Dan Snow's History Hit - The Last Dambuster: Johnny Johnson

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Of all the air raids carried out during World War Two, none are as enduringly famous as the attack by Lancaster Bombers against the dams of Germany’s industrial heartland. Commemorated in literature and film throughout the decades, the mission – which was codenamed Operation ‘Chastise’ – has come to epitomise British ingenuity and courage throughout the war. On the night of 16-17 May 1943, an audacious raid using purpose-built “bouncing bombs” destroyed the Möhne and Edersee Dams. Successful detonation required great technical skill from the pilots: they needed to be dropped from a height of 60 feet, at a ground speed of 232mph, in challenging conditions. Once the dams were breached, there was catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley and of villages in the Eder valley. Despite the fact that the impact on industrial production was limited, the raid gave a significant morale boost to the people of Britain and became enshrined in popular consciousness. In late March 1943, the RAF 617 Squadron was formed under great secrecy at RAF Scampton, for the specific purpose of attacking the dams. Led by 24-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the squadron was made up of aircrew from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Over 100 aircrew, aboard 19 Lancaster bombers, would eventually carry out the famous raids. One of the young men selected to take part in the crew was 21-year-old George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, who had been trained as a specialist bomb aimer. He was the last surviving Dambuster until his death, aged 101, on 7 December 2022. In this fascinating interview, Dan meets with Johnny Johnson to hear about the extraordinary events in the lead-up to the raid, and about how his life was altered by the events of those fateful nights in May 1943.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's a sad episode today. The family of squadron leader George Leonard Johnson, Johnny Johnson, have announced that Johnny died at the age of 101 on December the 7th, 2022. Johnny Johnson was the last surviving member of the original 617 squadron who took part in Operation Chastise, the Dam Busters raid in May 1943. He was the last Dam Buster. I was lucky enough to meet Johnny several times in my career. I remember going way back into the early noughties. He came as a hardy, healthy man in his eighties, drove himself up to Derbyshire where we walked the Derbyshire dams on which the Dam Busters trained. Little did I think then as we went to the pub afterwards and had a few beers and dinner how

rare and extraordinary this opportunity was. As the years went by and the group of veterans from that conflict dwindled it started to feel more and more special every time I met him. I saw him in Lincoln and I used to go and visit him in his care home where he sat down very kindly and gave me an interview for the History Hit podcast just as I was starting out. That is the episode that we're repeating today on the podcast so we can celebrate the passing of a national treasure. Thank you, Johnny, for a lifetime of service and thank you personally for being so nice to me and allowing me to bother you and record your words for posterity. Here he is. R.I.P. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Can I ask first about your upbringing? Because it was quite a tough childhood you had. My mother died the fortnight before my third birthday. So I never knew a mother's love.

And I had a father. Whether he blamed me for my mother's death, I don't know. But the first thing I remember about him was we were at the hospital waiting to go up and see my mother. And he was talking to somebody else. I went to join them. And he explained to this character who I was.

I was the sixth of the family, the youngest of six. And this character said, what, another one? My father said, yes, it's a mistake. I thought, thank you very much. I remembered that from that age. And from then on, as far as I was concerned, he was concerned I was a mistake. And as with most men, he used a cut cut throat razor for shaving

and the strop was hung on the back of the kitchen door. And if that shop came down and he wasn't shaving, I knew where it was headed, right across my back, and that was it. And that was the sort of upbringing that I started with. And my sister almost became my surrogate mother. She was seven years older than me. My father treated her much the same he treated me, not hitting her, but he argued.

Her daughter was there to look after her father in the way he wanted it done at the time he wanted it done. And that was it. And what is now Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire was Lord Wandsworth Agricultural College in my day. And it was bequeathed by Lord Wandsworth for the children of agricultural families that lost one or both parents and everything was free. Well, the head teacher of our elementary school

heard about this. She applied on my behalf and I was interviewed. I was offered a place. My father said no. At 14 he leaves school. He goes out and gets a job and brings some money into the house.

The teacher was so furious about this. We had a squire, still got a squire in the small village. She went to see the squire's wife and told her the story. And the squire's wife went to see my father and told him his fortune in no uncertain terms, how he was ruining my chances of a better education and a much better future life. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

I suppose I'd let him go then, and that was it. Do you remember being happy as a child, or was it just hard? It was hard at that stage. And at 11, I went over to Lord Wandsworth, and that's when life really started. And it was so different, and so much different from what I'd been used to. One interesting thing, there was a junior school there of course I joined in I had a a fairly rough skin

on my face and the matron treated it with lard I was known as lardy face and about almost four years ago now I had a telephone call.

