by John Nichol
Losses of crewmates and friends were never discussed. ‘It just never came up,’ Johnny Johnson says:
though I did think about death when my roommate on 97 Squadron, Bernie May, was killed. We were on the same op together when his pilot overshot the runway on landing, went through a hedge and smashed the nose up. Bernie was still in the bomb-aimer’s position and was killed outright. By the time I got back, all his gear had been cleared away from our room. It affected me that one minute he was there, and the next minute, no trace of him. Just bad luck really, but you just had to go on and find another friend. That was how it was then.
‘The hardest part was writing to the relatives of those that didn’t make it,’ front gunner Fred Sutherland says. ‘Trying to write to a mother, and all you could say was how sorry you were and what a good friend their son had been to you.’
‘I’d lost friends and colleagues,’ Johnson adds:
but never thought it would happen to me, and I had total trust in Joe McCarthy. He was a big man – six feet six – with a big personality, but also big in ability. He was strong on the ground and in the air, which gave the rest of the crew a tremendous boost. Joe had a toy panda doll called Chuck-Chuck, and we had a picture of it painted on the front of all the aircraft we flew. Other than that, I didn’t believe in lucky charms – you made your own luck – but we had such confidence in Joe that it welded us together. We all gave him the best we could and trusted him with our lives and I never, ever, thought he’d not bring me back home.
McCarthy was a genial giant who had spent some of his youth working as a lifeguard at Coney Island. After three failed attempts to join the US Army Air Corps, he crossed the border and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force instead. He came to England in January 1942 and flew on operations to the Ruhr even before he’d completed his advanced training. He then joined 97 Squadron in September 1942, where Johnny Johnston became his bomb-aimer. Most of the ops they flew together were to the ironically named ‘Happy Valley’ – the Ruhr, which had such formidable air defences that bombing there was anything but a happy experience, and many of their fellow aircrews lost their lives.
McCarthy led a multinational crew. He was from the Bronx in New York, his navigator Don McLean, rear gunner Dave Rodger, and flight engineer Bill Radcliffe were all Canadians, and the three Englishmen – Johnny Johnson, Ron Batson, the mid-upper gunner, and Len Eaton, the wireless operator – were NCOs.
The mixture of rank and nationalities, Johnson says, ‘had no significance whatsoever to any of us. We were all on Christian-name terms, including Joe, and we all got on well. There was no stand-offishness, nothing to suggest any difference between any of us.’ By contrast their first meeting with their new commanding officer had been chilly, but Gibson was already known to get on much better with men of his own class and background than with ‘other ranks and colonials’. When Gibson was on 106 Squadron, Johnson says:
he was known as the ‘Arch-Bastard’ because of his strict discipline, and one thing he didn’t have was much of an ability to mix with the lower ranks; he wasn’t able to bring himself to talk with the NCOs, and certainly not with the ground crews. He was a little man and he was arrogant, bombastic, and a strict disciplinarian, but he was one of the most experienced bomber pilots in Bomber Command, so he had something to be bombastic about. He spoke to us all at briefings, but he never spoke to me on a one-to-one basis, or ever shook my hand, or even acknowledged me. But that’s just the way he was and he was a true leader in the operational sense, his courage at the dams showed that.14
Gibson expected others to show no less courage and dedication, and he could be abrupt, even merciless, with those whom he decided had failed to meet his exacting standards. One of the reserve crews on the Dams raid, piloted by Yorkshireman Cyril Anderson, had been redirected to the Sorpe dam from their original target, but failed to find it. After searching for forty minutes, suffering a mechanical problem, and with dawn already beginning to lighten the eastern sky, Anderson aborted the op and returned to base with his Upkeep bomb still on board. Whether or not Anderson’s humble Yorkshire origins played a part in Gibson’s decision, he showed his displeasure by immediately posting Anderson and his crew back to 49 Squadron. In any event, the commander of that squadron did not share Gibson’s opinion of Anderson, and in fact recommended him for a commission as an officer shortly after he rejoined the squadron.15
However, others, even among the ‘other ranks’, found Gibson easier to deal with. He and his beer-drinking black Labrador – sadly run over outside Scampton the night before the Dams raid – were regulars in the Officers’ Mess, and wireless operator Larry Curtis, whose Black Country origins and rise from the ranks would not have made him a natural soulmate for Gibson, said of him: ‘I know some people said he was a bit hard, but I got on well with him … I found him hard but very just, you couldn’t ask any more than that. When it was time for business he was very businesslike, when it was time to relax, he relaxed with the best of them. I only regret I never had a chance to fly with him, because he was a wonderful pilot.’16 Gibson had demonstrated his skill and bravery as both a pilot and a leader many times, but the Dams raid was to be his crowning achievement.
