Part two...
The knowledge that there were Poles up in the sky over London touched a chord in the population, and the fame of 303 began to spread. The press related tales of the bravery and skill of the ‘cavaliers from a conquered land’. Fan mail poured in from all over the country. A school in Ruislip had a whip-round and sent 450 cigarettes ‘for the brave Polish fighters’. A girls’ school in Glasgow sent them ten shillings. The Borough of Willesden, which had collected money to fund a Spitfire, stipulated that it should be flown by a Pole. The Daily Telegraph printed poems sent in by enthusiastic literati. ‘Gallants, who here patrol the sky, And strew the land with wrack of raiders,’ one bard began.
‘We had a fantastic time,’ remarks one pilot. ‘We were continually mobbed, and we were also very much in demand among English women.’ For a girl at this time, to be seen on the arm of a fighter pilot was a triumph. ‘I just cannot begin to describe the effect that “wings” had on a girl then,’ confirms Joan Wyndham, a WAAF stationed at Stanmore. Besides wearing two sets of ‘wings’, the regulation British ones and the Polish pilot’s eagle, the Poles enjoyed an additional glamour based on novelty value and the romantic aura with which people endowed their nation.
One day 303 returned to base after an operation, but without Flight Lieutenant Antoni Wczelik. Next day, his crashed plane and a Messerschmitt he had evidently shot down were located. The German pilot was apprehended, but there was no sign of Wczelik. Two days later he was officially posted missing and his gear was packed up to make room for a new pilot. But that evening he gaily marched into the Northolt mess. He had parachuted on to a golf course, to the consternation of some elderly gentlemen in the middle of a game. He was dragged off to the club house and plied with drinks. By the evening he was so drunk that he was taken home by a lady whose husband happened to be on active service overseas, and who refused to let him go for two days.
The only ones who had mixed feelings about the successes of 303 were the pilots of 302, who had been patrolling the east for the past two weeks without sighting a single enemy plane. Their frustration built up into frequent rows between their commander Mieczystaw Mummler and his British counterpart, Squadron Leader Jack Satchell. Satchell was a regular officer, and although he was thirty years old, he was young in spirit, more so than Mummler, who belonged to the old school and could not catch the spirit of 1940. Satchell’s flight lieutenants were younger and less experienced than their Polish pilots, and one of them, Nigel Farmer, was by common consent a poor and therefore dangerous pilot. The only thing that made up for this was that 302 was stationed with 242 Canadian Squadron, commanded by the legless Douglas Bader. Poles and Canadians vied with each other in horseplay, and having no legs did not prevent Bader from leading his men when the evening’s entertainment consisted of building a barricade of furniture down the centre of the room and then fighting a battle over it.
302 Squadron’s chance to prove themselves came on 15 September, arguably the most crucial day of the Battle of Britain, when massed German attacks on London succeeded one another and virtually swamped the fighter squadrons sent up to meet them. As if sensing the importance of that Sunday, Winston Churchill had gone to the headquarters of 11 Fighter Group at Uxbridge, and spent the whole day in the operations room following the course of the battle.
303 Squadron was scrambled in mid morning and again at about 2 pm, when, along with one other RAF squadron, it had to head-off a raid by some 400 German planes. The fact that only twenty-four Hurricanes could be sent up to meet such a force is eloquent testimony to the shortage of fighters on the British side. To bolster the thinning defences of the capital an extra fighter wing, consisting of 302, a Czech, a Canadian and two RAF squadrons, was seconded from 12 Group to help. This wing was led by Douglas Bader, who was already immensely popular with the Polish pilots, and as it took off from Duxford to go into action, Bader shouted ‘You’ll be in Warsaw soon!’ over the radio. The pilots of 302 were determined to show their colleagues what they could do, and shot down ten German planes, with another five probables, at the cost of two planes and one of their own pilots killed.
‘The terrified mug of the Kraut flashed by, and a split second later he crashed into the ground, throwing up a cloud of smoke and clods of earth. I pulled up higher and circled over the burning remnants of the machine before turning away and taking a course for my base.’
