Police Sergeant Terry Collins was on firewatching duty on the night of May 10/11 at the Houses of Parliament, with particular responsibility, along with other members of Westminster Police, for the safety of Victoria Tower. After nightfall the Luftwaffe launched what turned out to be the biggest raid of all on London. Breaking with their normal practice of concentrating on the industrial areas and docks in the East End, the German bombers ranged far and wide across London, with few areas of the capital entirely free from bombing. The most concerted attack took place in the West End and surrounding districts, areas which until this night had been left relatively unscathed by the bombing. More than one thousand four hundred Londoners were killed during the night and another one thousand eight hundred were injured. In excess of sixty thousand homes were destroyed or damaged; many important buildings or famous landmarks were devastated. The debating chamber of the House of Commons was ruined by explosion and fire. The BBC took a direct hit, but managed to continue its activities during and after the raid. Westminster Abbey sustained hits by at least fifteen incendiary devices. Buckingham Palace was hit. The British Museum was bombed. Big Ben was hit by a bomb, halting the chime but not the clock. Shops and offices the length of Oxford Street were burned out. Gas mains, sewers and telephone connections were seriously damaged. Victoria Tower, for which Sergeant Collins was responsible, was at the time shrouded in scaffolding for essential cleaning and repairs. The presence of so many wooden planks attached to the outer structure presented a serious fire risk. Shortly after midnight, a rain of incendiaries fell in the immediate vicinity. Most of those falling on the streets were dealt with swiftly, but one that lodged in the scaffolding close to the top of the tower continued to burn brightly. Sergeant Collins grabbed a heavy sandbag and climbed up the scaffolding ladders and platforms to reach the fire. After a strenuous climb, Sergeant Collins quickly extinguished the fire with the sand and returned to the ground. (He told Stuart Gratton that he thought no more about his actions until the following year, when he was awarded the George Cross. By this time he had moved to the British mandated territory of Madagascar, where he helped oversee civilian security matters during the transition. He remained on Madagascar throughout the upheavals caused by the struggle for independence. When the Republic of Masada was declared in 1962, Chief Superintendent Collins was forced to return home with the other British administrative and diplomatic officials.)
In the early evening of May 10, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took off in a twin-engined Me-110D from the Messerschmitt factory’s airfield in Augsburg, Bavaria. He carried with him a plan for peace between Britain and Germany, commissioned and authorized by Hitler, which Hess intended to deliver in person to Winston Churchill. He landed his plane in Holland for refuelling. Shortly after taking off again, his plane was intercepted by German fighters, which first attempted to make him land, then later tried to destroy his aircraft with machine-gun fire. Hess managed to elude them and headed out across the North Sea. The smaller fighters gave chase for a while, before dropping back. More Luftwaffe fighters, based in occupied Denmark, also took off in an attempt to intercept his aircraft. They returned to base, claiming that they had shot down his plane over the sea, but in spite of vivid descriptions and corroboration of each other’s stories, the pilots were unable to provide conclusive proof. (Hess completed his mission to bring peace.)
Then, latterly, there was Flight Lieutenant Sawyer, RAF Bomber Command. Churchill said Sawyer was a registered conscientious objector who was also an operational bomber pilot. Churchill’s memorandum to his departmental staff required them to discover how this came about. No official reply was recorded. Nearly sixty years later, Stuart Gratton, whose own family had a tradition of pacifism, sensed a story. What was it about? In particular, what might Sawyer have been doing on May 10, 1941?
Part Two
1936–1945
1
I was a serving officer with RAF Bomber Command from the beginning of the Second World War. My entry into the service was by way of the University Air Squadron at Oxford, where I was a rowing blue at Brasenose College. In those early years I had two passions: one was rowing, the other was flying. I had no interest in war, no premonition that I might ever become involved in one. The events of the world went on beyond my restricted area of awareness, as they had done for most of my life. I know I was naïve and therefore badly prepared for the immense war in which we were all eventually caught up.
I should have known better. My father was a registered conscientious objector during the Great War, as the First World War was still called in the 1930s. A reserved and private man, my father would never have tried to force his own convictions on his children. Nevertheless, my brother Joe and I were brought up to believe that war was evil, something to be avoided at all costs. During the Second World War and the years after it, the prewar British policy of appeasing the Nazis became discredited and despicable, but my father would never have that. He maintained that the beginnings of appeasement lay in a humane and pragmatic economic policy, of not forcing Germany to meet her crippling reparations under the Versailles Treaty. Practically every member of the British government of those days had fought in the Great War and felt themselves under a duty to go to any lengths to avoid another. They sensed, perhaps, what Adolf Hitler always claimed: that it was the iniquities of Versailles that led to the second war.
The naïveté was therefore my own fault, because my interest in sport, in rowing, overshadowed everything else. I lived only for the moment and was totally focused on the sport I loved. During the years 1935 and 1936 I concentrated on a single aim: to qualify for the British team that would compete in the Olympic Games. My brother and I trained and practised with an almost obsessive energy.