And the caller said, is that Lardy? I said, my God, that must be from Lord Monmouth. He's one of the other old boys as well. Growing up, as an agricultural labouring family, did you ever dream that one day you might join the RAF, this glamorous aviation service? No dream about that sort of thing. ever dream that one day you might join the RAF, this glamorous aviation service? No. No dream about that sort of thing.

I sat and asked Lord Wanderlust. My original ambition was to be a vet. But my school certificate results weren't quite as good as they might have been. I passed, yes. I left school. I thought, yes. When I left school,

I thought, it's time I got into this war. Having seen the films of the First World War with the trench fire fighting, the army was out as far as I was concerned. I didn't like water anyway, so the Navy was out. Just left me the Air Force. But I didn't want water anyway, so the Navy was out, just left me the Air Force.

But I didn't want to be a pilot. I didn't feel I had the coordination or the aptitude. And at that age, I wanted to go bomber rather than fighter. I knew that bomber pilots were responsible for the safety of the crew as a whole. And I didn't think I had the responsibility for that either. However, when it came to the selection committee, they made me change my mind and selected me for pilot training. And that was a standby for almost a year before we started the training.

Why did you join the RAF, though, when war broke out? Basically, because I think I'd felt so much anti against Hitler. So even in the 1930s, you knew Hitler was an evil force in the world? That's right, yes, yes. Well, only because, basically, of the reaction, what he was doing to this country, the bombing and so on, and that was the basic reason behind it. And I felt I wanted to get back to him as much as I could.

And the only way to do that was joining one of the services. Tell me how you came to be on 617 Squadron. Well, with the pilot training, I eventually ended up in America. And we had two training schemes out there, the British Flying Training School and the rest with the American Army Air Corps. I got one of the Army Air Corps stations. Nice posting, Florida, Arcadia in Florida.

But I could not stand the Army Air Corps. Their petty discipline and their sloppy marching really got up my nose. Fortunately, the instructors were civilians and decent people. But I managed to solo, but my landings weren't quite what they ought to have been. And he said to me one day, I'm sorry, old son, I don't think you're gonna make it. I said, don't be sorry, neither do I.

And I joined a group, there were about 10 of us, washed out pilots. And we were sent back to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, still with the Army Air Corps. We weren't supposed to talk going into breakfast, so we sang Colonel Bogey just for the hell of it. And our senior member was a flight sergeant gunner who'd been hoping to reach out as a pilot.

And on the last morning, he said, let's show these so-and-sos how to march. So we fell in RAF style outside the dining room, then marched back to the billet, 160 paces to the minute, arms swinging waist-high forwards and backwards, just as it had been at ITW. And the looks we got from these people as we went by, at least we felt we'd left our mark on Maxwell Field. But then it was back to

kind of let's wait for a ship to bring us home. And it was January of 1942 by the time I got back into this country. No nearer to fighting that war than I had been when I joined. What was the shortest course? And it was gunnery. So I took the gunnery course. And again, going through the acceptance process, the president said, I think you'd be afraid to be a Gunner Johnson. I said, I don't think so, sir. If I were, I wouldn't have volunteered anyway. I said, I don't think so, sir. If I were, I wouldn't have volunteered anyway. End of the text, that conversation.

But I trained, I got past the gun exam. And instead of being posted to an OTU, which is the usual thing, you're posted to an OTU when you finish your aircrew training and you met the rest of the crew members, joined up a crew and then moved out for further training. But not me. I was posted direct to 97 Squadron at Woodhall as a spare gunner, which meant I had to fly with anybody who hadn't got a mid-upper or a rear gunner for that night's operations for various reasons.

Quite an inauguration into operational flying. But we managed to get through. What was your first operational sortie? A failure. The first one, I was flying with one of the squadron flight commanders. And we were carrying the 8,000 pound bomb. And nobody had been successfully dropped one of these up to that stage. And we were going to do it. So we took off with it on board. Flying across the North Sea,

I was in the middle of a passage. Swung around. I see petrol streaming out of one of the engines. I called up the captain. He said, oh dear. He said, I'm sorry, chaps. We'll have to go back. So we didn't drop the 8,000 pounder either.

