The Channel Islands At War (19 page)

Three groups of workers went to Alderney: farm labourers, those involved in maritime matters like pilotage and salvage, and those required to service Wehrmacht and Or
ganization Todt facilities. The
agricultural workers arrived early in 1941 having been directed there by Raymond Falla and Richard Johns. They cleared the land and collected 200 tons of straw. Crops were then planted and cultivation carried on until the summer of 1943. Four farms - Island, Mignot, Rose and Mill - were the main ones brought back into use, and working with Italians, Moroccans, POWs, and other camp inmates they managed to raise 250 tons of barley, oats, potatoes and vegetables. Some 40 workers were involved in the harvest that year. Pigs, cows, and a flock of 300 sheep with a Scots shepherd, Thomas Creron, were also tended on
Alderney
. A small number of Guernsey fishing boats were ordered to operate off Alderney with more severe restrictions than those imposed on all Island fishermen, and once again their catch was exclusively for German use.

The harbour commandants, Jacobi, Parsenow and Massmann, required expert maritime labour to pilot boats, maintain harbour works or check wrecks, and called on French and Dutch volunteers as well as Islanders for these tasks. Braye Harbour was subjected to considerable changes to accommodate convoys from Cherbourg every ten days. A spur was built to accommodate a bunker and guardroom, a boom with a gap in the centre was placed across the harbour from the end of the main breakwater to Bibette Head which proved difficult to maintain in high seas and the appalling winters of 1942-3, and 1944-5. A steel pier with a wooden deck was added to the original stone jetty, and cranes installed.

Storms were responsible for the sinking of several ships like the
Xaver Dorsch,
a dredger, a barge, and a harbour guard vessel, and after the winter of 1942-3 the Germans decided to recruit workers to salvage these wrecks.

A group was formed under John Matthews from marine workers on all three Islands, amounting to some 30 or more including several from Sark. Mrs Tremayne heard the men were told 'it was either Alderney or Germany', and this is borne out by Matthews' own account of their recruitment. The team were ordered to leave at once for Alderney and refused. After discussion, the Germans had to give way because they needed the equipment and skills of Matthews' men. They were told their task was to try and salvage a trawler, and that they would be given proper living quarters, Navy diet, and adequate leave. The party them embarked on the
Alfreda
and sailed to
Braye
where they were met by Captain Jacobi. They worked with German and French divers, but after a week it became clear the trawler could not be retrieved and was likely to break up where she lay wedged in a rock crevice. The marine workers remained on Alderney from May to October 1943.

The complete departure of the Island population left
Alderney
for some months largely uninhabited. Property decayed, and boatloads of German sightseers from other Islands and Cherbourg began to loot deserted houses. Doors and windows were smashed, and valuable goods, including a collection of silver trophies won by an Island farmer, were stolen. Other property was dragged out and left to rot in gardens. The Island governments were responsible for the property of evacuees and made some attempts to do their job by recruiting 40 Guernsey men to make the properties safe. With the decision to fortify the Island, and establish camps and a large garrison, Sonderfuhrer Herzog was ordered to requisition property and prepare accommodation for the coming forces, and this led in the spring of 1941 to substantial maintenance gangs of electricians, plumbers, and builders going to Alderney. Looting was stopped and the church plate of St Anne, for example, was sent to Guernsey for safekeeping, although the church was later desecrated by its use as a butcher's shop and wine store. Then, as the garrison grew, more Islanders went over to work as waiters, cooks, drivers, and domestic servants. The exact number is unknown but Mrs Cortvriend referred to 'several hundred' disembarking at St Peter Port in June 1944 when air raids forced the Germans to remove almost all civilians from Alderney.

Islanders on
Alderney
worked closely with prisoners on the Island, and were in daily contact with Todt workers and those from Sylt camp. When the Island was liberated in May 1945 not only was eyewitness evidence available from the four men who met the British troops, but in MI9 lists the government had names of those from Guernsey including power and sewage workers who were government employees and remained on the Guernsey payroll while they were on Alderney. One document listed 13 names.

