History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: Flying High with Johnny Smythe

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

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You're about to listen to brand new History's Secret Heroes.

Episodes will be released on Mondays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK and can't wait, you can hear the full series right now, before anyone else, first on BBC Sounds.

Freetown, Sierra Leone, summer 1966.

In the back bedroom of an elegant bungalow, Johnny Smythe was taking a nap.

We'd have the doors to the front of the house open and the doors to the veranda open so there'd be a cool breeze going through the house.

And he'd be in his room, peacefully sleeping.

Johnny's son, Eddie, was eight years old.

He was playing with his brother.

My mum would call one of us to wake him up.

Today was Eddie's turn.

And I hated...

to be asked.

I would walk down the corridor and turn right into the bedroom.

On his back, in a queen-sized bed, Johnny Smythe was stretched out, all six foot four of him in his underwear.

His legs would be crossed at the ankles, and I could see his chest and his stomach moving up and down, and the very deep breathing.

And I would almost whisper, Dad, and there'd be no reaction.

And I'd go a little bit closer and perhaps a little bit louder, Dad.

Still, no reaction.

reaction.

Eddie's heart was pounding.

He was filled with dread.

A bit closer and a little bit louder again, dad.

And then there'd be this almighty scream.

His muscles contracted and he'd lift vertically off the bed and he'd end up sitting up, eyes red, staring around.

And slowly the focus would come into his eyes.

And he'd sort of look at me and he'd make this tutting sound and lie back down.

It was really scary as a child to see that.

But all my mum would ever say was, it's the war.

And that was the only explanation we ever had.

When Johnny Smythe had returned from the Second World War, he'd thrown out his uniform and torn up his logbook.

He never spoke to his family about his experiences.

As a teenager, Eddie loved war films and magazines.

Yet his father would say nothing.

At last, just one year before he died, Johnny Smythe finally began to share his stories with his son.

He explained how and why he left West Africa to fight for the British.

Johnny Smythe had been one of the first black airmen in the Royal Air Force.

Though there were legal and social barriers to achievement for servicemen who were not white, he rose past them to become one of the leading airmen of his time.

Suddenly, the curtains were pulled back, and I could see it very, very clearly.

My mind immediately went back to him waking up.

It never occurred to me for one moment that perhaps deep down inside, he might have been suffering.

I'm Helena Bonankarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Flying High with Johnny Smythe

The hostilities of World War II were never confined to Europe.

By the time Germany invaded Poland in 1939, China and Japan had already been at war for two years.

After France fell to the Nazi invaders early in the summer of 1940, French colonies in Africa came under threat.

British colonies were already considered to be in the firing line.

The Second World War is a war of empires.

Ashley Jackson is Professor of Imperial and Military History at King's College London.

Nazi Germany wants empire, Italy wants empire, Japan wants empire.

In order to get those empires, they need to knock out the existing ones.

The dominions of the British Empire followed Britain to declare war on Germany.

With colonial troops ultimately commanded from London, decisions were taken there which would affect nearly half a billion imperial subjects.

In every single British colony, even the most distant outpost, the territories were put on a war footing.

Britain is now at war, the Empire is at war, the mother country, in adverted commons, is at war, and the population needs to understand this and get behind this imperial war effort in all sorts of disparate regions of the globe.

In British Sierra Leone, as it was then, Johnny Smythe walked slowly to the office where he worked in a clerical role.

During the First World War, Freetown's Harbour had been a stronghold for Britain's Atlantic fleet.

Smythe looked out across the water and remembered his parents saying how busy it had been in those years.

Now it was quiet.

But Smythe knew the world was about to change.

People in West Africa would have been very much aware, for instance, of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia a few years before the war, would have been aware of broadcast debates about fascism and communism, and the British government, through its local governments in Sierra Leone, in Freetown, coming out of Accra, coming out of Lagos, they're going to have been very, very good at producing newspaper articles, radio broadcasts that really try and highlight the threat.

As Smythe walked, he saw new propaganda posters had gone up showing how harvesting cocoa beans and ground nuts would help the war effort.