We just landed with it still on. However, by that time, 97 had been re-equipped with Lancasters and they were looking for the seventh member of crew, the bomb-aiming man. And they were training him locally. And since it made a difference between seven and six and 12 and six a day i thought i'd have a go at that so i retrained as a bomber and came back to 97 as a spare bomber when did

you first fire your your weapon as a mid upper gunner though before you retrained i only fired and practiced that sort of thing just to test the guns. And that was the same as a bomb-owner. I had to fly in the front turret on the way out, down to drop the bombs at the target, back into the front turret on the way back as part of the steel part of the eyes of the rest of the crew. And that was one of the things about the crews generally. I think the majority I'm sure the majority of the bomber command air crew were there to do the job that they'd been briefed for

to the best of their ability and that meant not only the job their individual job but their responsibility to the rest of the crew for the safety where they might be

responsible for the safety of the rest of the crew and that was common throughout the whole thing. When I asked about my 10th trip on this spared body, I was told I was joining this crew with an American pilot. And my immediate reaction was, oh my God, bloody Americans again. And then I met Joe McCarthy, six foot three,

under breath to go with the height. Big in size, big in personality, but from our point of view, big in palatability, which was tremendous confidence, certainly with me. I never once thought of Joe not bringing me back. And he didn't, of course. What's your first memory of being above occupied Europe, dropping bombs on targets below? Well, the first memory is that at that time, we were flying out of moon supposedly for defensive reasons so it's pretty dark all the way out i find 10 12 maybe 15 000 feet you didn't see anything until

you got to the target area then you saw all the guns that you've got to go through before you went home. People say to me, were you frightened? I said, well, I think anyone who saw that for the first time, if they weren't a bit apprehensive, were either devoid of emotion or strangers to the truth. What's it like looking up? You can see flares at the pathfinders have dropped, have you? And you can see anti-aircraft fire just swirling up all around you. Yeah. I found my concentration was purely on the bomb site and the target.

I'm concentrating, directing the pilot to get my bombs as close as I could to that particular target. Whatever was going on round about me, I just didn't see it, it didn't concern me. I was doing my job, so I thought, to the best of my ability. And that was all I considered I was there for. And so, strange as it may seem, I didn't notice the flak that was coming around. I didn't notice the other aircraft in the area until I dropped my bombs. And we then had to fly straight and low for the camera to operate.

And so when we got back, the intelligence could see where we dropped our bombs in spite of what we said. And so that was that. And did you... Would you see other Lancasters being hit and crews bailing out and falling out of the sky? I didn't ever see any of that. Although I understand it happened.

I know it happened. I've certainly aircraft shot down over the target area. And either by anti-aircraft guns or there were times when they brought the fighters into the target area as well. And it was a pretty rough old journey, basically, but you didn't have time to worry about it, at least I didn't. At least I didn't. And the only time I think I was a bit apprehensive, more than a bit apprehensive,

was before I joined Joe's crew. I was flying with an old NCO crew. And they were coming close to their last trip in the first tour. And we'd been up to Wiesmar in the north of Germany and as usual the weather was dead lost when we got there. So it was aerial marking and you had no idea where your bombs went. You just bombed the target, a marker, and that was it.

Coming back, as soon as you drop below 10,000 feet, oxygen off, and usually cigarettes on as well. But on this occasion, we just dropped our masks off, and there was a God Almighty flash, and there was a God Almighty flash, absolutely blind all round, couldn't see a thing. And I was in the front turret by that time and as an eyesight came back it looked almost as though the perspex had been burnt out, it was just the metal strips there. But as the eyesight came back he came the turret was completely intact and the mid-over gunner was calling I all right Colin Colin was the pilot obviously fighting like mad with the aircraft that was going down and I don't know in certain terms and he kept on with this and in the end he said, my god they've all gone, I'm going to

get out. The worst operator went back to him and told him to stop being such a bloody idiot and not quite so polite as that. How could Colin possibly answer? Without his oxygen mask on, his microphone was away from his mouth, and he was fighting like mad to save the aircraft and us and you, you stupid so-and-so. When we got back, and he was in a rather pleasant mood, he saw the St. Elmo's fire creeping up the aerial towards his turret, and then woof, it was a lightning flash.

And it really was a heller. We dropped from 10 or just below 10 to 2,000 feet, just like that. But Colin got it controlled at 2,000 feet. I didn't bother to find out what had happened to the aircraft when we got back. I just got out of it and that was it. Did the experience of flying like that bring you very close? Did you make great mates in those conditions? Yes.

