‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’ he shouted twice more, saluting again, his glittering eyes regarding the huge crowd. He was rocking to and fro on his heels. At the front of the crowd, high on his special plinth, was Adolf Hitler. He stood stiffly as the salutations went on, his arms folded across his chest in the same forced position I noticed earlier. He looked around to all sides, apparently basking in the deafening waves of adulation that were flowing towards him.
Next to us, on the highest step in the centre of the Olympic podium, the two gold-medallist Germans were standing side by side, their right arms raised in salute, their faces lifted towards Hitler’s remote figure.
It was simultaneously terrifying and enthralling. In spite of what little I knew about the Nazis, I felt myself responding to the intoxicating thrill of the moment. The sheer size of the crowd, the deafening roar they were making, the almost mechanical precision of the SS men paraded in front of us, the high, distant figure of Adolf Hitler, virtually godlike in his remoteness and power. The urge to raise my own arm, to thrust it emphatically towards the German leader, was for a few moments almost irresistible.
I glanced across at Joe, to see how he was reacting. He was already watching me and I instantly recognized the expression of suppressed anger that Joe adopted whenever he felt cornered, unhappy, uncertain of himself. He spoke some words to me. Although I leaned towards him to hear better I couldn’t make out what he said because of the noise.
I nodded instead, acknowledging him.
With a sudden, peremptory swirl, Hitler turned his back on us and moved to return to his seat. The noisy acclaim quickly died away, to be replaced by the band striking up a new marching number. The SS men in front of our stand dispersed. The man who had given us our medals walked back towards Hitler’s podium with a measured tread. He went at the same relaxed pace up the steps and after a moment I saw his tall figure leaning over to speak to someone. Shortly afterwards he sat down.
The Olympics officials were clustering around us, making it clear it was time for us to leave. We shook hands with the Danish and German athletes we had raced against, uttered congratulations once more, then stepped down on to the grass. Our moment of Olympic fame had already passed.
11
We walked together towards the British pavilion, where we had left our street clothes and our other possessions. As we approached the temporary wooden building we saw a group of British Embassy officials standing by the entrance. They were apparently waiting for us, because as soon as we appeared they strode towards us, stretching out their hands in greeting and congratulation.
A man we already knew as Arthur Selwyn-Thaxted, a cultural attaché at the embassy, was the quietest but most insistent in his congratulations. As he shook my hand affably he gripped my elbow with his free hand. ‘Well done, Sawyer!’ he said. ‘Well done indeed, both of you!’
He turned to Joe and said much the same.
‘Thank you, sir,’ we said.
‘It’s a great day when Britain wins another medal. You probably heard us cheering for you! It was a hard race, but you did exceedingly well. What a brilliant race you rowed!’
We said what we felt we were expected to say.
‘Now, we can’t let this remarkable achievement of yours pass,’ said Selwyn-Thaxted. ‘We’d be pleased if you would join us this evening. Just a little celebration at the embassy. The ambassador would like to meet you and there will be members of the German government present.’
Out of the corner of my eye I detected Joe stiffening.
‘What kind of celebration would it be?’ he said. ‘We were planning—’
‘A quiet reception. It’s not every day that we have Olympic medal-winners to show off, so we like to make the most of them when we can. Your sculling colleagues will be there, the equestrian team, Harold Whitlock, Ernest Harper, many more. The evening clearly wouldn’t be complete without you.’
Joe said nothing.
I said, ‘Thank you, sir. We’d enjoy that.’
‘Excellent,’ Selwyn-Thaxted said, beaming at us as if he meant it. ‘Shall we say from about six o’clock onwards? No doubt you know the British Embassy, in Unter den Linden?’
He smiled sincerely again, then turned away towards somebody else, raising a hand in simulated greeting. He went back to the group with whom he had been standing when we arrived. They moved off at once. When I turned to speak to my brother, Joe had already walked away. I saw him striding at great speed past the marshals by the entrance to the enclosure. His head was lowered. I went after him, but within a few seconds he vanished into the crowds that were standing about in the park outside.
