Strictly not on the thread topic, but I came across this on a Facebook group and felt that, although lengthy, those here might find it readable...it was posted by Mark Drinkall, I know not the provenance....
Seems it was too long...so here it is in two posts...
On the afternoon of 30 August 1940, 303 Kosciuszko Squadron, still undergoing training at RAF Northolt, was carrying out an exercise in escorting a group of Blenheim bombers when a formation of German planes came in sight. Squadron Leader Kellett, the unit’s British commander, wanted to get the vulnerable Blenheims and his own planes out of the battle zone.
Pilot Officer Ludwik Paszkiewicz, who had noticed the enemy planes first, reported his wish to attack them over the radio, and, apparently receiving no answer, he took matters into his own hands and peeled off from the formation.
He went for the nearest of the German planes, a Dornier 17, which he shot down with a single burst of his machine guns. Having chased off the others he returned to Northolt, where he landed a little after the rest of his squadron. He was ordered to report immediately to Kellett, who gave him a thundering reprimand in front of his fellow pilots for leaving the formation without authorization.
Kellett then privately congratulated Paszkiewicz on his skilful attack, and announced that on his personal recommendation the squadron had been posted operational as from the next day. Thunderous cheers greeted the news. The pilots had been getting desperately restive as they watched the other squadrons stationed at Northolt, one British and one Canadian, go up on operations every day. They were also at loggerheads with some of their British superiors, nucleus of old hands from 1 Warsaw Air Regiment, many of whom had clocked up several kills in Poland and France. They included Zdzistaw Henneberg, who had brought his whole flight safely to Britain after the fall of France; Josef Frantisek, a Czech who had joined them in Poland and fought with them in France, knocking out eleven enemy aircraft by the time he reached Britain; Urbanowicz, transferred from RAF 145 Squadron; Zumbach; and others.
Grouped together in their own squadron, the Poles were not on their best behaviour, like those posted to British units. ‘They were a complete law unto themselves,’ in the words of a British fitter stationed at Northolt. ‘Nobody could control them.’ Their clannishness and cockiness put backs up and irritated those less concerned with their flying and fighting skills than with having to live and work alongside them. ‘The Poles were a funny bunch, actually,’ remarked the same fitter. ‘We used to get along.... reasonably well, but there was no real love lost between us.’
There was even less love lost between the Poles and the detachment of Irish Guards assigned to the base, and their differences flared dangerously on at least two occasions. One was at a dance in Ruislip, when a disagreement over dancing partners turned into a pitched battle after which a number of guardsmen had to be hospitalized. The other was sparked off by an altercation between drunken Polish ground crew returning to base and guardsmen checking their passes. ‘Machine gun fire from the south-east corner of the aerodrome!’ barked the tannoy in the operations room, to the consternation of the station commander, Group Captain S F Vincent. ‘I became thoroughly alarmed, thinking of parachute attacks, fifth columnists or something equally serious,’ he writes. When he went outside his own ears confirmed his alarm. ‘There was the Guards and the Poles having a proper firefight.’ Both sides soon ran out of ammunition, and Vincent managed to restore order. He also managed, miraculously, to hush up the incident, thereby avoiding a string of enquiries and commissions, but he had the Irish Guards replaced by the Coldstream Guards.
Group Captain Vincent was a regular officer in the RAF who had seen action in the First World War and, at 43, was on the old side. An enthusiastic flier, he understood the feelings of pilots, and he was not wedded, like some, to minute observance of regulations. But he did have certain responsibilities, and he had been given the firm instruction that ‘until all the Poles learn to speak English properly, they stay on the ground’. The primary concern was that if they did not understand English, the pilots could not be directed to an interception point or vectored home over the radio. Vincent did what he could. The pilots were given bicycles, told to don radio transmitter sets, and made to cycle around Uxbridge football pitch in perfect flying formation, responding to every order they received to turn one way or the other. ‘I could not declare them operational until they could understand English better, so they hated me!’ writes Vincent.