Yet digging for victory didn't interest Smythe.

Instead, the recruitment posters for the local Defence Force caught his eye.

Smythe signed up to fight for the British Empire.

He was Creo, part of a community which was not indigenous to Sierra Leone, but had been moved there after the end of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Creos are actually descendants of freed slaves and they'd come from different countries.

You know, the Nigerians weren't sent back to Nigeria, the Ghanaians weren't sent back to Ghana, etc.

So they had to come together, they had to learn a new language and basically develop a new culture and they learned to speak Creo.

The great majority of Creo people were Christian.

Many had a harmonious relationship with the British colonial administration.

And in fact, if you ever visited Sierra Leone, you could easily spot a Creo.

They dressed like the Victorians.

You know, they always wore their suits and their hats, etc.

And because of the way they dressed, because of the way they spoke, they were known within the country as the British Blacks.

They saw Britain as the mother country.

So when the call came for assistance, the Creoles were very, very quick to volunteer.

After signing up for the Sierra Leone Defence Corps, Smythe quickly rose to the rank of sergeant.

He was very tall, very fit, very good looking.

He was very charismatic.

Smythe had marvelled at Royal Air Force planes in the skies over Freetown.

He felt drawn to that service.

The Creos in Sierra Leone had good relationships with the British locally, yet racial prejudice persisted in the command of the British Empire's armed forces.

At the beginning of the war, in Britain itself, the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force all enforced an official colour bar, restricting service to those described as being of pure European descent.

Authorities are always trying to square an unsquarable circle of saying that this is not a racial structure, but it clearly is.

Various reasons were given for the exclusion of non-white people from service.

Unit cohesion, the difficulty of integration, language problems.

But as soon as the war began, many in Britain agreed this situation was not sustainable.

You have early in the war questions raised in Parliament, people saying, look, you can't have the colour bar.

You need to be recruiting from a wide range across the empire.

In October 1939, the British government lifted the colour bar and decreed that any colonial British subjects in Britain, even if not of European descent, could be recruited into the armed forces and considered for emergency commissions, meaning they could serve as officers, though only for the duration of the war.

In terms of Africa, we're looking at between 400 and 500,000 Africans in uniform.

So the recruitment of colonial people across the empire is enormously significant and drives the effects of being part of a global war deep into even the most remote communities.

Even with the colour bar lifted, Smythe and others like him faced considerable obstacles.

The British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force all found ways to keep enforcing the colour bar informally.

Though the RAF moved more quickly than the other services to incorporate non-European officers into its ranks, it was slow to expand that drive to Africa.

They only recruited from the white colonies, places like Australia and Canada and New Zealand.

And under pressure, they started recruiting from the Caribbean.

And very lastly, they recruited from Africa.

And even though there were thousands and thousands of men applying to join from Africa, only sixty were actually recruited.

Smythe was drawn to the glamour of the Royal Air Force, and the recruiters could not ignore the fact that he was an exceptionally qualified candidate, physically and intellectually.

Only five men from Sierra Leone were initially selected, all from the Creo community.

Johnny Smythe was one of them.

November 1941, the Firth of Clyde, Scotland.

A ship prepared to land.

Smythe and his four compatriots had been on board for days.

They were young.

It was an adventure.

It was glamorous.

But as he walked down the ramp at Greenock Harbour, Smythe got his first shock.

He was absolutely frozen.

I mean, he'd never worn a coat or a woollen jumper before because he'd never needed to.

And this was Scotland in the winter.

The few people who were around in the streets at that time were all cheering and clapping because here were these men coming to help fight in the war.

For their training, the Sierra Leoneans went south to London.

There, they learned to march and parade on Lord's cricket ground.

They studied mathematics, geography, aviation law, aircraft recognition and signalling.

Smythe excelled in every field and was selected to fly.

And my father...

he would fly tiger moths and was actually flying solo.

After just a few training flights though, the RAF would send Smythe in an unexpected and dangerous direction.

At that particular time, the bombing accuracy of the RAF was very, very poor.

