Island of Last Hope by Lydia Syson

Left to right, in the front row: Pilot Officer Mirosław Ferić, Flight Lieutenant John A Kent (Commander of ‘A’ Flight – Kent wrote out phonetically on his trouser leg the Polish words for every procedure involved in take-off, flying and landing), Flying Officer Bogdan Grzeszczak, Pilot Officer Jerzy Radomski, Pilot Officer Witold Łokuciewski, Pilot Officer Bogusław Mierzwa (obscured by Łokuciewski), Flying Officer Zdzisław Henneberg, Sergeant Jan Rogowski and Sergeant Eugeniusz Szaposznikow. In the centre, to the rear of this group, wearing helmet and goggles, is the infamous ace F.O. Jan Zumbach.

Last week this image of a group of fighter pilots - all but one of them Poles - walking away from a Hawker Hurricane in October 1940 was posted anonymously on the door of the Welsh Polish Association in Llanelli with the words: 'Thanks for being here then...still glad you're here now'.  The photograph - apparently taken after one of over a thousand sorties made in just the first six months of Squadron 303's formation during the Battle of Britain - has also been doing the rounds on Twitter, as part of the effort so many people have been making to combat the poisonous resurgence of xenophobia and racism unleashed by the Brexit vote. Yesterday Michael Rosen offered Nicky Morgan a draft letter outlining ways in which education could lead the way in helping the population understand that migrants are not to blame for the pressures on schools and public services:

"My door is open to hear any possible approach to stop this happening," he suggests she should write. "Perhaps we should be holding a Celebrate Migration week? Or should I be asking schools to develop teaching materials that make the connection between now and times in the past in Europe when minorities were scapegoats for economic problems they didn’t cause?"

Historical fiction can be immensely useful in making those connections, allowing young readers in Britain to see that such scapegoating didn't just take place 'over there' in Europe but on this island too. At school visits, talking about the reasons why so many international volunteers went to help the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, after a right-wing military coup that was backed by Hitler and Mussolini and happened eighty years ago this month, I show students pictures of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Nobody ever guesses the photographs were taken here, or that the Blackshirts could be British. And, during discussions of the Home Front in the summer of 1940, although there is always one who recognises the flag on this memorial as Polish, most young readers know very little about the part played by Polish airmen at 'our finest hour'.

For a long time after World War II a myth persisted that the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground within days of Hitler's invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939.  In fact, despite their outnumbered and out-of-date planes, Poland's highly trained airmen fought bravely for several weeks before accepting defeat.  By 17th September, the country 'first to fight' had been invaded for a second time, by Russia, and would soon be doubly occupied.  But for the pilots the battle was far from over. 

This poster was designed in 1942 by Marek Żuławski,
a Polish expressionist painter and graphic artist
who settled in London in 1936.

Descriptions of their departure from Poland make heartbreaking reading. Adam Zamoyski, author of The Forgotten Few, reckons that about 80% of the PAF survived the first Blitzkrieg of World War Two and managed to escape capture. 9.276 crossed the border into Romania (not all as easily as Henryk, in my novel, That Burning Summer), 900 fled to Hungary, about 1,00 escaped via the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, and another 1,500 were captured by the Soviets and sent straight to labour camps. The aim was to regroup in France.

In late December, 1939, Michal Leszkiewicz, a future Bomber Command pilot who had escaped from Poland via Rumania at the age of 23, was on the way to Beirut, though he did not know this when he recorded in his diary: ‘We’re probably sailing to Syria. A vague fear of the unknown – a purely human instinct. When you know what to expect, you don’t go to pieces. We have to – we must go on. The responsibility lies with us, the young people; they’re turning to us even in Poland – the innocent ones whom fate has wronged . . .we are their hope.’

Despite his great love and commitment to his homeland, Michal Leszkiewicz never again returned to Poland, and died in England in 1992. His diary made a huge impression on me when I was finding out about the odysseys so many airmen made before they reached Britain. I drew on his account for my descriptions of Henryk’s sea voyage from Bulgaria to Beirut, his arrival in the Middle East, the journey to France, and his frustration at the chaos there. On arrival, he found himself interned in miserable conditions in France with refugees from the defeated Spanish Republic.

