Tangmere Pilots - Join us for our D-Day Campaign - Recruiting New Pilots now. See last post.

[No145_Bunny]

TP are preparing for our RAF D-Day campaign starting in March - join us and be ready for the 1st mission.

 

S! Bunster

[TP_Sparky]

The last known pilot in the Battle of Britain passed away earlier this week, one of the many volunteers from the outside world came to the RAF in its greatest need. I met another.

My wife was a physician and a few years ago was medical director for rural hospital. One of her duties was also being medical director the two nursing homes affiliated with the hospital system. She told me one of the nursing home patients served as a pilot during the second world war and I asked her for his permission to come visit.

He agreed, and I spoke with him. My wife and said he was very lucid when she spoke with him. During my visit he was a bit less so. I asked him who he had flown for, and he said the Royal Air Force. I asked when he flew for them, and he said the Battle of Britain. Knowing how many in the United States claim that they were Special Forces or some other exotic military branch, but a couple questions show them to be lying, I was dubious, especially when he said he had flown Spitfires, since most (but not all) Polish fighter pilots flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain.

He spoke with what seemed to be a Polish accent, so I asked him if he had served as a pilot in the Polish Air Force. He said yes. I asked if he was in the group that escaped to Hungary at the end of the German invasion, and he again replied yes. I thought him just saying yes to everything and doubted his story. I asked if he had served in the Polish squadrons under the French Air Force and he again said yes but then paused, and very serious and seemingly sad, said, “But the airplanes that the French gave us were garbage.”

With those words, my doubt evaporated. The Warsaw ‘squadron’ (RAF Wing-size) were equipped with Caudron C.714, a new and very poor fighter design, that had no business fighting Bf-109s. Many of the new C.714s were without their armament, so the Polish pilots scrounged machine guns from other sources to jury rig some sort of armament and took to the skies to fight against the German invasion of France. The French Air Force evaluating the new fighter was so appalled at the terrible performance that they 'grounded' all C.714. The brave Polish pilots asked what other combat aircraft the French had for them to fly, but none were available, so the Polish squadrons disregarded the 'grounding' order and flew the C.714s in combat anyway.

I was stunned. Someone who hadn’t been there wouldn’t know about the terrible aircraft Polish pilots in the French Air Force were assigned, or the lengths they went to fly and to fight with whatever equipment they had or could scrounge up.

After the defeat of France, many Polish pilots made their way to England to join the RAF, where they augmented existing squadrons and formed two Polish fighter squadrons. Here, in a nursing home bed in rural Missouri in United States lay one of them. “We just wanted to fight,” he said.

He passed away shortly thereafter, and I didn’t get a chance to speak to him again. I wish I had reached him on a lucid day when he could’ve provided a lot more details. He might have flown Spitfires with one of the RAF squadrons in the Battle of Britain or flown them afterwards, as did the Polish RAF squadrons. Perhaps it was just a fabrication, but I don’t think so. Without honors or recognition, in his last days on earth, with no puffery or seeming pretense, he wanted only to say, “We just wanted to fight.”

 

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-polish-pilots-who-flew-in-the-battle-of-britain

Edited March 22 by TP_Sparky