Honza17 thank you, your father must have taken advantage of a very short lived window of opportunity to make it to the West via the Black Sea! Perhaps it was just as well that the Poles didn't offer them the chance to join them or he would have been trapped in the chaos that was shortly to follow. Interesting too that the French offer was to join the Foreign Legion but having no air arm it would have involved many square pegs in round holes, I would have thought. I wonder what he did at Sidi-bel-Abbes during his short time in the Legion? I doubt it was to sit around much awaiting developments. That was hardly the way of the Legion.
Events though very soon allowed for joining the FAF direct. One wonders why the Brits seemed to have shown little or no interest at the time of this sudden availability of so much skilled and fully trained manpower. Everyone knew that there was a full blown war on its way but it was the French who saw that it would need everyone that they could lay their hands on. Of course it is easy to be wise after the event and it might be that the rationale was to see that the French were bolstered for it as much as possible beforehand as they would have to take the initial onslaught.
The cruel fate of those who returned to their homeland only to suffer and even die at the hands of the incumbent regime must have sent a strong message to those who were still in the West. It certainly accounts for the many who remained in the RAF and made it their home. They certainly brought it home to their juniors, such as I, of the cruelty of war and the reason we had to defend our freedoms by standing together under the NATO umbrella to confront the next tyranny that threatened us.