Bomber Command C-in-C Arthur Harris had argued forcefully against the raid beforehand, describing the idea as ‘tripe of the wildest description’,17 but he and Air Vice Marshal The Honourable Ralph Cochrane, commander of 5 Group, of which 617 Squadron formed a part, had hurried from Grantham to Scampton to congratulate the returning heroes. For them, as for the government, the press and the nation, starved for so long of good news about the war, any reservations about the aircrew losses were swept away in the jubilation about the Dams raid’s success. 617 Squadron had shown Hitler and his Nazi hierarchy that the RAF could get through and destroy targets they had previously thought invulnerable. They had dealt a severe blow – albeit a short-term one, since the dams were repaired within months – to German arms production. They had forced the Germans to divert skilled workmen from constructing the Atlantic Wall to repair the dams, and that might well have a significant impact on the chances of success of an Allied invasion of France when it eventually came.
Even those successes paled beside the huge impact the raid had on the morale of the people of Britain, and on public opinion around the world, particularly that of our sometimes reluctant and grudging ally, the United States. ‘I don’t think we appreciated how important the raid was in that respect,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘until we saw the papers the next morning, when it was plastered all over the headlines. There had been the victory at El Alamein a few months before and now this, and it was a big, big change in what had been a bloody awful war for us until then.’18
Ironically, Cochrane, a severe-looking man with a high forehead and a piercing stare, had warned the crews at their final briefing that the Dams raid might be ‘a secret until after the war. So don’t think that you are going to get your pictures in the papers.’19 Security before the raid had been so tight that one of the local barmaids in Lincoln was sent on holiday, not because she was suspected of treachery but because she had such a remarkable memory and such a keen interest in the aircrews that it was feared she might inadvertently say something that would compromise the op.
However, once the raid was over, any considerations of the need for secrecy were swept away like the dams, by the propaganda value of publicising the raid. The Dams raid chimed perfectly with the narrative created by British propagandists: the plucky but overwhelmingly outnumbered underdog fighting alone, and through expertise, ingenuity, courage and daring, breaching the defences of the monolithic enemy.
The Daily Telegraph exulted on its front page that ‘With one single blow, the RAF has precipitated what may prove to be the greatest industrial disaster yet inflicted on Germany in this war,’20 and the other newspapers were equally triumphant in tone. Guy Gibson was awarded a Victoria Cross for his leadership of the raid and more than half the surviving members of the squadron were
also decorated, but Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s euphoria in the immediate aftermath of the raid soon gave way to pessimism. In a letter to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff he said he had ‘seen nothing … to show that the effort was worthwhile, except as a spectacular operation’,21 and although he often appeared unmoved by aircrew losses on Main Force – the major part of Bomber Command which carried out the near-nightly area bombing of German cities – he later remarked that missions where Victoria Crosses went along with high losses should not be repeated.