I went into the pavilion, changed into my street clothes, collected Joe’s gear as well as my own and walked down to the U-Bahn to catch a subway train back to the Sattmanns’ flat. By the time I arrived, Joe had already packed his belongings and his bags were stacked in the hallway. He looked impatiently at me then went back into the room we had been using. I followed him in and swung the door to behind me.
Birgit was practising her music in one of the rooms at the front of the apartment. The sweet sound was muted when the door closed.
‘What’s going on, Joe?’
‘I feel I should ask you that. Have you any idea, any idea at all, what’s been happening here at the Olympics?’
‘I know you don’t like the idea that the Games are a Nazi showpiece.’
‘So you’re not as blinkered as I thought.’
‘Joe, we came here to row. We can’t get involved in politics. We don’t know enough about it.’
‘Maybe there are occasions when we should.’
‘All right. But any country that hosts the Olympics uses the Games as a way of promoting itself to the world.’
‘This isn’t just any country,’ Joe said. ‘Not now, not any more.’
‘Look, you knew that before we left home. In effect we both made the decision to be part of it when we were selected.’
‘Did you realize who that was, who handed us the medals?’
‘I didn’t recognize him. I assumed it was someone from the government.’
‘It was Hess. Rudolf Hess.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He’s one of the most powerful Nazis in Germany.’
‘But that doesn’t affect us, Joe! It wouldn’t have made any difference if Hitler himself had given us the medals. We’re of no importance to the Nazis. We’re simply here to compete in the Games and when they’re over we’ll go home. We had to go through with the ceremony. Are you suggesting we should have turned our backs on that?’
‘Didn’t you even think we might?’
‘What good would it have done? President Hoover went to Los Angeles four years ago. You presumably didn’t object to that, so how can you object to Hitler turning up at his own Games?’
‘How can you not?’
‘You didn’t say anything at the time.’
‘Neither did you.’
We both stood there angrily in that pleasant room overlooking the broad parkland, hot in the late afternoon sun. Birgit’s plaintive music could still be heard, a little louder than before: it was a piece she played every evening, Beethoven’s Romance No. 1. I noticed that the draught had moved the door ajar. Because I knew that the family who were our hosts could all speak English, I quietly pushed the door and closed it properly.
We argued on, but there was no shifting Joe from his position. He intended to leave for home more or less straight away. I put up objections: our shells were with the scrutineers, the van was parked close to the Olympic Village, we still had some kit at the pavilion. No matter what, we couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to Jimmy Norton, the coach. Joe shrugged the objections away, saying he would deal with them all. He said he was going to retrieve the van, pick everything up and set off for England at once. He planned to drive all night and with any luck would have crossed the border out of Germany by the next morning.
All he would say about my position wa
s that if I wanted to leave with him I’d be welcome. If not, I’d have to find my own way home with one of the other teams.
Meanwhile, I was becoming as stubborn as him. If the British Olympic Committee wanted us to stay on for the closing ceremony, then we should do that. And then there was the reception at the British Embassy, which we would have to attend in less than an hour.
Finally, we reluctantly settled on the inevitable compromise that satisfied neither of us. Joe agreed to delay his departure until after the embassy reception, which I would go to on my own while he collected our property and loaded the van. We would then leave Berlin together. But if I was late meeting him after the party, or missed him somehow, he would set off without me.
While we had been arguing, Birgit’s violin had fallen silent.
I settled down in an angry mood to pack my belongings. An atmosphere of resentment hovered in the room around both of us. I put on a clean shirt and jacket and the only necktie I had brought with me. I slipped my medal into my pocket.