By June 1940, France too had fallen. The remaining Polish airmen were evacuated to Britain. Arriving exhausted and battleweary in the only allied country left unoccupied in Western Europe, they called it ‘The Island of Last Hope’. On 18th June, Churchill famously declared: ‘Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.’ J.B.Priestley (‘That Yorkshire man on the radio – the one with the calming voice Aunt Myra loved to listen to’ TBS, p. 100) remembered the Germany he’d known and loved before the last war, and warned ‘any country that allows itself to be dominated by the Nazis will not only have the German Gestapo crawling everywhere, but will also find itself in the power of all of its own most unpleasant types – the very people who, for years, have been rotten with unsatisfied vanity, gnawing envy, and haunted by dreams of cruel power. Let the Nazis in, and you will find that the laziest loudmouth in the workshop has suddenly been given the power to kick you up and down the street, and that if you try to make any appeal, you have to do it to the one man in the district whose every word and look you’d always distrusted.’

The forty Polish pilots who took to the skies at the beginning of the Battle of Britain were scattered at first among a number of RAF squadrons. Most were among the 2,000 or so airmen who'd been kicking their heels in Britain for months already. When the earliest pilots arrived between December 1939 and February 1940, they were given a frustratingly slow induction into RAF life, involving English lessons, education in the King's Regulations, and endless parades and roll calls: it seemed they would never be allowed near an actual plane.

Co-operation across national boundaries is never easy, and a distinct clash of military cultures soon became obvious. Driven to distraction by British officers who seemed to be hiding their heads in the sand about the real nature of the threat from Germany, the Poles called their RAF colleagues 'ostriches'. Meanwhile, as Zamoyski writes, the British were disconcerted, to say the least, by the newcomers' manners: 'The Polish habit of saluting everyone, on station, in town, in restaurants, irritated the British officers, who found they could not cross the airfield or walk down a street without acknowledging several dozen salutes. "They were always giving you salutes even if it was their dispatcher handing you a cup of coffee," recalls an RAF officer. "The heel-clicking that went on was terrific," remembers one RAF fitter, "and they had a funny way of bowing stiffly, from the waist up, like tin soldiers."'

Despite this, the Poles did not take easily to the kind of hierarchical deference traditional in the British military. Group Captain A.P.Davidson, a former air attaché in Warsaw and the station commander at RAF Eastchurch, near Sheerness, where the first Polish airmen were based, was shocked and baffled by their attitudes: “Whilst on the one hand there exists a distinct class feeling between officers and airmen and the former often treat the latter with a lack of consideration unknown in our own Service, on the other hand, officers fraternise with airmen, walk about and play cards with them.”

Morale improved once the Poles were finally allowed to fly, but then they discovered that everything on a British aircraft was back-to-front, so all their reflexes had to be reversed. You had to push instead of pull to open the throttle, and even the toggle for opening the parachute was on the ‘wrong’ side. There was also the difficulty of judging in feet and miles, not metres and kilometres, and new navigational aids to master like radar (only just adopted, and still secret) and radios. The British tactic of close formation flying seemed suicidal to the experienced Poles, for pilots had to pay far more attention to not colliding with each other than looking out for attacking aircraft. Four tight ranks of three planes were supposedly protected by the middle plane of the last rank, known as the ‘weaver’, but 32 Squadron, based at Biggin Hill, lost 21 of these pilots in three weeks, each ‘picked off’ by the enemy without the rest of the squadron even noticing.

A myth that came to dominate war films and popular memory was that all Polish pilots were reckless and individualistic. The stereotype arose partly because they were trained to fire at much closer range than British pilots – almost at pointblank. (‘Those crazy Poles’, thinks Peggy in That Burning Summer.) This scene from the 1969 film The Battle of Britain (whose uncountable stars included Laurence Oliver as Hugh Dowding and Trevor Howard as Keith Park) is typical of British attitudes. 

(Incidentally, and somewhat chillingly, the German aircraft used in this film were provided by Franco’s Spanish Air Force: a mixture of Heinkels, still used for transport, and retired Messerschmitt 109s.)

In August 1940, two new Polish fighter squadrons were formed: No. 302, ‘City of Poznań’, and No. 303, ‘Kościuszko’. By 1941 a fully-fledged Polish Air Force was operating alongside the RAF. By the end of the war, Polish pilots had won 342 British gallantry awards, and 303 Squadron claimed the highest number of kills of all the Allied squadrons in the Battle of Britain yet its death rate was the lowest.