Squadron Leader Ronald Kellett, 303’s commander, was more popular. A small, jovial figure known throughout the service as ‘Boozy’ Kellett, he was an Auxiliary who despised most regular RAF officers and liked to tell them so. And he could afford to. His father owned a coal-mine in Durham, he had been brought up in a stately home, and he made a respectable living as a stockbroker. He was also a very experienced flier. He delighted the Poles – and annoyed the regulars – with his magnificent Rolls-Royce and his subversive attitude.
He had two flight lieutenants, Athol Forbes and John Kent, an intelligence officer, an adjutant, an orderly-room corporal and three senior ground crew NCOs to help him turn these Poles into a fighting unit. The fact that they considered themselves to be one already did nothing to help him. To make matters worse, Kellett, Kent and Forbes did not get on together.
Kellett and Forbes spoke fluent French, which permitted them to communicate with some of the Poles. Kent, a Canadian from Winnipeg, was ‘thoroughly fed up and despondent’ about his new job. He was a very competent officer, but he was arrogant and tended towards bossiness, which did not endear him to many. He was also ambitious, and probably resented being placed under the command of an Auxiliary. ‘All I knew about the Polish Air Force was that it had lasted about three days against the Luftwaffe and I had no reason to suppose that they would shine any more brightly operating from England,’ he writes. He spoke no French at all, so he concentrated on learning a few key words of Polish, which earned him the sobriquet of ‘Kentowski’.
Kellett was less concerned with linguistics than with the pilots’ skills. One pilot remembers him pointing to a plane and uttering the word ‘Hurricane’, then flapping his arms like a bird and saying ‘Fly’, and then pushing the pilot towards the plane. Kellett quickly realized that these were excellent fliers; but, being new to it, they often left the radio switched on when not using it, which jammed the frequency, or forgot how to use it at critical moments.
More worrying was that, with little experience of retractable undercarriages, they sometimes forgot to lower them when coming in to land, and being unused to closed cockpits often forgot to open and lock the covers before landing (a precaution against being trapped in a burning machine). They soon got the hang of their Hurricanes, and although only the most rudimentary communication had been established, the squadron was needed in battle. English or no English, the Poles felt that they were ready, and in this they were not mistaken.
On the squadron’s first operational day, 31 August, six planes went up on patrol and returned to base having shot down four Messerschmitt 109s, with two more unverified. The pilots were euphoric, not least at the ease of fighting in proper machines.
‘I caught up with him easily,’ one of them scribbled in the squadron scrapbook that evening. ‘He grew in my sights until his fuselage filled the whole luminous circle. It was certainly time to fire. I did so quite calmly, and was not even excited, rather puzzled and surprised to find that it was so easy, quite different from Poland, where you had to scrape and strain until you were in a sweat, and then instead of getting the bastard he got you.’
Telegrams of congratulation poured in. ‘Magnificent fighting 303 Squadron,’ ran that from the RAF Chief-of-Staff. ‘I am delighted. The enemy is shown that Polish pilots definitely on top.’ As a treat, the pilots of 303 were given a day off – the very last thing they wanted. The RAF believed it was good for the psychological health of pilots to spend as much time as possible off the station. There was some justification for this with respect to British pilots, who could go home to their families. Polish pilots posted to RAF squadrons were often taken home by their British colleagues or relaxed with them at suburban tennis clubs, but the pilots of the all-Polish squadrons were isolated and had nowhere to go. They regarded it as a punishment rather than a treat to be grounded, particularly on 1 September, the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.
On 2 September they were in action again, over the Thames estuary and Dover, downing two German planes, with another two unverified. Along with a signal of congratulation, they earned themselves a light rebuke from Air Vice-Marshal Sir Keith Park of 11 Fighter Group. ‘The Group Commander appreciates the offensive spirit that carried two Polish pilots over the French coast in pursuit of the enemy today,’ it read. ‘This practice is not economical or sound now that there is such good shooting within sight of London.’ The British were still nervous of ‘Polish hot-headedness’.
The squadron went on notching up successes without any losses. On 5 September they shot down seven more planes and damaged one and on 6 September they repeated the same score, this time losing six of their own planes, but the only pilot hurt was Kellett. This meant that it was Forbes who led them on the following day to head off a massive German raid on London, which Göring termed ‘the historic hour when our air force for the first time delivered its blow right into the enemy’s heart’. He had come to the Headquarters of the Luftwaffe and Fleet at Cap Gris-Nez to take personal command.