Apart from the fact I was the only one out. I didn't drink, believe it or not. I managed to change that habit, but still. The reason, again, goes back to childhood, where our father being a farm foreman, during the lambing season, he stayed up most of the night nipping out to see that the lambs and the ewes were all right,

would sleep in his chair in between. And he'd had his beer, and even in those days, at that level of personality, we drank the beer out of the glass, not out of the bottle. And so the bottle and the glass, both empty or thereabouts, on the table the night passed. I thought, oh, I'll try that. And I took the dregs of wine into the glass. And, oh, God, flat as hell, tasted horrible.

But the smell, that's what really got me. It made me, literally made me sick. And that smell stayed with me. I couldn't stand the smell of beer from then onwards. So I didn't get into the bar, the pubs, or even into the mess bar, except for a quick trip at lunchtime to get me cigarettes and that was it. I enjoyed my war. I think I felt I was doing what I joined for and I was doing it to the best of my ability and that was what I was there for, what I enjoyed doing it and so much so

with the confidence in my pilot and the rest of the crew that I flew with. We had a crew comedian. That was Dave Roger in the rear turret. He could always make some craptic comment when situations were a bit grim. Like, as we were coming back from the dams raid, it must have been partially my fault we obviously got off track and we ended up on a railway

not only a railway but a railway yard but of course it wasn't a normal railway yard it was a ham marshalling yard where all the munitions that were made in the rear were distributed to various areas for the war. Obviously not the healthiest places to be at the end of May in 1943. There again down goes Joe. And from the rear turret

who needs guns? At this height all they need to do is change the points. And that was the sort of thing that Dave could come up with. Did you ever think about what was going on on the ground? You were dropping these bombs, smashing buildings, killing people. Did you think about that? No. No. I think the only respect with which I thought about it was it was basically retaliation for what Hitler was doing and had done to us. I think that was all it was. I think maybe from that childhood upbringing emotion was basically knocked out of me.

I don't think I had any particular strong emotion at all. And that's why I didn't feel, I put that on partially, I didn't feel frightened about the flying or the actual bombing. And I didn't really appreciate what it meant to those at the receiving end. I didn't find that out until after the war, when I went back and talked to some German people. Let's talk about the formation of 617. Was it an elite force

was it exciting to be part of this new organisation? Well the first we heard of it was that Gibson I beg his pardon, Wing Commander Gibson rang Joe and asked

would he join this special squadron he was forming for one special trip. We were just coming towards the end of our first tour then. Joe said, well, I'll have to ask my crew. We did and we agreed to go with him. After a first tour, normal practice was at least a week's leave and then you went on to a first tour, normal practice was at least a week's leave, and then you went on to a ground tour or an operational flying tour, until you were required back on ops.

In the past… I'll try it again. Looking forward to that leave, my fiancée and I had arranged to get married on April 3rd. I said, fine. I wrote to her and said, this is what was happening, but don't worry, it won't make any difference. The letter I got back just said, if you're not there on April 3rd, don't bother.

I thought, aye, aye, the first mandate's been issued. But there we go. Anyway, we left the dad, moved over to Scampton. And the first thing we heard was, no leave. Oh, God, there goes my wedding. However, Joe took us up as a crew to Gibson's office. And he said, we've just finished our first tour.

We're entitled to a week's leave. My boy was supposed to be getting married on April 3rd and he's going to get married on April 3rd. We got our leave and I got my wedding. So that was that. But that again was typical of Joe looking after his crew in there.

Was Guy Gibson a terrifying figure or was he a great leader? No. My reaction has to be retrospective. As we were on the same squad and that was all I could say about it, his basic problem was he was unable to bring himself down to mix and talk with lower ranks. Even junior officers on the duty side, the only time they'd be

certain to was to get a bollocking if they'd done something they shouldn't have done on duty. I gather he was quite a boy in the mess with the games and fun that went on in there. He was bombastic, he was autocratic, a strict disciplinarian which didn't go down very well with the aircrew of course. And on 106 Squadron which he'd commanded before he came over to 617, he was known as the Archbastard. And that summed him up pretty well. Mind you, he had done,

if he wasn't most experienced, he was one of the most experienced bomber pilots in the command. He'd done two tours of bomber operations and one tour of night operations and at this stage he was only 24 years of age, so he had something to be arrogant about. So I think when he came through 617 he realised he got to get more out of that squadron than

out of any of the others. He didn't know at that stage what the target was, apart from the fact he was just a special target. He got everything he could for the squadron. There was an instance where something he wanted, and he rang group. They said, sorry, we can't do that. So he rang command, and they gave him the same answer. He said, right, I'll ring the Air Ministry.