However, the damage to German industry and infrastructure was undoubtedly considerable. Thousands of acres of farmland and crops were buried by silt, and the land could not be tilled for several years. Food production, output from the coal mines and steel and arms manufacture were all badly hit. The destruction of power stations further reduced industrial output, and the disruption to water supplies caused by wrecked pumping stations and treatment plants not only deprived factories of water but left firemen in the industrial towns unable to extinguish the incendiaries dropped by RAF bombers. The destruction of 2,000 buildings in Dortmund was directly attributed to this.22
Nonetheless, when Barnes Wallis, who had also hurried to Scampton to add his congratulations, was told of the deaths of so many airmen, he cried. ‘I have killed all those young men,’ he said. His wife wrote to a friend the next day: ‘Poor B didn’t get home till 5 to 12 last night … and was awake till 2.30 this morning telling me all about it … He woke at six feeling absolutely awful; he’d killed so many people.’23 Although Guy Gibson and the others did their best to reassure him, according to his daughter Mary, Wallis lived with the thought of those deaths throughout the rest of his life.24
The Australian pilot Mick Martin’s opinion was that most of the casualties on the Dams raid had been caused because their navigation had been ‘a bit astray’ and, more importantly, because pilots didn’t keep below 200 feet on their way to the target. ‘Of course,’ said his rear gunner, who shared Martin’s views, ‘it’s easy to criticise when you’re sitting down at the back, arse about face, instead of up front where you see things rushing at you head-on, and even though it is moonlight, which can be almost as bright as day, there is a great risk of miscalculation of height, and objects such as power lines don’t show up like the Boston Stump’25 – the remarkably tall tower of St Botolph’s church in Boston, rising over 270 feet above the Lincolnshire fens, and visible from miles away.
The surviving aircrews washed away the bad memories of the night and toasted their success with a few beers. The Mess bars were reopened and drink was taken in considerable quantities. Some of the aircrews had ‘a mug of beer in each hand’, according to the Squadron Adjutant, Harry ‘Humph’ Humphries. ‘I could hardly keep my eyes open, yet these lads drank away as though they had just finished a good night’s sleep. The only thing that contradicted this was the number of red-rimmed eyes that could be seen peering into full beer mugs.’26 ‘The celebrations were in full swing,’ Les Munro says, ‘and I wondered if I really deserved to be part of it all. Should I be taking part in this when I hadn’t reached the target? All that training, preparation had been for nothing. But no one ever made any comment about us not getting to the target.’
The celebrations ended with a conga line of inebriated airmen visiting Station Commander Group Captain Charles Whitworth’s house and then departing again, having deprived the sleeping Whitworth of his pyjamas as a trophy. But while the crews had been celebrating or drowning their sorrows, Harry Humphries had the painful task as Squadron Adjutant of composing fifty-six telegrams and then fifty-six personal letters to wives and families, telling them that their loved ones would not be coming home.
Once the initial euphoria had passed, reactions within the squadron to the success of the Dams raid tended to be more muted. Some were elated but for most, ‘we were satisfied in doing the Dams raid,’ Johnson says, ‘but nothing more really. It was just another job we had to do. I had no sense of triumphalism or excitement, we realised what we had done, and were very satisfied, but that was all.’27 However, in a public demonstration of the importance of the raid to British morale, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to the squadron on 28 May 1943, with all the aircrews lined up, standing to attention and with their toecaps touching a white line that had been specially painted on the grass. They spent five hours there, though ‘naturally, of course, neither the King nor Queen visited the Sergeants’ Mess’.28
The gallantry awards for the raid – one Victoria Cross, five DSOs, fourteen DFCs, eleven DFMs and two Conspicuous Gallantry medals – were then awarded by the Queen in an investiture at Buckingham Palace on 22 June. Johnny Johnson hadn’t ‘the foggiest idea’ what the Queen said to him. ‘I was so bloody nervous. All I can remember saying is “Thank you, Ma’am” and that was it.’29 Although he was a teetotaller – ‘I couldn’t even stand the smell of beer,’ he says, ‘so I never went into the bars apart from a quick dash at lunchtime to pick up cigarettes’30 – he was in a minority of close to one on the squadron, and his fellows more than made up for him, with the investiture the trigger for a marathon booze-up. They were given a special carriage on the train taking them to London, where they had ‘a high old time’, and after chatting to the driver and his fireman during a stop at Grantham, Mick Martin’s crew made the next stage of the journey down to Peterborough on the footplate of the engine. They each threw a few shovelsful of coal into the firebox and took turns to operate the regulator under the supervision of the driver and ‘gave the old steam chugger full bore’. The driver offered to stand them a drink at any pub of their choice in London, and they duly obliged him at the appropriately named Coal Hole in the Strand.
