Outpost of Occupation by Barry Turner

Author:Barry Turner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781845137243
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2011-05-12T21:00:00+00:00

12

RESISTANCE AND RETALIATION

The first response to bravery is to praise it. Marie Ozanne and the Reverend Clifford Cohu died for their beliefs and for the right to free expression. They were, in their own ways, indomitable spirits who were ready to make the final sacrifice. But over their harrowing stories hangs the question: what did they achieve?

Marie Ozanne was a major in the Salvation Army, a proscribed organisation under the occupation. Defying the ban, she continued to appear in uniform and to preach from the steps of the Nocq Road Citadel in St Sampson’s in Guernsey. This put the Germans into a quandary. To arrest her would have been seen as an overreaction to the activities of someone they regarded as a religious fanatic. On the other hand, her defiance was setting a precedent that others might follow. After numerous cautions, Ozanne pushed her luck beyond tolerable limits with voluble protests at the treatment of slave workers held in a compound close to her parents’ home. Arrested and imprisoned without trial, she fell desperately ill, and died of peritonitis on 23 February 1943. Few attended her funeral, which was not publicised.

Canon Clifford Cohu, though much older than Ozanne, was equally zealous in advertising his independence. A leading participant in an underground news network, he took to cycling through St Saviour, ringing a bell like a town crier, and shouting, ‘Wonderful news today’, before delivering the latest BBC bulletins. His inevitable arrest led to a rounding-up of eighteen of his fellow conspirators including John Nicolle, a farmer, Joseph Tierney, a parish cemetery worker, and Arthur Dimmery, an English-born gardener.

Cohu was sentenced to eighteen months, to be served first in Dijon then in Preungesheim prison in Frankfurt, where for long periods he suffered cold and hunger in solitary confinement. The last his wife heard of him was in July 1944. Two months later he was dead. Nicolle, Tierney and Dimmery also succumbed to starvation and ill-treatment. Their names, along with that of Marie Ozanne appear on the Jersey Memorial, unveiled on 9 November 1996.

That it took over fifty years for their defiance of the occupation to be publicly recognised speaks volumes for the confusion among islanders when it came to deciding whether or not resistance had been justified. One side of the argument held that Marie Ozanne and Clifford Cohu had given their lives needlessly, that Cohu, by his foolhardy actions, had been culpable in leading others to early graves, and that it would have been better all round if they had redirected their religious fervour into supporting those in authority who were trying to minimise the damage caused by the occupation. The counter argument was that in refusing to submit to tyrannical rule, the resisters, however bizarre their activities, were sending out a message that was impossible to ignore.

The contradiction was endemic to the curious situation in which the islanders found themselves. Urged to stay at their posts and to do their best for their countrymen, the bailiffs and, by implication,

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