Books: Parvenu’s Captives

“ISLANDS IN DANGER (255 pp.)−Alan & Mary Wood−Macmillan ($3.50).

“The one thing I was keen about,” said the lieutenant governor of Guernsey when the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, “was that there shouldn’t be any sort of resistance movement.” This puts in a nutshell a matter over which people have been quarreling ever since the end of World War II. Why, it is asked, was the occupation of the Channel Islands so different from any other occupation? Why, when Poles and Frenchmen were resisting with all their might, did the 61,000 British citizens who stayed on the islands “cooperate” with the enemy?

Alan and Mary Wood, two British journalists, have searched high and low for answers to these questions and shaped them into an interesting story of perhaps the politest occupation in history.

Taken by a Junior. The Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Sark, Alderney) were the only British possessions ever captured by Hitler. For this reason, they were his showpiece. Their capture was the easiest thing imaginable; undefended. Jersey was “taken” by a junior officer of the Luftwaffe, and Guernsey by the crews of four transport planes. The occupation troops who marched in later were received with dignity and perfect politeness by the islands’ “bailiffs”−to which the Germans responded by imposing on their men a discipline and standard of conduct of exemplary merit. Something of the out-of-this-world nature of the occupation is seen in a photograph of Guernsey’s bailiff presiding as usual in the high chair of the States (local Parliament) with the royal coat of arms above his head and the German commandant in a low chair at his side.

Some called this treason. Others, including the bailiffs, called it tactics. Their job, said the bailiffs, was not to resist; it was to protect their defenseless people. However, many of the “defenseless” people led double lives. In public they worked with the Germans; in private, as loyal Britons, they worked against them, sheltering runaway P.W.s. spying for the Allies, keeping up each other’s patriotic morale.

Each island followed its characteristic methods. The men of Guernsey (traditional Puritans ) depended on their lawyers to exploit “the German delight in all rules and regulations.” won battles and saved lives by quoting unwearyingly the dicta of international law. The men of Jersey (traditional Cavaliers) took a gay delight in duping the Germans, e.g., simply by lowering their grasscutters’ blades they turned the Jersey airfield into a glassy lawn, on which 28 German planes skidded and turned turtle in a single year. The feudal ruler, Mrs. Hathaway, Dame of Sark, made it a rule never to visit the German commandant. If he wanted something done, he had to come to her. And so he did, bowing from the waist.

Never Shout. “The Channel Islands could not have done any more towards winning the war than they achieved by the simple process of being occupied,” say the Authors Wood. They mean by this that Hitler’s passion for his British islands caused him to flood them with thousands of valuable soldiers, to waste labor and material turning them into “impregnable fortresses” of no military value.

Like other occupied peoples, the Channel Islanders came out of the war half-starved and ragged, and some of them, caught in acts of espionage and trickery, suffered and died in German concentration camps. But Hitler’s determination to make a good impression spared most of them from the worst of the Nazi atrocities and gave them a unique protection. “In Britain we never shout,” was the Dame of Sark’s haughty rebuke to German officers−and she lives to tell the tale not so much because she was undoubtedly a brave woman, but because Hitler, like most barbarians, was undoubtedly a snob.