One bomb out of every bomb load dropped fell within five miles of the target.

So targets weren't being destroyed.

They would send dozens of planes to bomb a factory and hope that a few bombs would hit it.

Every bombing crew needed a navigator.

It was an extremely perilous job that required complex skills.

Johnny Smythe was a highly qualified candidate.

As Smythe walked onto the runway with his new team, he felt a mixture of excitement and nerves.

He told himself it was only a training flight.

They only flew at night, because the RAF bombed at night.

They had to navigate at night.

and they would be given locations to find.

And it was very dangerous.

And these men were young.

You know, some of them were still teenagers, and some of them in their early 20s.

A lot of responsibility on these young shoulders.

Smythe sat at the navigation table of the Sterling bomber.

He spread out his charts, flicked on his lamp, and adjusted his flying helmet.

Finally, he tapped his pocket to check his Bible was there.

Behind Smythe were the flight engineer and radio operator.

Ahead, the two pilots and the three gunners, one at the nose.

They taxied, took off, and flew north towards Scotland.

Smythe had to plot the course with incredible accuracy.

With no landmarks visible, the stress was overwhelming.

These planes were unpressurized, they were very cold.

Above 15,000 feet, you needed oxygen.

They had to deal with ice and snow and fog and there were mishaps.

Some people never found the target.

If Smythe failed, his whole crew could be left adrift with limited fuel.

But my father's plane hit all the waypoints and they got to the target.

They got back, filled out their logbooks.

No complaints.

After they landed, it was time to celebrate.

One of the team even made up a song about Johnny's skills on the training flight that day.

During training, they enjoyed themselves as much as they could.

They partied as hard as they could.

They drank as much as they they could because they actually believed that they weren't going to survive.

Weeks later, Smythe and his crew set out on their first operational mission.

The noise inside the Stirling bomber was tremendous.

As they passed landmarks, Smythe shouted them out to his crew.

My father was very nervous, lots of butterflies, because the planes were being shot down with such regularity.

Their mission was to parachute mines into French waterways to slow the German advance.

Smythe had to navigate to a location, aim and drop the mines.

But for the drop itself, they had to fly low.

That made them an easy target.

A lot of his colleagues actually believed that having a black person on the plane was good luck.

They were very superstitious and of course he played up to it, you know, and it was good banter between them.

But I suspect deep down there was that tiny bit of hope we've got this special mascot on board.

They flew over to France, they found their precise precise location, and they dropped their mines and they got back.

Exhilarating, you know.

Up in the air, Smythe and his crew were a tight group who relied on each other in moments of extreme danger.

Back on the ground, though, not all Allied servicemen were so accepting.

He was in London.

He was at Piccadilly Circus and he went up on an escalator and there was a female

Air Force officer in the the station who he recognized.

She waved to him and they started chatting.

She was with an American officer.

He stormed over and said, what the hell are you doing talking to this nigga?

You're with me.

And at that stage, he decided to turn and walk away.

But this guy grabbed hold of his arm.

Smythe acted instinctively.

He turned round and hit him very hard and knocked him to the floor.

When Smythe returned to the base, he was called in by his commanding officer.

He feared he would be in a lot of trouble for punching an American of rank.

Instead, to his great surprise, the commanding officer apologised to him for the incident.

He honestly would put his hand on his heart and say that he never received any racism whilst in the RAF.

Other black officers had different experiences.

There was a RAF officer from the Caribbean called Billy Stracham and he made an interesting statement.

He said when there was one black officer in a camp, they were actually treated like a a teddy bear.

They were loved and they were fated.

When there was two, they were tolerated.

And when there was three, it became difficult.

Smythe's crew faced incredible dangers together.

On their third mission, they spotted an enemy fighter plane shadowing them.

The rear gunner opened fire.

The fighter missed the bomber.

The bomber missed the fighter.

They needed to hang on till the English coast.

Once they came in range of British anti-aircraft guns, fire from the ground lit up the sky.

The fighter was scared off, and Smythe's crew all returned home safely.

I think on their fourth mission, one of their engines cut out, but they also managed to get back.

