Bolts from the Blue

From Cold War Warrior to Chief of the Air Staff

Richard Johns

• Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
• Print ISBN: 9781911621096
• eBook ISBN: 9781911621768
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns was commissioned at the RAF College Cranwell in 1959 after completing flying training on Piston Provost and Meteor aircraft. Following nine years service as an operational fast-jet pilot flying Javelins and Hunters he became a qualified flying instructor during which time he taught The Prince of Wales to wings standard. Returning to the front line he commanded a Harrier squadron and later the Harrier Force in Germany. A succession of national and NATO senior posts followed culminating in his appointment as Chief of the Air Staff and ADC to the Queen. On retirement in April 2000, he became Constable and Governor of Windsor Castle. A past chairman of the Board of Trustees of the RAF Museum, he is now president of the RAF Historical Society. His illustrious career gave him the privilege of a rare, if not singular, perspective of the RAF, its sister services and national defence matters, witnessing a steady decline in the combat power of the UK’s armed forces as financial management took precedence over identifying strategic priorities and maintaining the vital skill-sets of service personnel. His views are forensic and forthright, balanced and thought-provoking and this autobiography should be essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Allied air power over the last fifty years and its contribution to operations in the Middle East and the Balkans.

CHAPTER 1

EARLY YEARS

My flying career nearly came to an early and spectacular ending. Shortly after my first solo in a Tiger Moth, aged 17 and a few days, my instructor (a veteran of the Royal Flying Corps) decided to introduce me to aerobatics. After some loops and barrel rolls he inverted the aircraft to demonstrate the effect of negative G in straight and level flight. As my weight was taken up by the seat harness I felt something rip and realised that the buckle had sheared from the lap strap. This left me hanging on to the cockpit coaming with my hands and with my feet wedged under the instrument panel.

The instructor interpreted my yells down the Gosport tube, the means of communication between the front and back cockpit where I was positioned, as cries of sheer delight. When the aircraft was turned the right way up I was able to explain my discomfort which reflected the lack of a parachute and our close proximity to the mud in Langstone Harbour. We returned to Portsmouth Airport, now an industrial estate, landed and the instructor inspected my harness. “Not a word to anyone sonny,” he said. Happily, this early scrape did not dim my ambition to join the Royal Air Force.

My mother, sometimes prone to exaggeration, claimed this aspiration stemmed from observation of the Battle of Britain from Dene Park just south of Horsham where I was born. Only one year old at the time of that great battle, such precociousness can be safely denied. However, four years later now living in Walmer just south of Deal in Kent I can vividly remember Doodlebugs (V-1 flying bombs) overflying towards London, some of which were shot down or crashed nearby with a deafening explosion. My mother and I sheltered under the kitchen table as there was no bomb shelter in the garden. I retain a vivid impression of ships burning in the Channel and recall the sky darkened by a vast armada of aircraft, far too many to count. In later years I learnt that these aircraft and gliders were on their way to Arnhem as the first airborne assault of Operation Market Garden. And in Deal I first encountered Americans cruising around in their DUKWs, an amphibious assault vehicle, presumably as part of the D-Day deception plan. A friendly wave was often rewarded with a shower of ‘candy’.

When I was born in July 1939 my father was at sea as captain, Royal Marines, on board HMS Cumberland, a County-class heavy cruiser. He endured a long and arduous commission which included service in the South Atlantic, the Mediterranean and on Arctic convoys including the disastrous PQ17 which suffered the most grievous losses – 24 out of 35 merchant ships were sunk after the Admiralty ordered the convoy to scatter. The quality of father’s service was recognised by the award of the MBE (Military Division). On returning to England in autumn 1943 he was posted to the Royal Marines Barracks at Deal where my sister was to be born and where we lived together as a family for the first time. But not for long, as in late 1944 father was posted as second-in-command of a Royal Marines infantry battalion serving in north-west Europe where he remained until the end of the war.

A short spell at Lympstone, now the RM Commando Training Centre, followed before we moved to Portsmouth in January 1947 where my education continued at Boundary Oak Prep School, an establishment not then noted for pastoral care. Beatings were run of the mill, boxing was mandatory and many of the masters were, with the benefit of hindsight, psychologically disturbed – possibly as a consequence of wartime service and what we now know as post-traumatic stress. I survived and left with a sound grounding in the ‘three Rs’ and a reputation as a good boxer having won my weight in inter-school competitions. Boxing taught me an early and valuable lesson. Rather fancying myself with my fists, I intervened in a fight when I saw a bigger boy bullying a friend. For my pains I in turn got beaten up. From this I deduced that electing to punch above your weight was not necessarily a good idea when given choice – a lesson of contemporary strategic and military relevance.