And he did. And the Air Ministry gave him the same answer. So he said, right, I'll sit in my office until you change your mind. And he did, and they did, and he got what he wanted. That was typical of his reaction. And they did, and he got what he wanted. That was typical of his reaction. But he was obviously an action man, and his true indication of his leadership came with the dam's raid itself, where he and his crew made the first attack on the Moen Dam,

which we knew was the only dam that was defended. And apart from dropping his bomb, he wanted to assess those defenses at the same time. And then Asa, as he called each aircraft in, he flew alongside them to attract some of that defense. And that to me says, you're doing this, I'm doing this, we're doing it together. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, don't go anywhere, There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Lancaster's of 617 squadron flew by night to destroy the dams of the Mona Ader and salt the heartbeat of industrial Germany each bomber carried a new type of bomb specially devised for the raid by Barnes Wallace Each bomber carried a new type of bomb specially devised for the raid by Barnes Wallace.

Here, Dr. Wallace greets wartime members of the squadron arriving for a reunion at RAF Scanton. Fittingly, they came in a Lancaster. Trying the feel of a tail gun as turret again is Jerry Withrick, an air gunner on the mission. The flight deck of a lank. Surviving the mission, Squadron Commander Guy Gibson won a VC and his squadron won an immortal title, the Dam Busters. When you were training up in Derbyshire, what do you think was going on with this strange bomb that was being strapped to the Lancaster, the changes that were made? What on earth was happening? I think we were getting more fun out of the actual flying to think about what was happening. We knew it was a special time, we'd been told that. We'd also been told there had to be complete

security about what we were doing, and we told no one about the type of training that we were doing. But the interest in that training, of course, was at low level. The prescribed height was 100 feet. Very few people flew at 100 feet. It tended to be rather lower than that. And there were occasions when the early aircraft came back with a few tree branches stuck in the wings or something like that. But in Lincolnshire, there's a town called Sutton Bridge.

But as you fly up from the south, the electric cables also cross the bridge. This practice wasn't briefed, but everybody did it just for the hell of it. And we flew under the cables and up over the bridge. Great thrill that was, wonderful fun. And I learned subsequently that one of our residents here, she had an aunt living in Sutton Bridge at that time. And she said, all the people in Sutton Bridge

were scared stiff about all these low-flying aircraft. But that's war, dear. There's a terrible war. And did you drop this strange bouncing bomb in training, or was the first time never dropped? No. No, we didn't even spin it, but that comes later. But we started off with our only means of navigation was map reading and bed reading. Navigator and bomber mage had a map with a track marked out and the navigator would indicate what I should be seeing. If I saw it, that was fine.

If I didn't't I picked out something else equally prominent and he could adjust his cautiousness say on that. The bombers had to make their own bomb site and it consisted of a triangle of plywood with a peg in each angle but the distance between the base pins had to be specific, and the distance from the base, the apex, had to be equally specific. And on the bombing range they arranged two poles specific distances apart. And the practice was that And the practice was that the bomber had a single pin to his eye and directed the pilot until the two base pins were in line with the two poles on the top of the bomb.

Practice bombs, I needn't to add. And if you got it right the first time, great. If you didn't, you did again and again and again until you got it right. Until we got to the stage where I think most of us were fairly accurate with our bombing. We were also using some of the dams in this country for bombing practice. Most notably Derwent Water in Derbyshire. And it had towers, so we could use those for sighting. It also had a marker in the reservoir which showed where the bomb should drop.

And you used the same approach as you had on the range. And if your bomb dropped close to that marker, that was fine. Did you have any idea what the target was? What you were practising on these? What did you think it was? We didn't think. Too young to worry about anything. That was another thing.

How old were you at this point? At that stage, I was 21. But at this stage, when we first joined the squadron, one of the things that struck us was the experience of the crews. Most of them had done one tour, some were on their second tour. The next thing was the aircraft, special aircraft. Yes, a Lancaster of a court. No mid-upper turret, and it seems as though the bomb doors were sealed and there are these

two legs standing down one either side of the fuselage and the front just below the nose, just behind the nose. What the hell was that for? And then the bomb arrives. It was just like a glorified big dustbin. But at least it indicated to us what those legs were for. They obviously were going to carry that bomb when it was loaded onto the aircraft. And that was as far as we got with it. We went through training with the cross countries,

bombing practices, and then we went into a twilight situation where the front prospects of the cabin and the nose were covered in blue sheeting. And the pilot and the bomber wore night vision glasses. And that created a twilight situation. What I never understood was how you were supposed to map read over the North Sea. Because one of our turning points was over the North Sea. However, you had to hope like hell. You crossed our point, our coast, and the right place. And you hit the right place as you came back on Dead Reckoning.