Congratulations from the staff and the government were flooding in daily. When the car arrived with the sixth message from Downing Street, Kellett had had enough, and he sent back a note to the effect that, as words were losing their power, a more appropriate token of appreciation would come in the shape of a rase of whisky – which duly arrived. But the extraordinary successes of 303 had also raised eyebrows, and the Northolt intelligence officer was asked to investigate whether the Polish claims were not on the wild side (this was before cameras were fitted to run when the guns fired). Kellett and his two RAF flight leaders insisted that, if anything, they erred on the side of caution. As well as being highly competitive, the pilots of 303 had a healthy dose of the Polish characteristic of jealousy of one another’s achievements, and none of them could get away with claiming a kill unless it had been witnessed and certified beyond doubt by at least one colleague. But Group Captain Vincent was suspicious.
The next time 303 was scrambled, he took a plane up and followed them. The squadron met a large enemy formation over the London docks. Two Hurricanes immediately climbed high above, while the rest hung back, with Vincent behind them. Then the two lone planes dived almost vertically onto the Germans, spitting fire and making as if to collide with them, which forced the bombers to break formation. ‘The Poles behind jumped in on to the scattered individuals and suddenly the air was full of burning aircraft, parachutes, and pieces of disintegrating wings,’ records Vincent. ‘It was all so rapid that it was staggering.’ He tried to join in himself, but each time he fixed on a German plane it disintegrated before his eyes as a Pole got there first, and he returned to Northolt feeling old and musty. ‘I told Wilkins [the intelligence officer] that what they claimed they did, indeed, get!’
That day, 303 had repeated their record of fourteen certain kills, but this time at the cost of their first real losses, as two pilots were killed in the afternoon sortie. One of these, Flight Sergeant Wojtowicz, found himself on his own against six Messerschmitts. The population of Westerham spilled out onto the streets to watch as he destroyed two of the enemy planes before being sent to the ground in flames himself, and on the next day the Town Council sent a message of thanks and condolence to Northolt.
A remarkable aspect of the Battle of Britain was that a high proportion of civilians could actually see it going on. As the citizens of southern England were in a sense living on the battlefield, they could even participate, when a pilot crash-landed or parachuted to the ground. This helped to create a very special brand of solidarity between combatants and non-combatants. But it held hazards for any Pole who might come down to earth in such a way: they could never be quite sure of the reception they would get on the ground, as they were often taken for Germans. Franek Surma’s parachute caught in a tree just outside a pub in Kent, and a group of Free French who had been drinking in the pub almost lynched him for a ‘sale Boche’.
Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, the Polish commander of 303, was just setting his sights on a German bomber when he was himself attacked from behind.
Suddenly the glass on my dials was splintering and the fuel tank, holed by shells, burst into flames. I wanted to jump, but I could not undo the straps. There was a moment of resignation, but the will to live triumphed and I managed to undo the straps, open the cockpit and bale out. Remembering my unpleasant experiences in Poland, I refrained from opening my parachute, so as to get out of the fighting as quickly as possible and not make a target of myself. As I approached the ground, I thought that my adventures were over, but this turned out to be premature, for out of the bushes and buildings spilled the figures of Home Guards, brandishing guns, evidently hoping to bag a German. Luckily their English sang-froid held out and they did not shoot.
Krasnodebski was so badly burnt that he was rushed to hospital, but on the whole parachuting airmen were kept by the locals as long as possible and lionized. In this way, they got to know a remarkable cross-section of English society. Czestaw Tarkowski dropped on to the top rung.
I was floating down, looking at the countryside. Fields and meadows, large old oak trees. Despite frantic efforts, my parachute caught on the top branches of one of these. People with pitchforks and staves ran up. One of them, armed with a shotgun, was screaming ‘Hande hoch’. ‘F.... off,’ I answered in my very best English. The lowering faces immediately brightened up. ‘He’s one of ours!’ they shouted in unison. Hands reached up to help extricate me from the extremely uncomfortable position I was in. I was escorted to a vast fourteenth century house, the likes of which I had never seen before. The walls were covered in oak panelling, the darkened portraits of forebears looked down attentively, and a maid in a mob-cap led me into a large drawing-room. When they found out I was a Polish airman, they did everything they could for me. I was scorched and dirty, so I was given the opportunity to wash and my clothes were cleaned up. A young woman put some ointment on my burning and raw face. At lunch, my host made sure that my glass was never empty, and the twenty-year-old wine with which I was plied warmed and relaxed my aching muscles. It went to my strained and still reeling head.
