Page 32 Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 27, 2019by Stanley Johnson
O
ne of my earliest memories is
of being woken by my mother
one night. ‘Look darling! Come
quickly.’ She hustled me to the
window. ‘There’s a wonderful
bonfire on the runway. A plane has
crashed and quite soon the depth
charges may explode!’
I’m afraid I can’t remember whether the depth
charges (which RAF bombers dropped to
destroy submarines) did explode and I probably
went back to sleep soon afterwards. But I do
know it was World War II and we were living in
a cottage in Braunton, north Devon, overlook-
ing the runway of the RAF base at Chivenor.
My father, Wilfred Johnson, known as ‘Johnny’,
was a pilot with RAF Coastal Command.
Chivenor played a key role in the Battle of the
Atlantic. The squadrons based there patrolled
the seas, searching for and aiming to destroy
the German U-boats that were devastating
Britain’s shipping and supply routes.
Most of the pilots — mainly men in their 20s
— were quartered on the base. But as my father
was over 30 at the outbreak of war, married
with three children, we lived outside it.
My mother would never have expected my
father to be in the crash: he had taken off for a
ten-hour patrol at 10.30pm and the crash had
occurred at 11.20pm.
But the next morning — my fourth birthday,
August 18, 1944 — the ‘padre’ or RAF chaplain
came to our door.
There was bad news. My father had been
flying that crashed plane. He had broken a leg
and suffered severe burns, but would live. How-
ever, he would never fly on operations again.
Better news came in February 1945 when he
was awarded the DFC — the Distinguished Flying
Cross. The citation mentioned his skill and
coolness in emergencies. King George VI himself
sent a letter of congratulations.
Until a few years ago I knew only
the barest details of these events.
But thanks to an unexpected letter
that made me want to learn more
about what happened, I have been
able to piece together my knowl-
edge of that fateful night and keep
alive the memory of my father and
his comrades-in-arms.
T
HIS search was crowned
last Saturday by a deeply
moving remembrance
ceremony at Chivenor, a
tribute to my father and the heroes
with whom he flew. The event
brought a lump to my throat.
What a few weeks I’ve had, I
thought to myself. A son becoming
Prime Minister! A father honoured!
Let me explain. After the war, my
parents and my three siblings left
Braunton and moved to Surrey.
For a year or two my father
worked for a London timber-bro-
ker. His limbs were still scarred
from the burns and skin grafts,
and his right leg was now an inch
and a half shorter than the left. His
rugger-playing days were over.
My father hated his job; he
longed to return to the outdoor
life he had known before the war.
(He had met my mother in 1936 in
egypt, while he was cotton-farm-
ing in the nile Delta.)
When, in 1951, he had a chance to
buy a hill farm in the heart of
exmoor, he seized it. I am writing
these words in the steep-sided
river valley where my parents
spent the rest of their lives.
Amazing as it may seem, I don’t
recall my father talking about the
crash at Chivenor. True, during my
childhood, for most of the year I
was away at boarding school. But
even during the holidays, I don’t
remember ‘Daddy’s crash’ (as my
mother called it) being a major
topic of conversation.
But my father was not a talkative
man at the best of times. I can see
him now, sitting at the head of our
long oak kitchen table, pipe withineasy reach and Tiddles, his Jack
Russell terrier, on his lap.
My parents didn’t bring with
them to exmoor many mementos
of those wartime years at Chivenor.
There was an orange rubber dinghy
(issued to aircrew in case they had
to ‘ditch’) which my siblings and I
would use on the river, and an
airplane cockpit clock stood on
the mantelpiece.
But one item has survived, and is
sitting on the desk in front of me.
experts have identified this twisted
piece of metal as having once been
the vital throttle controls of the
plane my father crashed.
I have no idea how he came by
this chunk of ironmongery. Did
someone bring it to him in hospi-
tal? Was it presented to my mother
as a keepsake? Perhaps I shall
never know. It is too late to ask
them now, as my mother died in1987 and my father five years later.
In fact, the details of his crash
might have been lost to me for
ever, were it not for a letter I
received out of the blue in 2013.
This had been written by a man
named Lew Wilding — Flight
Sergeant Wilding — who said he
had been in the plane my father
was flying that night as one of the
wireless operators.
He lived near nottingham and,
when I went to meet him a few
weeks later, I learnt he was over 90
but still fighting fit, living by
himself in his own house. His mar-
ried daughter, Carolyn, joined us.
Trauma can distort the memory
but Lew’s recall seemed perfect.
‘Soon after we took off,’ he told
me, ‘the wireless failed, so your
father decided to return to base.
But then the port engine failed. We
had depth charges still on board,so he had to go around and drop
the depth charges in a safe place.
‘But he couldn’t make it all the
way back, not on just one engine
and losing height all the time. We
clipped a telegraph pole as we
came in.’
Carolyn, amazingly, had been
able to locate her father’s log book
and had brought it with her. She
turned the pages until she came to
the relevant entry.
There it was: ‘Ret base w/t failure.
Pt eng cut. A/C crashed and was
burned out. Two of crew killed.
Pilot’s injured, c/o pilot lost arm.’
In plain english, this meant the
aircraft had tried to return to
base with wireless transmission
failure, but had crashed and was
burned out. Two of the crew had
been killed. The pilot (my father)
had been injured; the co-pilot had
lost an arm.
‘Two of crew killed.’ The words
jumped out at me. Until that
moment, I’d had no idea anyone
had died in the crash.
Sadly, Lew Wilding, the last
survivor of the six-man crew that
flew in my father’s WellingtonTHE LETTER FROM
KING GEORGE VI
Boris’s father STANLEY
JOHNSON was just four
when he saw a mighty
Wellington Bomber
crash-land near his
Devon home — not
realising his father
was its pilot...
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