An Interview With s4

An Interview With…

The RAF PR Team is invited into the home of George Johnson, born 25th November 1921. Courtesy of the RAF which he served in for 22 years, on account of his surname he became ‘Johnny’. Join us, as we talk to the last surviving bomb aimer of the Dambusters raid 70 years on…

Why did you choose to enlist with the RAF? “I didn’t like what I’d seen and heard about trench warfare in WWI. I didn’t like the water so the Navy was out of the question. I rather fancied the air force and I wanted to fly on the bomber side. I didn’t want to be a pilot as I didn’t feel I had the aptitude or the co-ordination to do it properly. I didn’t want the responsibility of being responsible for a crew as well as flying the aircraft. The selection committee thought differently and I was recommended for pilot training in America, November 1940.”

In April 1941 Johnny met his wife and he fondly recalls the memory: “I was posted to Babbacombe, Torquay to the Aircrew receiving centre and was billeted at a hotel. One evening a friend and I were walking up the street and these two young ladies were walking towards us. I don’t know why because at that time I was a bit of a loner and for some unknown reason I said “Are you going our way” and the answer came “that depends which your way is”. That was it! My son calls it the corniest chat up line he’d ever heard, but it worked! It worked to such a degree that we managed to have sixty-two years of lovely married life together.”

When did you get into gunnery? “I managed about ten hours of dual flying and got as far as solo but my landings weren’t what they should have been. So then I joined a group of washed out pilots that had been training in the States and Canada. In January 1942 I was no nearer getting into that War than I had been when I had joined in 1940. So I thought which is the quickest course; and that was gunnery.”

How many sorties did you do throughout your RAF career? “From the bombing point of view I did 50 operations; the last 20 of those trips was flown as the Bomb aimer on Flt Lt Joe McCarthy’s crew.”

What was Flt Lt Joe McCarthy like? “Joe was an American in the Canadian Air Force, 6’3; and the breadth to go with the height. Big in size, big in personality. He was great for the crew and from my point of view created tremendous confidence in him, so much so that I never felt I wasn’t going to come back. He never did fail to bring us back.”

Can you remember when you first heard about Sqn ‘X’, which later became 617 Sqn? “Towards the end of March 1943. Wg Cdr Gibson had met Joe previously and he rung Joe and asked him: “would he join this new special Sqn for one special trip”. On 3rd April Joe said what Gibson had asked him, he said he’ll have to ask the crew, and we said; yes we’ll go with him. In some writings it says Gibson chose all the crews; he didn’t. He selected a few people that he knew anyway and whom he considered were going to be useful pilots on the Sqn. Others were appointed by their current Sqn commanders on recommendation of the AOC of the Group; Sir Ralph Cochrane.”

What happened when you first arrived at RAF Scampton? “By this time, because we were coming to the end of this tour we should have had a week leave and on this leave Gwyn and I had arranged to get married. Joe in typical American style took us as a crew up to Gibson’s office and said “we’ve just finished our first tour; we’re entitled to a weeks leave. My bomb aimer is supposed to get married on the 3rd April and he’s going to get married on the 3rd April”. Now that for a Flt Lt to Wg Cdr Gibson was a bit much, but he got away with it and we got our leave and so I got my wedding.” What did you think of Wg Cdr Guy Gibson? “ Oh god here we go. What I finally think of Gibson has to be retrospective. One of his major failings was he couldn’t bring himself down to the lower crews. He mixed very well with senior officers, particularly those above him and with the senior officers immediately below him but even with the junior officers he had difficulty. With the NCO’s he just didn’t want to know. He was bombastic, he was arrogant but at that time he was one of, if not the most experienced bomber pilots in bomber command and he’d also done a tour on night fighters as well, so he had something to be arrogant about. He was a strict disciplinarian. When he came to form 617, although at that stage he didn’t know what the target was, he knew it was a very special trip and that he was going to have to get more out of the crews than he would on a normal crew, on a normal Sqn. He cooled off a little bit. At one stage he wanted something for the Sqn so he rang Group who said “no can’t do it”, so he rang Command and they gave him the same answer. Right “I’ll ring the Air Ministry” which he did and even they said they couldn’t do it, so he said “right ill sit in my office until you change your mind” and he did, so he got what he wanted for the Sqn; that was typical Gibson. The true indication of leadership came with the attack on the Mohne dam, he made the first attack, ‘A’ to drop his bomb but also to assess the defences of the dam. The Mohne dam was the only one that was actually defended, so when he dropped his bomb as he called each aircraft in, he flew alongside them; and this to me says “your doing this, I’m doing this, we’re doing it together” and that to me is the essence of good leadership.”