But on 15 September, when he tried to repeat the procedure with a German bomber over the Thames estuary, he ended up ramming it and had to bale out of his disintegrating Hurricane. Another pilot of 303 also rammed a German, but he was less lucky and died on the way to hospital. ‘I got him, though,’ were his last words.
‘After every such victory one cannot help the thought going through one’s head that if we’d had such machines in Poland, things would have been so wonderful and so different,’
Churchill declared that the German squadrons had been ‘cut to rags and tatters’ on that day as he left the Uxbridge operations room. But it was not just a question of numbers of aircraft shot down. As one British pilot pointed out, the Poles, and particularly the pilots of 303, were particularly effective at breaking up and driving back enemy bomber formations, which was, after all, the object of the exercise. Thus, on 11 September, the twelve Hurricanes of 303 had intercepted a force of 150 German bombers crossing the south coast bound for London and forced them to jettison their bombs over Sussex and turn back for France.
They achieved such successes in a number of ways, but the principle was always the same – to force the Germans to break formation. Standard RAF training dictated that a pilot should open fire at a distance of not less than 150 yards, when all eight of the machine guns in a Hurricane’s wings (which converged slightly) would hit the enemy plane at the same spot, producing maximum impact and minimizing the risk. The Poles would have none of this. With centuries of cavalry tactics in their blood, they believed in the psychological effect of a charge aimed at the centre of an enemy formation. They also swore by holding their fire until they were very close, with the whole side of the enemy plane before them. ‘When they go tearing into the enemy bombers and fighters they go so close you would think they were going to collide,’ wrote Forbes. At this point they would fire a raking broadside which even it it did not hit something vital, certainly unnerved every single member of the enemy bomber’s crew.
When flying together in formation German bombers could defend themselves with their combined firepower, but once scattered they were far more vulnerable, so if their formation was broken up, individual planes would tend to cut and run. ‘The great number of German fighters and bombers they brought down by this method shows that they knew how to make it pay,’ comments Wing-Commander W B Austin. But the Poles did not stick rigidly to any one tactic, and the pilots of 303 con- tinually worked out new variants, with Kellett, in response to what was a completely novel form of fighting and a novel situation. Any tactic required ‘complete trust and perfect timing’, and in this respect the Poles responded well to him. ‘It was just common sense, really,’ adds Kellett. ‘And besides, once you’d gone in to attack there was no time to worry about what anyone else was doing.’ A few seconds’ pause or hesitation could cost a pilot his life.
Although Sunday, 15 September 1940 is now regarded by many as the turning-point in the Battle of Britain, this was by no means obvious to the participants. Huge formations of German planes continued to raid London in a desperate attempt to smash Britain into submission. By mid September Poles represented well over 10 per cent of all the fighter pilots defending the south-east, as British casualties mounted and Poles took their places. It was nevertheless 303 that continued to steal the lime-light.
On 17 September General Sikorski came down to Northolt to visit the squadron and decorate some of the pilots with gallantry awards. Churchill also dropped in unannounced several times on his way back to London. On 26 September King George VI paid 303 a visit. He inspected the base and talked with the pilots, who were on readiness in the dispersal hut. Suddenly the tele- phone rang, scrambling the squadron. The pilots dashed for the door, brushing aside the king with little ceremony, and ran to their machines. The king watched them take off and wished them ‘happy hunting’ over the radio before leaving the base. He also asked to be informed of the results. The squadron engaged and turned back an invading party over Portsmouth and returned to base safely. The telegram they sent to Buckingham Palace that evening read:
‘Eleven shot down for certain, one probably destroyed. Own losses nil.’
On the next day, 27 September, with an RAF squadron, 303 destroyed thirty-one German planes in 30 minutes over the Isle of Wight, and notched up its hundredth confirmed kill in Britain. It lost two pilots, including Ludwik Paszkiewicz, who had scored its first kill exactly four weeks earlier. Such losses could not mar the joy of the 303 pilots, and even Group Captain Vincent was dragged into the celebrations, noting that he had never found himself propelled so high into the air without wings before.
