INTERVIEW WITH WWII GLIDER PILOT RON JOHNSON
Operation Market Garden was the daring Allied airborne attempt to liberate the Netherlands, cross the River Rhine and advance into Germany. An extremely ambitious plan, the operation infamously failed to achieve its objectives in September 1944, with German armoured forces inflicting heavy casualties on lightly armed Allied troops.
Defined by the determination of the beleaguered airborne forces, Market Garden was characterised by huge numbers of soldiers being transported by air in both powered aircraft and gliders. The latter were extremely vulnerable aircraft, piloted by thousands of specially trained pilots. One of those unique airmen was Lieutenant Ron Johnson, a 23-year-old British officer from E Squadron, Glider Pilot Regiment.
Now 100 years old, Johnson still has vivid memories of fighting to liberate the Netherlands. He recalls flying over the North Sea among hundreds of aircraft, fighting in terrible conditions near Arnhem, successfully escaping from Germany as a POW and finally celebrating VE Day in London. Johnson is living proof of the wartime generation’s courage and his story reflects his regiment’s optimistic motto – “Nothing is Impossible”.
“A terrible mess”
Born in October 1921, Johnson grew up in the 1930s with an unsettling awareness that war was on the horizon: “When I was 17 the Oxford Union debated whether the young men of Britain would fight for ‘King and Country’. The Union concluded that they would not fight but a number of us thought: ‘If Hitler really believes we won’t fight then we’re going to be in a terrible mess.’ A lot of us then joined the Territorial Army for that reason.”
Johnson volunteered as a reservist and initially served in the Essex Regiment during the early years of WWII. “I was called up three days before the war started,” he says. “At that stage I didn’t have a uniform, boots, rifle or anything – I was just in my plain clothes. When I was with the Essex Regiment they put us on [anti-aircraft] searchlights. There was some activity when I fired a machine gun at low-flying aircraft and things like that but I didn’t really see combat.”
Johnson wanted to join the RAF but when he became an officer in September 1943 his priorities were diverted. “As soon as I was commissioned they asked for volunteers for the Glider Pilot Regiment,” he says. “Because I’d passed the RAF selection board I initially didn’t want to do it and waited to go in the air force.
