When the German army marched into the Channel Islands in June 1940, the oldest continuous possession of the British crown suddenly found itself cut adrift — outposts of what became a silenced press under Nazi control. Among those trapped was a 29-year-old Guernsey newspaperman named Frank Falla, who refused to let journalism die quietly. His story, and that of his colleagues in the clandestine Guernsey Underground News (GUNs) group, forms one of the most remarkable episodes of resistance in British journalism.
Eighty-five years after the start of the occupation, their courage was celebrated in an online seminar held by the Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIoJ) on Friday 21 March 2025 and led by Professor Gilly Carr O.B.E. of the University of Cambridge.
[Frank Falla left as he was in 1967 when his book was first published,]
She reflected on how Falla’s archive — rescued, catalogued, and digitised through her work — continues to bear witness to that “silent war.”
The discussion has inspired the Institute to investigate whether the Channel Islands journalists who defied Nazi censorship can be remembered in the Journalists’ Church, St Bride’s, in the City of London.
Institute members praised Professor Gilly Carr’s academic and civic activism which has resulted in impressive and tangible commemorations in Guernsey. They include the installation of a blue plaque and Stolpersteine for the GUNs group (memorial plaques in the form of a brass cube set into pavements to commemorate victims of Nazi persecution).
Professor Carr has also written extensively about Frank Falla and other resistance heroes in Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands, A Legitimate Heritage? which was published by Bloomsbury in 2019.
She wrote a foreword to the republication in 2018 of Frank Falla’s book The Silent War, first published in 1967. She said: “He described the men and women, who like him, had been deported to prisons, labour camps and concentration camps for acts of resistance as ‘forgotten people’. They had been left unprotected by the authorities after standing up to the occupiers in acts of protest, defiance and resistance. They were also overlooked after the Occupation and given no recognition or honour by those in authority.”
During her talk she outlined how her academic research and scholarship resulted in the 2016 BBC television documentary “Finding Our Fathers.” This directly enabled the discovery of where one of the GUNs group, Joseph Gillingham, and Joseph Tierney from Jersey, also arrested and deported for distributing news sheets of BBC radio broadcasts, had been buried in Europe. This brought comfort to their daughters in emotional scenes shown in the programme.
More recently Professor Carr played a prominent role as an advisor and interviewee in the recent Channel 4 series ‘Britain Under the Nazis: Forgotten Occupation’ (2025) – “The little-known story of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II – a shocking tale of collaborators, informants, black marketeers, forced labour camps and brave resisters.”
Such was the inspiration generated by her seminar, CIoJ President Gerald Bowey asked St Bride’s in Fleet Street if it were possible that the Channel Islands journalist resisters could be commemorated there.
James Irving, Head of Finance & Fundraising at St Bride’s Church, has responded favourably saying: “I can confirm that we would be delighted to accommodate a memorial plaque in the south aisle of the church … we normally ask for a donation of £1,000 to cover the calligraphy and to keep the plaque at St Bride’s in perpetuity.”
Historical and contemporary images of St Bride’s, Fleet Street- the Journalists’ Church
The Institute is currently looking at ways of raising these funds for the St Bride’s commemoration.
“One man’s war”
Frank Falla became acting editor of the Guernsey Star after the summary dismissal of the editor Bill Taylor when the occupying Nazis took offence to an article reporting “TROOPS WHO BREAK INTO PRIVATE PREMISES. Military Authorities Will Do All In Their Power To Stop Them.”
Frank and his remaining journalists had to sign a declaration to comply with full censorship and control. He wrote: “So the freedom of the press, which The Star had treasured since its birth in 1813 when Wellington was winning the last battle of the Peninsular War, went up in smoke.”
Frank said: “To produce a newspaper subject to wartime censorship is difficult enough, but to have the enemy as your censors is ten times worse … King Canute would have been quite as powerless to stem the flow of Nazi news during the occupation of Guernsey, as he was to halt the tide.”
The first edition of Falla’s memoir, The Silent War (1967), is described as “one man’s war… told with sincerity, feeling and a surprising lack of bitterness.” The book’s cover defined his quiet heroism: “For three years he and his colleagues fought Nazi censorship, slipping messages into the newspaper under the guise of news paragraphs, and placing the German propaganda they were given to print in column five ‘-the fifth column.’”
That subversive humour carried real peril. In occupied Guernsey, even listening to the BBC was punishable by imprisonment. Yet Falla and a small band of fellow activists, truly operating as resisting journalists — Cecil Duquemin, Joseph Gillingham, Hubert Lanyon and others — risked everything to type up summaries of BBC broadcasts on a battered typewriter, producing the underground news sheet GUNs. Distributed by hand, folded into loaves or hidden under doormats, it reminded islanders that Britain still fought on.
