TO MANY people, Bill Townsend was the amiable host of the Lord Napier pub in Observatory Street, Oxford.

To a select few, he was a member of the Dambusters, the elite team of RAF men led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who attacked the German dams with Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bombs on the night of May 16-17, 1943.

He rarely spoke of his wartime exploits with 617 Squadron, even less about the fact that he had been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal to add to his Distinguished Flying Medal.

Flight Sergeant Townsend led the third and final wave of six Lancasters on the dams.

They were intended as back-up and would have been recalled if the first and second groups had successfully breached all three dams – Mohne, Eder and Ennepe.

However, once Mohne and Eder had burst, the third group was called into action and diverted to Ennepe.

Flight Sergeant Townsend and his crew made three attempts to get speed and height right before dropping the bomb, but it detonated short of its target, which remained intact.

However, they then faced a hazardous journey home, flying at treetop level across Germany and Holland to avoid constant enemy fire.

Over the North Sea, Flight Sergeant Townsend was forced to shut down one failing engine.

He arrived back at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire on three engines at 6.15am, the last of the raid’s Lancasters to land.

His crew later paid tribute to the “superb flying” that had brought them home.

Nineteen aircraft had left on the mission and 11 made it back. Of the 133 men who had set out, 58 did not return.

As he came down the ladder, utterly exhausted, Flight Sergeant Townsend was asked how it had gone. He failed to notice the question had come from Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, the commander-in-chief. He brushed past him, saying: “Wait till debriefing.”

The crews were told just 36 hours before the operation what was planned.

Flight Sergeant Townsend recalled later: “I frankly thought it was impossible. I thought my chances of surviving a six-and-a-half hour low-level flight across Germany were nil.”

Afterwards, he had no doubt the raid was worthwhile.

He said: “It showed the people living in occupied countries that Hitler and the Germans could not sleep in their beds at night. We could penetrate wherever we wanted in Germany. If I go to Holland, I get an incredible welcome from people who remember.”

After the war, he studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, and led a quiet life with his wife Eileen, working as a businessman and civil servant.

When he died aged 70 in 1991, two RAF Tornado jets staged a flypast at his funeral service at Bromsgrove in the Midlands, where he lived. He was the last surviving pilot of the Dambusters’ team.

Among those at the funeral was his front gunner, Douglas Webb, who said: “Bill was a superb pilot and a hell of a nice guy.”

One regular who remembers him running the Lord Napier pub is his friend, Peter Couling, of North Hinksey Lane, Oxford.

He tells me: “He was a wonderful landlord and a very modest man.”

The Lord Napier pub closed in the 1980s and was converted into homes.