The Separation (2 page)

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Captain Samuel D. Levy Ret’d

P.O. Box 273

Antananarivo

Republic of Masada

Dear Captain Levy,

I hope you will remember me: I came to interview you in Antananarivo some eight years ago, about your experiences flying with the USAAF in the Chinese and Manchurian campaigns in 1942-3. You were kind enough to give me several hours of your time. From these conversations I extracted some excellent material about the fire-bomb missions in which you took part: the raids on the Japanese strongholds at Nanking and Ichang. I used most of that in my history of the campaign called
The Silver Dragons: the
9th US Army Air Force in China.
I recall that at the time I asked my publishers to send you a complimentary copy of the book. I realize that I never heard from you afterwards, so in case you did not receive the earlier copy I am enclosing one from the recently reissued paperback edition. As in the earlier editions, your interview features prominently in the first few chapters. Let me get to the point of this letter.

I have recently become interested in the life and career of a man who was involved in the war, whose name was Flight Lieutenant Sawyer. (I don’t know his first name, or even his initials.) A certain mystery attends Mr Sawyer. I found out about it through Winston Churchill. I came across a brief description of the puzzle in the second volume of Churchill’s wartime memoirs,
The German War: Volume II, Their
Finest Hour.
I am enclosing a photocopy of the relevant extract. It is from Appendix B of that volume, which consists of Churchill’s prime ministerial minutes and memoranda from the period. This minute, sent to various members of his war cabinet, is dated April 30, 1941. Churchill describes Sawyer as a conscientious objector who was also an operational RAF bomber pilot. He found it intriguing and so did I. What also interested me about the passage was that I had never come across any mention of Mr Sawyer in my other researches. Churchill himself never refers to the mystery anywhere else. From Churchill, I can work out that Sawyer was a serving officer in the RAF in 1941 - probably before then, possibly after. This information rang a distant bell, which made me scour through the interview material with ex-RAF members I have on file. Sure enough, on one of your own tapes I came across a passing reference to a man called Sawyer. You were talking about your background, before you went to the USA to join the Commonwealth Wing of the USAAF for the American invasion of the Japanese islands. That must have been in the summer of 1941, which was when most ex-RAF men signed on with the Americans.

It therefore seems likely to me that you were still serving in the RAF in April, which is a coincidence I can’t ignore. From the context of the tape, it sounds as if the Sawyer you knew in Britain was an officer, perhaps a pilot, but it is not clear whether he was in your own crew. I should love to find out if the Sawyer you knew was the one Churchill was briefly interested in. If so, did you by any chance know Sawyer well and what memories do you have of him?

I’m sure you have a busy life and therefore I do not expect you to reply to this letter at great length. If there’s enough in the Sawyer story, I would hope to get a contract out of my publisher for a book about him. If that comes to pass and you would prefer it, I would be able to make a special trip to Madagascar to visit you again and record your memories on tape in the same way as we did before. I have only just begun to research Mr Sawyer, so there will be many other avenues to explore. Your possible connection with him is a long shot. There must have been many chaps in the RAF with that name. I have advertised fairly widely in the usual specialist and veterans’ magazines. The main responses, twelve so far, have come from former RAF members or their families. However, it does seem there was rather more to the man than his time in the RAF, so I shall be fascinated to learn anything you are able to pass on to me.

I hope this letter finds you well and active and that you are continuing to enjoy your retirement in that beautiful house I was privileged to visit last time. I look forward with intense interest to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,

Stuart Gratton

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Stuart Gratton was born during the late evening of May 10, 1941. He was about three weeks premature, but otherwise his birth was normal. He grew up in the post-war years, a time of great social and political change in Britain, but because he was a boy at school for most of those crucial years, he was hardly aware of what was going on in the wider world.

