Last of the Dambusters: revealed Five, 8pm

PROCLAIMING itself "a journey into the past to confront the full truth", Last of the Dambusters: Revealed trudged 86-year-old great-grandfather George "Johnny" Johnson around various fields in the Somme and the Ruhr valley. For various reasons - not the least being respect for the physical wellbeing of a man not in the first flush of youth - this was a not-altogether-edifying TV spectacle, although it was certainly a grimly compelling one.

On the last occasion that former RAF bomb-aimer Johnny had seen the Ruhr valley, 65 years previously, he'd been squinting down at it through a perspex window in the belly of one of 617 Squadron's Lancaster bombers. His job during the famous Dambusters mission had been to unleash heavy munitions to breach the Sorpe dam, one of three such edifices that then served the industrial needs of the region's Nazi owner-occupiers.

Last of the Dambusters soon reunited Johnny with a shattered part of that very same perspex, uncovered in a muddy French field by eager aviation archaeologists. His old crate had survived the Dambusters raid, but subsequently crashed on another mission.

The show's specious urge for melodrama required Johnny to gaze through the old perspex again. The eager aviation archaeologists handed him a parachute harness recovered from the site (its former custodian obviously hadn't been able to use it to save himself) plus a muddied 1943 sixpence. No words came. None would have been adequate. None was truly necessary.

In Germany, three further crash sites awaited Johnny's inspection. Places where Johnny's comrades had perished in flames and terror. Downed Dambusters, 11 out of 19. Johnny pondered the horror of those final moments for his erstwhile colleagues, young men of 20, 23. One such grassy crater was marked by a simple wooden memorial to the fallen. Another had a museum nearby displaying photos of the crash's immediate aftermath. A charred corpse lay in the foreground in one of them; crumpled, in a torn, blackened flying-suit.

Everywhere Johnny went, he met German people who, as teenagers, had lived through the Dambusters raid. The programme had made its purpose plain from the off: Johnny was meant to engage with the locals and feel bad about what he'd done to them during the war.

At the programme's start, Johnny had been seen in his armchair at home, displaying wartime sang-froid. "I refer to myself as the murderer of the crew," he told us. "I was the one dropping the bombs. I felt no remorse at the time, and I have to confess that I still don't." He also revealed that his pet hate is "retrospective historians" who point to the civilian casualties sustained in military operations and then question the need for the operations at all.

But here Johnny was now, face to face with some of those who'd survived his attempts to murder them. Sixteen hundred people hadn't, on the night of May 15-16, 1943. These included 593 non-German women held by the Nazis as slave labourers, drowned after two of the targeted dams, the Eder and Mohne, were destroyed, releasing millions of gallons of water.

Of course, Johnny finally wound up expressing a measure of guilt for what he'd been a part of - along with relief that, while he'd managed to bomb the Sorpe dam, he didn't succeed in destroying it.

War is hell, we learned. TV programmes about war's hellishness can be less than heavenly in their motives, too.