ruefully acknowledged their reputation in their own squadron song, which they sang to the tune of a hymn written in 1899, ‘Come and Join Our Happy Throng’:
The Möhne and Eder dams were standing in the Ruhr,
617 Squadron bombed them to the floor.
Since that operation the squadron’s been a flop,
And we’ve got the reputation of the squadron with one op.
Come and join us,
Come and join us,
Come and join our happy throng.
Selected for the squadron with the finest crews,
But the only thing they’re good for is drinking all the booze.
They’re not afraid of Jerry and they don’t care for the Wops,
Cos they only go to Boston to do their bloody ops.
Come and join us …
To all you budding aircrew who want to go to heaven,
Come join the forces of good old 617.
The Main Force go to Berlin and are fighting their way back,
But we only go to Wainfleet where there isn’t any flak.
Come and join us …
Come and join our happy throng. 46
While some crewmen on 617 Squadron were chafing at their inactivity, Johnny Johnson welcomed the lack of ops. ‘It meant I had more time with Gwyn, and we had so little time together that it was important to make the most of every minute.’1
Born in 1921 near Horncastle in Lincolnshire, Johnson had been one of six children.
Unfortunately, my mother died two weeks before my third birthday, so I never really knew a mother’s love. It really affected me – I remember seeing her in the hospital bed. I was standing next to my father and another man, and my father described me to him as ‘this one is the mistake’. I remember that to this day.
I had a very unhappy childhood. He wouldn’t let me go to grammar school and was ruining my life. Eventually I went to the Lord Wandsworth agricultural college for children who had lost a parent. Again, my father had said no, but the local squire’s wife went to see him and told him in no uncertain terms that he had to let me go! I was eleven at the time.
By November 1940 Johnson was a trainee park keeper with ambitions to be the superintendent of a big London park, but with London suffering under the Blitz, he thought: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ He wanted to be part of the war, not left behind, but didn’t want to join the Army. ‘I had seen the reports of World War One trench warfare, casualties and the like, and didn’t want any of that, and I didn’t like water, so the Navy was out! So that left the RAF. I wanted to be on bombers so I could take the war to the enemy, to get at the Germans. I had no thought of any dangers back then, I just didn’t think about it.’
Like many other British aircrew, Johnson did his initial training in America because, even before Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the Americans into the war, the US government had arranged discreet support for the British war effort by secretly training British aircrew under the Arnold Scheme. To maintain the fiction of American neutrality, aircrew wore civilian clothes and travelled via Canada, before slipping across the US border.
Johnny Johnson pictured in 1947
Johnson returned to the UK in January 1942 and, desperate to get into action, volunteered to train as a gunner – the shortest training course. Testing his resolve, the president of the selection board said to him, ‘I think you’d be afraid to be a gunner, Johnson.’
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he said. ‘If I was, I wouldn’t have volunteered in the first place!’ ‘So I gave as good as I got,’ he says now, with a chuckle. ‘I was going to prove to him that I wasn’t afraid! I had no sense of fear or thoughts of what the future might hold, and certainly no idea of the losses Bomber Command would suffer.’
Johnson retrained as a bomb-aimer, not least because they earned five shillings (25p – about £10 at today’s values) a day more than gunners. As a bomb-aimer, he manned the front gun turret on the route out and only went into the bomb-aimer’s compartment as they approached the target. He then fused and selected the bombs, set the distributor and switched on his bombsight. Lying in the nose of the aircraft on the bombing run, he could see the flak coming up at him, but had to ignore that and concentrate on doing his job.
From a distance the flak bursts could seem almost beautiful, opening like white, yellow and orange flowers, but closer to, dense black smoke erupted around them and there was the machine-gun rattle of shrapnel against the fuselage and the stench of cordite from each smoking fragment that pierced the aircraft’s metal skin.
‘I don’t think I was afraid,’ he says:
but when you see the flak you have to go through, I think anyone who didn’t feel some apprehension was lacking in emotion or a stranger to the truth, but you didn’t want to let anyone down. The crew were doing their jobs and mine was to get those bombs on the target to the exclusion of all else. Once we got to the target area, I was too busy concentrating on the bombsight and dropping the bombs in the right place to worry about what else was going on.
Despite his initial scepticism about the value of a ‘special squadron’, in mid-July 1943, two months after the Dams raid, Bomber Harris proposed using 617 Squadron to assassinate the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. A letter to the Prime Minister from the Chief of the Air Staff revealed that Harris had asked permission to bomb Mussolini in his office in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, and his house, the Villa Torlonia, simultaneously, ‘in case Il Duce is late that morning … Harris would use the squadron of Lancasters (No. 617) which made the attacks on the dams. It is manned by experts and is kept for special ventures of this kind.’ It was suggested that if Mussolini were killed ‘or even badly shaken’, it might increase the Allies’ chances of speedily forcing Italy out of the war. However, the plan was vetoed by Foreign Office officials, who were unconvinced that eliminating Mussolini would guarantee an Italian surrender and feared that it might even lead to his replacement by a more effective Italian leader.2
Two days later, on 15 July 1943, 617 Squadron at last saw some fresh action, though it proved to be what one Australian rear gunner dismissed as ‘a stooge trip’ – an attack on a power station at San Polo d’Enza in northern Italy. ‘We screamed across France at practically zero level, climbed like a bat out of hell to get over the Alps, and then screamed down on to St Polo and completely