My parents planned for me to go on to Christ’s Hospital at Horsham. But in 1951 father was posted to Malaya as second-in-command of 40 Commando, Royal Marines. He took command a year later and was away for the best part of three years. Father decided I should stay at home and I was entered for Portsmouth Grammar School through common entrance examination. I joined PGS in the summer term of 1953 and to my surprise entered the A-stream which was full of academically gifted boys. Consequently I took my O levels shortly before my 15th birthday and my A levels two years later.

By contemporary standards my childhood was amazingly free and unrestricted, possibly because my father, a stern disciplinarian and very tough man, was away for much of the time leaving me in the care of my mother. She had trained as a nurse at St George’s Hospital then beside Hyde Park Corner and now the Lansdowne Hotel. She was an unconventional woman, entirely self-reliant with no interest in material things. She happily existed on the bare necessities of life which were selected purely on their utility. On the other hand she was a voracious reader who in the 90 years of her life accumulated an amazing fund of general knowledge. Well into her seventies she could still demolish The Telegraph and Times crossword puzzles before lunch and she was the meanest of Scrabble players. Kind to a fault she nevertheless expected me to look after myself as indeed did my father. Thus from an early age a bicycle gave me the freedom to roam far and wide with my mother rightly assuming I would come home when hungry. As a schoolboy I was a keen supporter of Portsmouth Football Club when crowds of 40,000 were the norm at Fratton Park as Pompey ruled the roost in the First Division. Going to matches alone I cannot remember ever being frightened or experiencing crowd trouble. As I grew older I started to transfer my sporting allegiances to rugby and cricket, interests that survive to this day. But I still follow the fortunes and misfortunes of Portsmouth FC as an ingrained habit, and a fat lot of good that’s done them.

I enjoyed my three and a half years at PGS. The quality of teaching was superb and discipline maintained with firmness and fairness by masters who dominated by strength of personality rather than random and underserved beatings which I still associate with my prep school days. PGS was unashamedly meritocratic and educated boys from a wide mix of family backgrounds which generated an early and sympathetic social awareness to the benefit of all. Grammar schools were a great engine of social mobility – a reality of life ignored by the patrician socialists who helped to do away with them. My academic progress was unspectacular with cricket and rugby the principal focus of my energy, while girls from Portsmouth High School became something of a distraction. But I made some memorable friendships, among them Rudyard Penley. He entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst about the same time as I joined the RAF and was the first Sandhurst cadet to be commissioned directly into the Parachute Regiment. Sadly he was killed a few years later while participating in a parachute jumping competition.

Also at PGS the teaching of an outstanding master, Ted Washington, developed my passion for history which over the years has concentrated mostly on military aspects with a special interest in the Georgian Navy as a result of many visits to HMS Victory and an early taste for the novels of C S Forrester. Years later my interest was reinvigorated by a naval friend who introduced me to the fascinating and exquisite tales fashioned by Patrick O’Brian. However, as a schoolboy I was also addicted to Biggles books by W E Johns, sadly no relation, which probably explains my early interest in aviation. But I can also well recall my excitement at seeing for the first time a jet aeroplane flying at high speed and low level. I must have been about 12 at the time. The aircraft was a Supermarine Attacker of the Fleet Air Arm displaying at the RNAS Lee-on-Solent.

After joining the Combined Cadet Force at PGS – scouting offered the only escape – I transferred to the RAF section and eventually won a flying scholarship. This involved 30 hours flying, dual and solo, to achieve a Private Pilot’s Licence. I started on 1st August 1956, three days after my 17th birthday, and finished the course by the end of the month. At the same time I received the good news that I had passed my A levels, which together with a clutch of O levels, gained me exemption from the Civil Service Commission Navy, Army and Air Force Entry examination. My ambition to join the RAF, undimmed by early proximity to accident statistics, was now firm and I started the process of application with medical and flying aptitude tests at RAF Hornchurch and selection testing for a cadetship at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell.

My father’s friends could not understand why I did not want to follow him into the Royal Marines and fly with the Fleet Air Arm. For my part, badly bitten by the flying bug, it seemed to me that the service whose whole raison d’être centred on flying was the best place for a career in military aviation. Apart from condemnation as a black sheep by father’s pals, I have to admit that my childhood influence on his career was wholly negative. While at Deal in 1944 my parents took me to tea with his commanding officer and wife who lived in a Georgian house with a long, gently sloping lawn. For amusement, and out of adult sight, I played with a heavy garden roller. Unfortunately, with gravity proving the stronger, I lost control of the roller which accelerated down the lawn to smash into smithereens an ancestral statue much loved by the colonel.

Two years later at Lympstone my parents left me in the car while they enjoyed drinks in the mess after a Sunday church parade. Like the lawn at Deal, the car park had a distinctive slope such that when I released the hand-brake – with nothing better to do – gravity again took control propelling the car backwards to achieve sufficient momentum for an effective and square-on collision with another vehicle. Both were prominently and undeniably damaged. The other car was owned by my father’s latest CO.

In my last year at home father decided to teach me poker. At first Sunday evenings passed pleasantly enough as we played for matchsticks until eventually I accepted his suggestion that we moved on to real money. Three weeks later I was in debt to the tune of two month’s pocket money and called quits. Father’s comment was uncompromising. “You will never be any good at cards and you are a hopeless bluffer. My strongest advice to you is never gamble at cards.” I accepted his counsel and recouped my losses in my final Easter holiday with part-time employment as the stoker on Southsea miniature railway. It didn’t take long for my hands to blister from shovelling coal and I sought advice from the driver, a retired Welsh coal miner. “Go behind that bush,” he said “and pee on your hands. That will toughen them up.” And it did.

In early December 1956 a letter arrived from the Air Ministry requiring me to report to the Royal Air Force College Cranwell on 9th January 1957 for enlistment, this subject to my parent or guardian’s consent as I was just under the 17½ entry age limit to the college. My father signed with alacrity and took me to Moss Bros on The Hard outside Portsmouth dockyard where he bought me a suit, an overcoat and a pair of black shoes. “That’s the last you get out of me,” he said “you are now on your own.” He meant it as he stayed true to his word.

Some more words on my family background. My mother was the second daughter of a rich New Zealander who came to England for medical reasons just before World War I. He decided to stay and took up farming only to become a casualty of the economic crash in 1929; he was declared bankrupt in 1931. Thereafter he lived in a small terraced house in Horsham where my mother and I spent the first three years of my life. I remember my grandparents with great affection which probably points to the fact that I was a spoiled brat. The circumstances of my mother’s childhood also probably explains the fierce streak of independence which remained with her to the end of her life. Shortly before her death in hospital suffering from emphysema, she was asked if she had any allergies. “Yes,” replied mother “I am allergic to men with beards.” These were her last recorded words.

My father came from a less privileged background and a long line of Royal Navy seamen. He told me that one of his forebears had served on HMS Victory at Trafalgar. It is a fact that a ‘Johns’ was on the nominal roll of the crew in October 1805, but I have never verified the truth of this ancestral boast. His own father joined the Royal Navy as a boy seaman in 1898, retired as a chief yeoman of signals in 1922 and died shortly after of throat cancer. During World War I he was at sea throughout the conflict serving for the most part on the battleship HMS Hibernia. He was mentioned in despatches ‘in recognition of distinguished services during the war’. His death left my father as the eldest of three children with my grandmother, from memory a rather unpleasant and domineering person, looking to him as the principal breadwinner for the family. Father was academically gifted with a particular bent for mathematics and the sciences as demonstrated by his distinguished examination achievements at the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe where he was considered a strong candidate for a university scholarship. However, grandmother insisted that he left school at 17 to take up employment as a bank clerk. This he tolerated for six months before enlisting in the Royal Marines without telling his mother. Subsequently my father paid her a portion of his income until she died in 1960.

After recruit training father served in HMS Suffolk on the Far East Station for two years before he was awarded a King’s Commission as a probationary second lieutenant. He passed out top of his training batch and was presented with a ceremonial sword for meritorious examinations by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Far more than I was to achieve. He excelled at rifle shooting and, after World War II, captained the Royal Marines team and represented England at international events.

Following service with 40 Commando in Malaya and the Canal Zone he returned home as second-in-command of the Royal Marines barracks at Eastney in Portsmouth where we lived together for three years before I joined the RAF. In April 1957 he was told that he would be prematurely retired as a consequence of manpower reductions required by the Sandys Defence Review. Of his contemporaries he alone had not attended Staff College. He left the RM in August that year, two months before the announcement of a ‘golden bowler’ scheme which would have made a significant difference to his financial wellbeing in the later years of his life. Short-changing service people who have given long and distinguished service to their country in war is by no means a new phenomenon.

Father never spoke about his wartime experiences and the only time he showed emotion was during a TV programme on the war at sea which explained the significance and dangers of Arctic convoys. As the story of PQ17 was told he spat out one word: “Shameful”. He died in 1977. His obituary in the Globe and Laurel, the journal of the Royal Marines, concluded:

“At the end of the day the real test of a man’s worth is his behaviour in adverse circumstances. When the going got rough it was a wonderful thing to have competent, tough, and utterly reliable Johnno at one’s side.”

