Whilst some riders will get out of bed on the morning of the 17th May and head for the south of France (lucky buggers!!) I will be making my way back towards the UK but making two important stops along the way.
One of these will be to pay a personal homage to the last surviving UK member of the Dambuster aircrew, Sqdn Ldr George 'Johnny' Johnson - a man I am now immensely proud to have as a friend.
On the night of 16th May 1943 Johnny was bomb aimer on Flt Lt Joe McCarthy's crew on Lancaster Q-Queenie and scheduled to attack the Sorpe Dam as part of the second wave of 617 Sqdn's attack. However, when they got out to their Lancaster it had a fault and in the end they took off in the spare aircraft, Lancaster AJ-T, ED825.
They then successfully flew across the Netherlands and Germany at low level all the way to the Sorpe Dam where they made no less than 9 unsuccessful runs along the Sorpe Dam before 'Johnny' was finally happy with their position and height to drop their 'Upkeep' weapon in exactly the right spot. This moment is wonderfully captured in Mark Postlethwaites painting 'The American Dambuster', a print of which hangs proudly in my hallway.
If you look behind Johnny's Lancaster in the painting you will see a church spire on the high ridge. Johnny and his pilot Joe McCarthy used this church spire as a reference point when starting each of their attacks. The first of my stops on the way home will be to visit the church and look down onto the Sorpe Dam as did Johnny 70 years before and try and get some sort of understanding of what it must have been like for the crew of AJ-T in the dark, far from home trying to get a heavy and manually handled Lancaster down into the valley on line and just 30ft above the water!
I am honoured to have Johnny as a friend and as a supporter of Dambusters2013.
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