Canada’s Most Decorated Hero of WWII
Canada’s most decorated World War II hero, Johnnie Fauquier, was buried in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery with full military honours more than a quarter century ago, and then forgotten. Only family members and a few fellow wartime bomber crews remember him.
Had Johnnie Fauquier been an American, Hollywood might have passed over Audie Murphy, Congressional Medal of Honor winner and the United States’ most decorated soldier, for star treatment. The movie To Hell and Back, which starred Audie Murphy himself, told the story of his heroism.
Johnnie Fauquier went to hell and back almost 100 times on bombing raids over Berlin, other key German targets, and the Peenamunde V2 rocket bases on the Baltic Sea. The normal tour for a bomber pilot was 30 raids. He did three tours and then some. He was the first Canadian to command a bomber squadron in battle, commanding both the crack RCAF 405 Pathfinder Squadron and later the RAF’s legendary Dambusters. Johnnie Fauquier was awarded the Distinguished Service Order Medal (second only to the Victoria Cross) three times — more than any other Canadian warrior. He also wore the distinctive ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Cross on his tunic.
It is unlikely that Audie Murphy would have even been considered for the role of Johnnie Fauquier in a movie. Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks, or Jimmy Cagney would have been elbowing one another aside to play him in a film, such were his exploits as “King of the Pathfinders” and totally fearless bomber pilot.
The Fauquiers were French Huguenots who probably came to North America to fight with Lafayette against the British at the Battle of New Orleans. There is also an old established Fauquier County in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
John Emilius Fauquier was born in Ottawa in 1909 with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, Gilbert Emilius, was a wealthy construction tycoon who built the Ontario leg of the first trans-continental railway. The Fauquier family home in Rockcliffe on Manor Road is now the residence of the Swedish ambassador.
Johnnie attended Ashbury College and became head prefect. He was a top student and, in athletics, he won more than 40 soccer, rugby, and cricket trophies. He moved to Montreal and became a successful but reluctant St. James’ Street stockbroker. His family’s standing in Ottawa social circles helped him move freely among Montreal’s finest. To blunt the tedium of his day job, he raced fast cars and motorcycles. Then, he took flying lessons at the Montreal Light Aeroplane Club. The die was cast. He was a natural pilot. The brokerage house on St. James’ Street was history.
He was married, at the time, to Dorothy Coulson of Ottawa. The Coulsons owned the popular Alexandra Hotel on Bank Street at Gilmour and another large hotel in Sudbury and were prominent in Ottawa social circles. Dorothy’s brother, Darcy, played one season on defence with the NHL’s Philadelphia Quakers in 1930–1931. In 28 games he had no goals or assists, but managed to rack up 103 penalty minutes. The remainder of his hockey career was in the Ottawa City Senior League with the Shamrocks and the Ottawa RCAF.
Johnnie persuaded his father to grubstake him, and he and his wife left Montreal and Ottawa for the mining boom in Noranda, Quebec. He set up a bush-plane airline called Commercial Airways with two planes: a Waco and a Fairchild. Dorothy was a frequent passenger on flights over the wilds of northern Quebec. His long time friend, the late Lieutenant General Reg Lane, from Victoria, British Columbia, laughed when he said that northern Quebec honed Johnnie’s brawling and fighting skills.
“Johnnie was only about five feet ten inches and no more than 160 pounds, but he loved to fight, especially when he had had a few. More than once, his pal, ‘Tiny’ Wilson, who was huge and weighed close to 300 pounds, would reach in and haul Johnnie out of a scrap by the back of the neck. ‘Tiny’ flew with Johnnie in the RCAF and, long after the war, the two of them were the original discoverers of the iron ore deposits in the Wabush area.”
When war broke out in 1939, he had logged more than 482,803 kilometres in the air and, for a frustrating year and a half, the RCAF slotted the newly commissioned Johnnie Fauquier in an instructor’s job teaching recruits how to fly ancient Tiger Moths. In 1941, he finally managed to wangle an overseas posting and was assigned to 405 Pathfinder Squadron as a pilot. He was 32. Johnnie had 10 to 12 years on most of his fellow bomber crews.
The legend of Johnnie Fauquier and his charmed life aloft was about to begin. His Pathfinder squadron flew Wellingtons before being assigned Halifax bombers. He flew a Halifax, then a Lancaster. He could do things with the lumbering bombers that fighter pilots could not do in a Hurricane or Spitfire. One of his favourite stunts was to sweep in so low in his Halifax that the bombardier could all but drop a two-ton bomb down a chimney.
When he switched over to high-flying Lancasters in 405 Squadron, his role was to pinpoint night targets and illuminate them with flares for the bomber stream. The average bomber was over a target, dropped his bombs, and headed home — all in three minutes. Not Johnnie Fauquier. He stayed over the target area for as long as 35 to 40 minutes leading the bomber stream in and laying more flares. When the last bomber had dropped its payload, he broke off and returned to base.
