Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next

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.

CHAPTER 2 (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22)

What Next? (#uad06135c-c554-5c44-9e3c-dbe88be51d22)

While some crewmen on 617 Squadron were chafing at their inactivity, Johnny 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.’

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.

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.’

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’.

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 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.

Six Mosquito fighter-bombers were to escort the squadron’s Lancasters, operating as ‘can-openers’ by dealing with any flak hot-spots on the route. The Lancasters were to approach the target at extreme low level – 30 feet over Holland and Germany – before climbing to 150 feet to bomb. Although they had been practising for several weeks, flying low level along English canals, first by day and later by night, not everyone was happy with the idea of another low level attack on a heavily defended target. ‘Our losses at the dams had been around fifty per cent,’ Fred Sutherland says. ‘And certainly I had doubts about this next op. My main concern was flying around at night, at very low level, with all those power cables criss-crossing everywhere.’

Born in 1923, Sutherland was Canadian, a full Cree Native American, who had volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force the minute he turned eighteen. ‘I couldn’t wait to get in the war in any way possible,’ he says. ‘Everybody wanted to get in. We were still suffering from the Depression, unemployment was high and it was a means to escape all that. All the talk was about the war and I wanted to be involved. I didn’t really understand what it would be like though, I had no idea what was to come, what I’d go through, so I suppose I was naive.’ After completing an air gunner’s course, he crewed up with Les Knight, a ‘short but very muscular’ Australian pilot, ‘strong in the shoulders and arms. He was a wonderful pilot,’ Sutherland says, ‘very quiet, but if you were out of line, he quietly told you that you’d better not do that again.’

David Maltby’s crew

One of the two four-ships – formations of four aircraft – making the raid was to be led by Squadron Leader David Maltby, a very skilful pilot who had completed thirty ops over Germany and been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross even before joining 617. Still only twenty-three, having struck the fatal blow against the Möhne dam, he was now one of the most highly decorated officers in the RAF and, like his comrades on the Dams raid, a national celebrity. A fun-loving, gentle giant over six feet tall, he was the life and soul of every party and always up for a prank; while training for the Dams raid, he had often ‘buzzed’ his wife Nina’s family farm. His first child, a son, had been born soon afterwards; the shock of Maltby’s aerobatics overhead may or may not have hastened the birth.

Maltby’s personal good luck token was a filthy, oil-stained forage cap. He had worn it on the night of the Dams raid, never flew without it, and even wore it on parade. He donned it once more as he prepared to lead Operation Garlic – the raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal. It would be his crew’s first operation since the dams, and they would be flying at low level, straight into anti-aircraft gunfire, just as they had at the dams. The op was scheduled as a night-time raid on 14 September 1943, and eight Lancasters took off around midnight, but were recalled within forty minutes because of cloud obscuring the target. However, that ‘boomerang’ order resulted in tragedy. After acknowledging the order to return to base, Maltby’s Lancaster crashed into the North Sea 8 miles off Cromer on the Norfolk coast, killing everyone on board. Famed as the man who breached the Möhne dam, Maltby had now joined the mounting tally of the squadron’s dead.

Although the official accident report mentioned ‘some obscure explosion and a fire’ before the aircraft’s fatal crash, it was believed for many years that Maltby had simply misjudged his height and dipped a wing into the sea, with fatal consequences. However, a rival theory has recently been advanced, claiming that he collided with a Mosquito from 139 Squadron that was returning from a separate raid on similar routing, and was also lost without trace that night.

Dave Shannon circled over the crash site for over two hours until an air-sea rescue craft arrived, but Maltby’s body was the only one ever to be recovered; his fellow crew members were lost in the depths of the North Sea, and are listed simply as having ‘no known grave’. Their average age was just twenty. David Maltby is buried in a quiet corner of St Andrew’s churchyard at Wickhambreaux near Canterbury, the church in which he had married Nina just sixteen months earlier. His son, just ten weeks old at the time of Maltby’s death, would now never know his father.

The following night, the surviving members of the squadron returned to the Dortmund–Ems Canal, with Mick Martin’s crew replacing Maltby’s. ‘Crews as a whole accepted the loss of a friend as a downside of the war in the air they were engaged in,’ Les Munro says, a view echoed by Larry Curtis. ‘One accepted the fact that you weren’t coming back from this war. I did and most people did and it helped a lot. You were frightened but you knew it had to be done, so you did it.’

However, Maltby’s death had given some of the aircrews pause for thought, and there was considerable trepidation about the op. ‘I knew Dave Maltby,’ Johnny Johnson recalls. ‘He and Les Munro were on 97 Squadron with us, so when he’d been lost the night before, there was already a sense of it being a dodgy op.’

The nervousness about the op only served to strengthen the importance of the pre-flight rituals or superstitions that almost all the crews followed. Every aircraft was carrying eight men rather than the usual seven, with an extra gunner aboard to ensure that all the gun turrets would be manned at all times throughout the flight. Unlike most of the other crews, one of Les Knight’s crew’s rituals was not peeing on the rear wheel before boarding their aircraft, and when Les Woollard, the extra gunner they were carrying, began to do so they all rushed over and pulled him away. ‘We were not really bothered though,’ Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland says, ‘we were just fooling with him.’ Sutherland thinks his crew was not superstitious, but then adds, ‘but we always did the same routine. I always ate my chocolate bar when we were charging down the runway, and I always wore the same socks that my girlfriend, now my wife, had knitted for me.’

