Guernsey Occupation Diaries 1940-1945

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‘It all looks like the end of the world. Of this little world at least. What shall we do?’

Thus speaks Douglas Ord at the beginning of his remarkable diary of the Occupation years.

What the islanders did, how they tried to cope with the massive German force in this very small island is the story of Ord’s book. He, unlike many people on the mainland, was in no doubt as to the existential threat posed by the German presence.

‘All the time, a dog that may turn savage is roaming loose amongst us.’

Indeed it was and often did turn savage and Ord describes in brilliant detail the many unkind acts, the gratuitous violence, shooting children’s pets, forcing old and sick people out of their homes, deporting islanders across the seas, and worse, sending those who resisted into German concentration camps. 75 years on it is still impossible not to experience the sense of outrage, the impotent anger that Ord felt at the time.

But the diary is more than a history of the Occupation as it happened in the island, Ord always looks outward to the titanic struggles that were taking place all over the world, in the Pacific, North Africa, the Atlantic and, most of all, on the Eastern Front. He keeps an intelligent and often fearful eye on the world beyond Guernsey shores to put the island experience into context and so to understand why there were Russian slave workers in the streets of St Peter Port, why Marie Ozanne could hear screams in Paradise, why Ted Ogier stood in despair outside the Grange Hotel one day in April 1942 and why, come the autumn of ‘44 the German landsers were shooting seagulls out of the air.

This story of the Guernsey Occupation is told in all its richness and complexity by Ord, and tells us so much about the ways people react to oppression, about the way the Guernsey people reacted in extremis, during those five long years. And because there is an immediacy and vivacity in the writing, we are there with Ord and with the island folk, we walk with them as they struggle through the ordeal and we can understand in a deep and often moving way, precisely how they felt and why they acted as they did.

This makes the Ord diaries a remarkably valuable work. It is a major primary source as an historical document, one of the best there is for Occupation history, but more than that it is a beautifully humane, intelligent and insightful work – one of the best to come out of the war.