What did you think the special mission was? “The only indication that we might have drawn, which we didn’t, was that we did a lot of training on the derwent water dam in Derbyshire and on uppingham lake in Rutland. On the derwent water was a towered dam, at Rutland there wasn’t so they put up a couple of posts for us. One of the things we had to do when we joined the Sqn as a bomb aimer was to make our own bomb sights. It consisted of a small triangle of plywood with pins or pegs in each corner and the distance between the base pins had to be specific and the distance from those to the apex pin had to be specific and the idea was that the bomb aimer held a single pin up to his eye and directed the aircraft until the base pins were in line with the towers on the dam or the poles that had been erected on the bombing range at specific distances, and when those coincided you released the bombs. We were using 25lbs package bombs at that stage. If you didn’t get it right, you would do it again and again until you got it right. It wasn’t so much a bombing site as a ranging site.”

Can you recall the brief before the raid? “ On the night before the raid, Sir Barnes Wallis showed us a film of his development of the bouncing bomb; an interesting film, including the early disasters and disappointments until he finally ended up with, what we found when he came onto Station was a glorified dustbin. The special aircraft had arrived at the squadron and no mid upper turret and the bomb bay was virtually sealed which had these two legs either side of the fuselage sticking down just below or just behind. At least it explained to us where the bomb was going to be carried. It weighed 9000lbs of which 6500lbs was explosive. Sir Barnes Wallis had said the bomb had to be spun backwards at 500 rpm, it had to be dropped from 60 feet at a ground speed of 220knts. The whole operation was a crew exercise, the navigator was watching the lights from the Perspex at the front, the flight engineer was watching the speeds and the bomb aimer was giving the pilot directions to guide the aircraft on to the target. That meant the pilot was being told by three members of the crew what to do. Having seen Barnes Wallis display on the Saturday evening, it raised some conjecture, but the majority was feeling that it was probably against the German battleships; particularly the Tirpitz. The first time we ever heard about what the target was, was at the briefing, on the day of the attack. We had no idea what it was until then. It was 3pm on the Sunday afternoon and the tannoy message said “all 617 aircrew into the operations room” and then we found out what the targets were; how wrong can you be. There were models of the Mohne and the Sorpe, the model for the Eder hadn’t been completed. The map on the wall indicated 2 routes in, the idea being to convince the Germans that it was a much bigger raid. The people in that briefing; the AOC, Station Commander, Barnes Wallis, Gibson, specialist officers were there and the dear old Met officer was there, hoping to give us a decent forecast for the trip, he was pretty good that night!” What dam was your target? “Gibson explained to us what was going to happen. 5 crews of which we were one were briefed for the Sorpe. The Sorpe was different from the other two dams, different in construction, it had no towers and it was built within hills on either side and also from the approach, so a frontal attack was more than difficult. It had a central core of concrete and either side there was rock built right out on the front and the back of it. Barnes Wallis had told us at the briefing, he estimated that it would take at least six bombs to crack that dam, “if you can crack it the water pressure will do the rest.” Because the Sorpe had no towers the attack had to be totally different and we had to fly down the side of one hill, aim to get in line with the dam itself and estimate to drop this inert bomb, we weren’t spinning it, as near as possible to the centre of the dam.”

What did you do prior to the operation? “ It was then back to the messes for the meal, good old eggs and bacon, probably powered scrambled egg. The crews all meld together, a family of crews. I think the spirit of the squadron was that we were all crews together for this squadron and we’re here to do the best we can for this squadron whatever may happen. I do believe that one or two felt they weren’t going to come back. I know that one of those was ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood and he was walking out to his aircraft with Dave Shannon and he said to Dave ‘Look Dave I have a feeling I might not be coming back. I’ve written a letter and its in my room and if I don’t come back will you get hold of it and destroy it as I don’t want them to know that I haven’t come back’. He went off and he got shot up making his attack on the dam and he crashed just beyond. The other one was Byers who had the same feeling he wasn’t going to come back and he got shot down too. I was quiet amazed that Gibson said “the worst part of any operation was the waiting time, between going out to the aircraft and the thinking, that’s the time when you’re worried about whether you’re going to come back.” I was surprised that he felt like that, it never, never crossed my mind, again my confidence in Joe, I never ever thought I wasn’t going to come back.”