I wanted to see the Sattmanns before I left, to say goodbye and thanks. I particularly wanted to see Birgit again, one last time. I went from room to room, but the place was empty. It felt too silent, making me wonder how much of our argument had been audible. To leave without giving thanks to these long-term friends of my mother’s was grossly discourteous, it seemed to me. It added to my sense of outrage at Joe, but there was no longer any point in arguing with him.
I went down to the dusty street outside, where the air was still stiflingly hot at this hour. I walked to the S-Bahnhof.
12
At the end of June 1941, nearly five years after Joe and I competed in the Olympics, I was recovering in a convalescent hospital in the Vale of Evesham. Gradually my memory was sharpening up. I was confident that this alone meant that I was on the mend, that I could soon return to my squadron. I was at last walking without crutches, although I did need a stick. Every day I took a turn about the gardens and every day I was able to walk a little further. The solitude gave me the chance to think, to remember what my life had been before the crash. The mental exercise began as a desperate quest to find myself there in the past, but as the days slipped by I took a real interest in discovering what had happened to me.
I remembered, for instance, that on the morning before that last raid I had woken up early. The squadron had not been on ops the night before, having been stood down in mid-afternoon.
In the indescribably heady mood of release that followed a stand-down I drove into Lincoln with Lofty Skinner and Sam Levy to see the early-evening showing of Santa Fe Trail, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Afterwards we went to a fish and chip shop for our dinner, walked around the quiet evening streets of Lincoln for a while, then decided to return to the airfield in time to watch the Whitleys of 166 Squadron – with whom we shared the airfield at Tealby Moor – taking off for their own raid. By ten-thirty the airfield was quiet again and I went to my hut to sleep. I slept so deeply that not even the sound of the Whitleys returning in the early hours woke me.
After breakfast the next morning, May 10, I carried out an air-test on A-Able, flew three low circuits of the airfield, then before lunch Kris Galasckja told me he needed to calibrate his guns in the rear turret, so I flew him in the Wellington across to the gunnery range at RAF Wickenby. We had lunch at Wickenby and were back at Tealby Moor before two in the afternoon.
Then the growing, inexorable pre-raid tension could not be ignored any longer. Everyone was watching for the familiar first signs of raid preparations: staff cars coming and going, trolleys of high-explosive bombs being trundled in from the distant dump, the engineers running up the engines and so on. We saw the various section chiefs heading for a meeting with the station commander: bombing and navigation leaders, met. officers, comms chiefs and so on. By two-thirty we were certain we would be flying that night. For us, though, there was nothing to do until the briefings began in the early evening.
Restlessness coursed through me. In the prewar years I would have gone for a run or taken a boat out on the river to work off any unwanted nervous energy, but in wartime conditions on a RAF station there were few such outlets. The rest of my crew were lounging about in the mess, playing cards or writing letters, showing their state of tension in different ways from mine, but I knew what they were going through. I left them to it and walked around the aircraft dispersals for a while, killing time.
At last it was time for the pre-raid briefing and I went across to the station hall, almost eager to begin. Once all the crews were settled in place, though, I found it hard to concentrate on what was being said. The target for the night was Hamburg: the station commander displayed the necessary maps of the general area and the city centre. We would be attacking the commercial area and the docks, making an early diversion to Lüneburg in the south to try to put the Hamburg flak batteries off their guard. I forced myself to concentrate: the lives of everyone in the plane could depend on this briefing.
Afterwards, the same sense of quiet agitation continued through the hasty pre-raid meal, through the technical tests and checks on engines, flying controls, guns, bomb-release mechanism, tyres and so on. I was under no illusions about what was causing the nervousness. By this time, what we all wanted to do was climb into the plane, take off for the raid and get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.
At just before eight o’clock a WAAF corporal drove us out to the aircraft in the crew bus. It was a warm evening and we were sweating and feeling overdressed in our fur-lined leather flying jackets, heavy boots, padded trousers. The gunners wore more clothes than the rest of us: their turrets were draughty and unheated, so they wrapped themselves up in additional layers beneath their electrically warmed flying suits (which warmed nothing): they wore extra underclothes, pullovers, two or three pairs of gloves and socks.
