Johnny Red

Johnny Red was written by Tom Tully and illustrated by Joe Colquhoun and John Cooper.

In his first appearance, he is a kitchen hand on a convoy ship in the Barents Sea. We flash back to him being dishonourably discharged from the Air Force immediately after his solo flight, due to an altercation with an officer. There is a rail-launch Hurricane on the ship. When the pilot is killed, Johnny Red takes flight. He is soon tangling with Stukas, then landing on a hidden Russian airstrip, where he meets the Falcons, a squadron of the Soviet Fifth Air Brigade.

He soons becomes their English leader, fighting in the skies over besieged Leningrad and defending himself and his fellow pilots from the political officers of the NKVD. His deepest fear is that they will discover his background, that he is in disgrace and considered a deserter by the British.

Eventually, Major Rastovitch,an NKVD officer, uses this to “blackmail” him into ferrying a senior Russian official to a conference in England, aboard a modified B-25 Mitchell Bomber – nicknamed the “Flying Gun”. They are chased across the skies by the German airforce, barely making it to England. There, he visits his parents in Liverpool, only to discover his father has been killed and his mother hospitalised in an air raid. Escaping the British Military Police, he is able to board the Flying Gun, which makes its way through more scrapes back to the Soviet Union.