Life changed after that. On 28 September the Germans adopted a new tactic. Instead of massive raids against London, they now used their bombers by night, or in very high-level flights. Their fighters swept the skies in smaller groups, engaging and tying down British defending fighters, or carried out low level strafing raids. This meant more work for the defending squadrons, which were scrambled several times a day but often could not make contact with the smaller raiding parties. There were thus fewer engagements, and consequently fewer kills. It was altogether more tiring and less fun for the pilots. It was also dangerous. The RAF’s losses continued to mount, causing it to draw on the pool of waiting Polish airmen, with the result that by the beginning of October 1940 there were times when one in five of the British fighters defending London was manned by a Pole. 303 Squadron had clocked up another twenty-six kills by 11 October, when it was withdrawn from the front line and sent to Leconfield for a period of rest. It had set two new records for the highest number of enemy planes shot down in a month (more than double the tally of the next highest-scoring squadron), and for the lowest ratio of own losses to successful kills. The squadron’s place at Northolt was taken by 302, whose pilots welcomed the opportunity to boost their reckoning. But their expectations were dashed. They were frequently scrambled but rarely made contact with the enemy, and when they did come across a large formation of Messerschmitts on 15 October, they lost two of their own pilots. Three days later they again lost two pilots in battle, while two more killed themselves landing in bad weather.
The Battle of Britain is officially deemed to have ended on 31 October. Of the 2,927 pilots who manned a fighter at any point between June and November, 146 (just under 5 per cent) were Poles. Of the 2,692 German planes deemed by the RAF ‘destroyed for certain’ (including those brought down by anti-aircraft fire and balloons), 203 (over 7.5 per cent) had been credited to Poles. 303 Squadron had downed three times the average RAF score, and incurred one-third of the average casualties. Excluding the sixteen planes shot down by Kellett, Kent and Forbes, 303 accounted for 110 certain kills, nine probables and six damaged, at the cost of eight of their own pilots. The figures for 302, excluding the five aircraft shot down by its British pilots, were sixteen definites, ten probables and one damaged, at the cost of six own losses. The eighty-nine Polish pilots serving in various RAF squadrons accounted for seventy-seven definites, sixteen probables and twenty-nine damaged, and seventeen of them lost their lives.
Although these figures proclaim a glorious performance, one must be very cautious before extrapolating any conclusions from them. The Polish individual top score of seventeen enemy planes shot down was about half the personal scores of some British ‘aces’. On the other hand, statistics show that in the RAF as a whole, 4.9 kills cost one own death, while the Polish squadrons notched up 10.5 enemy planes destroyed for every own pilot killed – a staggering discrepancy. Apart from demonstrating that Poles together work better than Poles apart, these figures would seem to bear out the Polish claim to superior tactics and better teamwork – the last thing the RAF top brass had expected of them.
‘The readiness to help a stricken comrade was a feature among the Poles that I was to witness on several occasions,’
‘One felt safe with them,’ adds Thomson; ‘they knew their business.’ Kellett himself is almost embarrassed by the way the three Poles of his section looked after him in the air, with an almost almost ‘feudal’ sense of loyalty.
Figures and statistics are by nature unfair, and in the case of the Battle of Britain, one is not comparing like with like. The RAF had many seasoned pilots of great skill, but it also contained many chivalrous boys, barely out of school, with great reserves of courage but little training and no fighting experience. The average age of all fighter pilots who took part was twenty, while the average age of the Polish pilots involved was twenty-four – a significant difference. All the Poles had hundreds of hours of flying time on a variety of planes behind them, and most had some fighting experience. The British squadrons had more time in the front line than the Polish ones, which entered the battle at a later stage or, like 302, were largely outside it. This meant that the British aces could clock up more kills, but it also meant that many more inexperienced young pilots were killed, particularly in the first weeks. The fact remains that the Poles did achieve above-average results, and there are several good reasons for this. Their very strong motivation and their hatred for the Germans meant that they were psychologically steadier and more determined than their British colleagues. They were on the whole older and more experienced, and they employed superior tactics. They had been trained to fly on inferior planes with little in the way of support systems, and as a result ‘their understanding and handling of aircraft was quite exceptional’, were the words of one British flight instructor. This meant that they were better equipped to get themselves and a damaged plane back to base, or to make a safe forced landing in difficult terrain. They had also had to face a vastly superior enemy in their primitive machines. They were thus able to make the most of their equipment, and while 303 was flying Hurricanes, which were inferior to the Messerschmitt 109, they could nevertheless achieve better results than Bntish squadrons equipped with the far more advanced Spitfire. ‘We would have done better if we’d had Spitfires, like the English,’ commented one. The Poles had, it has to be remembered, downed Messerschmitts with their P-11s, which had less than half of the speed and one-fifth of the firepower of a Hurricane. But perhaps their greatest asset was their eyes.