Was there a problem with your aircraft? “ We ultimately went out to the aircraft; our aircraft was known to the crew as “Queenie Chock Chock”. Joe had a toy Panda which was a bit of an omen and that was painted on to the nose of our aircraft. Queenie had behaved beautifully during training but she decided she didn’t want to go out that night and developed a hydraulic leak, which meant it couldn’t be fixed in time for us to go. As soon as we weren’t going Joe went berserk and said “let’s get to that reserve aircraft before some other buggar gets there before us and we don’t get to go”. There was only one reserve aircraft and it had only arrived on Station about 3 o’clock that afternoon, it had been bombed up, fuelled up and it had done a compass swing. It hadn’t had any lights fitted and it hadn’t got the special communication system that was fitted to all the other aircraft. We dashed over to the aircraft and in so dashing Joe caught his parachute handle as he got out of the aircraft and the parachute blew away behind him as we went over to the reserve aircraft. When we got to it there was no compass card, so he really went berserk then. So he got in a truck and went back to the flights and he was going mad. Fortunately the Squadron Adj Humphries was there and said: “for goodness sake Joe, calm down, you’re in such a bluster that you’ll make a cock up of the whole thing if you’re not careful”. It did calm him down a bit. We had a very reliable Flight Sergeant on the Squadron and he dashed off to the flights and corrected the compass card but he heard Joe say he wasn’t going to bother with the parachute, so he went back to the parachute section and collected another parachute. He gave Joe the compass card and he put the parachute in the truck and said “your parachute SIR!” Eventually we got off about thirty minutes late and Joe opened up the taps a little bit to make up as much time as he could.”

What happened on the flight to the dam? “On the way out we were flying just south of Hamm and there were these goods trains chugging along and because we had no mid upper turret the mid upper gunner was flying in the front turret and fortunately stirrups had been fitted so he wasn’t kicking me up the backside all the time. Ron said, “Can I have a go Joe?” and Joe I think somewhat reluctantly said “yeah alright then’ so Ron opened up the little 303” at the goods trains. What we didn’t know was not only was it a goods train, it was an armament goods train and it replied with rather more than 303! We knew we’d been hit, we heard it, we felt it, but it didn’t impede the aircraft at all so we just pressed on.”

What did it feel like being in a Lancaster that night? “Oh same as usual. It was noisy, sometimes smelly, but it was so reliable and its great advantage was its ability to carry a greater bomb load than any other aircraft. I have no doubt whatsoever; it was the finest bomber aircraft used during the War including the Americans. They are flying fortresses.”

How long did it take you to get to the dam? “I can never remember these times; perhaps two, two and half hours. Incidentally this was low- level flying all over the continent, map reading and of course it had to be done in bright moonlight. The timing of the raid had to coincide with a full moon and the highest possible height of water in the dams and it had to be within the first two weeks of May.”

What happened when you reached the dam? “Ultimately we found the Sorpe, a little difficult at first because mist was beginning to form at that stage. When we found the dam, over the dam itself was perfectly clear, brilliant moonlight. Having seen what we had to do, we discovered that what we hadn’t been told at briefing was that there was a church steeple on the side of the hill from which we were supposed to be making the attack. So Joe said right we’ll use that as a marker, It was fairly well lined up with the dam itself, so it meant over the top of the dam and down as far as you could get, we had no lights, not an easy attack to make. If I wasn’t satisfied I called “dummy run”, if Joe wasn’t satisfied he just pulled away and left me to call “dummy run”. I discovered how to become the most unpopular member of the crew in double quick time, after about the sixth or seventh dummy run, a voice from the rear turret, our crew comedian, Dave Rodger “won’t somebody get that bomb outta here?” However we went on. Although nothing had been said between Joe and myself, I’m sure we both realised, the lower we got the less forward travel that bomb was going to have before it hit the water and the easier it was going to be to estimate the dropping point. On the tenth run we got the line up right and we actually dropped from 30feet and I pride myself for the drop; pretty near the centre, a little bit over- shoot maybe but not too bad. When I said “bomb gone” a voice from the rear turret said “thank Christ!” and it was nose up before we hit the hills on the other side which wouldn’t have been very pleasant. Because we got nose up, I couldn’t see the explosion or anything, but Dave could see it from the rear turret. He estimated that the water went up to a height of about 1000ft and he said “not only that but on the down flow some of it got into the turret so I thought I was going to be drown as well as knocked around by you sods”.

