Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next. John Nichol
departing again, having deprived the sleeping Whitworth of his pyjamas as a trophy. But while the crews had been celebrating or drowning their sorrows, Harry Humphries had the painful task as Squadron Adjutant of composing fifty-six telegrams and then fifty-six personal letters to wives and families, telling them that their loved ones would not be coming home.
Once the initial euphoria had passed, reactions within the squadron to the success of the Dams raid tended to be more muted. Some were elated but for most, ‘we were satisfied in doing the Dams raid,’ Johnson says, ‘but nothing more really. It was just another job we had to do. I had no sense of triumphalism or excitement, we realised what we had done, and were very satisfied, but that was all.’27 However, in a public demonstration of the importance of the raid to British morale, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to the squadron on 28 May 1943, with all the aircrews lined up, standing to attention and with their toecaps touching a white line that had been specially painted on the grass. They spent five hours there, though ‘naturally, of course, neither the King nor Queen visited the Sergeants’ Mess’.28
The gallantry awards for the raid – one Victoria Cross, five DSOs, fourteen DFCs, eleven DFMs and two Conspicuous Gallantry medals – were then awarded by the Queen in an investiture at Buckingham Palace on 22 June. Johnny Johnson hadn’t ‘the foggiest idea’ what the Queen said to him. ‘I was so bloody nervous. All I can remember saying is “Thank you, Ma’am” and that was it.’29 Although he was a teetotaller – ‘I couldn’t even stand the smell of beer,’ he says, ‘so I never went into the bars apart from a quick dash at lunchtime to pick up cigarettes’30 – he was in a minority of close to one on the squadron, and his fellows more than made up for him, with the investiture the trigger for a marathon booze-up. They were given a special carriage on the train taking them to London, where they had ‘a high old time’, and after chatting to the driver and his fireman during a stop at Grantham, Mick Martin’s crew made the next stage of the journey down to Peterborough on the footplate of the engine. They each threw a few shovelsful of coal into the firebox and took turns to operate the regulator under the supervision of the driver and ‘gave the old steam chugger full bore’. The driver offered to stand them a drink at any pub of their choice in London, and they duly obliged him at the appropriately named Coal Hole in the Strand.
The more well-to-do of the aircrews stayed at the Mayfair Hotel, while the less affluent settled for the Strand, and in the words of one of the Australians, ‘for twenty-four hours there was a real whoopee beat-up’.31 As a result none of them were looking at their best on the morning of the investiture. Mick Martin’s braces had disappeared somewhere along the line, but his resourceful crewmates ‘scrounged a couple of ties and trussed him up like a chicken, sufficient to get him onto the dais at Buckingham Palace, down the steps and off again’.
The squadron’s resourcefulness was also demonstrated by one of Mick Martin’s crewmen, Toby Foxlee, who, as petrol was strictly rationed, obtained a regular supply of fuel for his MG by ‘a reduction process’ which involved pouring high-octane aircraft fuel through respirator canisters he had scrounged; ‘the little MG certainly used to purr along pretty sweetly’.32
On the evening of the investiture, A. V. Roe, the manufacturers of the Lancaster, threw a lavish dinner party at the Hungaria restaurant in Regent Street for the ‘Damn [sic] Busters following their gallant effort on the Rhur [sic] Dams’33 – the budget for the dinner clearly didn’t extend to a proofreader for the menu! Given the austerity of wartime rationing, a menu including ‘Crabe Cocktail, Caneton Farci a l’Anglaise, Asperges Vertes, Sauce Hollandaise, and Fraises au Marasquin’, washed down with cocktails and ample quantities of 1929 Riesling, 1930 Burgundy and vintage port, was an astonishing banquet.
As the heroes of 617 Squadron celebrated their awards that night, Bomber Command’s war against Germany ploughed on with a raid by nearly 600 aircraft against the city of Mulheim, north of Düsseldorf. The city’s own records describe the accuracy of the bombing and the ferocity of the fires. Roads into and out of the area were cut and the only means of escape was on foot. The rescue services were overwhelmed, resulting in terrible destruction. Five hundred and seventy-eight people were killed and another 1,174 injured. Public buildings, schools, hospitals and churches were all hit. The German civilian population was paying a high price for Nazi aggression.34
Churchill’s War Cabinet were quick to use the success of the Dams raid in the propaganda war against the enemy, and some of 617’s aircrews were sent on publicity tours that spanned the globe, spreading the message about how good the RAF’s 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’.35 Gibson also ‘wrote’ (it is possible that Roald Dahl, working as an air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, was the actual author) a series of articles, and a draft script for a movie of the Dams raid that director Howard Hawks was contemplating, then settled down to write his account of the Dams raid and his RAF career: Enemy Coast Ahead.
Mick Martin was by now widely recognised as the finest pilot on the squadron and had a wealth of operational experience behind him, but either his relatively lowly rank of Flight Lieutenant, requiring a double promotion to get him to the rank of Wing Commander – ‘it was considered not the done thing for him to jump two ranks’36 – or a belief among his superiors that he was a lax disciplinarian had counted against him – or perhaps the RAF ‘brass’ just didn’t want an Australian as CO. In any case, after just six weeks, he was replaced by Squadron Leader George Holden, who had taken over Guy Gibson’s crew following his departure. If Holden shared something of Gibson’s arrogance and his coolness towards NCOs, he lacked the former commander’s charisma and leadership ability, and was not generally popular with his men.
His reign as commander of 617 was not to prove a long one, and in the perhaps biased opinion of Mick Martin’s rear gunner, ‘somebody made a bad mistake’ in appointing Holden at all, since his knowledge of low flying was ‘practically nil’.37 Martin, by contrast, was ‘superb, a complete master of the low-flying technique’, and so dedicated that he continued to practise his skills every day. One new recruit to the squadron was given Martin’s formula for success at low level: ‘Don’t, if you can help it, fly over trees or haystacks, fly alongside them!’38 His bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, was also the Squadron Bombing Leader, charged with ensuring his peers achieved the highest possible degree of accuracy.
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,