by John Nichol
Iveson was at the forefront of the campaign to have the longed-for memorial built as a lasting testament to the horrific sacrifice of his friends and colleagues. He died not long after it was unveiled.
However, for most of the veterans of 617 Squadron, the business of getting on with their lives, earning a living and raising a family took priority over justifying their wartime role. Colin Cole went back to his pre-war job. ‘They had to give you your job back, so I returned to work as a clerk for local government. No one was interested in me at all. In fact, there was a sense of “Oh, he’s back now, is he?” I was back from the war but there was no welcome. Indeed, they made me start back at the bottom again. No hero’s welcome there!’5
Most of them rarely mentioned the war, even when they got together with old comrades. Johnny Johnson is one of only three men still alive who took part in the Dams raid. ‘After the war, Joe McCarthy and I, with our wives, would meet up before each reunion, but we didn’t really talk about the war,’ he says. ‘We discussed family life and where we were now, not where we had been. In the years after the war, even in the RAF, no one really mentioned the “Dambusters”. It just wasn’t of interest, or not until the film came out anyway.’6
‘There was very little talk about the war,’ agrees John Bell. ‘I served in the RAF until 1977, and I can hardly remember the war being mentioned, though it is now, of course, as our numbers get fewer.’
Yet, while many veterans quietly got on with the business of rebuilding their lives, some could not forget. After the war, as his own private act of reparation for the damage he had helped to wreak on German cities and civilian lives, Nick Knilans devoted himself to constructive public service. ‘I had made a vow that I would do some act to better mankind,’ he said. ‘I wanted to compensate for all the death and destruction I had helped create.’ He worked as a teacher for twenty-five years, including two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, and also championed the improvement of the lives of young Mexican-Americans and became a counsellor in Californian prisons. Even after his retirement in 1978, he continued to support programmes for underprivileged youths right up until his death in 2012, aged ninety-four.7
Don Cheney never forgot the day he was shot down and three of his crew were killed. He was awarded the DFC for helping his crew to escape from their doomed aircraft, but seventy years later, even though he was completely blameless, he had never stopped reproaching himself for the three deaths. His daughter Jan recalls:
There was very little discussion about Dad’s war experiences when I was growing up. Every August the fifth [the anniversary of his plane being shot down] Dad used to want to be alone and did not want to talk to anyone. I knew it had something to do with the war, but I only learned the true magnitude of what he had experienced in my late teens. Neither my mum or dad wanted to scare or disturb us by telling us earlier; and anyway, not talking about the war was very much a coping mechanism for Dad, who we know now has suffered from PTSD since coming back in 1944.
I never heard my mother talk about (and I have never asked her) what it was like to learn that my dad was missing in action and presumed dead. Not talking about it was also a way to cope for my mother, because it was when Dad talked about or was reminded of the war that he would experience severe anxiety and depression, and that was very hard on her and us kids. It would manifest by him not being able to get out of bed, being incredibly tense, stressed, unable to sleep, and unable to contribute or emotionally support my mother or us kids during those times. He was (and still is, at times) simply in survival mode. So, all in all, everyone thought the best way to deal with the war trauma was not to deal with it!
Dad said the worst thing he’d ever had to do in his life was to go and explain what had happened the day they were shot down to the mother of his wireless operator and friend, Reggie Pool, who was killed that day. That he had lost three of his friends and felt their deaths were his fault, occupied much of his thoughts throughout his life, however much he tried to suppress them. Dad told me not long ago that every night before he goes to sleep he thinks about the possibility that if he ‘had only turned the plane a little more one way or another’, they would not have been shot down and his friends would not have died that day.
My most vivid recollections of him when I was growing up were of him staring into space, lost in another world; I would have to shake his arm or hand, or sometimes take his face and turn it in the direction of my face, for him to come back to reality and pay attention to what I was trying to tell or show him. This happened all the time; the war robbed me of my dad, often at times when I really needed him to be there for me the most.8
Don died in August 2014 and was described as ‘an incomparable role model, strikingly modest about himself but unabashedly boastful about the accomplishments of others’.9 Before he died, speaking from his home in Canada, Cheney said, ‘I’m so very proud of my role in the RCAF. I was flying alongside the best crew in the world and I still think of them every day. Those wartime experiences made me the man I am today.’10
* * *
As they grew older, some veterans made pilgrimages to the sites of 617 Squadron’s most famous raids, laying wreaths on the graves of dead comrades or just reflecting on the events of all those years ago. Many, however, opted to stay away. A few years ago, Fred Sutherland was invited to visit the Eder dam he had helped to destroy, but he declined. ‘I was really embarrassed at the thought of going there,’ he says.
