded before, and was in danger of going to the grave with the generation who had lived it.
There have been islanders who have resented my questions, such as the Jerseywoman who rounded on me in fury: ‘I have two uncles who died fighting in the war, and their names are on the war monuments here. No one can dare say we didn’t play our part in the war. The French and the Dutch tourists come and ask why we leave all the German bunkers lying around and why haven’t we torn them down. Then they ask why there was no resistance here.’
One Guernseyman challenged me: ‘How dare you English come over here, dictating and pontificating about things which you know nothing, absolutely nothing about. Would you English have done any different? Leave those who lived through it to write the history of the Occupation. You can’t ever understand what it was like.’
I did not obey his advice, but I bore his words in mind. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ was the motto of my research. The Occupation compromised almost everybody who lived through it; each individual faced moral choices, and only a few could claim a calm conscience by 1945. It is now a minefield of buried resentment and uneasy accommodation.
Much of the islanders’ resentment appears to spring from two conflicting sources. On the one hand, they believe they have been misunderstood and misjudged. They feel they are criticised for having got on too well with the Germans, and for not having put up sufficient resistance. On the other hand, they feel guilty – they judge themselves. The man who demands ‘Would you English have done any different?’ exposes his belief that the islanders did indeed do something wrong.
Islanders prefer to mask the strength of these emotions behind an inscrutable, polite hospitality. As they press another cup of tea or biscuit on you, they blandly reply to your questions with, ‘No, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ This is said with the relish of those who have made it their business not to know. Only a tiny handful of Channel Islanders admit to knowing anything about the Jews who were deported, or what happened in the slave labour camps on Alderney.
Love, hate, betrayal, defiance, resentment and tragedy spill from the cracks in the islanders’ reminiscences, and pour across the pages of memoirs, diaries and government documents. Because many of this history’s protagonists are still alive, telling their stories verges on intruding on their privacy. By changing or omitting certain names, I have tried to protect living individuals. I am very conscious that this history trespasses into some of the most painful, hidden parts of their lives.
There is another reason why the Channel Islands’ Occupation deserves to be much more than a footnote to the history of World War II. The islanders’ unique experience throws into question Britain’s most basic assumptions about her own role in the war. Fifty years after the war’s end, the echo still reverberates in contemporary politics of Churchill’s oratory that the British alone had fought – like David to Hitler’s Goliath – an evil dictatorship from beginning to end. Only Britain had sought no compromise and had ‘an unblemished record’ in standing up to Nazism. The Channel Islands do not fit this history; islanders compromised, collaborated and fraternised just as people did throughout occupied Europe. Records documenting this were originally ordered by the British government to be closed for a hundred years, and some were destroyed. It is this history that the British people have been unable to assimilate; it directly challenges their belief that the Second World War proved that they were inherently different from the rest of Europe.
Over the last decade there has been a growing acceptance of the fact that some Channel Islanders collaborated with the Germans. The myth of the distinctiveness of the British character from that of Continental Europeans is slowly weakening its hold. The truth about the islands’ war record should not be an opportunity for Britain to indulge in moral indignation, but a chance to gain an understanding of an experience shared with Continental Europe. The British can then begin to find room alongside their narrow, nationalistic understanding of the war for a recognition of the common European history of those tumultuous years.
In the 1930s, the Channel Islands held a place in the British popular imagination much as the Costa del Sol and Marbella were to do in the 1970s. They were holiday islands, famous for their beautiful beaches, semi-tropical climate and stunning cliff walks. They were seen as the ideal family holiday destination in the age before cheap Continental package holidays; they were accessible, and had a familiar culture, comprehensible language and no danger of political unrest.
There are parts of the islands which have changed little since that time. The back lanes are still sunk between banked hedgerows which teem with wildflowers. In parts of Guernsey, the fields are still divided into small strips by banks which are covered in wild daffodils in the spring. The typical granite Guernsey farmhouse,stolid and unpretentious, aptly expresses its builder’s character. There is an extraordinary charm in these farmhouses: their plastered walls, the colour and appearance of melting ice cream; the short spiky palms beside the rarely-used front door; the camellia shedding its waxy pink petals on the front lawn. On Jersey the farmhouses are grander, and the granite a warmer pink.
All the islands are washed by brilliantly clear green-blue seas, glimpsed down narrow valleys or spread across the horizon in the big bays. There is an extraordinary variety of landscape packed into the forty-five square miles of Jersey, twenty-four square miles of Guernsey and mere thousand acres of Sark; wooded valleys, heaths covered with blazing-yellow gorse, cliffs and secret bays. Alderney is just under two thousand acres, and quite different from all the other islands; it has few trees, its bald, bracken-covered cliffs being more reminiscent of an isolated Scottish island.
