THE RUNAWAY BOY HERO OF D-DAY
At 14, he lied his way into the Army. At just 16 he parachuted into France ...with his frantic family hot on his tail
THE night sky concealed any anxiety on their young faces as a ‘stick’ of 20 paratroopers crowded aboard a Dakota aircraft. They crammed themselves and their heavy kit into their seats and faced each other, ten to a side, with their backs against the cold aluminium fuselage.
It was 11.30pm on June 5, 1944 – D-Day minus 30 minutes – and the moment everyone present had been thinking about for the previous two years had finally arrived. A long row of planes marked with the white-onblack invasion stripes lurched one after another down the runway at RAF Broadwell in Oxfordshire and veered south across a blacked-out England and into the English Channel, where a vast flotilla of ships signalled V for victory.
Unknown to Lieutenant Jack Watson, commander of the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion’s ‘A’ Company, one of his men on board, Private Robert ‘Bobby’ Johns, was about to make history – he would become the youngest soldier to parachute into Normandy on D-Day. Pte Johns may have been tall and broad-shouldered, with a fierce, defiant stare, but he was just 16 years old – two years below the minimum age for active service.
Lieut Watson was also unaware that his young charge was the subject of the British Army’s own real-life version of Saving Private Ryan.
In an echo of the blockbuster Hollywood movie – in which Tom Hanks’s character searches for the last surviving son of the fictional Ryan family after his brothers are killed in action – Bobby’s frantic parents had appealed to the War Office to trace him and bring him home. An investigation was already under way.
Bobby and his comrades were to be in the vanguard of one of the greatest days in British history: the invasion of Nazi-occupied France.
Few of those on board spoke until shortly before 12.50am on D-Day itself, when the red ‘ready’ light went on as the Dakota, flying at just 500ft, neared the Normandy coastline.
As one, the men stood up and ‘hooked up’ the D-rings attached to their parachute ripcords to the overhead wire, as they had done a thousand times in training. Then the light turned green – Go! Go! Go! Seconds later, the unit,
He was the youngest one in his unit – and the best
unexpectedly spread far and wide thanks to enemy flak and crosswinds, tasted French soil with a thump and a roll. Their war had begun.
The battalion was part of the 6th Airborne Division. The division, which spearheaded the first D-Day action at Pegasus Bridge, had a crucial role. They were tasked with seizing and holding the left flank of Sword Beach and clearing glider landing sites of defensive wooden stakes driven into the soil by the Nazis. They also had to capture the Orne River and the canal bridges at Benouville, destroy the heavy German coastal battery at Merville, and blow up bridges across the flooded River Dives to stall a German counter-attack from the east.
They fulfilled their mission with distinction, including capturing the village of Ranville, the first in France to fall to the Allies.
One of those who took the village 70 years ago next month was Pte Johns. Incredibly, he had run away from home at 14 and enlisted in the Army, hoodwinking the NCO in his local recruitment office in Portsmouth by claiming to be an adult. Bobby was issued with a rail warrant and instructions to join the 2nd/4th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment.
He had not discussed his plans with parents, Henry and Daisy Johns. They were still mourning the loss of their eldest son, William – he had been killed when the Luftwaffe bombed his minelaying submarine, HMS Narwhal, in the North Sea in July 1940.
Bobby was, in fact, the youngest of the couple’s four children and couldn’t wait to leave the family’s cramped two-bedroom terraced home in Jervis Road, Stamshaw, in the shadow of Portsmouth’s naval dockyard.
Unsurprisingly, Henry and Daisy Johns were beside themselves with worry when they discovered that Bobby was missing. They contacted his friends, the police and the local authorities before finally visiting the Army recruitment office. No one could shed any light on Bobby’s whereabouts, but his parents nevertheless lodged an ‘underage enlistment’ report with the military recruiter, which eventually arrived on the desk of an official at the War Office. This was at a time when most boys left school at 14 and thousands lied about their age, but the guidelines were clear: underage soldiers should be immediately returned home to the UK and their families.
Indeed, another young paratrooper, Private Harry Sands, had already been sent home after being discovered serving in Italy. The War Office did instigate a search for Pte Johns, but it was not regarded as a priority at a time when men and resources were in short supply. In any case, efficient administration was hampered by the rapid formation and training of new units in secret preparation for D-Day.
Bobby’s initial unit, the 2nd/4th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, was converted to a parachute unit and redesignated the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion.
He volunteered to undertake training for selection for the newly formed Parachute Regiment, which was then part of the Army Air Corps. At RAF Ringway near Manchester, Bobby joined Course 98 at No1 Parachute Training School and on January 10, 1944, he began a 12-day course which culminated in him jumping from a balloon and subsequently a Whitley bomber. His course reports state that he was the youngest there and the best performer. Still no one had questioned his age.