A lot of people were killed in the flooding. At the time we blew up the dam we never thought or worried about anything like that, but I think about it a bit differently now. We all lost a lot of friends back then, but it’s only recently that I’ve found myself thinking about those days. I don’t dwell on it, but I often think about the friends who died. It was such a loss of youth and promise and I often wonder what they’d have done, what they would have become. All that hope – just gone.11
As one of the three surviving Dambusters – and the only Canadian – Sutherland was invited to Britain to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Dams raid in 2013, but again he politely declined the invitation. ‘It’s not much of a party,’ he says, ‘when there are so few of us left. My crew are all gone. Passed away. And most people don’t really understand what we did anyway; they can’t understand it, because they weren’t there.’12
Perhaps it is the enduring scars left on the families of the dead that offer a lasting insight into the terrible cost. ‘I received a letter from the son of Ken Gill, my navigator who was killed,’ says Sydney Grimes. ‘Meeting him brought it all very clearly home to me when he asked, “What was my father like?” I realised so many children like him never knew their fathers.’13 Derek Gill is only one of tens of thousands of Bomber Command ‘children’ who would never know their fathers. He has spent many years researching his father’s life. ‘My mum never got over losing him and never remarried,’ he says. ‘I was so pleased to meet Sydney Grimes. He is the only person who could talk to me about my father’s life in the RAF.’14
Despite the traumas of battle and the loss of friends that they all experienced, few of the men of 617 Squadron harboured any regrets about their role in the war. ‘I look back now,’ Frank Tilley says, ‘and I am very proud of my service on 617 Squadron. I suppose my contribution to Bomber Command was quite small, a bit puny really, but I’m still proud of it. I was one of the lucky ones but I sometimes wonder why I survived and so many others didn’t. I’m simply very grateful; I remember all those who didn’t make it through.’
John Bell also remains very proud of his time on 617 Squadron:
It was an incredible period to be involved in the business of war, a time of huge change and development and achievement. I do think about the death and destruction of course, but I still think it was the only way to win the war. It would never happen again like that, but you can’t use today’s standards and reasoning to judge the all-out war of seventy years ago.
617 Squadron was also ‘
a huge part’ of Johnny Johnson’s life. ‘I was lucky, I was privileged to have been with the right crew, in the right place, at the right time, to have been involved in the Dams raid,’ he says, ‘and I’m honoured that I was part of it all.’
But I don’t like the thought of being a ‘national treasure’! I said to my children a while ago, ‘It’s time we forgot about this war business,’ but they said, ‘You’re part of history, Dad!’ I don’t want to be ‘history’!
The brutality of my father when I was a child meant that I never imagined the life I could go on to have. We never, ever got on – he never mentioned my life in the RAF or my role in the Dams raid – but my childhood and my life in the RAF, alongside my life with Gwyn, made me the person I am. Gwyn was my rock when I was on ops, the steadying influence that helped me focus on life outside the RAF. I’ve had the sort of life I never dreamed about as a child, full of love, enjoyment, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – a life of respect.15
Larry Curtis became a prominent member of the 617 Squadron Association, and remained very close to Mick Martin, naming one of his sons after him, and paying regular visits to the Sardinian grave-site of Bob Hay, their bomb-aimer who was killed over the Anthéor viaduct. Curtis said that the most important thing he learned from the war was ‘how good people were. A spirit was built up that I’m sure would never have happened in any other walk of life. The friendships we made in those days are still there. And all I’d say is, if I had it all to do again, I’d do it again.’16
* * *
When the surviving veterans of 617 Squadron held a reunion in 1980, the former head of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, wrote a note to them. It began:
To all my old lags of 617 Squadron and any other bombers. Ignore any sneers or smears of authors and those who find them the only means of selling their wares, and buy instead the books written by Albert Speer and Doc. Goebbels. From those two at the very centre of things from 38–45, but on the wrong side, you will find irrefutable and ample first-class evidence that the strategic bombing won the three main victories in the war:
In the air. Because they forced the enemy on the defensive, building and training practically nothing but fighters and fighter pilots in a despairing attempt, which failed, to defend their Fatherland.
On land. Because they gave the Allied armies absolute air supremacy and blasted out of their way any and every attempt by the enemy to make a successful stand or counter-attack.
At sea. Because the bombers sank or destroyed twice as many enemy capital ships as the Navy accounted for; sank, fatally damaged or destroyed before they were launched, at least a dozen submarines for every one the Navy scuppered; destroyed hundreds of small naval craft such as destroyers, torpedo and gun boats, minesweepers, and trawlers etc. And finally annihilated the enemy merchant marine on which they depended for vital ore supplies for industry.
The Germans had, Harris added:
900,000 fit soldiers on air defence and half the army’s anti-tank guns, while Speer had 800,000 fit men trying and failing to keep the railways going, doubtless thousands more repairing urgent damage to war industry. If you know of any Allied army that took two million out of the enemy’s fighting lines and half their vital anti-tank guns, I would be interested to hear about it. But that is all you old lags and loafers did for the pay you drew. No wonder authors and journalists find cause to smear you.
Harris signed off his letter to the 617 Squadron crews: ‘Enjoy yourselves, and how well you deserve it!’17
Picture Section
The Möhne dam: one of the iconic images from the aftermath of the raid that earned 617 Squadron its nickname.
