Over the moonlit Sorpe dam in Germany the Lancaster bomber known as T-Tommy made nine aborted runs. Three dams, the Möhne and Sorpe in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Eder in Hesse, were under attack from allied planes on the night of 16-17 May 1943.
Nine Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers were detailed to attack the Möhne and the Eder, five were held in reserve. Another five were targeted on the Sorpe, but just one got through. T-Tommy was piloted by the sole American of 617 Squadron, Flt Lt Joe McCarthy. His bomb-aimer, Sgt George “Johnny” Johnson, who has died aged 101, was the last survivor of the raid.
“On the tenth run in,” wrote Johnson “both Joe and I were satisfied we were right on track. I pushed the button and called ‘bomb gone’. And from the rear turret was heard, ‘thank Christ for that’.”
The Dambusters’ bouncing bomb technique, invented by the engineer Barnes Wallis, could not be used on the Sorpe. It had to be dropped by T-Tommy halfway along the length of the dam. In The Last British Dambuster (2014), Johnson wrote that he was convinced he heard Wallis say: “It would take six bombs to crack the Sorpe.”
The dam was hit above the waterline, but not seriously so. However, flying back, at near-ground altitude, Johnson could see that the Möhne, like the Eder, had been severely breached. Just before 3.30am T-Tommy’s crew were back on the ground at RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire.
Some 133 fliers took part in the raid; 53 of them never returned, and three became prisoners of war. Around 1,300 people died in the resulting floods, the majority of them slave labourers from the Soviet Union. The Nazi minister of armaments, Albert Speer, observed later that to make the Möhne-Katastrophe truly successful the RAF should have conducted further raids.
Born in the Lincolnshire village of Hameringham, George was the fifth son and last child of Charles Johnson, a farm worker, and Mary Ellen (nee Henfrey), who died just before George’s third birthday.
He remembered a brutal early childhood, thanks to his father. He was raised by his sister, Lena – his salvation, he wrote later. By 1926 all his brothers had left home and, soon after a move to Langford in Nottinghamshire, Lena went into service, and Johnson Sr married a “vicious and hellish woman”, as Johnson Jr recalled her, who left in summer 1928. George was initially educated at a primary school in nearby Winthorpe, and with the full-time return of his sister, life began to improve.
At the age of 11 he won a boarding place to Lord Wandsworth college in Long Sutton, Hampshire. In December 1939 he left it with his school certificate. Having volunteered for the RAF in 1940, by early 1941 he was in Torquay, Devon, and met his wife-to-be, Gwyneth Morgan. She and her family were to be a great influence on his life.
The RAF supplied his “Johnny” nickname. Having failed a pilot’s course in Florida, once back in Britain Johnson moved to air gunnery, and in July 1942 was posted to 97 Squadron in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire. There he stayed until spring 1943, initially as a “spare gunner”. During those months, raids took him across Germany and down into Italy.
It was in 1942 that planners separated the roles of navigator and bomb-aimer, for the RAF’s three new four-engined bombers, the Stirling, the Halifax and the Lancaster. The normal crew of a Lancaster was seven: pilot, flight engineer, navigator, wireless operator, mid-upper gunner (missing on 617’s Lancasters), “tail-end charlie” gunner, and, from that year, bomb aimer-cum-front turret gunner. “The difference in pay was from 7 shillings and 6 pence to 12 shillings and 6 pence,” Johnson wrote. “I thought I would have a go.” He took the bomb–aimer’s course. Then he was back on 97 Squadron, “this time as a spare bomb-aimer”.
Soon after, McCarthy, then a pilot officer, was looking for a new bomb-aimer. An initial suspicion from Johnson, wary of his experiences with Americans, gave way to respect. He would come to believe that the Long Islander was the best pilot in 617 Squadron.
Meanwhile he joined his 97 Squadron crew, and on the night of 22-23 December 1942 flew on his first sortie, to Nuremberg. Nineteen raids followed, mostly to Germany, but also taking in Turin, Italy, and the Nazi U-boat pens of Saint-Nazaire, western France.
Then, in mid-March 1943, Wg Cmdr Guy Gibson, commander of 106 Squadron, and known to many of his 106 crews as the “Arch Bastard”, was called to the HQ of 5 Group, in Grantham, Lincolnshire.
There Gibson was asked, according to his own account in Enemy Coast Ahead (1946), by the 5 Group commander, Ralph Cochrane, how he would “like the idea of doing one more trip”? Gibson got the job of heading “Squadron X”, based at Scampton, just north of Lincoln. The squadron would spend two months practising flying Lancasters at very low levels, down to 100ft, and then 60ft.
Among the pilots selected by Gibson was McCarthy. The American asked his crew whether they wished to join X. And that is how Johnson, the Lincolnshire lad, joined what became the most famous squadron in the RAF. For Johnson the next problem was his wedding, scheduled for 3 May 1943, but all leave had been cancelled. McCarthy appealed to Gibson, and Johnson got his wedding.
After the dams raid he was commissioned as an officer and awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. With McCarthy he took part in a further 19 raids, before becoming an instructor. After the war, as a navigator, he remained in the RAF, flying Lincoln bombers and Shackleton maritime patrol planes.
Sqn Ldr Johnson quit the RAF in 1962. He then became a teacher, first of primary children, then in adult education, working with people with mental health problems.
In retirement he lived in Torquay, and then Bristol. He was active in local Conservative politics, and in 2017 was appointed MBE. That year too he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lincoln, and the following year had a train named after him.
Gwyneth died in 2005. Johnson is survived by three children, eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
• George Leonard “Johnny” Johnson, airman, born 25 November 1921; died 7 December 2022
• This article was amended on 11 December 2022. The count of RAF Lancaster bombers on the night of the operation was corrected and a reference to Joe McCarthy being the only officer aboard T-Tommy deleted. Johnson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal rather than Cross, and the Shackleton he later flew was a maritime rather than a naval patrol plane.
