Born in 1929
© IWM (CH 10740) John Smythe
John ‘Johnny’ Smythe was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. When war came in 1939, Johnny served with the Sierra Leone Defence Corps before volunteering to serve his king and country in the RAF. In 1940 he travelled from his home in Freetown to the Scottish town of Greenock where he undertook training in the RAF. In 1941 Johnny went on his first mission. After nearly eighteen months of working as a navigator, Johnny, who had first become a sergeant, found himself promoted to flying officer. He was one of four out of ninety who was selected, and this made him immensely proud:
Standing in front of the noticeboard, I still refused to believe what I saw and read. An officer of the RAF! From that moment my life was completely changed. I no longer ate with the other ranks and I socialised only in the officers’ mess. In effect, I was no longer one of the boys, although I often went to town with some of the airmen for a beer. Airmen had to salute me all the time. What made me so uncomfortable as an officer was not that I was the only black man to be promoted to that rank, but I was the only black man in the entire camp.
Johnny acknowledged that the selection of his crew was extremely important, because they had to work as a team: ‘We were brothers in trouble, comrades in arms, and we needed to stick together and understand each other. We were posted to a squadron of the new Lancaster bombers; a plane superior to the Stirling.’ The crew’s first mission was uneventful, but they dreaded their second: ‘Before setting out, I had my Bible in my jacket pocket and butterflies in my stomach. Every day we counted the number of planes that returned, and the thought of not returning to base haunted us. We went – and returned unscathed. During these first few weeks of operations, we averaged about three bombing missions per week.’
On his twenty-seventh mission, on the night of 18 November 1943, Johnny’s luck ran out. He was the navigator aboard a Short Stirling III heavy bomber of No 623 Squadron, one of 395 aircraft dispatched to attack the German city of Mannheim. The aircraft was crippled by anti-aircraft fire, and the crew was forced to parachute from the stricken aircraft. Johnny hid in a barn but German soldiers opened fire, spraying the barn with bullets. Johnny surrendered but when they saw him the Germans couldn’t believe their eyes. They were shocked to see a black man who was also an officer. They could not reconcile this with the racist Nazi propaganda they had been indoctrinated with.
For the next eighteen months Johnny was a prisoner of the Nazis in Stalag Luft 1, a camp for 9,000 Allied airmen in Barth, Germany, a small town on the Baltic Sea. Stalag 1 had opened as a camp for British officers in 1942. American airmen began to arrive in early in 1943. At the camp, Johnny continued to shock the Germans. Prison guards were dumb-struck when they saw him in an RAF officer’s uniform but they did not treat him differently from the white prisoners. Johnny kept himself busy in the camp, and enthusiastically joined the escape committee. He helped other prisoners to escape, but he couldn’t break out himself: ‘I don’t think a six-foot-five black man would’ve got very far.’ Then one day, in May 1945, ‘we woke up and, to our utter amazement and disbelief, there was not a single German guard in sight. They had all abandoned their posts and fled. A few days later the camp was liberated by the advancing Soviet Army. A Soviet Army officer embraced him and gave him vodka.
This information is from Stephen Bourne's books Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the Home Front 1939-45 (The History Press, 2010) , The Motherland Calls: Britain's Black Servicemen and Women 1939-45 (The History Press, 2012) and War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939-48 (Jacaranda Books, 2018).
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