Bobby was just 15 when he was awarded his parachute ‘wings’ and presented with his coveted maroon beret. Those who passed the course headed for Larkhill in Wiltshire and the 13th Parachute Battalion. The battalion, officially formed in May
1943, was the last of the new parachute units to be created before the invasion of France. It became part of the 5th Parachute Brigade within the 6th Airborne Division. This merely added to the confusion about Bobby’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, living so close to the naval dockyard, Henry and Daisy Johns could have been in little doubt that something big was under way with the war effort.
Although the plans for D-Day itself were shrouded in secrecy, Portsmouth and the rest of southern England had become a vast military depot as Allied troops massed ahead of the invasion. The couple continued
Bobby was fearless. He loved being a paratrooper
to make enquiries about their son’s whereabouts, but heard nothing. Nevertheless, the War Office did persist in making checks to trace anyone with the surname ‘Johns’ who had enlisted in the Portsmouth area. However, communications were far from the top of any ‘action’ pile of correspondence and replies took weeks or months to come through. As D-Day approached, Bobby and his comrades in ‘A’ Company went into isolation at a camp near Broadwell to carry out final preparations prior to boarding the fleet of Dakota transport aircraft that would roar over his parents’ house in Portsmouth and take them to war.
Lieut Watson reported later: ‘Our battalion’s task was to secure Ranville and to protect the DZ [Drop Zone] and LZ [Landing Zone] during the landing of the gliders.
‘As I landed, my parachute got caught up in the trees so I had a fairly soft landing. I was lucky, but I was alone! I collected my equipment together and, seeing Ranville church tower, made for it while meeting my men on the way.
‘The DZ was a real muddle, with all three battalions of our Brigade and some sticks of the 8th Battalion, who had been dropped on the wrong DZ, all mixed up. But the hunting horns sounded clearly, and when I reached the rendezvous the Company was about 40-strong – half an hour later, we were up to 60.
‘We set off to clear DZ “N” of poles for the first wave of gliders. While we were doing this we could hear the fighting going on at Ranville, which our battalion captured by 0230 hours, the first village to be captured in France.’
D-Day was widely hailed as a resounding success but the fierce battle for Normandy was just beginning inland, with ‘A’ Company very much in the thick of it.
Dug in around the rubble and the ruins of Ranville, the battalion was subjected to constant artillery and mortar bombardments, and sporadic infantry assaults for 11 successive days before they were relieved by the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. Lieut Watson wrote: ‘On the early morning of D+4, patrols from our battalion reported signs of movement as if the enemy were preparing for an attack.
‘At about 0900, our forward positions reported the enemy were moving across the DZ/LZ using the mass of wrecked gliders as cover and were heading towards the direction of the battalion position – we were all ready for them.
‘The enemy were allowed to come within 50 yards of the battalion line when the order was given to fire. The result was devastating – the enemy were falling like a house of cards. The terrific force of rifle and machine-gun fire took them by surprise and in no time they were a disorganised mass. They suffered 400 dead or wounded and we took some 150 prisoners and passed them back to the brigade cage. They were a German Grenadier Battalion of 346 Division.
‘For the rest of that period we were well dug in around Ranville. We lost quite a few men through shelling and mortaring, but we held our ground and eventually we were moved to Le Mesnil to take over the 3rd Parachute Brigade’s position.’
The unit arrived just in time to take part in one of the fiercest battles – the fight for Caen.
Bobby’s parents were unaware of the bloody battles in which their youngest son was engaged. On July 15, 1944, they themselves had a narrow escape when a V1 flying bomb landed in Stamshaw, causing heavy damage to 185 homes around them.
A week later, the War Office finally discovered Bobby’s location and wrote to his Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Luard, for confirmation. Shortly afterwards, Henry and Daisy Johns were informed in a letter from the War Office that their son had been located and was serving in France.
Tragically, however, the search for Bobby would not have a Hollywood happy ending. By the time his parents received their letter from the War Office, Military Police had already reached his unit and discovered that Bobby had been shot dead by a German sniper in Le Mesnil. Lieut Watson, who was later awarded the Military Cross, described the firefight as being ‘at the forefront of the main effort to prevent a German counter-attack’. The unit’s war diary for July 23, 1944 – the day Bobby was killed – recorded: ‘The enemy was very sensitive all day and fired on the least provocation. ‘C Coy were unfortunate in sustaining a number of casualties from enemy mortar fire as a result of very accurate fire from 50mm and 81mm mortars on their forward positions. Two casualties were also caused by enemy sniper.’ One of them was Bobby Johns.
Lieut Watson later said of the youngster: ‘He was quite a big lad when he did his training, and it was only when he died that we found out he had lied about his age.’
Shortly before his own death many years later, Watson recalled: ‘ I remember him well. He was a very big chap and very capable. He was always ready to help people and was fearless. He loved being a paratrooper. But I never suspected that he was underage and it was not until after his death that we were informed that he was just 16. I was shocked and saddened.’
Next month, a ceremony will be held to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day at Ranville War Cemetery, where Pte Johns’s headstone has a fitting inscription: ‘He lived as he died, fearlessly.’
Seventy years after his death, it is sobering to think that today’s 16-year-olds are currently sitting their GCSE exams.