On 11th September 1940 at 16.15 hrs, Sergeant Stanisław Duszyński was shot down over Romney Marsh, not far from Lydd, while attacking a Ju 88. He was 24, and like Henryk in That Burning Summer, had initially been evacuated to Rumania in 1939. Neither his body nor his Hurricane were recovered at the time, although unsuccessful efforts, both official and unofficial were made in 1973 and 1996. Six months later, Pilot Officer Bogusław Mierzwa’s Spitfire came down in flames on the stony promontory of Dungeness, not far from the lighthouse. 

Another pilot of the 303 Squadron, Mieczyslaw Waskiewicz, crashed into the sea off the point and was never found. Both were returning from a mission to escort six Blenheims sent to bomb a fighter airfield in France. Mierzwa had been awarded his Pilot’s Wings in Poland less than two years earlier, at the age of 22, not three months before the invasion of Poland. For many years, a tattered Polish flag flew over the spot where his aircraft burned, next to a plastic garden chair and the rather makeshift memorial shown above.  It's now been replaced by this slightly less romantic but more informative noticeboard.

Between 1939 and 1945, well over 200,000 Poles fought in all the forces under British High Command. But for complex reasons, largely connected with post-war shortages of jobs and housing, anti-Polish sentiment in Britain had become so bad by 1946 that ‘Poles go Home’ graffiti began to appear near Polish Air Force bases. Squadron 318 Spitfire pilot Stefan Knapp, a sculptor and painter who suffered from recurring nightmares and insomnia for years after the war, recalled the change in his memoir, The Square Sun (1956):

‘I was choking with the bitterness of it…Not so long ago I had enjoyed the exaggerated prestige of a fighter pilot and the hysterical adulation that surrounded him. Suddenly I turned into the slag everybody wanted to be rid of, a thing useless, burdensome, even noxious. It was very hard to bear.’

In the programme for the Allied Victory Celebrations in London a year later, you will only find a mention of Poland under one heading – the Central Band of the Royal Air Force. By this time it was Stalin, not Hitler, who seemed to require appeasement. The fate of Poland had already been determined around conference tables at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.

Find out more: 

Adam Zamoyski, The Forgotten Few: The Polish Air Force in World War II (1995, Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009)

Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud, For Your Freedom and Ours: The Kosciuszko Squadron – Forgotten Heroes of World War II, (2004)

Robert Gretyngier, in association with Wojtek Matusiak, Poles in Defence of Great Britain, July 1940-June 1941 (London, Grub St, 2001)

Josef Zielnski, Polish Airmen in the Battle of Britain, 2005 (A very useful book, with a short chapter on every airman, but not easy to get hold of)

Kenneth K. Koskodan No Greater Ally: The Untold Story of Poland’s Forces in World War II (Osprey, 2011)

Arkady Fiedler, 303 Squadron: The Legendary Battle of Britain Fighter Squadron (2010)

F.B.Czarmomski, They Fight for Poland: The War in the First Person, (1941 – Front Line Library)

Patrick Bishop, Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940 (Harper, 2003)

Jonathan Falconer, Life as a Battle of Britain Pilot (The History Press, 2007)

Battle of Britain monument…find out about the Polish airmen.

RAF Museum online exhibition on Polish Pilots

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum

Commemorative site with information to help find all the cemetaries in the world where Polish airmen were buried during WW2

Polish War Memorial

Lydia Syson is the author of A World Between Us, about Britain and the Spanish Civil War, and That Burning Summer, the story of a Polish pilot suffering from flying fatigue (or 'Lack of Moral Fibre') during the Battle of Britain.  

www.lydiasyson.com

The Summer of 1940 by Lydia Syson

A big welcome to Lydia Syson, who is our guest for November. Appropiaitely enough in theis onth of Remembrance, she has written a novel set in 1940.

Photo: Sanne Vliegenthart

About Lydia: she is a fifth-generation North Londoner who now lives south of the river. Although writing a novel was a very early ambition, it took her rather a long time to get round to A World Between Us, set during the Spanish Civil War and published by Hot Key Books in 2012. In the meantime, she went from being a World Service radio listener in Botswana to a producer in London, leaving the BBC after her first child was born. Three more children later she wrote a biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed, telling the full story of the charismatic eighteenth-century ‘electric’ doctor. Getting to Timbuktu is still on the ‘to do’ list – explorers, poets and Timbuktu fever were the subject of the PhD she finished in 2003 – but recent travels have been closer to home. