A quiet man with a heroic past
ARTHUR Joplin was a quiet, humble man, so modest that few would have picked that he was a distinguished member of one of the Royal Air Force’s most storied squadrons.
Mr Joplin, who died on March 21 aged 99, was the last surviving pilot of RAF 617 Squadron, the ‘‘Dambusters’’.
He not only attacked one of the Rhine dams but flew in both attacks against Tirpitz, the pride of the German kriegsmarine.
Mr Joplin’s bomb aimer was Loftus Hebbard, then of Mosgiel but a resident of Wa¯naka when he died in 2004. Mr Hebbard’s children initially knew the RAF pilot as Mr Joplin, but by 1970 he told them to call him ‘‘Joppy’’, the nickname given to him by his crew.
Arthur William Joplin was born in Auckland on October 23 1923, the only son of Arthur Briggs and Amie Belle Joplin.
The Wellesley Street Primary and Auckland Grammareducated lad was always mad on flying: he made many model aircraft as a child and always wanted to learn to fly.
He joined the air force aged 18 and in May 1942 was sent to Levin as part of the aerodrome defence squad, biding his time before training to fly.
Mr Joplin proved a natural, and after training in Rotorua, Ashburton and Wigram, he attained his wings at age 20.
The top 10 aviators on the course were commissioned, and Mr Joplin was one of them.
His elevation in the ranks brought with it a trip to England, and after arriving in Brighton he was posted to various places around the country to become familiar with the landmarks. Mr Joplin trained on Wellingtons with men for all positions before moving to Stirlings — where he met Mr Hebbard — and then the famed Lancaster bomber.
Flying Officer Joplin and his crew were posted to 617 Squadron, one of six crews to do so directly from training. RAF personnel did not underestimate the difficulty of the task set the Dambusters. Mr Hebbard reported back to his crew mates: ‘‘I think we have been posted to that suicide squadron”.
They continued training at Woodhall Spa for another two months apart from an operation on shipping at Brest.
Training was rigorous as just one of the special bombs that the Dambusters were to drop, the Tallboy and later the
Grandslam, each cost as much or more than the aircraft carrying them.
Mr Joplin and his crew were the top of 5 group of the squadron for bombing accuracy on three different months, a success rate that they were not told of at the time.
Mr Joplin’s first Tallboy operation was an attack on the Kembs Dam, across the Rhine. He took part in other special operations, but the biggest ones by far were the two operations on the battleship Tirpitz in Tromso Fjord, Norway.
This operation required exceptional piloting, navigation and bomb aiming. It was later described by a historian as the most accurate and precise operation of World War 2, when
Tirpitz,
taking piloting, navigation and bomb aiming into account.
On the final Tirpitz operation, Mr Joplin and his crew got a clear view of the ship they bombed from 15,200 feet. It was estimated their bomb landed about 75ft between the ship and the shore. While direct hits were good, as much damage was done with the near misses that cleared away the ballast placed under the keel by the Germans allowing the ship to roll over into the void the Tallboy blast created.
Eventually an explosion was set off in the ship’s ammunition store. Tirpitz capsized, dooming 940 of its 1204 crew.
The 617 crews on the mission were treated as heroes. A group of airmen, including Mr Joplin, were taken to London to be congratulated by the top brass and to enjoy a 48hour leave pass.
Mr Joplin’s luck ran out after an operation to a synthetic oil plant in Politz, near Stettin in Poland.
The raid was uneventful but the flight home was hampered by thick fog.
Running short on fuel, and not having received permission to land, the wing of the lowflying Lancaster brushed a hillside and the plane crashed.
Mr Joplin was trapped in his seat and was pulled out of the burning wreckage by his navigator, Basil Fish, who could hear the sound of bones breaking as he pulled him out of his seat. The injuries he suffered dogged him for the rest of his life, as did the mental scars of knowing two of his crew died.
Mr Joplin was given a red endorsement in his logbook, an unjust punishment which rankled and festered for decades. Subsequent investigations found that several other planes crashed that night and that Mr Joplin’s plane should have been sent to Scotland to land . . . an order he never received.
Robert Owen, the squadron historian stated recently: ‘‘Certainly the contemporary feeling of his crew [Basil Fish and Frank Tilley] and other contemporaries [such as Tom Bennett and Benny Goodman] was that the endorsement was unfounded and unwarranted. In their eyes, Joppy was exonerated. He was a victim of the system of that time.’’
In 2020, the red endorsement was finally removed from Mr Joplin’s record, but a combination of it, his injuries and the war ending meant that he never flew another combat mission.
Although he never received the Distinguished Flying Cross which should have been his due, Mr Joplin was awarded the 193945 Star with Bomber Command clasp, the Arctic Star, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal, the War Medal, the New Zealand Operational Service Medal, and the Legion of Honour (France).
When Mr Joplin returned home in 1945, still recovering from the accident, he did not want to go to university, as he had planned before he joined the RNZAF.
He instead worked in the office of his father’s knitwear business in central Auckland until his retirement.
He met Bette Hinemoa in 1953 and they married a year later. They had no children.
She became Sir Edmund Hillary’s secretary and also active in his Himalayan trust, endeavours in which Mr Joplin supported her
They were invited to accompany Sir Edmund to the 40th anniversary of the ascent of Everest, in 1993, in Wales. The ktrip coincided with a 617 reunion in Woodhall Spa.
The couple attended a 617 Squadron reunion in Adelaide in 1980, along with other New Zealand squadron members, and they helped organise a similar occasion in Auckland, which drew participants from all over the Commonwealth. — Bruce Hebbard and Mike Houlahan