British airmen were trained with a wealth of sophisticated equipment, including radar and constant radio contact with the ground and other planes. They therefore naturally relied on these to tell them where they were and where the enemy was. ‘You’d get these chaps who’d go up, lose half their bloody squadron, and they never saw a thing,’ as one British squadron leader puts it. The Polish airmen had been through rigorous medicals before being accepted into the air force, including stringent eyesight tests. Moreover, until they reached England they had never enjoyed the luxury of radio or radar, so they relied for their own safety on keeping an eye out on all sides at all times. The Poles always seemed to see everything first,’ remarked Squadron Leader Crook, who had two of them in his squadron, and he was not alone in noticing this. ‘The Poles seem to have an uncanny gift in this respect,’ another British pilot told a Daily Telegraph reporter. ‘They have “spotted” Germans in the distance long before I have been able to see them.’ Another, talking to an Evening News reporter, explained that,
‘whereas the British pilots were trained to rely on their radios, and to go exactly where they are told, Polish pilots are always turning and twisting their heads in an effort to spot a distant enemy’.
Given the speed with which an enemy fighter could dive out of the sun and attack from behind, this was a tremendous asset.
Another element in the fine showing of the Polish squadrons, intangible yet undoubtedly very important, was the superiority of their ground crews. These were the pick of the pre-war ground personnel, supplemented by LOT engineers and technicians from aircraft factories in Poland. ‘I don’t believe any squadron had better NCOs or better aircraft maintenance than 303,’ wrote Kellett. These men faced a challenge quite different from that faced by the pilots. One of the mechanics wrote,
For the pilots, a Hurricane or a Spitfire was not actually such a novelty. A machine like any other, a little practice and you’re off. But for the mechanics it was a difficult, a very hard nut to crack. While the engine itself and the body did not present any great problem, the instructions, the names of tools and parts caused major headaches to even the most resourceful among us. At first, we would get new machines in exchange for damaged ones, but as the number of sorties grew, the supply system began to falter and one had to begin to fly ‘on one’s own industry’, just as it had been in 1920 and 1939 in Poland, and in 1940 in France. And it was here that the Polish mechanic showed what he could do. With strange use of language and particularly hands, they managed to explain to the stores personnel what the problem was in order to obtain the necessary part. And if the part they needed was not there, they would make it up themselves, because, after all, the pilots had to fly on something.
What helped was the quality of the machines they were put to work on. ‘Nothing flashy,’ commented the chief engineer of 303, ‘but there are no nasty surprises or construction faults either. It’s all good sound workman- ship.’
‘The mechanics like to have their own planes to work on, and here you can see our Polish traditions and habits coming out,’ writes the engineer. ‘It was always the tradition that every plane had its own fitter and his assistant – it did not like or want others. To begin with, when we blindly subordinated ourselves to British ways and abandoned our own, it often happened that numerous doctor-mechanics would endlessly debate how to repair a sick plane.’
