After the Flood

by John Nichol

  In this, he was encouraged by Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane, who on one celebrated occasion even flew as bomb-aimer with Mick Martin’s crew on a practice bombing detail. Cochrane arrived ‘all spick and span in a white flying suit’, took the bomb-aimer’s post and achieved remarkable accuracy. The results were shown to the other crews, with the implicit message that if an unpractised bomb-aimer like Cochrane could achieve such results, the full-time men on 617 Squadron should be doing a lot better themselves.

  While Martin was in temporary charge, his crew had put their enforced spare time to good use by creating a garden in front of ‘the Flights’ – the place where they spent their time before training flights or ops, often hanging around waiting for the weather to clear. Having found a pile of elm branches, they erected a rustic fence with an arch at the front and the squadron number at its apex, picked out in odd-shaped pieces of wood. They scavenged, dug up and, in cases of dire necessity, bought plants and shrubs, creating a peaceful haven. Sitting there in the sunshine, inhaling the scents of flowers and listening to the birdsong and the drowsy sound of bees, they could imagine themselves far from the war … until the spell was broken as the Merlin engines of one of the squadron’s Lancasters roared into life.

  As the euphoria of the Dams raid faded, the remaining men of 617 and the new arrivals brought in to replace the crews lost on the raid settled down to a period of training which extended, almost unbroken, for four months. ‘There was quite a gap between ops after the dams,’ Fred Sutherland says, ‘though I must say, I wasn’t that bothered, and in no hurry to get back on ops.’ Not all of the replacements were as experienced as the original crews. When Larry Curtis first reported to his commander, Gibson looked him over and then said, ‘I see you haven’t got any decorations, which surprises me.’

  ‘The day after I joined, I was on operations,’ Curtis said, with a grin, ‘which surprised me!’39

  Born at Wednesbury in 1921, Curtis joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve from Technical College in November 1939. After training as a wireless operator/air gunner, he was posted to 149 Squadron, flying Wellingtons, and took part in the attack on the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at Brest. After completing thirty ops, Curtis was sent to a bomber training unit as a wireless instructor, but still flew on the first thousand-bomber raid to Cologne. Commissioned in January 1943, he converted to the Halifax and joined 158 Squadron. During a raid on Berlin in March 1943 his aircraft was hit by flak over the target and all four engines stopped. As the aircraft spiralled towards the ground, the crew were about to bale out, when one engine picked up and the pilot was then able to recover and start the remaining three. Having already completed two bomber tours, Curtis joined Mick Martin’s crew on 617 Squadron in July 1943 as one of the replacements for the men lost on the Dams raid.40

  One of the main attractions for a lot of the aircrew joining 617 Squadron was the chance to fly low level. After flying at 10,000 to 15,000 feet on his previous ops, the thought of operating at 100 feet or even less was thrilling for Johnny Johnson. ‘I thought, Wahey! Before I had been sitting on top of those bloody clouds and you could see nothing until you got to the target and then all you saw was rubbish. So it was absolutely exhilarating, just lying there and watching the ground going Woooof! Woooof! Wooooof! underneath me!’ Against the regulations, he always took off and landed from his position in the nose. ‘I didn’t see the point of trying to stagger back and forwards to the normal position by the spar. So I could see the runway rushing beneath my nose every time we took off, and as we landed, the runway raced up to meet me – I loved that!’41 One of their practice routes was over the Spalding tulip fields, and Johnson remembers a guilty feeling as they flew over the fields at low level, leaving a snowstorm of multi-coloured, shredded blooms and petals in their wake, torn up by the slipstream.42

  In some ways the tail gunners had the worst job, with the greatest amount of time to ponder their fate. One rear gunner found it:

  a very lonely job, cold and lonely, stuck out at the back of the aircraft with no one to glance at for reassurance or a little comfort. The first op was the worst; the only person who knew what it would be like was the skipper, because he had been on one op before with another crew. And he wouldn’t tell us what it was going to be like; he didn’t want to put the wind up us. We were naive and quite happy to trust to luck. Oh, I was afraid, especially of what was to come, the unknown, but you just couldn’t show it.

  The odds were stacked against us, we knew that at the time, knew that the losses were huge. It’s not a particularly nice thought, but once you were in that situation you just had to carry on and do the job you were trained for, and you just blotted out everything else. You ignored the flak, ignored the aircraft going down around you. What else could you do? In many ways you were stuck in the middle of that horror, those losses. You don’t ‘cope’ with it, do you? You just do it.43

  Having been specifically formed for that single op against the dams, it now appeared to pilots like Les ‘Happy’ Munro (also known as ‘Smiler’ – both nicknames were sarcastic, because he was famed for his dour demeanour) that ‘nobody knew what to do with us. There was a hiatus, a sense of frustration. What was 617 Squadron for? The powers that be couldn’t seem to make up their minds about what to do with this special squadron they’d created.’ Munro was a New Zealander, but had enlisted because of:

  a general feeling that we were part of the British Empire, and had an allegiance to King and Country. We were really aware, through radio broadcasts and cinema newsreels, of what Britain was facing and what they were being subjected to: the air attacks, the Blitz. It was a sense of duty for most of us young men in New Zealand to fight for ‘the old country’ against the Nazis, but of course I had no idea at all of what would happen to me or what was to come: the devastation, the dangers, the losses I’d see and experience. Nor that seventy years on I’d still be talking about it!

