Joining the RAF straight from school at 18 early in 1941 after watching the Battle of Britain being fought in the skies over Kent, “Johnnie” Johnson flew more than 60 bombing sorties over Germany, winning the DFC and Bar. After the war he was for some time a test pilot and in the 1960s he commanded an operations wing based at Singapore, during the confrontation with Indonesia.
George Walter Johnson was born in 1923 and educated at grammar school in Erith on the River Thames. When Hitler decided to attack London from September 7, 1940, the drone of the Luftwaffe’s air fleets almost overhead became a familiar sound as they made their way up the river to bomb the docks and City. As soon as his 18th birthday came round Johnson reported to his nearest RAF recruiting office and offered his services as a pilot.
After basic training he was sent to America under the Arnold scheme by which RAF pilots were given training in the US, even before the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Towards the end of his training period in Georgia, America was brought into the war and in mid-1942 Johnson returned to Britain. After a frustrating period as a flying instructor, he managed to get a posting to Bomber Command, and after training on heavy bombers in 1652 Conversion Unit under the celebrated Leonard Cheshire, joined 158 (Halifax) Squadron in early January 1944.
The Battle of Berlin, in which “Bomber” Harris, Bomber Command’s fiery C-in-C, hoped to carry the destructive impact of his summer campaign against Hamburg to the very heart of the Third Reich, had been in progress since the previous November, and No 158 was among the squadrons deployed against this heavily defended target.
On Johnson’s first raid as captain, the Halifax’s intercom failed, robbing him of contact with his mid-upper and rear gunners — vital to the defence of the aircraft against nightfighters. It being his first raid, he pressed on, reporting the defect on landing. But on his second flight nothing had been done to rectify it. In his reticent memoir, Finals — Three Greens (2000), Johnson explained the dilemma confronting pilots plagued by instrument failure. “This time my reason for not turning back was that we had done it before — no sweat — but secretly I was fearful that when we landed and the intercom was found to be working (as it was with the wheels down) lack of moral fibre might be suspected, the fate worse than being shot down.”
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Such was the unforgiving nature of higher authority to its fighting men in those times. The intercom defect was not in fact rectified until early February.
Johnson’s first half-dozen missions were to Berlin — “learning the trade the hard way,” as he referred to it. But the fact of their surviving in the face of odds was of immense importance to the morale of his crew. In March 1944, with Harris compelled to concede, in the face of mounting aircraft losses, that he could not bring Berlin to its knees, No 158 switched to other targets, and Johnson and his crew attacked the ball bearing works at Schweinfurt and the Bosch magneto works at Stuttgart.
Thereafter, for a period as the D-Day landings approached, Bomber Command was tasked to bombard railway lines, tunnels and marshalling yards in France, with a view to interdicting the movement of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead. Although Harris — by now totally wedded to his “area offensive” against German cities — was extremely reluctant to allow the use of his heavy bombers for this purpose, the results were extremely effective. In the event many German armoured units had to make prolonged detours in their journey to Normandy because of the damage to the French railway system. By the end of 16 sorties Johnson and his men had progressed from being the “rookie” crew to being the most senior in the squadron, such was the rate of attrition. In one period 158 Squadron lost 16 aircraft and their crews in just four sorties.
In May 1944 Johnson and his crew were sent to join 635 Squadron, flying Lancasters in the Pathfinder Force. Returning from a raid over France on June 15, Johnson was astonished to find his Lancaster overtaken at great speed over the Thames Estuary by an aircraft “apparently on fire”. When he mentioned it to the intelligence officer at debriefing, he was immediately sworn to secrecy. What he had seen was a flying bomb. The V1 offensive had begun only two days earlier, and there was near panic in Whitehall about the effect on civilian morale of this new and indiscriminate threat.
By the time he was rested from operations in October 1944, Johnson had flown 62 sorties. He also had the French Croix de Guerre to add to his two DFCs. Johnson ended his war with Transport Command in the Far East and Australia, carrying troops and freight in Dakotas and Liberator bombers reconfigured as transports.
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Given a permanent commission after the war, he spent ten years from 1946 test flying, initially at the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment, based at Boscombe Down. By now British military aviation was in the jet age, and he tested the DH Vampire and Venom for the RAF and the Supermarine Attacker and Hawker Seahawk for the Navy.
Passing through the RAF Staff College, Bracknell, in 1958, he had a spell as an air planner at HQ Fighter Command before going, in 1962, as commander of the Operations Wing at RAF Tengah, Singapore.
Indonesia’s long-cherished ambition to control Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei had led to revolt in Brunei and armed incursion into Sarawak from Indonesian Borneo. As the man in charge of all the RAF’s combat aircraft in the region — Hunters and Javelins for day and night air defence, and Canberras for photo reconnaisance and strike sorties — Johnson had multiple responsibilities. He had to guard against possible strikes on Tengah by Indonesian Mustangs and Mitchell bombers based on an island only 20 miles from Singapore. With the threat on the ground to Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei, he had to dispatch aircraft from Tengah to stabilise the situation and boost local morale. The Indonesian Air Force’s MiG 21s and Badger bombers added to his problems, which were compounded by the fact that the RAF’s Firestreak air-to-air missile had to be kept dehumidified and temperature-controlled to have any chance of working when launched. In the event, the few Badgers that approached beat a retreat when they caught sight of the Tengah Javelins, and Johnson’s period in command ended without any aerial clashes.
Returning to Britain, Johnson ended his career on the staff of the RAF Staff College, Andover, retiring from the RAF in 1969. For the next 20 years he worked on the Hawker Siddeley Aviation marketing team, where he was much involved with the sales potential of the Harrier jump jet and the commercially successful Hawk trainer. He finally retired in in 1988.
Johnson was legally separated from his wife. He is survived by her and by their daughter.
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Wing Commander G. W. (Johnnie) Johnson, DFC and Bar, bomber and test pilot, was born on January 8, 1923. He died on July 28, 2004, aged 81.