And from there on to Bright Moonlight Night flying. It had to be bright moonlight. Until we got to the stage where Gibson thought we were fit to go. We still had no idea what the target was. He had. He'd been told by then. And I think certainly the bombing leader, Bob Hay, had been told. On the Saturday night before the raid, we met as an squadron. The majority of you really met Barnes Wallace for the first time. And he explained, showed his film of his development of the bomb, how it had been developed, how difficult it had been to get it right in the first place. And then he told us something about the bomb itself.

It weighed 9,000 pounds, of which 6,500 was explosive within that bomb, fused with two depth fuses to explode at a depth of 25 feet, but also fused with a self-destruct fuse. And we learned out subjectly why. And then I think it was probably the highest powered briefing I attended throughout my operational career. The AOC was there, station commander, Gibson of course was there doing the briefing, Barnes office, including the briefing team, senior officers of armament and engineering from the station were there, intelligence officer, and the dear old net man was there too. Well, Gibson explained the trip to us.

The first thing we saw of course when we got in the operations room was that the two models were there, one of the Moon and one of the Zopa. What on the Ada hadn't been fitted, hadn't been completed. So models of the Danes. Yes. And that was how we found out what the target was going to be. How wrong can you be?

On the previous evening, after Barnes-Welles' talk, the conjecture was it was going to be German battleships, notably the Tirpitz. Because when you dropped that bomb, it was being rotated at 500 revs a minute backwards. Yes. And it had to be dropped from exactly 60 feet at a ground speed of 200 knots.

And so it became a sort of four men flying of the aircraft. Navigator watching the lights and when they can up or down until they were coincident, that was the exact height. Flight engineer watching the speed and indicating whether it was up or down, and the bomber directing the pilot to the target. It meant the pilots were being told by three other members of the crew how to fly the aircraft, but they didn't seem to complain too much about it. And that was the

way it was going to be. And Gibson in the briefing explained that he would take off with two others and they'd head for the moan and they would attack the moan when they got there.

Six others in two threes would follow him and they too would head for the Moan. And if the Moan hadn't been briefed by the time they got there, they would attack that under Gibson's direction. And then that was briefed, they would move over to the Ada. That was nine of the crews briefed. Five of which we were one were briefed for the Zorpa. And of course, the Zorpa had to be different from the other two.

It had no towers, so there was nothing to sight on. And it was so placed in the hills that a head-on attack was virtually impossible, certainly extremely difficult. And so we were briefed. We had to fly down one side of the hills with the port outer engine over the dam itself and fly along the dam and estimate to drop the bomb as near as possible to the centre of the dam.

With the port engine over the dam, the bomb obviously was on the water side. We were a big disappointment because we weren't going to use any bombing practices we'd been doing for the last six weeks. But that was what we had to do, so that was the job. Went back then to the messes for the usual operational bacon and eggs meal before you went. That was a time when in the Santa's mess some wit would say to Captain LinkedIn, if you don't come back can I have your sausage? But that sort of thing was taken in good form.

But you saw it. I was then out the aircraft and then came our big shock. Because Q Queen, I know it's Quebec now, but it was Q Queen in those days, decided he didn't want to go that night. And he developed a hydraulic leak on run-up, which couldn't be fixed in time for take-off. So there was only one reserve aircraft, and that had come in at three o'clock that afternoon. It had been bombed up, fueled up and it had done a compass swing with the bomb on board to offset the metal of that bomb against the aircraft compasses. As soon as we knew we weren't going to be able to take Queen

Joe said for Christ's sake get that reserved before someone gets there and we don't get to go so you guys wanted to go yeah oh yes you were excited so that was the way it went in his hurry to get there

he pulled his parachute so it was blooming behind him as he went over to the aircraft. Did it feel different to other raids you'd been on? Oh, yes, very much so. We knew how special it was. And it was explained by the internment officer why the raid was so important, because of the damage it would do to the German armament industry.