Frank Falla said one of “the most dastardly deeds perpetrated” by the censor took place on Christmas Eve 1941 when the Christmas message to the people of the island from the vicar of St Stephen’s, the Reverend T Hartley Jackson was changed from: “The recognition that Christ was born into the world to save the world, and bring peace on earth, is the need of the world’ to “The recognition that Christ was born into the world to save the world, and bring peace on earth is the need of Britain and her Jewish and Bolshevik allies.”
THE CHANNEL ISLANDS 1940-1945 Ministry of Information directed by Gerard Bryant– Also presented by the Imperial War Museum
In The Silent War, Falla described the provocative epidemic of V-for-Victory signs appearing in roads and on buildings directed by a BBC radio campaign.
These were small acts of defiance reassuring the occupied islanders that they had not been forgotten. It was as though the truth was being printed in miniature after having been outlawed through occupation and censorship.
In 1944 the GUNs network was betrayed by an Irishman living on the island, and its members were deported to mainland Europe. Falla endured the sub-human conditions of two Nazi prisons; two of his comrades died in his second prison of Naumburg. He was two weeks away from death when liberated by American forces.
The historian of the occupied
Few scholars have done more to preserve this legacy than Professor Carr, whose research has transformed public understanding of the Channel Islands’ occupation. Her work combines forensic historical investigation with moral purpose. Through her leadership of the Frank Falla Archive, she has made accessible hundreds of personal testimonies, letters, and documents detailing the persecution of Channel Islanders who resisted Nazi rule.
Carr’s scholarship has illuminated what for Falla amounted to post-war silence. After liberation in 1945, islanders who had resisted often found indifference instead of gratitude. As The Silent War observed, “freedom… did not bring the hoped-for brave new world. It brought official reticence and evasion about known quislings, about compensation for those who had suffered during the occupation.”
For decades, many survivors of deportation and forced labour were denied recognition as victims of Nazi persecution because they were British citizens — a bureaucratic absurdity that left them excluded from post-war compensation schemes. Frank Falla became a campaigning journalist to challenge this injustice in his postwar career.
It is one of the reasons why I have strongly believed Frank Falla’s book should be central to any history module in journalism training and education. I place it on a par with the book All The President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two investigative journalists for The Washington Post who exposed the 1974 Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of US President Nixon.
Professor Carr’s painstaking advocacy has continued Fank Falla’s campaigning legacy. Her work with the office of the UK’s post-Holocaust issues special envoy and the German EVZ Foundation has secured belated acknowledgment and redress for Channel Islanders who suffered for acts of resistance — journalists among them.
Journalism under occupation
Falla’s underground reporting was, in essence, a restoration of journalistic ethics under tyranny. He and his colleagues sought to inform the public, to challenge propaganda, outmanoeuvre censorship, and to keep a community tethered to truth. They knew that even a whisper of the BBC through a GUNs news sheet was enough to stiffen the spine.
New Ordinances issued to people of Guernsey under occupation reported in Guernsey Evening Press 7th August 1940- German money to be legal tender in the Bailliwick and full report of ‘William Joyce Thinks’ on Front Page Guernsey Evening Press 19th January 1944
One might think of the GUNs group as the smallest newsroom in occupied Europe. Their carbon-copied bulletins a testament to journalism’s democratic instinct. At the CIoJ seminar, we learned that these men risked imprisonment and death not for ideology, but for the principle that information belongs to the people.
That principle resonates powerfully with modern journalists. CIoJ members attending her seminar recognised that Falla’s group “upheld the same values that the CIoJ exists to defend: accuracy, courage, and the moral duty to bear witness.”
The struggle for recognition
After returning home in 1945, Falla became Guernsey correspondent for six national newspapers. Yet he remained haunted by the memory of those who did not return as well as having to deal with disabling Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder himself from the brutal treatment he received during his detention in Germany.
In the 1950s, he campaigned tirelessly for recognition and compensation for Channel Islanders imprisoned by the Nazis. His correspondence with ministries and charities — preserved thanks to Carr’s archival work — reveals a man driven by fairness, not bitterness.
Falla also demanded official recognition for the islands themselves. In his book The Silent War he expressed his indignation that the Channel Islands as the only British territory to be occupied by German forces were never honoured like Malta with the George Cross, nor visited by Winston Churchill after liberation. He believed that government reluctance stemmed from embarrassment — a wish to forget that British soil had been conquered.
It was this same reluctance, Carr argues, that long obscured the stories of resistance journalists. The British war narratives focused on military victory and not on the story of victims and victimhood.