  ‘Being on 617 meant that there could be quite a long gap between ops,’ another crewman says.

  I remember going on leave and meeting friends from my engineers’ course who had nearly finished their thirty-op tour whilst I’d only done three or four. That’s when you began to understand how different 617 was. My friends said I was a ‘lucky bastard’ for being on 617 and not Main Force, and they were probably right – I wouldn’t have liked to be on MF from all the stories I heard and read afterwards.44

  617’s lack of ops led aircrew from 57 Squadron, also based at Scampton, to shower them with jibes and insults and give them the sardonic nickname ‘The One-op Squadron’. The men of 617 retaliated by ‘debagging many of the Fifty-Seven men in a scragging session in the Officers’ Mess’,45 but they also 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

  CHAPTER 2

  What Next?

  While some crewmen on 617 Squadron were chafing at their inactivity, John
ny 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 obliterated the unfortunate power station without seeing a single aircraft or a single burst of flak.’3 Other crews would have been grateful even for that level of activity, one pilot complaining that after two months’ inaction, when they finally did get an op it was ‘to bomb Italy … with leaflets’. As Joe McCarthy grumpily remarked, it was ‘like selling god-damned newspapers’.4

  There was only one thing McCarthy hated more than dropping leaflets, and that was signing forms, and one of his duties was to sign his aircrews’ logbooks every month. It was a task he seemed to find more difficult and intimidating than the most dangerous op. His education had been as much on the streets of the Bronx and the beaches of Coney Island as in the classroom, and his handwriting was laborious and painfully slow. He would put the task off as long as possible and when he could finally avoid it no longer, his crewmates would gather to watch, in fits of laughter at the sight of their huge and normally unflappable Flight Commander, with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, sweating buckets and cursing under his breath as he struggled to complete the hated task.

  During that summer of 1943, 617 Squadron moved from Scampton to Coningsby, where they would have the advantage of concrete runways, rather than the grass strips they had been using at Scampton. Those grass runways, camouflaged with ‘hedgerows’ painted on the turf to fool German raiders, had been less of a problem than they might have been, because the airfield was at the top of an escarpment and the natural drainage prevented Scampton from becoming boggy in all but the most relentless wet weather. However, with the squadron’s Lancasters carrying increasingly heavy fuel- and bomb-loads, a move to Coningsby was necessary, and 617’s pilots were soon airborne and familiarising themselves with the local landmarks there: a windmill in the nearby Coningsby village, Tattershall Castle to the north-west, beyond the river Bain, and, most distinctive of all, the towering St Botolph’s church, universally known as the ‘Boston Stump’. It was a rheumy, water-filled land, criss-crossed by dykes and ditches, and prone to autumn mists and winter fogs that often forced returning aircraft to divert elsewhere. There were farms dotted among the heathland and birch woods, rich pastures and water meadows, but to many of the aircrew the endless plains beneath the vast canopy of the skies seemed echoingly empty of life.

  * * *

  During the summer of 1943, Main Force had continued to take the war to the enemy, with Operation Gomorrah – the virtual destruction of Hamburg in a raid beginning on 24 July – creating havoc on an unprecedented scale. In one hour alone, 350,000 incendiaries were dropped there, and succeeding waves of British and US bombers over the next few days created firestorms that engulfed the city, killing 30,000 people. Elsewhere in the war, the tide was increasingly running in the Allies’ favour. The Battle of Kursk had been launched by the Nazis in early July, but it proved to be their last major offensive on the Eastern Front, and the S
oviets first neutralised the attack and then launched their own counter-offensive, driving the Germans back. In the west, the invasion of Sicily began on 10 July, and within five weeks the whole island was under Allied control, while on the Italian mainland Mussolini was deposed on 25 July 1943.

  617 Squadron’s long period of relative inactivity came to an abrupt end on 14 September 1943, when they were tasked with attacking the Dortmund–Ems Canal, a waterway 160 miles long, and the only one linking the Ruhr valley with eastern Germany and the ports of the Baltic and North Seas. That made it the most important canal system in Germany, a vital artery feeding Germany’s war industries with strategic materials including the crucial imports of Swedish iron ore, and transporting finished products that ranged from arms and munitions to prefabricated U-boat sections.

  The canal was most vulnerable north of Münster around Ladbergen, where it ran in twin aqueducts over the river Glane. To either side of the aqueducts the canal was carried in embankments raised above the level of the surrounding land, and these, rather than the aqueducts, were designated as 617 Squadron’s targets with the first operational use of much more powerful 12,000-pound High Capacity (HC) bombs, of which three-quarters of the weight was high explosive, compared with half in the smaller bombs.

  On the face of it, 617’s task was simple: bombing from 150 feet at a speed of 180 miles an hour, they were to drop their bombs on a precise aiming point within 40 feet of the west bank of the canal until a breach had been achieved. The remaining bombs were then to be dropped on alternate banks of the canal, moving north at 50-yard intervals to ensure as widespread a destruction of the canal embankments as possible. Even one bomb breaching the embankment would drain the canal, halting the flow of barge traffic, flooding the surrounding area and preventing millions of tons of Nazi supplies and weapons of war from reaching the front lines. However, the HC bombs were like elongated dustbins, built without streamlining and only small fins to enable them to fit into the bomb-bay. This made them unstable in flight and hard to drop accurately.