John Fraser

Dambuster of the Day No. 12: John Fraser

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p_fraser1

Pic: Bomber Command Museum of Canada

Flt Sgt J W Fraser
Bomb aimer
Lancaster serial number: ED925/G
Call sign: AJ-M
First wave. Second aircraft to attack Möhne Dam. Aircraft hit by flak. Mine dropped late and bounced over dam. Aircraft crashed on far side of dam.

John William Fraser was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada on 22 September 1922 and joined the RCAF soon after the war started. After qualifying as a bomb aimer he arrived in England in April 1942, and shortly after was posted to 50 Squadron. There he flew a full tour of thirty operations, mostly with Canadian pilot Norman Schofield, whose crew also included two more people who would become Dambusters: another Canadian, the navigator Ken Earnshaw, and gunner Brian Jagger.

By mid April 1943, Fraser and Earnshaw were both scheduled to go to a training unit for the normal inter-tour rest period. However a call came from the new 617 Squadron being set up at Scampton. Pilot John Hopgood needed an experienced navigator and bomb aimer. His first navigator had fallen ill and his bomb aimer had not come up to scratch. Earnshaw and Fraser were recommended, and arrived at Scampton at the end of April, some time after training for the Dams Raid had begun. However, as Fraser had already arranged his wedding for 29 April, he was given special permission to have a day off.

On the Dams Raid itself, Hopgood’s aircraft AJ-M was hit by flak well before they reached the Möhne Dam. One engine was damaged, Hopgood himself was wounded, as was George Gregory in the front turret.

Fraser released the mine and it bounced over the dam, blowing up the power station on the other side. But his Lancaster was doomed.

After the war he wrote: ‘We flew on and the pilot gave the order to abandon the aircraft within about 25 seconds after we passed over the dam. I knelt facing forward over the escape hatch and I saw that the trees looked awful close. I thought there was only one thing to do and that was to pull the rip cord and let the pilot chute go out first and then let it pull the chute out and me after it, and that’s what I did.’

He landed almost a mile away from where the aircraft crashed, but was soon captured by the Germans. After interrogation, where he was forced to give some details of the mission, he was sent to a PoW camp.
Released at the end of the war, he saw his wife Doris again in May 1945 for the first time since the day after their wedding. They made their home in Canada. Fraser never forgot the sacrifice made by John Hopgood which saved the lives of two of his crew. The names of all of his children were chosen as a tribute to Hopgood and 617 Squadron. His first son has the given names John Hopgood; his daughter was called Shere, after Hopgood’s home village; and his second son was called Guy, after the squadron CO.

Fraser worked in the forestry service, and fulfilled his lifetime ambition to qualify as a pilot. Unfortunately, he was killed in a flying accident, at Saltery Bay in British Columbia on 2 June 1962.

More about Fraser online:
Articles at Bomber Command Museum of Canada 1 2

Survived war. Died 2 June 1962.
Rank and decorations as of 16 May 1943.

Sources: Richard Morris, Guy Gibson, Penguin 1995
John Sweetman, The Dambusters Raid, Cassell 2002
The information above has been taken from the books and online sources listed and other online material. Apologies for any errors or omissions. Please add any corrections or links to further information in the comments section below.

Further information about John Fraser and the other 132 men who flew on the Dams Raid can be found in my book The Complete Dambusters, published by History Press in 2018.

Dambusters Declassified discussed

charlesfoster3 Comments

The Dambusters Declassified documentary shown on BBC a couple of weeks ago wasn’t widely reviewed in the national press, but has been the subject of debate on a number of internet forums. One of these discussions, on a forum widely frequented by modern day pilots, had a surprising intervention from the film’s producer, Ian Cundall. Posting under the pretty cool name of ‘TVflyer’ he explained that they only had a short time to fix up the camera shots, so couldn’t get an exterior view of what it felt like to fly only 100 feet above the ground.
He countered the grumbles from some quarters that there was ‘nothing new’ in the programme:

Some of the stories told in the film are well known to aviation historians but – I’d suggest – not to most general viewers who base their knowledge of the raid on the movie.

That’s my view now, some time after transmission. When the programme finished my immediate conclusion was exactly that – there was nothing in it that I hadn’t read or heard about already. But some of the material which was used has only been previously published in pretty obscure books. One example is the story of how shot-down bomb aimer John Fraser was interrogated by the Germans, which to the best of my knowledge has only been discussed in detail in Helmuth Euler’s The Dams Raid through the Lens. It took a certain degree of bravery for his daughter Shere – a doughty defender of her father’s memory – to stand in front of a camera and say that he did reveal some details of how the weapon worked.
The only bit of the documentary which got picked up in the national press was the interview with Margaret Masters, the woman Guy Gibson was seeing in the run up to the Dams Raid. Again, this is well known to aficionados, as she was interviewed at length by Richard Morris for his 1994 biography of Gibson. But she has never spoken on camera before, which led the Mail on Sunday to cobble together a predictably  sensationalist story based entirely on quotes from the programme.
What I think didn’t work was the use of Martin Shaw as a front man for the film. He’s a good enough actor, and has a private pilot’s licence, but I don’t think this necessarily qualifies him to ‘investigate’ on our behalf. There are real experts who could have fronted the programme – one, John Sweetman, appeared as an interviewee – but, of course, they are not as good box office as a hunky middle aged actor in serious spectacles, which he was able to take off several times with a theatrical flourish.
Shaw was also absent for some parts of the film – a woman’s voice could be heard during one of the interviews – and this betrays the fact that some parts were cobbled together from other BBC projects. Long term readers of this blog will know that as far back as June 2009 a BBC South West researcher had contacted me looking for information about the youngest Dambuster, rear gunner Jack Liddell. The last 15 minutes or so of Dambusters Declassified appeared to be made up of this material, tacked onto the end of Martin Shaw’s description of the difficulties of low flying.
Ultimately, it was a serious programme, with some interesting material, and well worth catching again if you can find it on iPlayer or other sources.