Before the war, the islands were seen as quintessentially British. They were stubbornly independent, and proud of their history and ancient constitutions and their long tradition of democracy. They kept their distance from Europe, even though Alderney at its nearest point is only seven miles from Cap de la Hague on the Cotentin peninsula of northern France, and were very loyal to the British monarchy. They were considered hardworking, enterprising and pragmatic; both Guernsey and Jersey had healthy export industries, and had captured the British market in early potatoes, tomatoes, flowers and grapes. The financial acumen and discretion which was to make the islands major offshore banking centres later in the century had already begun to bear fruit.
The population had an island mentality not unlike that of the rest of Britain, with all its strengths and weaknesses; they were cautious and conservative about change, and distrustful of outsiders. Each island was proudly independent of the others. In particular, no love was lost between the two main islands; Guernseymen still call Jerseymen ‘crapauds’, and Jerseymen call Guernseymen ‘donkeys’. Their rivalry dates back three hundred years, to the Civil War, when Guernsey declared for Cromwell and Jersey for the King. Now they are competitors in tourism, tomatoes and finance, and there is surprisingly little co-operation, either political or economic, between them. The writer John Fowles summarised island characteristics in his introduction to G.B. Edwards’s masterful evocation of the Guernsey character, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page: ‘All small islands conform their inhabitants in markedly similar ways, both socially and psychologically. On the credit side there is the fierce independence, the toughness of spirit, the patience and the courage, the ability to cope and make do; on the debit, the dourness, the incest, the backwardness, the suspicion of non-islanders.’
In 1939 the islands were still predominantly rural, and people did not move much outside their parish. The circumference of their whole lives might be only a few miles. Norman French, the original language of the islands, was still spoken, and an islander might not understand another from a parish only a few miles away, so thick were the accents, and so scanty the traffic between the communities. Most islanders left school at fourteen; going on to higher education was the privilege of a tiny minority whose parents could afford to send them to universities in England or France. Families intermarried. The entries for some surnames in the telephone directories run to pages and pages, although the blood connections may be so distant that people of the same name do not necessarily consider each other relations. In these isolated, tightly-knit rural parishes, incest was common. The pre-war Jersey police files list a remarkable number of convictions for incest; over the years the large mental hospital St Saviour’s housed many of the products of these relationships.
In the first part of the twentieth century these old, rural island communities had been changing quickly, and were rapidly becoming Anglicised. English was being spoken more widely than Norman French. English ‘incomers’ were arriving to live in the bungalows and villas which were proliferating along the islands’ picturesque coasts. Many were pensioners – retired army colonels and civil servants – taking advantage of the lower income taxes and warmer climate. There was another distinct element diluting the traditional island communities: seasonal labourers came from France and Ireland to work on the potato or tomato harvests.
Islanders had – as they still do – an ambivalent relationship towards the United Kingdom. They resent its power over island affairs, and are extremely critical of mainland Britain, which they see as riddled with social conflict, poverty and crime. But there are too many ties of history and culture for them to want to break away completely.
Few islanders will miss an opportunity of reminding you that they conquered England, and not the other way round. Since AD 933 the islands have belonged to the Duchy of Normandy (William the Conqueror stopped and recruited islanders before setting off to defeat King Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066), and this title has remained with the British monarchy to the Judge day. The Westminster Parliament has no jurisdiction over the islands, which are entirely self-governing, except in matters related to defence and foreign policy, for which the Privy Council is responsible.
Each island has an independent system of government, with its own parliament – known as the States – of elected Deputies. At the head of the government are the Bailiff, the Attorney General, and the Solicitor General on Guernsey and Jersey, the Judge on Alderney. Prominent islanders are appointed to these positions by the Crown. On Guernsey and Jersey, Lieutenant Governors are the official representatives of the British monarchy. Each island has its own civil service and system of local government based on the parishes into which the islands are divided.
Sark is a hereditary Seigneurie, which prides itself on having the last, working, feudal constitution. A Seigneur governs with the help of the island’s parliament, the Chief Pleas. During the Occupation the Dame of Sark, Sybil Hathaway, ruled the island. She inherited the title from her father, the son of a Guernsey businessman who had bought out the bankrupt former Seigneur. Sybil Hathaway’s strong character divided the island’s population into two camps: admirers and fierce critics.
In the days immediately prior to the Occupation, Guernsey and Jersey streamlined their governments for quicker decision-making. On Guernsey, power was centralised in the hands of the eight-member Controlling Committee, appointed by the Attorney General, who was himself appointed its President by the States. Elections were abandoned for the duration of the Occupation and the States met only infrequently. On Jersey the eleven-member Superior Council took over, appointed by the Bailiff. Democracy was put in abeyance and power was concentrated in this tiny group, which was to cause considerable resentment.
It was this cluster of beautiful islands, with their antiquated governments and their dogged independence, which was clearly visible through the binoculars of the German officers on the Normandy coast in June 1940.