From archive to altar: St Bride’s and the CIoJ initiative
The initiative of the Chartered Institute of Journalists and St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street — the spiritual home of British journalism — for a permanent commemoration of the Channel Islands journalists who resisted Nazi occupation would certainly help to bring more recognition to the bravery of the Channel Islands journalists during the Second World War.
There is the potential for a continuum of conscience linking these wartime underground reporters with today’s journalists who face censorship and persecution across the world.
St Bride’s, whose walls already bear memorials to war correspondents killed in action, provides a fitting sanctuary for such remembrance.
Underground News and Resistance in Jersey and the wider legacy
Professor Carr’s comparative research across the islands shows how these micro-resistances — typists and printers — formed a quiet network of defiance. “Every act of reporting was an act of faith,” she says. “They were practising journalists in the purest sense: recording events truthfully so that others might know.”
While there was no widely recognised group named “JUNS,” the act of distributing BBC news was one of several forms of resistance in Jersey, with different acts carried out by multiple small, independent groups, just as in Guernsey.
Groups like the Jersey Communist Party (JCP) and the Jersey Democratic Movement (JDM) (led by Norman Le Brocq) circulated translated BBC news sheets and anti-Nazi leaflets.
Canon Clifford Cohu used to call out the BBC news while cycling through St Helier and passed it on to patients in the General Hospital. He was arrested, deported, and died as a result of his brutal treatment in Zoeschen labour camp. Joseph Tierney and John Nicolle were part of a group that listened to a forbidden radio and compiled the news sheets that Cohu and others distributed. Like the members of GUNS, many Jersey Islanders involved in these acts were caught, imprisoned, and deported to Nazi camps and prisons, with many never returning home.
It could be argued that The Frank Falla Archive now unites these stories, linking the Channel Islands’ experience to broader questions about media freedom under occupation — from wartime Europe to today’s authoritarian regimes. Their courage echoes that of contemporary reporters imprisoned in Russia, Myanmar or Iran. Remembering the Channel Islanders, therefore, is not an exercise in nostalgia but a reaffirmation of journalism’s universal values.
Falla himself foresaw that continuity. There was a telling episode in his book when he described how “We lost publication for two days in one bad spell and it was amazing and flattering the number of people who asked why had we been caught. It was then that we realized as never before that our own news-sheet meant something.” The lesson of his book The Silent War, is that truth is always deeply valued through journalism.
Commemoration as restoration
Any forthcoming St Bride’s memorial can contribute to the restoration of a missing chapter of British journalistic history. It could help to extend Frank Falla’s own campaign for recognition — the campaign he waged from his small home in St Peter Port, writing letters to ministries and newspapers long after the war ended.
Frank Falla died in 1983, aged 71. Yet his legacy — of integrity under duress — feels newly urgent. He was arguably a newspaperman first, a patriot second and believed that information, freely shared, was the essence of liberty.
The Guernsey Press office where he once edited copy still stands, its post-war façade concealing the memory of the underground newsroom that defied Hitler’s censors. From there, Falla’s moral lineage should run directly to Fleet Street, to St Bride’s, and to the wider fraternity of journalists who continue to confront tyranny with truth.
Any future memorial can honour not only the men of GUNs but the principle they embodied: that even in the darkest times, the duty to report endures.
In The Silent War Frank Falla reminds us, in writing without rancour but charged with unflinching clarity, that they had fought their war with words and those words had won.
Important links
Professor Carr has established and maintains the online Frank Falla archive. See: https://www.frankfallaarchive.org/
The story of Frank Falla and GUNS is set out by her at: https://www.frankfallaarchive.org/people/frank-falla/
‘Finding Our Fathers’ a BBC documentary about the fates of Joseph Gillingham and Joseph Tierney. See: https://www.frankfallaarchive.org/people/joseph-john-gillingham/ and https://vimeo.com/229688437
Channel 4 series ‘Britain Under the Nazis: Forgotten Occupation’ (2025)- ‘The little-known story of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II – a shocking tale of collaborators, informants, black marketeers, forced labour camps and brave resisters.’
See the 2 episodes at: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/britain-under-the-nazis-forgotten-occupation/on-demand/77435-001
Professor Carr has also written extensively about Frank Falla and Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands, A Legitimate Heritage? See: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/victims-of-nazi-persecution-in-the-channel-islands-9781474245692/
A new edition of Frank Falla’s The Silent War available in different formats at Amazon.co.uk. See: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silent-War-Frank-Falla-ebook/dp/B07K8TSXGK/r
Imperial War Museum- Film THE CHANNEL ISLANDS 1940-1945 See: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060006354
A version of this article was first published in The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Journalists for Winter 2025 pages 11 to 13. See: https://www.cioj.org/journal-pdfs/
This article is also available on Tim Crook’s Substack at https://substack.com/home/post/p-184013426
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