For him, the war against Germany was an event that affected his parents’ generation, something that bonded people of that age in a way that he never really understood while a child. The most interesting and obvious legacy of the war, from his point of view, was the immense amount of physical damage that had been caused to most of the major towns and cities in Britain by the German bombing. Throughout his childhood he was aware of public rebuilding and restoration programmes but, even so, hundreds of acres of the city of Manchester, close to where Gratton was brought up, remained unrepaired for many years. Even in the strategically unimportant village where he was living, traces of the war remained for a long time. A quarter of a mile from the family home there was an area of derelict land where he and his friends regularly played. They knew of it as the ‘gun base’, a huge zone of concrete aprons and underground shelters, all now in ruins, which for the period of the war had been an anti-aircraft-gun emplacement. Only later, as Gratton’s adult awareness began to dawn, did his interest in the events of the war start to grow. The beginning was the historical accident of his birth date. To many historians, May 10, 1941 was the culminating date of the war, the day that hostilities ended, even though the treaty itself was not signed until a few days later. His mother certainly treated his birthday as significant, always talking about her memories of the war each year as the date came around.

Gratton became a history teacher after he left school and university, working with a growing enthusiasm for the subject, but as the years went by his interest in a teaching career diminished. He was married in 1969 and for a few years he and his wife Wendy, another teacher, lived in a series of rented flats close to their respective schools. During the 1970s two sons were born. Trying to help make ends meet, Gratton began writing books of popular or oral history, concentrating at first on local people’s memories of the Blitz. What fascinated him about the war period was the stoic nature of the British as they suffered the news of military setbacks and the terrible experience of the bombing of civilians, still glumly relishing their traumatic memories years after the war. By the seventies, life for most ordinary people in Britain had been transformed by the post-war boom, yet the survivors of those dark days still seemed to think of them as a defining experience.

Although his early books did sell reasonably well, especially in the localities where they were based, they never provided more than a minor supplement to the family income. Gratton tried broadening his interests, and in the seventies he wrote a straightforward history of the Sino-American War and the way in which the sequence of apparent military successes against Mao, after the invasion of Japan, had led to the economic and social stagnation of the USA. The deep American recession had been a problem when he wrote the book, as it still was today. That book received respectful views and was stocked on the reference shelves of most libraries in the UK. but again did little to change the Gratton family finances. In 1981, Gratton’s adoptive father Harry died, leaving Gratton the house where he still lived, a large stone-built cottage in a village on the outskirts of Macclesfield. In the same year, Gratton published the book that was to make his name and transform his finances:
The Last Day of War.
In the introduction to the book Gratton argued that the war between Britain and Germany lasted for exactly one year, from May 10, 1940 until May 10, 1941. Although Britain and France had declared war on Germany at the beginning of September 1939, there was no serious fighting before the following May. Until then there were only skirmishes, some of them huge and destructive but not in themselves representing all-out war. It was the period an isolationist American senator named William E. Borah dubbed the ‘phony war’.

On May 10, 1940 three significant events occurred. In the first place, the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France, eventually forcing the British army to evacuate from France. Secondly, the first air bombing of civilians took place, on the German university town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Although the bombing turned out to be accidental, it began a series of reprisal raids that led ultimately to the saturation bombing of cities by both sides. Finally, on May 10, 1940 the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, resigned. He was replaced by Winston Churchill.

Exactly one year later, Britain still stood alone against Germany, but the war had moved on into an entirely different and more complex state.

By 1941, Germany was at the height of its military power. German troops occupied most of Europe and with its Vichy French ally dominated a huge area of Africa and the Middle East. Germany also controlled the Balkans, including Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and most of Greece. The first Jews in Poland had been rounded up and were being moved to ghettos in Warsaw and other large cities. Italy had joined the war on the German side. The USA was neutral, but was supplying ships, aircraft and guns to the British. The Soviet Union was in alliance with Germany. Japan, also allied to Germany, was embroiled in a war in China and Manchuria and was severely weakened by oil sanctions imposed on her by the USA. On the night of May 10, 1941, Britain and Germany launched devastating bombing attacks against each other. The RAF raided Hamburg and Berlin, causing extensive damage to both cities, although particularly to Hamburg. At the same time, the Luftwaffe carried out the most destructive bombing attack of the war, with nearly seven hundred aircraft dropping high-explosive bombs and incendiary canisters on wide areas of London. But out of the sight of most people, hidden also from history, several small events were taking place that night. One of these events had been his own birth, in the very house in Cheshire where he was living once more.