I hauled myself up through the hatch in the floor of the fuselage and went straight to the cockpit. I squeezed into the seat. Everything was in good working order, the LAC told me informally as I scribbled my name on the sheet of paper on the clipboard to sign off the plane for the ground crew. No problems, nothing to worry about. Take her out and bring her home. Our last raid had been six nights earlier, on the dockyards in Brest, where we had been trying to hit the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, so I felt a little out of practice as we went through the rote of pre-flight technical and arming checks. Both engines started at the first attempt. A good sign.
As we were taxiing down from dispersal to the take-off point it seemed to me that the plane felt heavier than usual, but I knew we were carrying a full load of fuel and bombs. I ran the engines up and down, clearing their throats, kicked the rudder left and right, feeling the aircraft responding sluggishly. Tonight was what Bomber Command called a maximum effort. A runway marshal gave me the thumbs-up as we lumbered past him, then turned away with his head bent over and his hand clamped down on his cap. The slipstream from our props bashed against him. Ahead of us was M-Mother with Derek Hanton at the controls – I’d known Derek since the days of the University Air Squadron. Behind us and to the side other Wellingtons were rolling forward from their dispersal positions, turning laboriously on to the side runway, taxiing down, ready to take off. On the other side of the main runway I could see a similar procession of slow-moving aircraft, a gathering of might, ready to go. We passed the caravan where the airfield controller had his station. No lights showed.
As usual, a little crowd had gathered at the end of the main runway to wave us off: WAAFs, ground crew, station officers, all turned out to watch us leave. Every night there would be someone there, standing against the perimeter fence where a great thicket of trees pressed close to the edge of the airfield. M-Mother rolled forward, turned on to the main runway, propellers blurring, flattening and shaking the grass in the slipstream. Derek accelerated away slowly. Another Wellington from the side runway opposite moved across to take his place. At last our turn came and I pushed the Wellington forwa
rd, swung her around to face down the long concrete strip. The airsock was slack.
I watched the dim outline of the airfield controller’s caravan: from this position I could see a steady red light, holding me until the airspace was clear. I waited, waited, the engines turning, the plane rattling and shuddering. My hand on the throttles was blurred by the vibration. I tried to stay calm. The light went to green at last. Our watchers at the side waved cheerfully.
I released the brakes, opened the throttles, adjusted the pitch and we began to move down the runway, slowly at first, so slowly, feeling every bump in the hastily laid concrete, the wings rocking, then a gradual increase in speed, the instruments showing we were going faster than it seemed. At flying speed, with the tail already free of the ground, I pulled back on the stick and the Wellington began its long, shallow climb into the evening sky.
As we ascended slowly through the calm air, circling over the familiar fields to gain a little height before setting off across the sea, I looked down at the quiet meadows and untidy rows of trees, their long shadows striking eastwards. I saw the steeples of churches, clusters of village houses, irrationally curving roads, hazy smoke from chimneys. Lincoln cathedral loomed up a few miles away to the south-east, the tower black against the blue of the evening sky. There were other aircraft in sight: Wellingtons from our own station, below and around us, but also far away, miles off, more tiny black dots lifting away from their own airfields, circling for height around the wide assembly point, seeking the others, aiming to form a broad and self-defensive stream for the long flight across the North Sea.
At last the radio signal came from the ground controller, his final clearance to start the raid. We turned one last time to the east, climbing steadily, away from the brilliant setting sun and towards the gathering dusk. The gunners let off a few trial rounds, their tracers glinting sharply down towards the sea. At five thousand feet the interior of the plane started to feel cold – for a few minutes we were actually more comfortable than we had been on the ground, before the sub-zero freeze of high altitude gripped us. At seven thousand feet I ordered the crew to put on their oxygen masks.