Gretzyngier - Poles in Defence of Britain: a Day-by-Day Chronology of Polish Day and Night Fighter Pilot Operations: July 1940-June 1941

Published by
Grub Street
The Basement
10 Chivalry Road
London SW11 1HT

Copyright 2001 Grub Street, London
Text copyright Robert Gretzyngier

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gretzyngier, Robert
Poles in defence of Britain: a day-by-day chronology of Polish day and night fighter pilot
operations, July 1940-June 1941
1. Great Britain. Royal Air Force History 2. Poland. Lotnicze Sily Zbrojne History
3. World War, 1939-1945 Aerial operations, Polish 4. Britain, Battle of, 1940
5. Air pilots, Military Poland Biography 6. Poles Great Britain Biography
7. World War, 1939-1945 Aerial operations, Polish Personal narratives
I.Title
940.5449438

ISBN 1 902304 54 3
PRINT ISBN: 9781904943051
EPUB ISBN: 9781909166271

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Typeset by Pearl Graphics, Hemel Hempstead

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and Kings Lynn

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been compiled without the generous assistance of many Polish Air Force airmen, veterans of WWII. I am particularly indebted to Jerzy B. Cynk, G/Cpt Stanisaw Wandzilak and Roman Kulik, who supported me and my friend Wojtek Matusiak in our endless research in London archives. Their priceless help in surviving our yearly expeditions to the Last Hope Island are inestimable. I would like to thank Stanisaw Bochniak, Jan Budziski, Micha Cwynar, Edward Jaworski, Ludwik Martel, and many others for their anecdotes, details of service of the Polish personnel in the RAF, as well as hours of discussions.

Special thanks go to Andrzej Suchcitz, Wacaw Milewski and Krzysztof Barbarski from the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, as well as to the staff of the RAF Museum, Hendon, the Public Records Office at Kew for their patience, and to Christopher Shores for his excellent foreword.

Among those who kindly provided information and photographs were: Peter Arnold, Bartomiej Belcarz, Krzysztof Chooniewski, Stefan Czmur, Tomasz Drecki, Mrs. Gabszewicz and Stefan Gabszewicz, Kazimierz Gardzina, Franciszek Xawery Grabowski, Jerzy Janaszewski, Dr Jan P. Koniarek, Tomek Kopaski, Leszek A. Kosiski, Micha Mucha, Jii Rajlich, Andrew Rycki, Pawe Sembrat, Grzegorz liewski, Olivier Tyrbas de Chamberet, Simon Watson, Piotr Winiewski, and Jzef Zieliski.

My final thanks always go to my wife who supported my interest in the Polish Air Force history for the last decade, continuously asking when are you going to finish your work?

PREFACE

By the time I and my friends arrived in Britain in 1940, we had travelled around the whole of Europe, spurred by the will to fight for our oppressed homeland. My desire to fight was finally fulfilled when I was posted to a fighter squadron of the RAF. Far from officialdom, among my British colleagues, I felt really happy. Luck was with me during those months it was with me when I shot down an enemy plane, and it did not abandon me when I was badly hit myself.

The latter fact is more and more often brought to my attention both by my old bones, and by people who have researched the Battle of Britain. For some time now they have not only been British historians, but also young men from Poland, who persistently bother me and my aged friends with detailed questions about what happened sixty years ago. Unfortunately, they are not always satisfied with my answers, while my memory does not serve me as it used to

Attending Battle of Britain meetings every year, I notice fewer and fewer of the familiar faces, and the number of surviving Polish participants of that great air battle has long since become a single-digit one. More and more often we mourn yet another Polish pilot who at one time flew in defence of Britain. If not for the commemorative plaques, monuments, and memorials, erected by the Polish Air Force Association as well as by our British friends, any trace of the Polish Air Force on British soil would soon be gone.

When we came to this Island of Last Hope, nobody promised things would be easy. We fought on, knowing that a good life is seldom an easy one. Today, it is not easy, too, when we fight to preserve the memory of that great effort and great sacrifice of so many young lives. I see this book about Poles who fought in defence of Britain as a homage to the lost generation and to all my colleagues, even if I no longer remember their names.

Ludwik Martel

AUTHORS PREFACE

This work was initiated during one of the last Polish Air Force Association congresses by discussions between members of the PAFA and young history enthusiasts. For many years historians from my country were cut off from the historical sources of the Polish Air Force, located mostly in London. All information about the PAF history and people who served in its units came from the books published in Poland, written by several pilots who survived the war and the communists repressions. In fact my interest in the Polish airmen serving in the RAF during WWII was aroused when I read the exciting stories of those fighter pilots. Many years later I was able to meet and talk to Witold okuciewski, Bolesaw Gadych, Witold Urbanowicz, Stanisaw Skalski, and other top scoring aces of the famous Polish squadrons, and then I realised how little we knew about the birth of the Polish Air Force in Britain and the first year of fighting against the Germans alongside the RAF. Every child in Poland knows about 303 Squadron and its heroes, but the knowledge about other units is almost nil. Also English speaking readers associate the famous Kociuszko Squadron with its victories during the Battle of Britain, but who knows of the Polish airmen serving in many of the RAF squadrons? The rest of the Polish Air Force is left somewhere in the shadow of the most famous unit and its pilots.

It is hard to describe the feelings of all the people who in September 1939 left their homeland and answered the appeals of their commanders to continue their fight. Left only with shabby uniforms, they made the long journey through European and North African countries to reform the Polish Air Force, first in France and finally in Britain. To show the hard days of the Polish soldiers I decided to use their original memoirs and diaries written during the war, as often as it was possible. Now, their stories provide a colourful addition to the documents preserved in archives and museums, which show only dates, figures and names of what then was their entire life.

This work is dedicated to those who sacrificed their lives in wartime.

FOREWORD

By the end of August Fighter Command had been fighting a series of increasingly desperate combats since the Dunkirk evacuation, three months earlier. During this period many of the long serving, experienced career pilots had been killed, wounded, or were close to exhaustion. Others particularly those who had been involved in the fighting over France during the weeks of the Blitzkreig, had already been rested and sent to the new Operation Training Units in order that they might pass on at least a fraction of the experience they had gained to those now being rushed through the training process to get them into the front line units as replacements and reinforcements.

In the situation in which the Command found itself, there were simply insufficient pilots and insufficient time to train those that were available, before they had to be thrown into the fray. The brilliant initiative that had set up the RAF Volunteer Reserve had provided at least a nursery of partly trained personnel when war broke out, but now these young acolytes, and indeed, many pilots from other Commands who now volunteered to transfer to fighters, were being provided with so brief an introduction to operational flying, as to be little more than nothing. Whereas later in the war the period spent at OTUs would stretch for weeks, at this time no more than a few days could be provided, so great was the call for replacements. Many young pilots arrived on their first squadrons with only a few hours of experience of flying a Hurricane or Spitfire barely enough to allow them to take off, hold formation, and land again. Indepth training in aerial gunnery simply was not available.