‘The army came easy to me’
At 93, Second World War veteran Lewis Sawler still a force to be reckoned with
MIDDLETON, N.S. — Lewis Sawler has his iPad out texting to his friend Dorothy. He pulls up Google Maps, types in New Minas and pulls up a satellite image of his house. Zooms in. “It's that one there on the corner.” He points. It won't do ‘street view' and that's disappointing.
At 93, Sawler belies the notion of old age despite now living in the veterans' wing of Soldiers' Memorial Hospital. He's a force onto himself with a personality big enough to fill whatever room he's in.
He was born in Kentville but claims to have been at home from North Alton all the way to New Ross. He built a house when he was 16. He can make an ox whip. That toque he's wearing? He knit that.
Sawler joined the army when he was 17 and if the American's hadn't dropped the atomic bomb, he believes he was destined to be part of the invasion of Japan.
“How I got in the army, I was working for the Kentville Electric Commission and I made up my mind – I was only 17 – I wasn't climbing those damned 40-foot poles in the wet and the rain,” he said. “So I quit. I wound up in court. They were going to put me in jail for two years for leaving the priority job that I didn't know anything about.” He got off with a six-month suspended sentence.
“I looked at the judge and said ‘What am I supposed to do?' ‘Young fella,' he said. ‘You better join the army.' So I did. A lot of the young fellows went in. They weren't toughened to it like I was. At 17 I could do pretty near anything. That's why I'm 93 today I guess.”
JOINED UP
He joined up at depot in Halifax. It was early in 1945 and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was still more than six months away. But it would change the world forever, including Sawler's little piece of it.
And he remembers they were supposed to see action in the Pacific. He trained in Yarmouth, Aldershot, and Sussex, New Brunswick. At that early point, his training wasn't aimed at any particular area. He thinks he would have gone on to drive trucks.
“Could have been anything,” he said. “When you say infantry it really involves a whole lot of different parts. Could have been medical. It could have been maintenance of any kind.” He said in basic training it was very little about shooting and a lot to do with first aid and other things -- how to survive.
“I had two years in Aldershot with MacKenzie King's Youth Army prior to joining,” he said. “I lugged one of those old .303 rifles around and around and around. I wasn't the only one. So the army came easy to me.” Basic training? “It didn't bother me any,” he said. “I was one of those hard little nuts.”
He said you didn't learn to kill people. You learned to survive. “That's what people don't understand,” he said. “You done anything you could to survive. And help your buddy survive, but if he's down, don't touch him. They'll get you then. There's other people behind you to look after him.”
ATOMIC BOMB
“I was only in about seven months, eight months and the war ended,” he said. “They dropped the bomb. I had doubts about that. Three more weeks we would have been in Wainwright. From Wainwright to Oregon. In Oregon we would have been the Canadian 6th Division and joined the American 8th Army. You don't hear much about it.”
He believes they would have gone to Japan.
“It would have been the invasion of Japan properly. That's what I understood. Without the bomb,” he said. “I was in Aldershot at that time. Three more weeks and our company, our group, would have went to Wainwright in Alberta. Had all new American equipment.” But on Aug. 6 the first atomic bomb ever to be used in wartime was dropped on Hiroshima. On Sept. 2 Japan surrendered to the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.
“I'm here because of a dozen days. I was 18 on the 18th of September,” he said. “The 30th of September they drew the line. Get in or get out. I chose to get out because I knew where I could go to work and what I could do. I was brought up in a carpenter family. I built a house when I was 16 years old. The other fellows couldn't even drive a nail.”
Among other things, he worked for A.W. Allen's in Middleton for seven years. “Four years I did nothing but make doors,” he said. “Father started a floorcovering business. Thirty-five years I spent at that.”
GOT MARRIED
Sawler did get married but his wife has been gone for many years now.
“I had one son. I lost him when he was 34. Tried to work himself to death I guess,” Sawler said. “Tried to follow me. Major heart attack.”
Sawler never slowed down. He's one of those people who has to be doing something all the time. “I was some kind of a craftsman from Day 1. I was making things when I was 10 years old. You know what that thing up there is? That black thing?” He points to an ox whip hanging on the wall above a shelf filled with books. “I made a hundred of them.”
While he didn't have oxen, he grew up with them out New Ross way.
“Mother was sick when I was six years old,” he said. “They farmed me out. I sort of made home there (New Ross) and Kentville. I'd come to Kentville to school and back out there to play I guess. They had horses and cattle. They had everything.” He's been at the Veteran's Wing for two years now. There was a guy there knitting socks so Sawler decided he would knit hats. Then it was dolls and he's got completed ones lined up on the bookshelf and another one half done. He's got another toque started.
“I never sold nothing,” he said of his knitting. “I give them away.” He claims he can hardly read and write, but he's got books on K.C. Irving, Frank Sobey, Prince Philip, Oak Island. Birds of North America. He reads newspapers and Macleans Magazine. He looks up knitting patterns on the Internet. If he doesn't know a word? He looks it up in the dictionary on his iPad.
Get old? Hardly.