Eight Lancasters, all carrying 12,000-pound delayed-action bombs, and flying in two four-ships, took off at midnight on a beautiful, clear moonlit night. As they crossed the North Sea, the lessons learned on the Dams raid led them to adopt a new method of crossing the hostile coastline. Instead of flying a constant low level approach, they climbed before reaching the coast, but then went into a shallow dive back to low level, building up speed before flashing over the coastal flak batteries. ‘And it really was low level,’ wireless operator Larry Curtis recalls. ‘I can remember the pilot pulling up to go over the high-tension cables.’

‘What was really scary for me were the power wires,’ adds Fred Sutherland, who had the closest view of them from his gun turret under his aircraft’s nose. ‘Even if there was moonlight, you couldn’t see the wires until you were practically on them, and once you hit them, that was it, you were done for.’

George Holden led the formation, with Mick Martin on his starboard flank and Les Knight to port. Rear gunner Tom Simpson heard Martin and his bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, complaining that Holden was flying too high, allowing the searchlights to pick them up. ‘We seemed to be getting into a lot of trouble and I had never experienced such intense ground fire.’ Just before reaching the small German town of Nordhorn, Martin was, as usual, flying ‘lower than low’, squeezing between some factory chimney stacks, ‘the top of the stacks being higher than we were’, but Holden, still much higher, was drawing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Fred Sutherland, front gunner in Les Knight’s crew, whose job was to attack ‘any ground flak units that started firing at us, tried to return fire but couldn’t depress my gun enough because we were right on top of it’.

Rather than skirting a white-painted church with a high steeple near the town centre at low level, Holden opted to fly over it. Moments later, his aircraft was hit by lines of red and green tracer that flashed upwards, biting into his starboard wing. Almost immediately the aircraft was engulfed in flames. ‘There was poor old Holden up about four hundred feet or more, being shot to blazes and on fire.’

Holden’s aircraft went out of control, diving and veering sharply to port. Les Knight had to haul on the controls to avoid a collision with his leader’s aircraft and within seconds Holden’s Lancaster had crashed and exploded with the loss of everyone – Guy Gibson’s Dambusters crew – on board. It was Holden’s thirtieth birthday. ‘They just dived down, nearly hitting us on the way,’ Fred Sutherland recalls, ‘straight into the ground with a huge explosion. It was some sight – eight guys just dying in front of my eyes. They didn’t have a hope. It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it. Your friends are getting killed and you are scared as hell but you can’t let it bother you; if you did, you could never do your job. You just think, “Thank God it wasn’t us.”’

The blast from the crash almost brought down the two Lancasters flying close behind him, but, fortunately, his delay-fused 12,000-pounder didn’t explode. Had it detonated on impact, all the other aircraft in his formation, flying as low as 30 feet above the ground, would almost certainly have been destroyed as well. Instead an unfortunate German family whose farm was the site of Holden’s fatal crash suffered a tragic blow when the bomb detonated fifteen minutes later. Alerted by the anti-aircraft fire and the thunder of the approaching bombers, the farmer, his wife and their six children had been sheltering in a cellar beneath their farmhouse when the crash occurred. However, a few minutes later, the parents decided to go back upstairs to fetch some warm clothing for their shivering children. They were still above ground when the bomb exploded. The farmer survived, sheltered by one of the few pieces of wall to survive a blast that demolished every farm building and set fire to an avenue of oak trees, but his wife was killed instantly. She was the only German fatality from the raid.

The remaining aircraft re-formed, with Mick Martin taking over as leader, but ran into low-lying mist and fog over the Dortmund area, at times reducing visibility to as little as 500 yards. The haze was reflecting the moonlight and ‘making the whole scene appear like a silver veil. We could see practically no ground detail when flying into-moon.’

They were supposed to bomb from 150 feet at two-minute intervals, but the fog and haze meant that the only time they could actually spot the canal was when they were already directly overhead and too late to drop their bombs on it. They kept circling, hoping for a break or eddy in the fog that would give them a sight of the target, but with no sign of the Mosquitos that were supposed to act as ‘can-openers’, suppressing the air defences, the Lancasters were making themselves ‘sitting ducks for the air defences putting up a wall of flak’, and the prowling night-fighters. They soon lost another aircraft, when Mick Martin’s rear gunner suddenly called out, ‘There goes Jerry Wilson.’ Flight Lieutenant Harold ‘Jerry’ Wilson’s Lancaster had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and he crashed into the canal bank, killing himself and all his crew.

‘There was only us and Micky Martin left by then from our formation,’ Les Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland, says. ‘It was a desperate scene unfolding around us; it was pretty scary.’ Soon afterwards, squinting into the fog, Sutherland froze as ‘trees atop a ridge just appeared in front of me, rushing towards me. Someone else screamed for Les to climb but it was too late.’ Sydney Hobday, the crew’s navigator, remembered the moment all too clearly, ‘To my horror,’ he says, ‘I saw the treetops straight ahead and thought we had at last “bought it” – after quite a good run for our money I admit!’

The trees hit them on the port side, puncturing the radiators of both port engines and damaging the tail. Both port engines overheated and had to be shut down, and the starboard inner engine then began to fail as well.

Knight fought to control his badly damaged aircraft as Edward ‘Johnny’ Johnson – not the member of Joe McCarthy’s crew married to Gwyn, but another bomb-aimer with a similar name – jettisoned the 12,000-pound bomb, praying that the delayed-action fuse would work, because, if not, they’d be blown to pieces as it detonated. It fell away silently and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The crew also threw out their guns and ammunition to lose weight as Knight tried to nurse his battered aircraft back to England, alternately feathering the port engines to cool them and then briefly restarting them as the aircraft dropped towards stalling speed.