Hamburg’s shipyards produced most of Germany’s U-boats. Its oil refineries were vital to the Luftwaffe. It was also one of Germany’s key port cities. In July 1943, Johnnie led a 700-bomber night raid on Hamburg, “Operation Gomorrah.” Hamburg’s assets were protected by six night-fighter bases, 22 searchlight batteries, and more than 50 heavy ack-ack guns.
Fauquier’s bomber group dropped 10,000 tons of bombs on Hamburg in four nights and levelled the city. His Pathfinders lit up target areas for 1,000 bomber raids on Essen, Cologne, Berlin, and Bremen.
The main fear for a pilot of a slow-flying Lancaster was being “coned” by searchlights and raked by anti-aircraft flak (shrapnel). Fauquier solved that problem over Bremen. He used his bomber to strafe the searchlight and anti-aircraft batteries. Fauquier threw his aircraft into a steep 10,000-foot dive, levelled off just above the tree tops and his nose, tail, and mid-upper gunners raked the ground installations with a hail of lethal fire, dousing searchlights and destroying gun batteries. It was an amazing feat of flying few others would attempt with a fighter plane. Asked if he was scared, his reply was: “A man who isn’t frightened lacks imagination and without imagination, he can’t be a first class warrior. Let’s face it: the good men were frightened, especially between briefing and takeoff. The bravest men I knew used to go to bed after briefing and refuse to eat. Sick with fear. Any man that frightened who goes to the target is brave.”
A Canadian Mosquito pilot, Flying Officer William J. White, DFC, from Roland, Manitoba, flew the photo mission revealing the secret German V1 and V2 rocket base at Peenamunde on a Baltic Sea estuary. The slower, engine-driven V1 “Doodlebug” could be shot down by a fighter or tipped off course by the wing of a Hurricane or a Spitfire.
There was no defence against the V2. It was the world’s first jet-guided missile and was capable of bombing London into rubble. Peenamunde had to be destroyed. On August 17, 1943, the Allies put bombers in the air to trick the Germans into believing Berlin was the target. The diversion worked; 600 heavy bombers arrived, undetected, over Peenamunde at midnight.
Fauquier’s group laid down flares and he flew 17 circuits over the target, guiding the bombers in. Thirty-five minutes later, Peenamunde was wiped off the map. Laboratories and workshops were destroyed, most of the scientists were killed, and the German rocket program was history. The surprise raid was a total success, but 41 Allied bombers were destroyed.
In 1944, Johnnie was promoted to air commodore, but requested that he be demoted to his old rank of group captain so that he could continue to fly. He was given command of the RAF’s elite Dambusters and he had tough acts to follow as CO: Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, and Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, another Victoria Cross winner. For a Canadian to be given command of the Dambuster squadron that had blown up the Mohne and Eder dams, flooding the Ruhr Valley, was considered apostasy. To even contemplate naming a colonial as CO of the squadron that had sunk the German battleship Tirpitz was akin to heresy.
Tension filled the air at his first meeting with the officers of his new command. They were not impressed with his DSOs and DFC. There were a goodly number of similar “gongs” among the Dambusters. One of the Dambusters shouted out the old RAF challenge: “sing us a song or take your pants off,” a favourite mess tradition to “take the mickey” out of a brass hat.
The unflappable Johnnie Fauquier dropped his pants and one of the Dambusters cooled off his hindquarters with a well-aimed stream of foamy beer. Fauquier pulled up his pants, test passed. The Dambusters then discovered he was a no-nonsense skipper: early morning callisthenics, lectures on formation flying, and shovelling snow off runways.
Johnnie Fauquier’s squadron was given a new toy by Barnes Wallace, the man who designed the Wellington bomber and the bouncing bomb the Dambusters had used to destroy the Ruhr Valley dams. It was a bomb 8 metres long, weighing 10 long tons (9,979 kg), and was nicknamed “Grand Slam.” Destroying key Nienburg Bridge, a vital German oil route, was “a piece of cake.” Initially, he sent only four of his 18 planes in. Three direct hits took the bridge out, and the frugal Fauquier flew home with 15 Grand Slams that would fight another day.
He used them to sink Germany’s last pocket battleship, the Lutzow, and to destroy communications and rail links. His planes dropped two Grand Slam bombs on U-boat pens near Bremen. The submarines were protected by a concrete and steel roof more than four metres thick. Grand Slams sliced through the roof as if through butter and destroyed the base. Pens at Saint-Nazaire suffered the same fate. Grand Slam was so powerful it created small earthquakes. It was dropped from high altitude and penetrated deep into the earth before it exploded. It created an underground cavern 31 metres beneath the surface. Bridges and viaducts would be shaken apart and collapse into the cavern. Bielefeld Viaduct near Bremen had been bracketed by over 3,000 tons of bombs without success. One Grand Slam dropped from 19,000 feet took out 91 metres of the viaduct.