Two survivors of the Dams raid: Les Munro (far left) and Johnny Johnson, along with Mary Stopes-Roe (the daughter of Barnes Wallis) and Wing Commander David Arthurton, in front of a Lancaster bomber at a ceremony commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Dams raid.
Johnny Johnson in March 2014.
Johnny Johnson some seventy years earlier at RAF Scampton with his Dams raid crewmates. Front row, left to right: bomb-aimer Johnny Johnson; navigator Don MacLean; pilot Joe McCarthy; wireless operator Len Eaton. Back row, left to right: front gunner Ron Batson; flight engineer Bill Radcliffe.
Frank Tilley in February 2014.
Frank Tilley’s first night op on 617 Squadron, a raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal, was a baptism of fire: ‘I was transfixed by it,’ he says, ‘and by seeing other Lancasters going down in flames … In that moment I realised what the war, Bomber Command, the flying, all meant.’ Making a safe return to RAF Woodhall Spa, where 617 Squadron was based from January 1944 until the end of the war, he had never been so glad to see the runway.
The raid on the Gnome-Rhône aero-engine factory at Limoges in Occupied France in February 1944 was the first op for John Bell and the rest of Bob Knights’ crew after joining 617 Squadron. Leonard Cheshire and Mick Martin carried out the target marking, seen here.
John Bell and the author at the site of the V-2 assembly and launch bunker at Wizernes in July 2013, standing just a few feet from where Bell dropped his bomb on the reinforced concrete dome.
Colin Cole in March 2014.
When 617 went back to the Tirpitz on 12 November 1944, wireless operator Colin Cole watched his crew’s Tallboy in flight through the open bomb doors: ‘It was an amazing sight to see it dropping away, tracking to the target.’ He would have seen something like the photograph taken from Bob Knights’ Lancaster on the same raid.
Willie Tait’s crew after returning from the sinking of the Tirpitz.
The author standing in front of the wreckage of Bill Carey’s ‘Easy Elsie’, which, having made seven runs at the Tirpitz, was fatally damaged by flak. Carey nursed his Lancaster over the Swedish border before crash-landing deep in the Arctic Circle. Although Carey was believed killed, and his kit cleared away by the Committee of Adjustment, he and his crew miraculously survived
Iris and Sydney Grimes in March 2014, some seventy-five years after they met.
The decision to dispense with wireless operators and mid-upper gunners in order to accommodate Barnes Wallis s Grand Slam meant that Sydney Grimes’s last op was the raid on the Bielefeld viaduct.
John Bell back in the bomb-aimer’s compartment of a Lancaster, ‘Just Jane’, at the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre in July 2013.
The same day brought together the author (centre) and, left to right, Benny Goodman, David Fellowes (460 Squadron), Colin Cole and John Bell, in front of ‘Just Jane’.
Notes
CHAPTER 1 THE DAMS
1 Fred Sutherland, interview with the author
2 George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, interview with the author
3 ibid.
4 Clive Rowley, Dambusters
5 ibid.
6 Quoted in Charles Foster, Breaking the Dams
7 Fred Sutherland, interview with the author
8 Chris Ward, Dambusters: The Forging of a Legend
9 ibid.
10 ibid.
11 Harry Humphries, Living with Heroes
12 Mrs M. Brookes, ‘A WAAF’s Tale’
13 George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, interview with the author
14 ibid.
15 Richard Morris, ‘Prosopography – A Special Group of Men’, Après Moi!, Summer 2011
16 Lawrence Wesley Curtis, IWM Sound 92111
17 Clive Rowley, Dambusters
18 George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, interview with the author
19 Quoted in Charles Foster, Breaking the Dams
20 Daily Telegraph, 19 May 1943
21 Clive Rowley, Dambusters
22 ibid.
23 Quoted in Richard Morris, ‘The Legacy of the Dambusters’
24 Mary Stopes-Roe, interview with the author
25 Tom Simpson, Lower than Low
26 Harry Humphries, Living with Heroes
27 George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, interview with the author
28 Tom Simpson, Lower
than Low
29 George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, interview with the author
30 ibid.
31 Tom Simpson, Lower than Low
32 ibid.
33 ‘Damn Busters’ dinner menu, RAF Museum, Hendon
34 Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries
35 Charles Foster, Breaking the Dams
36 E. A. Eaton, Two Friends: Two Different Hells
37 Tom Simpson, Lower than Low
38 Alan Cooper, Beyond the Dams to the Tirpitz
39 Lawrence Wesley Curtis, IWM Sound 92111
40 ‘Squadron Leader Larry Curtis’, obituary, Daily Telegraph, 29 June 2008
41 George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, interview with the author
42 ibid.
43 David Fellowes, interview with the author
44 Frank Tilley, interview with the author
45 E. A. Eaton, Two Friends: Two Different Hells
46 Quoted in Tom Simpson, Lower than Low