That was the basic point behind it. When we got to Speer Aircraft, the compass card for that last compass swing wasn't in the aircraft. Joe, I don't think he used the same, had a tremendous vocabulary. I don't think he used the same word twice. He was so furious. He got into the truck and down to the flights. Fortunately, the squadron adjutant was there all humph.

And he said, for Christ's sake, Joe, calm down. If you don't, you'll make a complete pig's ear of the whole thing. And that calmed him down a bit. However, we had a very good flight sergeant who said, Chiefie Powell. And he went over to the flights to collect the compass card. But he'd heard Joe say he wasn't going to bother with the parachute. So he detoured to the parachute't going to bother with the parachute. So he detoured to the parachute section and he picked up another parachute.

Went back to the truck, gave Joe the compass card in the front, put the parachute in the back and said, your parachute, sir. Flights onto a flight attendant didn't make much difference in those days. But there we are. Joe had got a parachute and that was it. And so eventually we got back to the aircraft and we were about half an hour late taking off. When we got flying some distance south of Ham, there was a goods train travelling up at right angles to our track. And because we had no mid-upper turret,

the mid-upper gunner was flying in the front turret. Fortunately, they'd fit in stirrups so he wasn't kicking me up the backside all the time. But then, when we saw this train, he said, Can I have a go, Joe? I think somewhat reluctantly, Joe said, well, yes, all right then. And Ron opened up with these little 303s.

That's all we had in the front, all right. What we didn't know, of course, it wasn't just a good strain. It was an armoured good strain. And it replied with rather more than 303s. We knew we'd been hit, we heard it and we felt it, but it didn't seem to impede the aircraft at all, so we carried on. And we eventually found the Zorpa. The first thing we noticed, which we should have probably, if it was on the model, we should have seen, was a church steeple on the

side of the hill down which it was supposed to go. Joe used that as a marker, tried to align the aircraft as best he could at that position and then went down. Because we weren't spinning the bomb, it was an inert drop, the actual position, the conditions for dropping it didn't apply. So it didn't matter about the height or the speed at which he dropped it. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. We hadn't practiced that type of attack at all. And it wasn't easy. If I wasn't satisfied, I called dummy run. If Joe wasn't satisfied, he just pulled away and left me to call dummy run. This is where Dave Roger in the rear turret came up. Not in a humorous vein. I had a voice from the rear turret out of about the sixth or seventh of these dummy runs.

Won't somebody get that bum out of here? And I had to realise how to become the most unpopular member of crew in double quick time. But that was my job. And that was what I was there for. So how many times did you go over the dam to try and get it right? Yeah. Then we had to go up again. And in retrospect, I can understand to some degree Dave's anxiety,

because his job basically was the safety of the aircraft from enemy fighters. And each time he went up, came back over the village, there's nothing to stop somebody down there ringing up the authorities and saying, they're bombing our dam at that moment. And of course that would have brought the fighters in, bye-bye McCarthy's crew, just like that. And that would have been part of his apprehension, I think. But then on the tenth run, neither Joe nor I had said anything to each other about height. But I'm sure we both realized that the lower we got, the less forward travel that bomb would have before it hit the water.

And secondly, the lower he got, the easier it would be to estimate the dropping point. On that tenth run, we were down to 30 feet. And when I said, bomb gone, thank Christ came from the rear turret, just like that. And of course, it was so low, he was nose up straight away, so I didn't see the explosion. But Dave did in the rear turret. And he estimated that the tower of water being detonated at a depth of 25 feet, it's going to move a hell of a lot of water in all directions, upwards as well as outwards. And that was what he saw.

He said, not only that, but in the downflow, some of it came into the turret. So I thought I was going to be drowned as well as knocked around by you buggers up there. But that was just, again, typical of Dave. We circled and we found that we'd crumbled the top of the dam. That was all. Barnes Wallace had told us at briefing that he estimated that because of the structure of the Zorpa, it was like a concrete centre with a sort of pyramid building of broken rock, its earth packed in tight

and then concrete again on either side. He said it would need at least six bombs to crack it. And if you can crack it, the water pressure will do the rest. And judging from the amount of water in that dam, I'm sure he was right. However, it would seem, and this is what surprised us, although we were half an hour late, or thereabouts, when we got there, it didn't seem that any of the other five had been. Nor did they arrive whilst we were there. And we didn't find out about that until we got back. So eventually we just soldiered off and the route home took us over what had been the Moan. And for me, that was probably the greatest satisfaction of the raid.