What did you see? “We circled then and we saw that we had crumbled the crest of the dam from a distance of about twenty yards that was all, there was a little leak going over the top into the overflow pool and that was that and eventually we set course for home, not before the navigator had said to Joe “for god sake stop talking and lets get on our way home”. Joe could talk quite a lot when he felt like it, but he was so pleased and relieved that it had gone so well in the end he couldn’t help but talk about it. The thing that surprised us most was that we were late taking off, when we got there, there was nobody else there and nobody else came whilst we were there. We didn’t realise why till we got back.”

What was the journey like back home? “The first thing we saw on the route home was what had been the Mohne dam, it was just like an inland sea, there was water everywhere! We had the satisfaction at least of knowing that some of it had been successful, we had heard this over the radio broadcast. We also heard that the Eder had been breached as well. But having seen that was wonderful satisfaction of seeing what had been achieved. We tootled off towards home. For some unknown reason we found ourselves coming up to a town that shouldn’t have been there, not only that but we found ourselves over a railways marshalling yard and this was the Hamm marshalling yard that was the distribution centre for all the armaments that were made in the Ruhr and distributed to all areas where needed; not the healthiest of places to be in April of ’43. Once again from the rear turret “who needs guns? At this height all they need to do is change the points” that was a good indication of the sort of height that we were flying at. The navigator complained that the only compass card he got was the one that had been used with the compass swing with the bomb on board, so he had been using that and his directions hadn’t been quite as good as they might have been. There is some doubt about that, I never heard it checked up but I know that John Sweetman (military historian and author of ‘The Official Dambusters Experience’, published by Carlton) argues that there certainly were more compass cards in the aircraft than that one.”

What happened when you landed back at RAF Scampton? “Scampton in those days was a grass airfield, so all landings were a bit rough, but ours was rather rougher than rough and we were starboard wing low. The engineer looking out the side said, “We’ve got a burst tyre skipper”. The shot that we heard was that the shot had gone through the starboard undercarriage nacelle and we ultimately learnt went on through the wing and ended in the roof, just above the navigators head. Another foot either way and it would have been in to the petrol tanks and that would have been bye bye McCarthy’s crew. Lady luck was with us that night without a shadow of doubt. That was confirmation that we had in fact got away with it.”

What happened at the de-brief? “We discovered why we were the only aircraft there at that particular time. Les Munro had been so badly shot up over the islands going in that apart from the damage to the aircraft the whole of his communications system had been destroyed internal and external so since it was a communications operation there was no point of him going on. Geoff Rice had been flying low and he got so low that he got his bomb in the water and it ripped it off, back through the aircraft, it didn’t do the aircraft any good; holes in the bottom of the aircraft and tore off the tail wheel. Of the others, Byers had been shot down and Barlow, an Australian, had flown in to electric cables and crashed. When he crashed his bomb rolled off and didn’t explode. Those bombs were fitted with two fuse- depth fuses, which I still say I was briefed for a depth of 25feet. It was also fused with a self- destruct fuse, so if we had to drop it over the continent, it would destroy itself rather than be there for an example for the Germans to copy. This one didn’t, and the only reason I can think of for not exploding was the bomb aimer at that stage hadn’t fused the bomb. The normal practice for a normal bombing operation was the bomb aimer fused the bomb as we left the English coast. The Germans then had a perfect specimen, and they worked on it, but fortunately there was more concern with the B1 and B2 bombs, so they spent more time on that, than they did in developing a similar type of spinning bomb. The de-brief was just a question of saying exactly what you had done and how you had done it and what sort of results you had. In our case after we left , three of the reserve aircraft briefed to go to the Sorpe; one was shot down on route, Ken Brown got through to the dam and dropped a second bomb and had much of the same experience as we did. Flight Sergeant Anderson was the third one, the mist was thickening, and he got lost, couldn’t find the dam at all so came back to base and landed with his bomb on.”