He was installed in a comfortable armchair, where he slept until he was picked up by a sergeant from his base.
The shock, the alcohol and the sunny afternoon meant that I sat in the car in a complete daze. I looked at the surroundings through a mist.
At a set of traffic lights, he noticed someone waving a stick and shouting insults in German. ‘Madam, it’s one of ours – it’s a Polish pilot,’ the driver explained. The old lady’s face fell. She reached into her purse and produced a florin. ‘There was no time to resist, so I returned to base with a gleaming florin.’
Another airman penetrated a less aristocratic, but no less exclusive world, as Richard Cobb relates:
My sister’s father-in-law’s tennis club was a respectable institution, that is to say, members were admitted to it not according to the quality of their tennis, but of their speech. The first essential was that the aspiring member should ‘speak nicely’; if he did, one would assume he was a gentleman and a fit person to play ball with. My sister’s father-in-law always played a ‘foursome’ with the unmarried sister of a vicar, ‘a gentleman who kept dogs’, and his wife. The ‘foursome’ was of about fifteen years’ standing, not the sort of thing in fact that Adolf Hitler could interrupt.
On this particular Saturday, the doggy gentleman and his wife and my sister’s father-in-law were all on the court punctually at 3 pm, but there’ was no sign of the vicar’s sister. At 3.30 they were still standing on the court; it was most annoying, such a thing had never happened in fifteen years. Up above, all sorts of things were happening, and now and then aeroplanes fell out of the sky like dead flies. But the three were much too angry to pay attention to the weekend visitors from across the water. How were they going to have their game? How was my sister’s father-in-law going to get through till Wednesday without his exercise? The doggy man swore and swore, and his wife started getting irritable. ‘It’s too bad, Archibald,’ she said, ‘it really is too bad, war or no war.’ There was a war. A parachute was coming down, with someone swinging from it. The wife was the first to notice it. ‘Archibald, look, look, one of those Germans is coming down, surely he won’t land here, it’s private property!’ But he did, parachute and all, in a tree by the ladies’ dressing-room, where he remained hanging. The three would-be tennis players were puzzled what to do. My sister’s father-in-law, a resourceful man, eventually decided. ‘Look here, we’ll go to the foot of the tree and ask him who he is. If he’s a German we’ll leave him up there and phone Police Constable Snodgrass. If he’s one of ours we’ll cut him down and give him tea.’ So they moved over to the tree and shouted up, ‘Hello there! Who are you? Sind sie Allemanisch, or whatever it is? You know – sie wissen was I mean? Understanden sie?’ ‘Ask him if he is a Nazi,’ said the wife triumphantly. ‘Sind sie Nazi’? ‘Bloody fools Nazis,’ came distinctly from the branches. ‘Me, Polish man’. ‘’Oh, good chap, bloody good chap!’ said the doggy man. ‘Let him down.’ Then my sister’s father-in-law had an idea and the three whispered together. ‘But he’s not a member,’ objected the wife. ‘To hell with that,’ said her husband vigorously. So they cut him down. ‘Do you play tennis?’ he asked, and the airman replied, ‘Pardon, yes, thank you, I am quite all right.’ So they lent him some white flannels and took him to the gentlemen’s dressing-room. When the RAF car came for him, the remaining three staggered to deck-chairs. They’d never had such a game. The wife gasped: ‘Such a nice man, so strong, and how polite!’ My sister’s father-in-law murmured: ‘What a game! I don’t think I’ll play next Wednesday.’ In the club minutes you can read: ‘August 2nd, Polish officer, introduced by Mr and Mrs ——.’ That’s how a Pole came to this little town and entered the English Holy of Holies, a lawn tennis club which was strictly closed to all but ‘nice people'.
Lower down the social scale, the experience could still prove interesting. One pilot came down in a south London back garden and fell at the feet of a girl, whom he married two months later.