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
4
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.