His next targets were U-boat pens at Farge and Brest; the roofs were more than six metres of reinforced concrete. Two Grand Slams went through the roofs creating craters six metres across. The docks at Brest were heavily damaged and the heavy cruisers Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen were crippled.
The Dambusters very last operational objective was to flatten Hitler’s mountain hideaway, Berchtesgaden. Unfortunately, the buildings and mountain peaks were snow covered and Fauquier’s bomb aimers couldn’t tell one peak from another. Their consolation prize was to level the barracks of Hitler’s SS guards.
The British Navy was not convinced that the Hamburg U-boat pens had been destroyed, so Johnnie Fauquier was ordered by Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris to eyeball them personally. The garrison at Hamburg was supposed to have surrendered. Inspecting the pens, Fauquier was surprised to find 200 German sailors at work repairing them. The commanding officer surrendered formally to Fauquier and invited him to lunch. Johnnie Fauquier became the only RCAF commander to accept a formal enemy surrender.
Johnnie Fauquier’s life was on the line every time he flew into German searchlights and ack-ack flak, but he always managed to make it home. He only had one close call returning from an aborted raid over Berlin. Fauquier was over the rough North Sea, which was tossing waves 31 metres in the air, he had little or no fuel left, and his plane was icing up, when he ordered his crew to take up ditching positions.
“It was then I saw briefly one of those wonderful homing lights and made a bee-line straight for it.” When he landed, the Home Guard (“Dad’s army”) surrounded his plane and threatened to jail the crew until they were able to prove who they were by phoning their base at Pocklington.
He minced no words describing the Berlin mission: “utterly fatigued, half frozen, and disgusted at being launched on a major operation against the German capital in weather totally unfitted to the task.”
The war was over for Johnnie Fauquier. There were no brass bands to welcome Canada’s most decorated airman home to Ottawa. He quietly settled into civilian life and never again took the controls of an aircraft. War had changed that. War and a long separation had also placed an irrevocable rift in his marriage, and he and his wife, Dorothy, divorced.
Reg Lane recalled that he plunged himself back into mining exploration: “Johnnie Fauquier and Tiny Wilson discovered the rich iron ore deposits of Wabush and Ungava. He was a millionaire one day and broke the next. He made and lost money more times than anyone else I ever heard of.”
Johnnie Fauquier’s first stiff test in civilian life came, and he flunked it. His best friend, Tiny Wilson, was killed. Tiny was a passenger in a float plane flying from Labrador to Montreal and drowned when it crashed. Johnnie was devastated and started drinking. Tiny’s death hit him hard. It was the worst crisis in his life until his second wife, Mary, died from Lou Gehrig’s disease in March 1980. Stories of Johnny Fauquier’s “alcoholism” were greatly exaggerated. Family member, Chris Fauquier of Kanata, says “the Fauquiers were wild and loved to party, but Johnnie was never a problem drinker.”
General Lane and Justice Houston both agreed: “Johnnie could be a hell-raiser at a party and try to pick a fight with someone, but he’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning.” His second marriage to Mary Burden was the rock on which he built the rest of his life. They settled in Toronto and raised three children. Together, in partnership, they forged a successful real estate business and “Johnnie was on top again.”
Three DSOs! Why not a Victoria Cross? The Fauquier family was brought up on the folklore that he was offered the VC and declined it. “Not very likely,” said General Lane, “it never happened.” Since the Victoria Cross was initiated by Queen Victoria, more than 1,350 have been awarded, but only 51 have gone to airmen — 41 to Britain, four to Canada, three to Australia, two to New Zealand, and one to South Africa. Only one very junior British fighter pilot was awarded a VC in World War II.
General Lane volunteered that “early on, a very senior British air ministry officer was quoted as saying ‘Canadians are not good leaders and should not be promoted beyond the rank of wing commander.’ It was also a British recommendation that any VCs won by Canadian airmen should be posthumous awards,” General Lane added. Indeed, the three VCs won by Canadian airmen were awarded posthumously: WO11 Andrew Charles Mynarski, RCAF; Flight Lieutenant David Ernest Hornell, RCAF; and Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray, RCNVR. The British fighter pilot, Flight Lieutenant Eric James Brindley Nicholson, RAF Spitfire pilot, lived to display his VC and distinctive maroon ribbon.
Johnnie Fauquier’s final resting place is alongside his beloved wife, Mary, on a grassy knoll in Section 51 of Beechwood Cemetery. The plain, large, grey granite grave marker simply indicates that Air Commodore John Emilius Fauquier is at rest there. Despite the many awards he received throughout his wartime career, there are no battle honours, decorations, or initials after his name.