Thomas Barr Johnston

Thomas Barr Johnston was born on 19 July 1921 in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, the son of Peter and Elizabeth Johnston, and educated at Bellshill Academy before working in the laboratory of the local steelworks. He volunteered for the Royal Air Force soon after the outbreak of war and trained as a bomb aimer in Canada, returning to Britain in 1942 and joining No. 207 Squadron that July, where he flew his first operation against Duisburg on 21 July. He soon became the regular bomb aimer to pilot Pilot Officer Warner “Bill” Ottley, and when Ottley’s crew was posted to the newly formed No. 617 Squadron in the spring of 1943, Johnston went with them. On the night of 16/17 May 1943, now a Flight Sergeant, he flew as bomb aimer aboard Lancaster ED910, coded AJ-C, in the third (reserve) wave of Operation Chastise, the attack on the German dams. In the early hours of 17 May the aircraft was caught in searchlights and hit by intense flak near Hamm and crashed; only the rear gunner, Fred Tees, survived, while Johnston and the rest of the crew were killed. He was twenty-one. Initially buried by the Germans at Hamm, he was reinterred after the war in Reichswald Forest War Cemetery, Germany.