I deeply regret not having learnt more about my father in his lifetime.

CHAPTER 2

CRANWELL

The aim of the RAF College was to train the future permanent officer cadre of the service. Some 300 flight cadets were resident for a course lasting three years with pilots going through basic and advanced flying training so that, on graduation and commissioning, they went straight to operational conversion units. Navigator flight cadet training followed a similar pattern while ground branch cadets (administrative and supply) completed their own specialist courses.

The first two terms at Cranwell were tough. The new intake was accommodated in the South Brick Lines (now demolished) – five new cadets with a mentor from the entry above. The daily routine was focused on drill (foot drill for the first term), kit cleaning and preparation, and academics which provided some welcome relief from other pressures deliberately applied to test resolve and commitment. In the second term, having passed off the square in foot drill, arms drill was introduced. However, before then our .303 Lee Enfield rifles, personally issued and retained for 2½ years, had to be burnished. Woodwork was bulled (spit and polished) with a mixture of ox blood and black shoe polish to the necessary high-gloss mahogany-coloured finish. On parade the first arms drill movement taught was ground arms which removed the bull from one side of the weapon to be replaced that evening with a further application of boot polish. I think my entry (No.76) was the last to endure this absurdity which was stopped on order from the Air Ministry but not before arms drill was mastered and the entry was judged fit to parade with the rest of the college.

Elsewhere a number of other hurdles were encountered. The first visit to the swimming pool, constructed within a World War I edifice, involved climbing into the rafters and jumping into the deep end; no-one asked if you could swim and some couldn’t. First term boxing against a flight cadet of approximate weight and height from another squadron was put on as after-dinner entertainment for the rest of the college. Some flying careers were inevitably lost to injuries incurred during the two-round slugging contest. Soon afterwards the junior entry was welcomed by the senior entries at a guest night after which the juniors were obliged to entertain their seniors in the college lecture hall. Failure to provide adequate amusement earned a forfeit of fiendish ingenuity or physical discomfort. Walking 14 miles in the dead of night to recover drill boots from the satellite airfield at RAF Barkston Heath – placed there without the knowledge of the owner – in time for the morning drill parade was no joke.

The final hurdle at the end of the second term was survival camp held in the Hartz Mountains in Germany. Preliminary exercises concentrated on orientation and map reading with ever-increasing long marches in sections of a dozen or so to build up stamina and to test leadership. All of this was the preparation phase for a five-day escape-and-evasion exercise in three-man teams. Enemy forces were the German border guards, German customs police and British soldiers. We moved only at night from rendezvous (RV) to RV for further briefing on our ‘escape route’. If captured, the evaders were returned to their starting point to start all over again. Rations (emergency Mk 5 packs) sufficient for three days marching were provided which assumed that some ingredients could be ‘brewed up’. But as lighting fires in a densely forested region was forbidden, the entry returned home fit and certainly the leaner for a spot of leave before the start of the third term.

While the parade ground and academic subjects split between science and the humanities filled at least half the working day, sport of all disciplines, ranging from traditional activities – rugby, football, cricket etc – to the notso-common individual events within athletics and pentathlon, filled any spare time. With some 300 extremely fit young men, the majority medically fit for flying duties, it was not surprising that there was a wealth of sporting talent in the college. Cranwell more than held its own against...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 Early Years
• CHAPTER 2 Cranwell
• CHAPTER 3 Flying Training
• CHAPTER 4 Night Fighting
• CHAPTER 5 ADC
• CHAPTER 6 Hunters and Aden
• CHAPTER 7 Domesticity
• CHAPTER 8 Central Flying School and Cranwell
• CHAPTER 9 Golden Eagle
• CHAPTER 10 Staff College to Cyprus
• CHAPTER 11 The Harrier
• CHAPTER 12 3(F) Squadron
• CHAPTER 13 Royal Events
• CHAPTER 14 Ministry of Defence
• CHAPTER 15 RAF Gütersloh
• CHAPTER 16 Interlude
• CHAPTER 17 Back to Germany
• CHAPTER 18 To War with the Army
• CHAPTER 19 High Wycombe
• CHAPTER 20 Gulf War I
• CHAPTER 21 On the Move
• CHAPTER 22 Strike Command
• CHAPTER 23 Allied Forces North-West Europe
• CHAPTER 24 Recollections and Reflections
• CHAPTER 25 Attitudes and Prejudices
• CHAPTER 26 Chief of the Air Staff
• CHAPTER 27 Operations
• CHAPTER 28 RAF Strategic Plan
• CHAPTER 29 Flying Visits
• CHAPTER 30 Departure
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX 1 Eyeballing Ratko
• ABBREVIATIONS
• Plate Section