To anyone who had seen us training, or who saw us competing, it might have seemed a foregone conclusion that we would be selected for the team. We were consistently on form and easily won most of the races we entered, but when you are there at the centre of the obsession you feel you can take nothing for granted. When Joe and I were finally selected, at the beginning of June 1936, it felt that this was quite simply the greatest news we would ever receive. We celebrated with friends in a number of Oxford pubs that night, but afterwards returned with single-minded dedication to our training.
My story of what happened to me during the war therefore begins in July 1936, when Joe and I set off together for the Berlin Olympics.
2
I was nineteen years old and although I had no way of knowing it then, it was not to be my only trip to Berlin. My later visits took place when I was in the RAF, at the controls of a bomber, peering down through darkness, smoke and cloud at the vast city below, releasing incendiaries on to the buildings and streets. That future was unimaginable to me in 1936.
I had been living away from our family home in Tewkesbury for less than a year. I went home most weekends and still collected my mail, clean laundry and a great deal of food for the following week. I had hardly grown up at all, so a journey out of England, especially one to Germany in that eventful year, was an adventure at the highest level.
As we headed for the south coast of England I was at the wheel of our equipment van, in itself another small step for me. I had only recently begun driving, as until then my brother Joe normally drove us around. All the trips I made before this had been short ones, mostly on the familiar roads between Oxford and Tewkesbury. I had gone no further south or east than to London, and then in daylight. Now here I was, embarking on our adventure, driving our van slowly in the dark across the Downs towards Dover, with Joe dozing in the passenger seat beside me.
I wonder now if we should have gone on with that trip, but perhaps that is simply the luxury that goes with hindsight. In the small world of rowing, as in most sports, politics was a dirty word. It was easy to close yourself off from international events in the 1930s: there was no television, radio was not the force of journalistic independence it became during and after the war, and for most people the ma
in source of information was whatever newspaper they happened to read. Joe and I rarely read any part of newspapers other than the sports pages. Britons in general closed their minds against Hitler and the Nazis, hoping they would go away. For people like Joe and myself, though, there should have been no such excuses. We were at university, surrounded by articulate and intelligent men and women with views on every subject, frequently aired. We knew well enough what was happening in Germany and that to take part in the Games could be construed as giving aid and comfort to the Hitler regime.
I knew this, but frankly I was not interested. The finest sportsmen and sportswomen from around the world would be in Berlin. It was going to be the only opportunity in my lifetime to compete in my chosen event at the highest level.
Joe did not think entirely alike, I should say. Whenever we discussed what we thought was happening in Germany we vehemently disagreed, but because we were both committed to the sport and had to work as a team we generally steered clear of the subject.
I loved rowing. I loved the strength I had in my body, the speed I could find, the agility with which I could move. I rowed every day that the weather allowed, sometimes alone for endurance development, but usually with Joe, training for speed, for coordination, for the simple familiarity of rowing together. We could never train too much, or enough. I knew I could always improve, always hone my muscles a little more. We competed in a sport in which winning margins were often measured in fractions of a second; there was no possible improvement that was so small we could safely neglect it.
Joe was just as committed. Everything I felt inside myself I could observe taking shape in him. Joe rowed stroke. As we rowed, his body was only inches away from mine. His back filled my view, shoulders, arms, flowing to and fro, straining back with the main pull, recovering, sweeping forward, slicing the blades down into the water, putting on the pressure for the next stroke. When we rowed Joe’s back became my inspiration, the powerful, functional muscles matching every movement I made as if we were somehow synchronized by an invisible power from above. I watched his back in the sunlight, in the rain, on grey days, when our coordination was perfect and when we could get nothing right. I watched it at rest as well as during the bursts of energy. I watched it, yet I rarely saw it properly. It was something on which to rest my gaze, a familiar and undisturbing sight while I concentrated on the mindless task of going faster than ever before. Joe and I became more than a team at such times – it was as if we were one person sharing two bodies.
People said we were the best coxless pairs team in the country. They invested great hopes in us, because rowing was a sport in which Britain excelled. The Olympic coxless pairs gold medallists in Los Angeles in 1932 had been Edwards and Clive, the British team, now retired from the sport. Edwards and Clive were our heroes, but we were still expected to equal or better them.
So this was the consuming foreground of our lives. Youth is blind to the world around it, but obsessive youth is blinder still. Ignoring everything, we trained intensively for the Games through the spring and early summer of 1936. Germany was re-arming, building an illegal air force, and Hitler marched in his troops to occupy the Rhineland, but we were training on weights, sprinting and running, bringing our times down, getting the rhythm and the smoothness of the strokes right, learning when and how to burst with speed, when to consolidate our strength, how to take the shortest, straightest line in water that constantly flowed and eddied unpredictably beneath us. Then July came and it was time for us to travel to Germany.
In 1936 there was no combined embarkation of a national team wearing colours, as we see in the modern age. We were expected to make our own way to Berlin, so we carried our equipment in our own van, taking it in turns to drive.
