Strix
Under Two Flags
IHAVE been reading with great interest a book about the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the last war; it is called Islands in Danger, by Alan and Mary Wood, and will be published on Monday by Evans Brothers at 15s. The authors' researches have been both thorough and imaginative, and their approach to a controversial interlude is scrupulously fair-minded. I do not think they meant their crowded canvas to be a Problem Picture, to immortalise in the late Victorian manner a dramatic situation in which the longer we look at it the harder it becomes to distinguish Right from Wrong and Innocence from Guilt; yet that is the impression which their very readable book has made on me.
The Channel Islands—an appendage of the Duchy of Nor- mandy which 'stayed loyal' (as Mr. and Mrs. Wood put it) to the British Crown when the rest of the Duchy reverted to France—were the only part of British territory to be captured by the Germans, during the war; they emerged from their ordeal, which included a narrow escape from starvation in 1944, with a record which can hardly be called inspiring.
Their predicament had several unique features. Both geo- graphy and their own traditions gave the islanders, when war broke out, a certain detachment from the main struggle. Muddle and panic attended their surrender. As the Germans swept down the French coast, small forces were hastily sent to defend the islands and then as hastily withdrawn. From Guern- sey half, from Jersey a fifth and from Alderney the whole of the civilian population were evacuated, under chaotic arrange- ments, to England. The War Cabinet decided to demilitarise the islands and did so, but failed to notify the Germans, who bombed St. Peter Port and St. Helier before they realised that there was no need to do so. The Germans had arrived by the time that the victims (twenty-nine in Guernsey and nine in Jersey) were buried; to be on the safe side, the obituary columns of the local newspapers merely recorded that they had 'died.'
The conquerors, arriving on this confused scene, behaved at first with affable punctilio, and the islanders' fears of Nazi brutality, much enhanced by the harrowing tales of transient refugees from France, seemed groundless. Their relief ex- pressed itself, at times, in a tendency to fawn. The Bailiffs and other officials, who had received written orders from the Home Office to stay at their posts, seem in these relatively haldyon days to have done things which could not but call their staunchness in question among those who did not know them personally.
In Guernsey, for instance, a senior official recorded a speech to be broadcast from Bremen Radio in which he praised the conduct of the German troops and thanked them for their 'kindly attitude.' His motive in doing so, and in asking the BBC to retransmit his message, was the laudable one of allay- ing anxiety among evacuees about the island's fate; but to over- look the effect which his words would have had (had they in fact been retransmitted) on a country bracing itself to resist invasion was surely carrying insularity a little far.
When the Germans required the Royal Courts of Jersey and Guernsey to register anti-semitic edicts, 'it was felt that the number of Jews was so small—less than ten in each island— that it was not worth asking for trouble by making an issue of the matter.' Later some of the Jews were taken to the Con- tinent; 'we were surprised,' say the authors, 'to be unable to obtain any reliable information as to their ultimate fate, even from present members .of the Jewish communities.' In such matters as encouraging people to hand over to the Germans leaflets dropped by the RAF and offering a reward of £25 for information leading to the conviction of anyone marking up the V-sign, the island authorities seem to have been ready to go to considerable lengths to avoid asking for trouble. '
Although towards the end several islanders were martyred in distant concentration camps for defying or infringing the German regulations, there was no resistance movement in the Channel Islands. It is difficult to see how there could have been. The serried glasshouses of the Guernsey tomato-growers, the hotels and boarding-houses on which much of Jersey's economy is based, do not offer the guerrilla the sort of lebens- raum which he put to good use in Crete. The islands were the only corner of German-occupied territory to which it was not found necessary to dispatch a Gestapo detachment; the premises now shown to tourists as 'Gestapo headquarters' in fact housed the Secret Field Police, whose behaviour—especi- ally towards the starving slave-labourers imported by the Todt Organisation—was often up to the beastly standards of their better-known confreres.
Is it right to connive at bold and patriotic action by a few which may bring retaliation against all? The islanders were after all civilians. It was not their duty to embarrass or outwit the enemy; they were indeed, as was the Occupying Power, bound by The Hague Convention to a certain code of conduct, and their leaders' firm adherence to this code almost certainly saved much pointless suffering. 'A model occupation' was what one of them, in the early days, publicly looked forward to; and that was what—from the occupier's point of view—it turned out to be.
Some of the islanders behaved with quiet heroism, and some behaved like saints. At the other end of the scale there were the black marketeers, who waxed fat as well as rich during the famine; and there were, in particular, the informers, whose denunciations sent many men and women to prison and some to their deaths. Those who, after the war, wanted this infamy to be punished did not get their way. 'We believe,' write Mr. and Mrs. Wood, 'the main reason why there was no action against disloyal conduct was the feeling that it would be bad for British prestige to admit that, in the only British territory to be occupied, everybody had not behaved perfectly.'
From a military point of view the authors are right in saying that the Channel Islands 'could not have done more towards winning the war than they achieved by the simple process of being occupied.' The fact that German officers did not feel obliged to carry their revolvers loaded, the fact that a care-and- maintenance party of elderly Landwehr was all the garrison that these submissive islands really needed, were, as it hap- pened, of no benefit to the German war-machine when it found itself in straits. From the autumn of 1941 onwards Hitler became obsessed with the islands. More and more troops, more and more concrete, more and more guns were poured into them, until in 1945 a huge, half-starved force, complete with a fanatical Nazi commander and an ineffective 'officers' plot,' was locked up in this strategical limbo. So in the end the islands were responsible for a costly and importarlt diversion of the German war effort. But nobody can say that this was—or in- deed could have been—anything to do with the way the inhabitants behaved under occupation; nor is it likely that those five difficult and often harrowing years will be remembered in the Channel Islands as their finest hour.
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