Operation Ju Jitsu
I have just received a letter from Squadron Leader John Crampton DFC AFC & Bar RAF Ret'd, what a delightful Gentleman. John wrote "Let it be clearly understood from the start - we survived by pure luck".
"Two or three points: We were never told what the operation was all about. Never. It was one of the most difficult aspects about it all. Why were we attached to an elite USAF RB45C Strategic Reconnaissance Squodron? Why didn't the Yanks fly the missions? It was only at the end when I realized that what you do not tell the Squadron Leader and his aircrew they cannot tell the Russians in the unlikely event of their surviving a successful shoot-down".
"You might know about the above by now. In early 1951 The Russians were fed-up with American recce aircraft flying over their territory and so Kruschev got on the hot line to Washington and told Harry Truman that Russia would consider it a act of war if America sent one more recce aircraft over their Country. This put the wind up the American President who sent for General Curtis E LeMay, C in C Strategic Air Command, and told him - no more recce aircraft over Russia.................
LeMay went immediatly to the Pentagon and called for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He told them it was essential that the target information was obtained. The Russian nuclear targets have to be destroyed in the first ten minutes of WW3 not just the first day. Since the President had banned him from sending any more recce aircraft out would the Joint Chiefs get onto Westminster and ask if the RAF would do the job if neccessary in the USAF's RB45Cs? Attlee, the PM, didn't like it all but his Intellegence blokes persuaded him to at least form an RAF Special Duty Flight only to go out with his permission if all was clear. So Attlee agreed. The VCAS asked Squadron Leader Micky Martin the last surviving Dam Buster pilot to form the Flight but Micky failed his explosive decompression test so it was back to his day job and someone else had to be called. Get Crampton perhaps the only operational type in Bomber Command at that time with jet experience and how that came about is another story altogether".
"Now all you have to do is read my paper that appeared in Air Clues in August 1997. That's what happened".
"One of the stuped things about the flight was that it contained three NCO's. We should all have been officers and lived together in the US Officers Club and Batchelor Officers Quarters. As things were three of my men were in the Enlisted Mens Quarters. A security leak was the problem. The NCO's were subjected to searching questions as indeed the officers were".
"Also the Second Pilots were Flight Engineers incapable of flying the aircraft if the pilot had been hit".
P.S. "Churchill was back in Downing St when we did the two ops in April '52 & '54".