Every time Smythe landed back in the English countryside, he breathed a sigh of relief.

At the time, the life expectancy for RAF bomber crews was five to seven missions.

My father said sometimes you'd get up in the morning and there'd be a bunk next to you which was empty.

And during the course of the day, someone would come and pick up that person's clothes and books and pictures and personal effects.

And the following day there'd be someone else in the bunk.

Soon, Smythe would be completing his fifth mission.

Yet he always suspected that his luck must be about to run out.

What he feared most was passing over the cities.

His plane would approach from the countryside where all was quiet.

Then, suddenly, shells were bursting all around, and heavy anti-aircraft fire would arc towards the bomber.

Time and time again, they kept making it home.

As they walked off the runway, the crew would pat Smythe on his back, recognizing his extraordinary skill.

They were very fond of him, and he was called Big Henry.

Middle name was Henry, so it was John Henry Smythe.

He was actually in his room straightening out his uniform when a few of the guys came running and shouting, Big Henry, you've made it, you've made it.

And he had no idea what he was talking about because he did not expect in his wildest dreams that he would be made an officer.

With his promotion, he was now Flight Officer Johnny Smythe.

It was a long way to come from being you know a young lad in Freetown Sierra Leone and now here he was was the only black person in his camp and he was one of four officers, you know, being saluted.

He could no longer eat with his chums, he had to eat with the officers, you know, he had to get used to all of this.

On the 18th of November 1943, Smythe once again took the navigator's chair and checked his instruments.

This would be his fifth mission.

The RAF hoped that this was the night when German resistance would be broken.

Smythe would be flying with hundreds of other bombers deep into Germany.

for the Battle of Berlin.

As they flew over the countryside, Smythe directed his pilots to peel off from the group.

As they neared Berlin, Smythe crawled into the nose of the plane, the navigator's bombing position.

He took aim.

At that moment, though, a shell exploded beneath the bomber.

Shards of hot metal ripped through the plane.

A father was hit by shrapnel in the thigh, and another piece went into his abdomen, went straight through the front and out the back.

just missing his lungs.

Despite the chaos all around him, Smythe managed to drop the bombs, but a German fighter plane was closing in.

They'd lost an engine, and it would be impossible to reach full height again.

It was time to bail out.

Smythe scrambled to the escape hatch.

Outside, the wind screamed in his face.

Remembering his parachute training, he jumped into the unknown.

He landed in a snow-covered field in the middle of nowhere.

He took off his parachute and hid in some bushes.

Dosing himself with morphine to dull the pain of his injuries, Smythe walked towards the lights in the distance.

Outside a tavern, he spotted a bicycle.

He stole it.

And after cycling for a few miles, he sees a barn.

And he thinks I need some rest.

Smythe crawled into the barn.

He took a cigarette from his emergency bag, smoked it, and drifted off.

He awoke to the sound of shouting in German.

A bullet was fired into the barn, so he knew that the game was up.

Smythe emerged from the barn with his hands held in surrender.

There was a look of shock on the faces of these Germans to see this six foot four black man in an RAF officer's uniform.

You know, at a time that the German propaganda would suggest black person could not fly a plane.

Smythe was forced to walk barefoot over frozen ground to a police station, but frostbite was the least of his problems.

And he was roughed up, beaten badly and there was a German officer who was quite short who came over to him and hit him with the butt of his rifle in the side and he was still bleeding from his wounds at this stage and they continued talking to him shouting at him and this officer came and hit him a second time in the side with a rifle and he decided the next time he approaches, I will snap his neck and I'll be killed but I'm probably going to die anyway.

Now, fortunately, he didn't get hit again.

In a centre in Frankfurt, Smythe was bundled out of his cramped cell into an interview room.

As he sat down, his captors showed a man into the room.

He had a conversation that Smythe would recall years later when he was interviewed for the BBC World Service.

They brought this man in.

And immediately he came in.

He said, hello, Bo, how you do?

You could have knocked me me down with a feather

to see somebody in Germany talking to you so perfectly.

So I replied, I will.

