Bob Johns paused on the stairs and cocked his head to one side. He could hear his father’s snores. He smiled to himself and stepped carefully down into the hall of 129 Jervis Road, the small, terraced house in Portsmouth where he’d spent the first 14 years of his life.
Outside, he pulled the front door quietly shut behind him and sat on the steps to put his shoes on before plunging his hands into his pockets, turning up his jacket collar and hurrying off past the Royal Navy dockyards. Did he look back? If he did it would have been the last time Bob Johns ever saw home.
Bob Johns
Fast forward a couple of years, to the early hours of 6 June 1944 and Bob Johns was taking a deep breath before leaping into the night sky above Normandy, one of the first… I was going to say men to take part in D-day but Bob Johns was not a man, he was a boy. Bob Johns was 16, and he shouldn’t have been there.
His story is one of so many found within the history of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe 80 years ago, the day of days for so many young men and the end of days for plenty among them.
I have read and written plenty about D-day – including a podcast, Wars That Shaped The World – and been interested in it since I was a teenager and persuaded my parents to drive us from our home in Belgium so I could go and walk the ground, see Pegasus Bridge, Omaha beach, St Mere Eglise and all the other places that fill the history books.
Yet for all that I only came across the story of Bob Johns this week, stumbled over it while looking up something else. It’s why history fascinates me – there is always something new to learn, to discover to understand. History is always alive.
I can’t remember if we stopped in Ranville on that teenage trip or subsequent visits. Ranville, a small Norman village, occupies a footnote in history – it was the first village or town in France to be liberated. Among the men of the 6th Airborne Division who drove the Germans out at 2.30am was the boy Bob.
He's still there in Ranville, laid to rest forever in the war cemetery outside the village. On his white marble tombstone, the curved top matching all the other 2,417 graves, is carved the winged badge of the Parachute Regiment, the date of his death and his age, 16. It’s an age that places him exactly between my two daughters.
Bob's grave
There is an inscription on it, requested by his parents, Henry and Daisy… ‘He died as he lived, fearlessly.’
He was the second of Henry and Daisy’s five children to be killed in the war. His eldest brother, William, had been lost at sea in 1940 when his submarine was sunk in the Atlantic.
Perhaps that’s where the impulse came from for Bob to run off and join the army. When he turned up at the recruiting office, the sergeant must have had his suspicions, although Bob was tall and broad for his age – but nevertheless his age was only 14. The sergeant looked the other way and Bob was in.
By January 1944 he had sailed through the parachute training school. “He loved being a paratrooper,” his commanding officer, Jack Watson, was to recall after the war. “He was a very big chap and very capable. He was always ready to help people and really was fearless.”
He jumped into Normandy not long after the clock had hurried past midnight on 6 June to signal the beginning of D-day. Bob and his company were to spend 11 days on the frontline around Ranville and after a brief break were back in action in the bloody battle for Normandy. Some veterans have described this as the time of their lives, and from what we know of Bob this does sound like the time of his young life.
Back home, that was not how his parents saw it. When he’d disappeared, they searched with mounting desperation for their son. Not a single friend knew where he’d gone, or if they did they didn’t let on. The local recruitment office said they’d not seen him (he must have joined up away from Portsmouth). Henry and Daisy filled an ‘Under-age enlistment’ form and waited for the army to send him home to his mum and dad. Except this was not a priority within the armed forces – there was a war on.
At last, the Military Police picked up his trail. He was tracked down to his unit, the 13th (South Lancs) battalion of the Parachute regiment. Two MPs were dispatched across the Channel to find Bob – he was two young to fight. He should not be in Normandy.
On 23 July 1944, Bob was two days from turning 17. He’d no idea the net was closing in on him. He had a war to fight, a war he’d been fighting for six weeks. His platoon was dug in at the Le Mesnil crossroads. At 10am firing broke out. This is how his battalion’s war diary recorded what happened.
“At 1140hrs an OR [other rank] of the Anti-Rank Platoon was shot dead by a sniper from the area 146725. In retaliation we attacked [the sniper’s position] with mortars and PIATs at 1400hrs.”
That was it – the OR was Bob Johns, shot dead by a German sniper. Coincidentally, I read of the death of my great uncle Ronnie in the First World War in the same way; a brief sentence in a war diary that ends with him being shot by a sniper.
A few days later the two MPs arrived in Normandy with orders to take Bob Johns home to his mum and dad. They were too late. Instead of their son Harry and Daisy received a telegram… their boy Bob was dead for king and country, aged 16.
Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.