The more well-to-do of the aircrews stayed at the Mayfair Hotel, while the less affluent settled for the Strand, and in the words of one of the Australians, ‘for twenty-four hours there was a real whoopee beat-up’.31 As a result none of them were looking at their best on the morning of the investiture. Mick Martin’s braces had disappeared somewhere along the line, but his resourceful crewmates ‘scrounged a couple of ties and trussed him up like a chicken, sufficient to get him onto the dais at Buckingham Palace, down the steps and off again’.
The squadron’s resourcefulness was also demonstrated by one of Mick Martin’s crewmen, Toby Foxlee, who, as petrol was strictly rationed, obtained a regular supply of fuel for his MG by ‘a reduction process’ which involved pouring high-octane aircraft fuel through respirator canisters he had scrounged; ‘the little MG certainly used to purr along pretty sweetly’.32
On the evening of the investiture, A. V. Roe, the manufacturers of the Lancaster, threw a lavish dinner party at the Hungaria restaurant in Regent Street for the ‘Damn [sic] Busters following their gallant effort on the Rhur [sic] Dams’33 – the budget for the dinner clearly didn’t extend to a proofreader for the menu! Given the austerity of wartime rationing, a menu including ‘Crabe Cocktail, Caneton Farci a l’Anglaise, Asperges Vertes, Sauce Hollandaise, and Fraises au Marasquin’, washed down with cocktails and ample quantities of 1929 Riesling, 1930 Burgundy and vintage port, was an astonishing banquet.
As the heroes of 617 Squadron celebrated their awards that night, Bomber Command’s war against Germany ploughed on with a raid by nearly 600 aircraft against the city of Mulheim, north of Düsseldorf. The city’s own records describe the accuracy of the bombing and the ferocity of the fires. Roads into and out of the area were cut and the only means of escape was on foot. The rescue services were overwhelmed, resulting in terrible destruction. Five hundred and seventy-eight people were killed and another 1,174 injured. Public buildings, schools, hospitals and churches were all hit. The German civilian population was paying a high price for Nazi aggression.34
Churchill’s War Cabinet were quick to use the success of the Dams raid in the propaganda war against the enemy, and some of 617’s aircrews were sent on publicity tours that spanned the globe, spreading the message about how good the RAF’s pre
mier squadron was through the world’s press, radio stations and cinema newsreels. The main attraction was of course the leader of the raid, Guy Gibson, who was taken off ops, stood down as commander of the squadron, and sent on a near-permanent flag-waving tour, though before he left he managed to fit in a last trip to see ‘one of the local women, a nurse, with whom he had been involved while his wife was in London’.35 Gibson also ‘wrote’ (it is possible that Roald Dahl, working as an air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, was the actual author) a series of articles, and a draft script for a movie of the Dams raid that director Howard Hawks was contemplating, then settled down to write his account of the Dams raid and his RAF career: Enemy Coast Ahead.
Mick Martin was by now widely recognised as the finest pilot on the squadron and had a wealth of operational experience behind him, but either his relatively lowly rank of Flight Lieutenant, requiring a double promotion to get him to the rank of Wing Commander – ‘it was considered not the done thing for him to jump two ranks’36 – or a belief among his superiors that he was a lax disciplinarian had counted against him – or perhaps the RAF ‘brass’ just didn’t want an Australian as CO. In any case, after just six weeks, he was replaced by Squadron Leader George Holden, who had taken over Guy Gibson’s crew following his departure. If Holden shared something of Gibson’s arrogance and his coolness towards NCOs, he lacked the former commander’s charisma and leadership ability, and was not generally popular with his men.
His reign as commander of 617 was not to prove a long one, and in the perhaps biased opinion of Mick Martin’s rear gunner, ‘somebody made a bad mistake’ in appointing Holden at all, since his knowledge of low flying was ‘practically nil’.37 Martin, by contrast, was ‘superb, a complete master of the low-flying technique’, and so dedicated that he continued to practise his skills every day. One new recruit to the squadron was given Martin’s formula for success at low level: ‘Don’t, if you can help it, fly over trees or haystacks, fly alongside them!’38 His bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, was also the Squadron Bombing Leader, charged with ensuring his peers achieved the highest possible degree of accuracy.