I said, are you safe?

He said, I well.

And we started talking about Freetown.

Smythe chatted to this Creo-speaking man about the Grand Hotel in Freetown and about football.

But he knew that he was being softened up, and soon enough, the conversation turned to the war.

He said, I want you to cooperate, and I can get you out of this place.

I say, yes, I will help you.

I'll give you my name and number.

Then he started being a Nazi officer, screamed at me, shouted me, then said, you know,

he said they are voting

tomorrow morning.

whether to execute you or not.

Because you are a black man, you should not interfere in a white man's war.

Smythe looked at them and called their bluff.

So I said if they're going to shoot me, so be it.

Let them shoot me.

The notorious prison camp, Stalag Luft 1, was overlooked by watchtowers, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.

9,000 men, mostly American and British, were detained in its wooden huts.

All were officers, high-value prisoners.

Smythe knew he could never escape.

Even if he did, how on earth could he blend in among the German population?

He had no choice but to adapt to camp life.

A constant barrage of German propaganda was broadcast on loudspeakers to try to break the inmates.

They'd heard about the forced marches.

There were rumours that the Germans were building a gas chamber in the forest nearby to kill

the inmates.

These were things that the stories stories that were circulating,

and it was scary for them.

Smythe saw Jewish prisoners rounded up and taken away.

He saw a prisoner shot for walking too close to a barbed wire fence.

Then there was the question of what the Nazis would do with him.

In many prisoner of war camps, black inmates were subjected to worse conditions than their white peers.

Whilst my father was in the prison of war camp, he didn't particularly like a black man because he was treated no different to anyone else.

And when I asked him, a year before he died, how did you feel?

He actually said, the only time I remembered I was black was when I looked in the mirror.

After two long, bitter years in the camp, on the 1st of May, 1945, Smythe awoke to an unexpected quiet.

There was no roll call.

This was unprecedented.

The Germans were sticklers for a routine.

He walked out of his hut and looked up at the towers.

The guards were gone.

He turned to look at the main gates.

They were wide open.

The German officers had simply disappeared.

The war was over.

Afterwards, Smythe returned to Britain and remained in the RAF.

He worked for the Colonial Office where he was given the task of assisting demobbed Caribbean soldiers.

He was a senior officer on the Empire Windrush.

After leaving the Armed Forces, Smythe trained as a barrister in London, becoming a Queen's Counsel.

He returned to Sierra Leone, where he rose to national prominence as the country's Attorney General.

The contribution of service men and women like Johnny Smythe haven't been as well incorporated into our stories of the Second World War as they should have been.

And I think this is something that is being increasingly addressed.

Decades after the war, as a distinguished lawyer, Smythe attended a cocktail party at the British Ambassador's residence in Freetown.

He was introduced to a man who asked, I hear you were in the RAF during the war.

The man was the German ambassador.

He said to my father, so how did the war end for you?

And he said, well, I was shot down.

I shot down over Meinheim

on the 18th of November 1943.

This ambassador's face just went pale and he looked up at him and he said, on that day I flew and on that day I shot a bomber down in that vicinity.

Eddie Smythe asked his father if he felt angry or vengeful in that moment.

He said, no, we actually threw our arms around each other

and we drank and we toasted the fact that we were here today.

Next time on History's Secret Heroes, Countess Christina Skarbeck storms into the headquarters of the British Secret Service with a daring offer to gather intelligence.

They say she's a flaming Polish patriot, an expert skier and a great adventuress, as well as being absolutely fearless.

And one of those men had scribbled in the margin in pencil: She absolutely terrifies me.

The spy who skied in from the cold.

Hi, I'm Izzy Judd, and I'm quickly dropping in to let you know of an incredibly calming podcast which I think you'll love.

The Music and Meditation Podcast is a place where we press pause and give ourselves some brain space to step back from life a bit.

With the help of inspirational guests, wonderful guided meditations, and stunning music.

Honestly, I think you'll really enjoy it.

Why not give it a go?

Join me, Izzy Judd, for the Music and Meditation Podcast on BBC Sounds Now.

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