Wiktor Fontes
Victor was an officer in a Polish Army Mounted Infantry Regiment. Faced with an armoured Wehrmacht blitzkrieg invasion of his country, the outcome was inevitable. Victor, along with many others, fled south to the Black Sea where he embarked on a British ship in order to fight the hated enemy another day. They survived the hazardous voyage the length of the Mediterranean Sea and via Gibraltar, the Atlantic, and the Bay of Biscay, to disembark in Western France.
Again the writing was on the wall, France collapsed, the last British evacuation gone, and again he had to walk south to freedom over the Pyrenees into a hostile Fascist Spain. He was arrested, incarcerated, escaped, and continued south back to Gibraltar. He burned with hatred of an enemy that had enslaved his homeland and killed so many of his countrymen. He imparted this in very imperfect English to his British hosts. What military experience did he have? "I am Polish Cavalry Officer!". Their are no vacancies for Cavalry Officers, the only force in direct conflict with the enemy is RAF Bomber Command. "Then I fly with them as pilot".
So it was. Victor somehow continued his charmed survival while taking the war directly to those who had destroyed all that he loved. Come the end of hostilities there was no returning home to a now communist Poland, where he would face likely death. The RAF was his life, his home, his family. There were now however too many pilots, but a shortage of Navigators, so once again this versatile man learned new skills.That is how I came to know him, a big man in every sense, like so many others who fought alongside us to destroy Nazism.