Sure, his side did not play particularly well, and was in fact lucky to win, but for Johnson the game was all about getting a victory over Argentina at Otago Stadium on Saturday night.
Johnson acknowledged his side had to play better in the coming weeks, after gutsing out a 13-9 win, having trailed for most of the match.
"We can be a lot better clearly but these games are black and white, and we won," Johnson said.
"We said before the tournament that these game are about finding a way to win. You're against difficult teams, you get into trouble with the ref, the penalty count starts going against you ... but we found a way to win."
The English left for some different scenery yesterday, travelling to Queenstown. They will stay there until Thursday, when they return to Dunedin to prepare to take on Georgia on Sunday night.
Johnson, a World Cup winner in 2003, said the side just had to stay clam on Saturday night and hang in there.
"It was tough day for everyone and we could have easily have lost that game. It was blindingly obvious we could have lost that game but we didn't."
Argentina had its chances on both defence and attack and missed six penalties, although England was no better with Jonny Wilkinson having an off day, missing five penalties.
Wilkinson laid no blame for his inaccurate radar on the new stadium, saying he was solely guilty for the misses and it had nothing to do with the conditions or the uniqueness of playing under a roof.
England captain Mike Tindall said his side just stuck to its guns and eventually got results.
"No-one got frustrated and we kept calm. We just carried on plugging away, wanting to play the game we wanted to play, and then we went over and got in front," he said.
"We needed to keep the tempo of the game a bit higher. It was stop-start a lot of the time and the guys were getting frustrated."
England did not get ahead until the final quarter of the game when replacement halfback Ben Youngs went over after finding a gap against the tiring Argentinian defence.
With Wilkinson's conversion and a penalty with seven minutes to go, England got home although it was poor at times. It ran across the field too much, and made easy targets for the defence.
Winger Delon Armitage admitted England would have to improve next week.
"Georgia is going to be exactly the same and we know what they are coming with so we will be ready for them. We need to start a bit better, keep our discipline and do our jobs.
"Hopefully, next time those half chances we can finish them.
Get it into our outside backs a bit more and play to our strengths." Argentina and its wonderful supporters will head to Invercargill to face Romania on Saturday.
The scores
ENGLAND v ARGENTINA
• England 13
Ben Youngs try; Jonny Wilkinson con, 2 pen
• Argentina 9
Martin Rodriguez 2 pen, Felipe Contepomi pen
• Halftime: Argentina 6-3.
• Crowd: 26,000.