My Time with the RAF

I’m Sammy Johnson, and I’m a retired Squadron Leader from the Royal Air Force. I entered the Royal Air Force in 1936, straight from school, as an Aircraft Apprentice, learning all the skills required to maintain, which in those days of course was very simple. I was 16 when I left school, and at that time we were what was called one of the “expansion entries”. The government had decided that the country had to start and re-arm and consequently recruitment was at its fullest. I was one of some 900 young men who went into the Air Force. All of them had either School Certificate or Matric, so we were pretty well qualified. And we needed to be, because as well as the skills, we had to have the knowledge to support them, particularly mathematics, engineering drawing and general studies, and the theory of flight of course — we had to know how and why an aeroplane flew. I studied there for three years; it was full-time study. We had some military training in between, quite a bit of drill, because we had to be part of a disciplined force and a lot of sport — keeping fit was an important thing. One of the things I remember was that we were always hungry, although the diet was wholesome, it was also fairly monotonous. So none of us were overweight when we left, and that’s something that continued all the way through the War.

I left Holton in June 1939 at the end of my training and I went to my first Squadron, which was equipped with an antiquated light bomber called the Fairey Battle. It had a crew of three: a pilot, a navigator and a gunner, and we took those off to France with us and we operated right through the War. Accommodation in France was very sparse. We lived in some agricultural workers’ billets in a vine growing area and we had our aircraft parked in a champagne-growing vineyard — you may have heard of Veuve Cliquot, a champagne which they still make today; and the aeroplanes were parked out in the open. The winter of 1939/1940 was a particularly bitter one and we had to start the engines every day, and we had to do this by cranking them, and it was a most exhausting business. When you finished your hands were covered in blisters. If you were lucky, you just managed to get it to start, then they just warmed it up. If we’d been called and we had to launch our aircraft for a raid, I don’t think we’d have got more than one or two up in the first hour. Then the German blitzkrieg started and we lost of lot of aircraft in the early days of the War, to the extent that the fighting forces were absolutely decimated. We were fortunate that we were on the south side of the breakthrough. The people who were on the north side of the breakthrough, of course, had to make their way to Dunkirk, and got out that way. We headed for Le Havre. One thing I can remember was we couldn’t get across the river at Rouen because the Germans were there already and there wasn’t a bridge, so we had to go south and we had some trouble with the ferryman and it wasn’t until we threatened to shoot him and his crew that they agreed to take us across, and we managed to get ourselves and our vehicles across, and we headed off to St Nazaire. Eventually it was quite obvious that we weren’t going to be able to operate any further in France and we withdrawn by sea from St Nazaire. It was a much easier evacuation than Dunkirk and I remember being taken out on a destroyer called the Havelock to a liner call the Duchess of York and when we laden, we just pushed off back to Liverpool. We were very fortunate, because we were lying very close to a ship called the Lancastria. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that: it was one of the bad disasters in the War because in an attack, the Germans got a direct hit; in fact it went straight down and the ship sank, with the loss of about 2,000 men, and they were mostly RAF.

We came back to the UK and got some more aeroplanes, and I was posted to a place up on the Solway Firth. They were training crews, but the people who came to us had already done their flying training, but they had to do their operational training and we were flying Lockheed Hudsons which were an American twin engined aircraft, and Wellingtons and Ansons and these had to be maintained. The rate of flying was extremely high and we were working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. We got one day off a month. It was a fairly exhausting business — however, we survived it! We were all young and relatively fit. The beer around that area was fairly weak anyway. It was one of the areas which was strictly controlled from pre-war days, and there was not a great deal to do there.

I was there until the end of 1941, by which time the War in the Far East had started. I’d come off a 12 hour night shift, and had been asleep for about an hour when a man from the Orderly Room woke me up and said I was required straight away and I was required straight away to the extent that I had to leave the next day, which was Christmas Day and go down to the station in Gloucestershire and I found that when I got down to this station that we were crewing up with a batch of 60 Hudsons which we were to take out to Singapore to re-equip two Squadrons which were already out there with old aeroplanes. So each aircraft had to carry spares and a technical tradesman, who were to provide the nucleus of the engineering support for this new Squadron in Singapore. Well, it was quite an exciting journey (at that time the old gentleman over there, with the white stick, and the medals, was in Malta). We flew from a base down in Cornwall, Portreath, to Gibraltar. We had to go miles out into the Atlantic because of the excitement — the Germans were in France and Spain. The only thing really I can remember about that, was we only had three cigarettes between the crew and we were airborne for nearly ten hours. But when we got to Gibraltar we nearly smoked ourselves to death, on the round tins of 50 Players — remember those!
Then we had a long flight from there to Malta where we had to refuel again, and that was quite hazardous because the Germans were very active in the air. However, we got in — our plane was one that had survived the day and we took off that same evening, with quite a number of extra passengers, I think we had about 15 aircrew who had lost their aircraft, on the deck at Malta. We then flew to Cairo, went our way through the Middle East, across what’s now Iraq, and I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of an airfield called Sharjah. It’s one of the Trucial States near Dubai. Well we landed there — it was a station that had been used by Imperial Airways on the run to Singapore and Australia, and it was just a sand strip, but there was a fort there. We taxied into a barbed wire enclosure and left our planes to the hands of the guards, and the next morning when we took off, there wasn’t another habitation for a hundred miles — you could see nothing, no towns. I went there, some 20 years later, and I just couldn’t believe my eyes. There was this modern city of Sharjah, with a duel carriageway outside the gates, running across the desert to Dubai. Unbelievable!

Eventually we got to Singapore and we started operating. Big Hudsons were used on shipping patrols, but they were very vulnerable. The Japanese fighters got them and we suffered some very heavy casualties, both in the air and on the ground. Eventually we had to go a to strip in the jungle in Sumatra. I can’t remember much about Sumatra — we lived in tents on a diet of porridge and pineapple, three times a day. Well, we operated there until we’d lost all our aeroplanes, and we had to fly off because the Japanese had just made an airborne attack about 40 miles away and were heading our way. So we flew off to Java with the rest of the Squadron and eventually we were moved to a port on the south side of what is now Indonesia, a port called Tilichap. When we got there, some of the squadron were diverted into a prisoner of war camp. We were lucky and went on to a Dutch tramp. The captain of this Dutch tramp decided he didn’t want to join the convoy that was going to Australia, he preferred to go to Colombo, so we sailed out and turned to starboard, whereas the rest of them turned to port. And we sailed across the Indian Ocean by ourselves, and we were very fortunate, we got to Colombo without incident. The others, I’m afraid, sailed straight into the Jap fleet and few of them escaped.

After a while there we went up to Karachi, which is part of Pakistan now. We had a very big RAF depot there and we got more aircraft, worked our way over to the Bay of Bengal, near a town called Katak, and we were operating there, and we had a lot more success with the shipping patrols because the Japanese didn’t have their superiority, we had it. I was there for some time, and eventually I was posted to a fighter Squadron and I went up to Imphal and I was up there for a couple of years. The Squadron I was with was very active, and eventually we were equipped with Spitfires; and we went up the road just before the Japanese cut it. We were fortunate. You’ve heard of Kohima? Kohima was the site of one of the bloodiest battles in the whole war, where the Japanese and the British were fighting, literally, on a tennis court. Casualties were absolutely horrendous. But we defeated the Japanese there and that changed the whole course of the War because that Japanese defeat meant they could no longer sustain the losses that they’d been experiencing and they retreated, with the British Army, the 14th Army, in hot pursuit, and they were thrashed. And that literally was the end of the War in the Far East.

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