Jim Johnson
95th BOMB GROUP (H) ASSOCIATION
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
2000 REUNION ORLANDO, FLORIDA
Interviewed by Russ McKnight
RM: Hello, this is Russ McKnight. We are here interviewing Jim Johnson today. Jim, what were your dates of service with the Army/Air Corps?
JJ: I started in 1942 when I joined the National Guard. This was in Emporia, Kansas. And then after that, we had maneuvers, and eventually, we were called into active service after the Pearl Harbor attack. My group went to the west coast in California. While there, I had an extremely severe case of poison oak. It was so severe that I was put into the hospital for three or four or five weeks. The unit left. I was sent to a replacement pool where the odds and end were left over. And while there, I saw a notice that said there’s an Intelligence School offered in Salt Lake City. I applied to go to this Intelligence School in Salt Lake City. So from Fort Snell, Minnesota, where I was in this replacement pool, I was sent to Fort Snelling, sorry, I was sent to Salt Lake City for this Intelligence School. And while there, several were chosen to learn a special bit of intelligence called photo interpretation. And I was one of those chosen. It was at that stage that someone came along and chose me to go with others to a place called Ephrata, Washington as part of the 95thBomb Group. This would be sometime around the winter of about 1942. It was extremely cold there and the shortage of so many, many, many things. I remember the story was going around that because of the shortage of coal, that the chaplain was trying to find some, and the MP’s caught him one night stealing coal. They shouldn’t do a thing like that, but the poor guy got cold like the rest of us. And so this put me in the 95th Bomb Group then at Ephrata, Washington in the winter of 1942. And then, soon after that, we went on to a place called Rapid City in South Dakota. And it was very, very cold there too. Now my overseas time began about May of 1943 when we went across on the Queen Elizabeth. The Queen Elizabeth was built for luxury service to take 3,000 people, but it wasn’t completed. And so, with the need being greater for military transport of soldiers across the ocean at that time, it was passed into this sort of service. And there were 17,000 of us on there. You can imagine that there were not nearly enough beds to go around. And so we were allowed, once every 48 hours, to have the benefit of this so-called bed. The other times we had to go out on the deck and on the companionways in shifts as best as we could. We finally landed on the ground of Scotland at a place called Gorlick or Greenock; I do not know which it was. We were met there by a reception committee, placed on trains, and taken from Scotland to England. And I cannot remember exactly where we went. I believe our air pilot went to Auchenbury, and I went to an area called Horham, which was near Framingham. That’s the best I can remember.
RM: Jim, you bring a perspective to our oral histories that we do not have yet. Can you tell me which squadron you served in?
JJ: Yes, I was in the Headquarters Squadron. My job in the Headquarters Squadron, because of this special training that I had, put me ahead of a lot of other people, as far as enlisted men were concerned. And so I was able to get five stripes Tech Sergeant ahead of the squadron like that. My particular job was carrying the responsibility to see that every plane had all of the maps. Every navigator required a set of maps so that they would know where they were going to go. In addition to that, I had to mark out on a wall map the targets that we were going to go. It was my additional responsibility to see that the information that we had regarding where German flak guns were. And I had to post this on this map as well so that when we posted the route that the bombers were going to go with the red yarn and an arrow, it would skirt the flak we hoped. And the bombers wouldn’t be touched much by the flak.
RM: That’s very interesting. Do you know how the information would get back to you about where the flak guns…?
JJ: Oh yes. The RAF every day sent some planes, usually they were mosquito bombers, sent them back and forth in the sky like that photographing from a very great height. And that information would be returned to their photo labs, and it would be studied then and brought up to date. And then this information was disseminated and sent out to those of us that required this information. As an aside, these buffins found out that later on the Germans were building a fake Berlin. They were building a fake Berlin, so that when the time came that Berlin was going to be bombed, enough lights would be exposed on this fake Berlin, that it would be attacked and not the real Berlin. These planes went over this day by day by day and saw what was taking place. And when they reckoned that the Germans had this finished, they sent one plane over with a wooden bomb, and a note in German saying, “Well done.”
RM: (Laughter) That’s a great story. I’m curious about getting the maps into the plane. Did you ever have trouble getting the supply of necessary equipment?
JJ: No, the RAF, Royal Air Force, supplied us with all of these things. They were very, very good about seeing that they were delivered to us. I had special training given to me there just outside of London soon after we arrived in a place called High Wicombe. And this was in their map stores.
RM: That’s extremely interesting. About the briefings, I imagine that you had to spend a lot of sleepless nights getting ready for these takeoffs.
JJ: I think I was there for every one of the over 300 missions that we had. The message would come in on Teletype, be given to the Teletype operator. He would come over there to where I was, this in the Headquarters spot. Operations Officer would be there, Intelligence Officer would be there, the Supply Officer, head officer, would not be there, but it was nothing to do with them. Oh, I should take that back, because perhaps it was because it would depend upon the target to which they were going to go as to how much fuel they had to have. I didn’t know about that part. The Teletype message would be brought in to me and in code. I would have to decipher the code by looking in another book and determine what the target was, and then go to the file and get the information regarding the targets and then let the others know.
RM: Gosh, that’s a very important function. I also sense from your answer that you were there for the duration, unlike the pilots and aircrews that were there for 25 or more missions.
JJ: Oh yes, I was there a long, long, time and had my own way of getting a little bit of diversion when I could (chuckle).
RM: I wondered if you ever had a chance to go on R & R, looking after all those missions day after day.