Driven initially by curiosity, later by the sense that he had a good book in the making, Stuart Gratton set out to discover what people had been doing on that day.

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On May 10, 1941, Pilot Officer Leonard Cheshire, DSO DFC, was on a Norwegian cargo ship, crossing the North Atlantic in convoy from Liverpool to Montreal. He was a serving pilot in RAF

Bomber Command, but having reached the end of his first tour of duty he volunteered to act as an air-ferry pilot, flying lend-lease American bombers across the Atlantic to Britain. That night he was playing cards with other volunteers. Cheshire told Stuart Gratton that he remembered that after the game he went up on deck for a breath of fresh air and stood at the ship’s rail for several minutes, watching the dark shape of the ship closest to his own, sailing a parallel course a few hundred yards away. Someone was also on the deck of that ship - Cheshire saw the man light a cigarette, causing a sudden flare of light that he was convinced could have been spotted by an enemy plane or ship from a great distance. (Cheshire told Stuart Gratton that because of the armistice he stayed on in the USA until the end of that summer. He helped set up the Commonwealth Flight for the USAAF, in which demobilized RAF aircrew were encouraged to bring their combat experience to aid the USA in its pre-emptive air strikes against Japanese expansionism. Although tempted to join the USAAF himself, Cheshire instead returned to Britain to take part in Operation Maccabeus, the British sea-and air-evacuation of European Jews to Madagascar. He acted as both a pilot and administrator during the long and dangerous operation. When he returned to civilian life in 1949 he set up charitable homes for critically ill ex-servicemen and others.) John Hitchens was a telegraph operator for the Post Office, living in the north of England. On May 10 he travelled to London by train to watch a football match. The Football Association Cup had been suspended in 1939 when war was declared. However, by 1941 a certain amount of competitive soccer was being played again. On that day the final of the Football League War Cup was being played at Wembley, between Arsenal and Preston North End. More than sixty thousand fans attended the match, which finished in a 1-1 draw. Most of the crowd came from London, but the ones who travelled down for the match were able to be on their homeward trains by the evening. Hitchens was on one of the last trains to leave Euston Station; he recalled hearing the sirens as the train pulled out. (John Hitchens worked in Eastern Europe between 1942 and 1945, helping to repair and maintain telephone networks in the wake of Operation Barbarossa. He returned to Britain in 1945 and retired from the Post Office in 1967.)

Dr Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, spent the day in his office in Berlin. He issued new penalties for illegally listening to BBC broadcasts. He received the latest shipping-loss figures, in which it was claimed the British had lost half a million tons during April. He stepped up his broadcasting effort directed at Iraq. He closed down the German radio service to South Africa. In the evening Dr Goebbels returned to his estate in Lanke. He was visited by people from the film world and they watched a recent British newsreel: they agreed that it was ‘bad and in no way comparable with ours’. They then watched two films in colour, one German and one American. A discussion of film-making problems followed, interrupted by an air-raid warning. (Dr Goebbels remained at his position until 1943. He published the first of his
Diaries
in 1944, with subsequent volumes appearing at yearly intervals. He later became a noted documentary film-maker and newspaper columnist. He retired from public life in 1972.)

Flight Lieutenant Guy Gibson, DFC, was based at RAF West Mailing, in Kent. On the night in question he and his navigator, Sergeant Richard James, were flying a Bristol Beaufighter on night-fighter patrol over London. A heavy Luftwaffe raid was in progress. He and Sergeant James saw two Heinkel 111