In that we were able to see the destructive result of at least one of those attacks. And we knew that the Ada had been breached as well by radio broadcast. What did the Mona Dam had been breached by your other crews? What did the area look like? The area was just like an inland sea. There was water everywhere and it was still coming out of that dam about 20 minutes, maybe half an hour since it had been breezed. It had been difficult to breech it, but they'd made it. And the Aida was even more difficult, but the last one to attack it, there's Knights, an Australian. His bomber was also a Johnson, Ted Johnson, but he was a flight lieutenant. And they managed to breach

it on their run. That was the last aircraft there. If they hadn't made it, that one would have stayed stick to. But it didn't. It breached. And that was not so much important as far as the I mean it's an industry to turn but the canals round about and the agricultural land and the the waterways

the access on the waterways into the the Harmond area Were you cheering and whooping in your plane when you saw that? into the Harmond area. Were you cheering and whooping in your plane when you saw that? No. Cheering quietly, yes. At least we'd seen the success of part of the raid,

even though ours hadn't been quite so successful. There were, in fact, six reserve aircraft that had taken off somewhat later than we did, and three of those were breached for the Zorpa. They were breached once they were airborne. And the first one was shot down almost as soon as he crossed the coast. Ken Brown, a Canadian NCO, made a similar attack to us and had the same sort of result. Sergeant Stanley was in the third. The mist was developing

and they couldn't find the Zorpa. And since he was getting near to daylight, he thought they'd better go home. So they came home and landed with the bomb on, which we had been briefed we weren't supposed to do because I think, and the only reason I think, is that the authorities weren't sure exactly what would happen with an aircraft landing with a bomb on board, particularly on Scamton, which was still grass. The idea was if you didn't use it on the dams, you'd drop the bomb over Germany somewhere and it would explode with a self-detonating.

The Germans wouldn't get a copy. Les Monroe had been shot up going across the coast and apart from other damage to the aircraft, his communication system, internal and external, was destroyed. And so since it was a communications operation, there was no point in him going on. And he came back, and he couldn't discharge his bomb because his release system had been damaged as well. So he had to land with the bomb on board, and they made a dash out as soon as they landed, to make sure that if he didn't go off, they were going to get out of the way first. When Anderson

came back he also landed with the bomb on board but he got away with it. The next morning Gibson sent Anderson back to the squadron he came from for failing to carry out an operation that he'd been ordered to take. Sounds hard. When one considers the cost, training, aircraft, aircrews, the losses, I think it was a justified decision. We did hear subsequently, unfortunately, very shortly afterwards, the crew were shot down on another raid. When we got back, we landed at Scanton, I say, to the grass-fire field, and landings

tended to be a bit more lumpy than they were on the runway. But in our case, they were a bit lumpy, and we just started doing low. And the engineer looking out of the perspective said, we've got a burst tire skipper. So we taxi back carefully to dispersal, and the chief engineer took the aircraft off for inspection. When he came back, he gave us a severe telling off, only he put it rather more strongly than that, for getting his aircraft shot up so much. But he could tell us the shot that we'd heard and felt had passed through the starboard

under the carriage nacelle, had burst the tyre en route, had then passed through the wing and had landed in the roof just above the navigator's head. How lucky can you get? But we'd got away with it. How lucky can you get? But we got away with it. Of course, at debriefing, we learned the end of the story. I don't look forward to war, certainly. But at that time and at that age, I felt I had to do something. I had to join and try to do something about it.

And I think that's what makes my life so different from what it had been. At Lord's Wonders, the school motto was in Latin. In translation, it means perseverance conquers. And looking back on my life, I found how true that has been from time to time. It's pure guts going forward with what you want to do and making sure you do it to the best of your ability. Doing something that was worthwhile

and doing it for a real purpose. I have to say that I feel privileged and, yes, honoured at being able to take part in that raid. Having said that, able to take part in that raid. Having said that, now I have to constantly remind people that I'm the lucky one. I'm still alive. And what I'm doing and what they are saying to me is not for me, it's for the squadron. And I am purely representing the squadron. Of the 19 aircraft that took off, three came back, had to come back early.

Of the 16 that went on, only eight came back. We lost eight aircraft. Three crew members had been able to escape from one of the aircraft, but it meant 53 aircrew had been lost as well. And that was a tremendous loss for one squadron, for one night's operation, and everybody felt very strongly about it. And although the bars were open in the messes and there was drinking

going on, I'm quite sure it wasn't because of the success of the operation, it was commiseration with all those who hadn't come back. And that was what the drinking was about. And that was the end of it all. Thank you. you