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 Soviets 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