The workers were billeted in St Anne and fed at a communal canteen in the Victoria Hotel where they received the same food as the Germans. They ha
d access to shops and soldatenhe
ims, and were able to buy luxuries like biscuits and sweets. Oselton and other Islanders said they were well treated by the Germans. Perhaps there was reluctance on their part to get Germans into trouble for crimes that did not directly affect them. There was every reason after 1945 for keeping quiet about working for the enemy.

'Boots for Bags': Fraternization by the Island Women

Ginger Lou ran frantically across Howard Dav
is Park in St He
lier, her smart day frock awry, her silver fur cape slipping, and her perfectly done red hair dishevelled, as she dodged this way and that between the bushes. It was a fortnight after the Liberation of the Islands when this scene was witnessed by a local doctor. A crowd formed, and she was dragged from a shrubbery, her clothes nearly torn from her, and bits of fur left clinging to the bushes. Car lubricating oil was smeared over her before she was rolled in the dust of the park by the shouting mob. Extricating herself, she ran to the doorway of a nearby house, where she cowered until the police arrived. Later she appeared before magistrates who gave her a small sum of money and put her
on the boat to Weymouth.

'One of the Jerry bags had got her deserts', some might have said in 1945 when memories were fresh. Certainly Ginger Lou had been a flagrant example of the breed. French by birth, married to a local tailor, she had taken up with a German officer in the first year of occupation, and for five years received all the perks of her squalid position. She had been given another Islander's house, and was driven wherever she pleased. She had the best clothes and make-up. She took precedence in queues at the hairdresser's and in food shops. She was not the only Jerry bag to be caught. A local writer noticed on the evening of Liberation that: 'regrettably scenes took place this evening when one or two of these women were severely handled, and possibly but for the intervention of troops would have been murdered".

Such scenes were enacted in many European countries at the time of liberation, and in some countries, like Denmark, retrospective laws made it a crime to have profited from the occupation in any way so that well-heeled collaborators could receive their punishment.

There is no doubt that such fraternization was widespread in the two main Islands even if it did not affect more than several hundred women out of many thousands. A report to MI9 in 1944 observed that, 'local women, chiefly Jersey-born, have been prostituting themselves with the Germans in the most shameless manner. There
are
quite a considerable number of these women all over the Islands.' A later report commented that D-Day had made no difference to these relations: informants are

amazed at the ostrich-like attitude of the local quislings, both male and female. Ever since D-Day they have continued their nefarious practices and seem quite unconcerned with the fate awaiting them. The women
are
especially blind and
are
continuing their association with the Germans to the bitter end.' The reports referred to the problems of abortions, unwanted and illegitimate children, and widespread venereal disease resulting in part from these liaisons.

Naturally reports from the Islands stressed the great bitterness about many of these women. Feeling is so strong said one report: 'that the girls will find that certain groups of people will probably round them up, shave their heads and treat them as similar French girls have been treated by French patriots'. It was stressed the local police would turn a blind eye to attacks on these women after liberation, 'because murder will be done, and public opinion in general will approve'.

Fraternizers comforted the enemy in time of war in return for privileges at a time when most people were suffering, and they brought dishonour and misery to their families. In some cases men returning were prepared to accept a new member of a family, like the baby boy born to a girl called 'Louise' taken in by her family and adopted by a childless sister, he later became a sergeant in the British Army. Advertisements sometimes appeared in local papers reading 'Wanted - someone to adopt a baby due on [such and such a date]'. In other cases, the presence of such babies no doubt caused much bitterness and fury. One girl beaten up by her father for returning to breakfast in her lover's car denounced her father for possessing a wireless, and he received six months!

