Uncovering Jersey’s Wartime Resistance

I fell in love with Jersey on a trip to The Jersey Festival of Words in September 2019. I defy anyone who visits not to. Its color and charm is spellbinding. The wild flowers that smother the countryside, fill the air with their fragrance. But there is something else in the air in Jersey, a tangible sense of history, a connection to its cataclysmic past.

(Why We Must Embrace Reading and Writing Historical Fiction.)

You see reminders of it in the glimpses of bunkers and other German fortifications buried beneath the wild brambles. But for me, history isn’t about guns, fortifications, and bunkers, it’s about oral history. People. The most powerful reminders of the Occupation come from the people themselves.

I was privileged to interview many islanders about their memories of this time in my five visits to the island. Some came in the form of pre-arranged interviews, others came when I pitched up at Age Concern coffee mornings and sat and listened spellbound to the back and forth memories, the unfiltered gush of social history that brings the past alive.

Some islanders were suspicious about ‘what sort’ of book I was writing, fearful it would over simplify or focus on the clumsy and tired collaboration narrative.

2024 marks 79 years since the liberation of the Channel Islands. For some these stories have rolled from islanders lips many a time, but for others, they were telling it for the first time. ‘I don’t know where that came from…I shouldn’t really be saying this…’ was a common refrain in interviews. After so many years, the need to share overcomes the desire to forget, for this truly is an island simmering with stories.

I have nothing but respect for the people who survived five long years of Occupation and faced devastating moral choices, privation, starvation, fear, and boredom.

The Channel Islands Occupation in books tends to be framed by the narrative of collaboration v resistance, which remains contentious to this day.

On one of my trips, a tour-guide told me how an elderly woman went into a care home recently and was roundly ignored by all the other women in the communal lounge. Her crime? She was a Jerrybag, a derisory term for a woman who consorted with the Germans. Memories are long in the Channel Islands, as they are in all countries which have withstood war. The Occupation injected poison into a once tight-knit community.

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And yet, not every woman who fraternized with a German was a collaborator. Sure there were some who slept or socialized with Germans, inspired by greed, malice, or, in rare circumstances, ideological sympathy. But there were also a large number who simply fell in love.

Resistance such as that seen in occupied France simply wasn’t possible. The geography of the islands meant that there were no forests or mountains to hide out in. The Channel Islands were simply too small and the scale of the German presence too vast.

My overriding sense is that we will never know the true extent of resistance. It might have been largely unorganized and organic, but there was a tribe of spirited men and women operating in a clandestine way to do their bit to strike back against a totalitarian regime.

MY THREE FAVORITE ISLAND STORIES

The Shopkeeper

Louisa Gould’s registration card. Image courtesy of Jersey Heritage

In July 1941, Louisa Gould received a message that her son Edward had been killed in action in the Mediterranean. Three months later, in October 1941, a Soviet plane piloted by a young man named Feodor Buryi was shot down in Germany. He was caught and sent to a Prisoner of War camp, before being transported to Jersey to work.

Feodor was one of many captured Russian soldiers termed Untermenschen by the Nazi regime and used as slave labor. He escaped and Louisa agreed to shelter him, saying, “I had to do something for another mother’s son.” She treated him with love and respect, bathed his wounds, and altered her son’s clothing to fit him. Bill, as he became known, stayed with Louisa for 20 months until she was denounced and arrested.

Louisa was taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She never came home. In the last winter of war, Louisa was murdered in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück.

The Great Escape

It sounds like the plot of blockbuster film, The Great Escape. Captain Ed Clarke from the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, (Assistant Division Engineer of the 25th Armored Engineers) and Yale-educated First Lt. George C Haas from New York (Aerial Observer with the 6th Armored Division) were captured in Brittany in August 1944 and brought to Jersey to avoid falling back into Allied hands. They were imprisoned in a Prisoner of War camp at South Hill, St Helier.

Plans were made to try and escape by digging a tunnel from the toilets, but the plan was scuppered when a guard noticed that George took a considerable time when going to the loo. The guard investigated, and signs of tunneling were discovered. As punishment, George was sent to Newgate Prison for 10 days’ solitary confinement only to discover it was easy to chat to other inmates, all locals in for resistance activities. His stay proved useful as he was able to find out detailed plans of the island and a list of loyal islanders to stay with.

“It is amazing how much more generous people become when they are undergoing troubles together,” George later wrote. He returned to the prison camp with a rough map etched on toilet paper tucked under the inner sole of his shoe and a plan forming in his mind.

Just before dawn on January 8, 1945, Ed and George escaped over the 12-foot high wall and barbed wire using a crutch and a bent iron poker as a ladder. It wasn’t until 10 a.m. that their German captors discovered two dummy body shapes in their beds. The Americans were treated like old friends at two homes on the island before managing to escape on a rowing boat with donated food, water, and warm clothing.

Dodging German patrols, the plucky pair battled 60-mile-an-hour winds, waves “like rollercoasters,” and freezing snowstorms, before arriving in Countances on the French coast after 15 grueling hours. “The Lord was sitting on both our shoulders,” George later recollected.

Their travels ended in Paris with a return to duty and an eventual return to the United States. George went home, got a job with Pepsi-Cola, married, and had three daughters. Ed stayed in the U.S. Army, retiring after 25 years of service. On the 50th anniversary of their great escape, George and Ed returned to Jersey to witness the unveiling of a monument in their honor.

Jersey’s Plucky Posties

Jersey Post Sorting Office, where informers’ letters were intercepted. Photo reproduced courtesy of Dave Vautier.

For the first time in Jersey’s history, the wartime postal workers were hell-bent on not delivering the mail! When it came to delivering hateful informers’ letters like this one below, for many it was a step too far, especially when they knew that those who had been denounced faced arrest and a potential death sentence in a Nazi prison.

A ‘poison pen’ letter written during the Occupation. Photo CIOS Jersey,

Certain postmen either chucked these informers’ letters straight in the boiler, or they would steam them open. Letters which weren’t destroyed would be held back for three days before they were date stamped and then delivered. In the meantime, the postman on his rounds would have warned the recipient that a search was imminent, and the radio or other forbidden item would be hastily removed. To me this is a story of quiet resistance.

Check out Kate Thompson’s The Wartime Book Club here:

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