What did you think about surviving the raid, when so many didn’t come back? “That was shattering. Of the 19 aircraft that took off, 2 had boomeranged, 17 headed for target of those, 8 were shot down or missing which meant it’s getting very close to 50% which is an awful lot of loss. When Barnes Wallis heard the tragedy of the loss he cried and he said “I’ve killed all those young men I’ll never do anything like that again” and Gibson tried to alleviate a little bit of his pain by saying “no Barnes, you didn’t kill those people, without you that raid could never have taken place. We would never have been as successful as we have been. But you have to know that whenever we take off on any of these raids we realise there is always the possibility that we may not be coming back and that is what’s happened to those people tonight, not your fault at all” but I hear from Mary (Barnes Wallis’s daughter) that he never got away from that right up to his death, he thought about that the whole time, it always troubled him, that of his invention would cause so many deaths on one occasion, that I think was typical of the man, he was a wonderful man there’s no doubt, first class engineer and inventor.”

What happened after? “I don’t think quite honestly that we had appreciated how serious that raid was. It wasn’t until we saw the national paper headlines the following morning “German dams breached by brave Lancaster crews”. “Did we do that?” was somebody’s reaction. But it was a feeling of satisfaction certainly that so much had been achieved and from our point of view a bitter disappointment that we hadn’t been able to achieve the ultimate with the Sorpe as well, but I suppose sometime subsequently we learnt that the Germans had to drain the Sorpe in order to repair the damage lower down, so some satisfaction ultimately of that.”

What did your wife say when she knew what you’d been up to? “She didn’t know of course. Gwyn was in the billet and the girl who was on duty said “we’ve been shot down, there’s something special happening at Scampton and Gwyn said she heard the aircraft take off, she went to sleep and woke up to hear the aircraft come back. She said” I didn’t count them but I knew you’d come back”. She knew Joe and she had the same confidence in him as I had. She never ever felt I wasn’t coming back.”

What do you think 70 years on? “It makes me think in retrospect, I feel lucky in that I was in the right crew, in the right place at the right time. I feel privileged and honoured to have been able to take part in that particular raid.”

What do you think about the level of interest there is about the raid now? “ I’m somewhat surprised. It’s not only in the adult population, but also with the Junior Schools. When we were living in Torquay I was invited to a school to give a talk and I could see the interest in their eyes and that made it for me. The staff had shown the film to the children and asked them “to write down any questions they had for Mr Johnson”. When I‘d finished talking, hands went up all over the place. From my point of view it was refreshing to know that the Junior Schools were teaching English history and certainly World War II history.”

Are you looking forward to the Sunset Ceremony on the 16th May? “That is going to be a big day. Post War at an air display, a Lancaster was taking part and this little girl about nine years old as it was coming in, looked at her father and said “Daddy listen to the music of those engines” and I thought coming from a nine year old that was wonderful. I still feel the music of those four merlins going around, I shall always live with and I shall always welcome every time I hear them. Whatever else the zoom of the Tornadoes is great, but the dear old Lanc is still there.”

What do you think of the modern 617 Squadron? “I think they’re terrific! I think they have maintained throughout their being, if I dare say this, the example that the original Squadron set.”

Is there anything you would like to add? “One of the television programmes we did involved going back the dams and when we went back to the Sorpe, I fully expected to get my nose punched, but I was amazed at the friendlessness of the German people. They explained to me how very few of the real German people were supporters of Hitler, but if they’d said so they would have been shot. I said to them “it was a long time ago, we won’t forget it, but it’s up to us two countries now to make sure that sort of situation doesn’t arise again” and that set the scene for any other conversation we had. It was at this time when I met the engineer who had been part of the programme to repair the Sorpe lower down, so that added to my satisfaction. I remember walking along the dam and looked over the edge and I was dropping that bomb again, it came back just like that.”

Bitesize  After Johnny left the Service he trained as a Junior school teacher.