The contemptuous phrase 'Jerry bag(gage)' was an evocative one. Boots the chemist attracted German attentions because they employed particularly attractive girls on their make-up and perfumery counters. In St Peter Port, the Germans were lured by the Boots girls sunbathing on a roof during their lunch-hour. In St Helier 'Boots for Bags' was chalked in the road, and Reginald Gould, the manager, sacked some of the more obvious goodtime girls. The Germans compelled him to reinstate them, and when he appealed to the Island authorities the solicitor-general advised Gould to obey the Germans. The Goulds were among those deported in 1942-3. The girls were sacked in 1945.

But before dealing with the sorry events of female fraternization, it is important to set them in the context of occupation conditions, and the position of women in society in those days. Few were traitors or informers, some were hard luck cases, others goodtime girls, and there were also genuine love affairs resulting in marriages after the war. Doctor John Lewis who was in charge of the Jersey Maternity Hospital referred to a girl called 'Louisa'. She gave birth to a boy. A year after the war, her German lover returned, her house was sold, they married at the Roman Catholic church and she left for Germany.

It would have been impossible for 30,000 Germans to descend on the Islands without causing social disruption. Abortions, divorces, illegitimacy and venereal disease statistics increased under the stress of war. Even though the German forces were far better behaved than Allied forces in Britain inevitably, wartime disru
pted family life, and added to
pressures on women. For five years, Island women were shut up in a drab, grey, penny-pinching atmosphere of privation and
slow starvation. Mrs Cortvriend
suggested many of the relationships were simply a release from intolerable boredom. Island women who had men serving in the forces had infrequent news, sometimes no news at all for five years, of their relatives. There were no leave-time homecomings, and no letters besides a standard Red Cross form. Many women had also been separated from their families by evacuation of all or some of their relatives, and in some cases a woman might be left without children or husband when in 1939 she ha
d both. When the hotels of St He
lier and St Peter Port filled with a company of healthy, strong and uninhibited young Germans, themselves condemned to the boredom of occupation life, and without even a brothel of their own until 1942, it was a temptation that a good many could not refuse. The relationships, as Norman Longmate points out, were usually due neither to German lust or Island looseness of morals, but to the war itself. Those girls who kept a low profile were forgiven, and they and their children were accepted into Island life, because, apart from the criminals and the officers' molls, it was recognized that what had happened was to some extent inevitable and natural.

It was not treachery, but the possibility of small gifts of soap and scent, or sweets and toys for the children, combined with a straightforward desire for sex, which mainly motivated Island Jerry bags. The Islands were holiday resorts, and to Germans fresh from campaigns, particularly in Russia, or from the tensions of occupation life in other countries, they were places to be enjoyed. Unlike the seedy British holidaymaker who often sat nearly fully clothed on the beach in those days the Germans were soon seen, semi-naked and bronzed, on the beaches and in the lanes, and although this affronted a more
elderly woman like Mrs Tremayne
it proved to be popular with younger women. In July 1943, she wrote, 'Grand Greve Bay has been opened for bathing, but more for the troops than the civilians, lots of the Sarkees go, all those who have
,
have turned pro-German.' Their friendly approach to children, their gifts and money, their singsongs, their good looks, and camaraderie in wartime proved as popular as similar GI characteristics did in Britain. If Guernsey girls 'have gone crazy with the German soldiers', it was not entirely surprising.

From the first months of occupation good relations prevailed between many Island women and the Germans. Mrs Tremayne wrote in her diary she would like to stab them in the back, but even she admitted from time to time that their behaviour was correct enough. Other women attended the first dances held by the Germans, and these were reported in the censored Island press and in German forces magazines as highly successful. Islanders continued to attend, particularly at festive times of the year and the various functions for celebrating Hitler's birthday. German bands and touring theatrical groups from the Strength Through Joy movement visited the Islands to provide entertainment. Germans coming to the Islands, from an ordinary soldier like Gerhard Nebel to an officer like von Aufsess, recorded their pleasure at the relaxed and friendly atmosphere they found. Von Aufsess noticed the women would surrender readily enough 'provided this can be effected in proper privacy'.