3
I prowled about on the boat deck during the short sea-crossing to France. Joe was inside the lounge cabin and I did not see him again until the ship docked. I was wide awake, exhilarated by everything, but also concerned about the well-being of our two shells, lashed side by side to the roof of the van. We transported them everywhere like that, but never before had we taken them on board a ship. Watching the van being lowered by crane into the hold, the chains swinging, had been an uncomfortable moment of alarm. It reminded me how vulnerable they were and how damage to either of them could put us out of the competition.
I stared restlessly out to sea. I watched the two coasts between which we were slowly crossing. Somewhere in the middle of the Channel, with the lights of both England and France in clear view, it felt as if the sea had narrowed. Both coasts seemed to be almost within reach. I had never before realized how close our country actually was to the mainland of Europe. From this perspective the sea did not seem much wider than a big river. I stood at the rail amidships, thinking such thoughts, little appreciating – how could I have done? – what an important symbol of national security that short stretch of water was soon to assume for everyone in Britain.
Three hours later, with the early dawn breaking ahead of us, we were travelling eastwards away from Calais, along the French coast, heading for the border with Belgium.
Joe was driving. I curled up as comfortably as I could in the passenger seat beside him, closed my eyes and tried to snatch some sleep, but I was too excited. The strange French farmland was drifting magically past our windows, flat fields cultivated in exact, rectangular shapes, tall trees planted alongside the road. Ahead was the prospect of hundreds of miles more of sweet foreignness, Belgium and Holland and Germany.
4
The next day I was driving the van when we reached the border crossing between Holland and Germany.
It was a moment we had been looking forward to with mixed feelings. We were undoubtedly nervous of the Nazis, but at the same time, because our mother had been born in Germany, we had been brought up believing that Germany was a good and beautiful place, with a great civilization and culture. Frankly, we had no idea what to expect.
We had driven through the Dutch town of Eindhoven an hour or two before reaching the German border. The road was straight but perilously narrow, built up on embankments that ran between wide and uninteresting fields. Beyond Venlo we entered an area of woodland. After crossing the River Maas on a long bridge built of girders, we drove into the border zone, hidden where the road ran through a dense thicket of trees.
The officers on the Dutch side dealt with us quickly. After a perfunctory examination of our passports one of the officials raised the barrier and I drove across into the narrow strip of no man’s land. We could see the German border post about a hundred yards ahead, where another long pole straddled the road. This one was painted with a triple spiral of red, black and white.
We drew up behind two other vehicles that were already waiting to cross, inching the van forward as each passed through the border ahead. When it was our turn, the officer, a rotund man wearing a uniform of green jacket, black trousers and highly polished black boots, saluted us with his arm raised at a smart angle.
‘Heil Hitler!’
‘Heil Hitler!’ Joe responded.
Before leaving home we had received a letter sent by the Foreign Office to Games competitors, warning us of the behaviour and courtesies that would be expected of us in Germany. The Hitler salute was the first item on the list. To neglect or refuse to make it could lead swiftly to trouble, including imprisonment and deportation. Like most people in Britain we had seen newsreel film of the Nazis. To us, there was something unmistakably ridiculous and histrionic about it. Back in our rooms in college, Joe and I had Heil-Hitlered each other and our friends, goose-stepping about, laughing and laughing.
The guard lowered his arm stiffly. He leaned down by the passenger window and stared in at us. He was a youngish man, with pale blue eyes and a fair moustache, neatly cropped. He glanced suspiciously into the compartment of our van, where our luggage was stowed, leaned back with his hands on his hips while he regarded our shells strapped to the roof, then held out his plump fingers. Joe gave him our passport
s.
He looked through both documents slowly, turning the pages with precise motions of his fingers. The sun was beating down on me through the window. I began to feel anxious.
‘[These passports are for the same man,]’ he said, not looking up. ‘[J. L. Sawyer twice.]’
‘[We have the same initials,]’ I replied, beginning what was for us the familiar explanation. Joe was always Joe. I was sometimes called Jack, but usually JL. ‘[But our names—]’
‘[No, I think not.]’
‘[We are brothers.]’
‘[You are both initialled J. L., I see! Some coincidence. Joseph, Jacob! That is how they name twins in England?]’
Neither Joe nor I said anything. The officer closed the second of our passports, but he did not hand them back.
‘[You are going to the Olympic Games in Berlin,]’ he said to me, looking across. I was in the driver’s seat, but from his point of view the right-hand drive must have put me on the wrong side of the vehicle.
‘[Yes, sir,]’ I replied.
‘[In which event do you propose to compete?]’
‘[We are in the coxwainless pairs.]’
‘[You have two boats. Only one is necessary.]’
‘[One is for practice, sir. And as a reserve, in case of accident.]’
He opened our passports again, closely scrutinizing the photographs.
‘[You are twins, you say. Brothers.]’
‘[Yes, sir.]’
He turned away from us and walked to his office, a solid-looking wooden hut built beside the barrier. Several large red flags with the swastika emblazoned on a white circle hung from poles standing out at an angle from the wall. There was no wind in this sheltered spot surrounded by trees and the flags barely moved.