Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next. John Nichol
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!’39
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.40
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!’41 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.42
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. 43
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. 44
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’,45 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.
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. 46
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.’1
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