LET’S FINISH THIS BEFORE THE BOMBER BOYS ARE ALL GONE
Dambuster Johnnie Johnson leads the appeal to complete the magnificent Bomber Command museum while the remaining veterans can still see it
WHEN my generation finally starts to drop off its perch the obituary pages will make for very dreary reading. They will be full of pioneering venture capitalists, heartless bean counters who found new ways to make workers redundant and computer geeks who let trolls loose on the well- meaning.
Yet there is a generation with true tales of derring- do, sacrifice and duty – and time is running out to ensure their breathtaking stories are not lost for ever.
Take Air Commodore John Mitchell who was the navigator on Winston Churchill’s personal aircraft during the Second World War.
John, a veteran of that most hazardous of duties, a tour of raids with Bomber Command, flew Churchill around the war- torn world in a converted Avro York, a transport version of the Lancaster bomber, and later a Douglas C- 54 Skymaster, which Churchill nicknamed an “aerial yacht”.
John flew Churchill to summits with Stalin in Tehran, Moscow and Yalta and ferried General Lion – the code- name for George VI – on a two- week visit to British forces in North Africa in 1943.
But John, who also entered the world of spooks as defence attaché in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, is no longer with us, having passed away aged 97 in February, one of more than 56 Bomber Command veterans to die this year.
With fewer than 1,500 surviving worldwide, aged between 91 and 102, a grim race is under way to finish a new memorial to the Bomber Boys, complete with an archive of their stories, before they disappear for ever.
The £ 10million International Bomber Command Centre ( IBCC) is being built in Lincolnshire, effectively a huge bomber base in the Second World War. It has to raise another £ 3.8million to complete its dream of telling the story of how the crews took the war to Hitler.
THE first phase, a 102ft spire, is already up, bronzing in the elements, on a hill directly opposite Lincoln Cathedral, which for many of the crews was a prized landmark. It was a beacon telling them they had made it home safely – or their last sight of Britain before being shot down in flames over occupied Europe.
The spire’s height is the length of a Lancaster’s wingspan. Around its base, in the same burnished steel, are 120 panels carrying the names of the 26,296 young men lost flying from Lincolnshire’s 27 RAF bomber bases in the Second World War.
Future phases will have panels carrying the names of the rest of Bomber Command’s dead, taking the total to 55,573.
Daily Express readers contributed generously to the national Bomber Command memorial in London’s Green Park, donating more than £ 1million and Daily Express owner Richard Desmond gave another £ 500,000. And they have rallied magnificently to the IBCC, showing they appreciate the need to remember the heroism despite decades of controversy over the bombing campaign.
The IBCC will have an education centre to tell the story of the campaign from all sides: the crews who suffered the heaviest losses of any British- led command in the war and the civilians and troops hit by the raids on the Nazi war machine.
The IBCC’s Chadwick Centre will house archives, interviews with veterans and memorabilia from medals to logbooks, flying helmets to crew photos.
It has already digitised 41,000 documents and recorded 300 oral histories but its 500 volunteers want to save all the other personal histories.
So why should we care? Well, without the bravery of these men, all volunteers, average age just 22, we might well be speaking German now and the history taught in our schools could very easily be of the glorious Third Reich and the heroism of the SS. We owe the Bomber Boys a debt and one way of paying it is to remember them.
Their stories are remarkable. There’s Stanislaw Jozefiak, who died aged 96 just before Christmas. After Germany invaded his native Poland in 1939 he made his way to Britain as a 20- year- old via Romania, Yugoslavia, Beirut and Marseilles and served on 53 bombing raids as a gunner. Shot up on one mission, his Wellington limped back, crashing in Sussex, where Stanislaw suffered the indignity of being mistaken for a German by the Home Guard. After surviving far more missions than could reasonably be expected he retrained as a pilot and flew Hurricanes and Spitfires before serving as a pilot for the CIA and then opting for a quieter life running his own furniture store in Derby. Also recently lost was Dr Malcolm Arthurton, 97, from London, who was the medical officer to the Dambusters’ 617 Squadron as it prepared for the 1943 raid which made its name. He had a steady stream of aircrew complaining of airsickness during the arduous lowlevel training so he went up to experience it for himself. He recorded in his logbook: “Low flying experience. Weather bumpy. Airsick after half hour.” Then there is Bob Tizard, 91, who served as a navigator and went on to be New Zealand’s deputy prime minister, and Kenneth Trueman, from Solihull, who has died aged 93. He was shot down over Belgium in August 1944. Two of the crew were killed, two were captured but Kenneth and three others escaped and were sheltered by the Resistance. They were protected at great risk for six months as the Germans retreated in the face of the Allied advance before the crew- mates were smuggled back to Blighty.
BUT so many other extraordinary stories are in danger of being lost. And the surviving men who risked all for their countries risk dying before this very special memorial has been completed.
Perhaps the best person to comment is the last surviving British Dambuster, Squadron Leader George “Johnnie” Johnson, who knows all about courage and duty.
Johnnie, 94, from Bristol, said: “It took 70 years for those who served in Bomber Command to get any recognition and now we have this marvellous opportunity to leave our stories as a legacy for the future, in the county that many of us veterans think of as the spiritual home of Bomber Command.
“Our worry is that we won’t get to see this centre opened, that we will have passed unless we can get this money raised.
“To us it is important that after all these years people have the opportunity to understand what we went through and the impact it had on all our lives.”