As soon as they joined their own squadrons, they reverted to the Polish system. ‘The return to Polish ways has meant that the planes now have their permanent guardians, tender and sensitive to every minute ailment of their own machine.’ These ‘guardians’ were to be found hanging around their Hurricane at all hours, endlessly cleaning and re-checking odd pieces of equipment. ‘There was no caste difference between pilots and mechanics,’ writes Krol. These are not empty words. He was the son of an illiterate peasant, while many of the fitters were middle-class men with degrees. Yet several British officers have made the point that the Polish officers treated their men ‘like dirt’, and professed themselves disgusted by it. Kellett recalls having to sort out a mutiny by three ground staff who refused to obey one of the officers of 303. Andrzej Nahlik, a pilot who spent as much time in British as in Polish units, tells a different story. ‘The British treated their ground crew with far greater hauteur, even with scorn,’ he states, adding that there was far more rigid stratification in the RAF between aircrew officers, aircrew NCOs and ground crew. The very idea that an officer was awarded a DFC and an NCO a DFM for the same action struck the Poles as monstrous. Polish ground crew themselves believe they enjoyed a completely different standing from those of the RAF.
The very proportion of ground to air crew must have made a difference: in the RAF it was more than 100 to 1, in the Luftwaffe it was about 80 to 1, and in the Polish Air Force it was only 30 to 1. ‘Brothers have never been closer than we were,’ confirms Skalski’s fitter. He recalls a reception where Skalski, the Battle of Britain ace and by then a wing-commander, walked up to him and kissed his hands. The British officers present were astonished and a little shocked at the sight of a wing-commander kissing a fitter’s hands. ‘Were it not for these hands I would never have shot down so many planes – I’d be dead,’ Skalski declared. ‘The whole squadron was one family, sharing the joy of victories and successful flights, and sharing in the sorrow of losses. The mechanics would be in a frenzy of excitement as the planes came back from an operation, waiting to see whether they would buzz the airfield or make a victory roll, signifying success. They could see from the torn masking of the machine guns if the plane had been firing and would run up to their planes, hang on to the wings while they were still taxiing and shout: “How many?” The pilots would show them on their fingers. According to the pilots, the ground crew took more pride in the squadron’s score than did pilots themselves. “Mine’s been firing,” hollers one of them, as though it were all down to him. Such is the unwritten but immutable law, that the machine belongs not to God, nor to the king, nor to the government, but to him, and only to him, an oil-smeared scarecrow in blue overalls.’
The ground staff were just as eager as the pilots to get the machines airborne again. ‘Just take a look at what happens when a plane returns from a flight – like a honey sandwich it is instantly covered in busy bees, and you can almost hear the hum of a hive,’ writes 303’s engineer. Their dedication was so great that during its whole participation in the Battle of Britain, 303 only went up four times with less than its full complement of twelve planes.
When the squadron returned to Northolt after the fighting of 15 September, the ten planes (two had been shot down) were declared write-offs by Kellett. But the mechanics refused to see the squadron reduced to its four spare machines, and after a night of frenzied clanging and banging, twelve planes stood ready for take-off on the runway.
Such hard work meant that the squadron remained at full strength in virtually all operations, which obviously increased its effectiveness and its collective safety. The meticulous attention to detail also minimized the possibility of snapping cables, jamming machine guns or instrument failure, all of which could easily cost a pilot his life. Above all, the devotion of the mechanics meant that the pilots were utterly confident that their planes were in prime condition and fine-tuned, and such confidence counted for a great deal in battle.
However one reads the statistics, one can see what made Flight Lieutenant Kent call 303 ‘the finest squadron in the whole world’ – to which he added ‘profound thanks for keeping me alive and teaching me to fight’. With only about 400 fighters defending the south-east at any one time, the Polish contribution of between 50 and 100 in action throughout September and October was vital. On 11 September, the Poles accounted for 18 per cent of the enemy aircraft destroyed, on 15 September they accounted for 14 per cent, on 19 September 25 per cent, on 26 September a staggering 48 per cent.
‘Our shortage of trained pilots would have made it impossible to man the squadrons which were required to defeat the German air force and so win the Battle of Britain, if the gallant airmen of Poland had not leapt into the breach.’ Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for the Air Force.
‘What we could have done without the Polish fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain is difficult to contemplate.’ Air Marshal Sir Michael Beetham.
More telling still is the statement by the far from effusive Dowding, who declared:
‘Had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry I hesitate to say that the outcome of battle would have been the same’.