JJ: The kind of R & R I had was an additional schooling. It was Aircraft Recognition School, over on the other side of the island of England near Liverpool. A place called Southport. Oh I had recreation all right, because one day I saw a notice that said that anyone who wants to play tennis, come in and we’ll tell you where to go. And I went in and this man said, “An Englishman has a grass tennis court over here, and he says we can come and play. If you want to go, you got a bicycle I assume.” I said, “Oh yes.” He said, “Get on your bicycle, ride the six miles over there to a tiny, tiny village called Broome, and you can play tennis. Take along some other fellas.” He did not know, nor did I, nor did anyone, that about 18 months later on, a tiny village through which I had to go to get there – the name of the tiny village was Eye – that place, Eye, would be declared off limits to all of us soldiers who were white, because it was reserved for the blacks. Just a mile and a half to two miles away on the other side was a black, completely black engineering unit, and they were building another aerodrome. I could go through there on a bicycle. I was not allowed to stop. So I went over there and played tennis, and after about six months, to my great and wonderful surprise, I discover an English girl. A charming English girl and she and I had great times together. She was wonderful at making picnic lunches for us. We would go out for cycle rides. And it was also with her that we had a wonderful picnic one time on the way to the coast. Horham was about 30 miles inland from the North Sea Coast, and the man who was to be my father-in-law, at this time had bought a property on the North Sea Coast. This place in which they were living at the time was a farmhouse. The farmer would never sell it. He said this house must go with the farm. And so my father-in-law went to the east coast and bought this house called “Lilliput” in a tiny village housing to this day no more than 300 people. And it was called “Walderswick.” I lived there for 20 years in that place.
RM: That’s a wonderful story. So you must have gone on with your relationship with the daughter?
JJ: Oh, this interests you, does it? (Laughing) Her father was very, very opposed to this – very opposed. Since that time, I’ve had a couple of reasons as to why he might have opposed that. He had a son, and this son had a wonderful, wonderful brain and disposition. Would you know what I mean when I say a public school? What do you think I mean?
RM: I think it means a school that’s sponsored by public funding.
JJ: No, no, no. That’s why I asked you if you knew. In England, a public school means fee-paying school. It’s not public at all. No. We know now what we mean when we talk about public school. A great public school was called Greshans. This was in Norfolk, the county north of Suffolk where we were. And this son was sent to Greshans and from finishing this school up to about age 18, he then went to Cambridge. About this time, hostilities in Europe were developing, and this young man called George was sent to Sandhurst. Would you know what Sandhurst is? No one here knows what Sandhurst is? People know what West Point is. West Point is a great army military academy in this country. Sandhurst is a great military academy in England. And so this young man was sent to Sandhurst. He had a wonderful disposition. England is noted for its willingness, its ability to put up with anybody or anything that is wild and eccentric and unusual. They put up with a man called Alan Turing who was the great mathematician at Cambridge University. Alan Turing was the one who cracked Enigma, the great, great code machine that the Germans were using. They thought that this was so secret, Enigma, that no one could break it. But Alan Turing, the great mathematician from Cambridge University who was a bit wild himself, and would play with his toy trains every night, and telephone his mummy every night as well, he succeeded in breaking it. The English authorities realized how important this was. If they were going to use it to its greatest advantage, they dare not overuse it. It is said that the English knew that Coventry was going to be smashed to smithereens because they had interpreted the secret message. And Churchill knew this also, but that he weighed up the pros and cons of this and said, “If we use this and let the Germans find out that we know about this, we are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.” They did not use it. Coventry was bombed mercilessly, terribly bombed. So that’s one example. Now the other example I can give you about the eccentricity is that of a brilliant English General called Orde C. Wingate. The man who eventually became my brother-in-law, whom I never met, was Wingate’s ADC, and on the same plane with him that happened to be an American B-25 when they were flying over Burma in 1944. And the plane blew up in mid air. Because it was an American plane with an American crew with three English newspaper correspondents on it, and they all came down in a heap. They would gather up together all of the remains and, as I said, because they were primarily an American group, all buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
RM: Jim that’s just an incredible story. Thank you very much for sharing that with us. You’ve brought a perspective regarding the part of Intelligence that I don’t think we have in our archives. I wish we could go on today. I wonder if, in closing, you could tell us about your last days with the 95th. And did you stay in England at the end of the war.
JJ: I had enough points that I could get out of the service right away, because I’d been in such a long time. I could not wait to get out. We were offered the opportunity of hanging around in England until we could go back in a rather relaxed, leisurely fashion. Or, we could go back again on the Queen Elizabeth and have such a nightmare effect of that. I wish I had time to tell you about one of the most amazing things about a fella who somehow left that place with $100,000, which he had accumulated during this time. He hired a bodyguard to guard him on the way back on the Queen Elizabeth, not to keep anyone away from him from stealing the money, but to keep him from gambling. But that’s another story (laughter).
RM: So did you return to the United States?
JJ: Yes, this lovely English girl and I agreed, in spite of her father, that if she would come to California, if we felt the same way, we would give it a few more months and be married, which we did. I waited three years for her to come. We were married 47 years. Poor dear began to develop osteoporosis, which is a bone disease. She fell 25 times the last 18 months and either could not or would not get up and walk or try. The death certificate said bronchial pneumonia. But before all of that happened, we were in California six years where I taught school. We were in Oregon four years where I taught school. We went back to England in 1958 and continued to live there. My wife died eight years ago. Let’s see, we are now on Saturday, the 16th of September here in Orlando. She died eight years ago. I could see no point in going on living in England where I had to pay two or three times the price of petrol, or gasoline that we pay here. And so I thought I might as well go back and live in Florida. So, for two years now I’ve been living in Florida.
RM: Well, welcome home, and thank you very much for coming in today and giving us a brief oral history and a continued additional perspective to our study.
JJ: My pleasure.
RM: On behalf of the Legacy Committee, we really honor your contributions.