Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next

‘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.’

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’.

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.’

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’

– 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’.

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’.

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’

– 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.

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 premier 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’.

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’

– 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’.

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!’

His bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, was also the Squadron Bombing Leader, charged with ensuring his peers achieved the highest possible degree of accuracy.

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!’

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.

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!’

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.

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.

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.

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’,

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.