Lieutenant-Colonel Johnny Johnson
12th (Yorkshire) Parachute Battalion

Everything opened up. There was airbursts and there was machine gun fire coming right across, tracer bullets coming at us, mortars being dropped and shells … There were a few of us around there. There was the C.O., the second-in-command, the adjutant, I think there must have been about half a dozen. And there was such a bang against this wall that I wondered what it was. I didn’t know evidently it was a shell that had dropped amongst us … it killed the C.O.

(Ronald Dixon, IWM interview, 3 Sep 1999)

Born on 28 July 1911 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, Alexander Percival Johnson was commissioned into the Suffolk Regiment in 1931. He had previously been educated in Switzerland before graduating from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Just as he completed staff college in 1941, the British Army had started to form the new airborne forces. As an adventuring sportsman with an interest in skinning and mountain climbing, Johnson volunteered as a paratrooper.

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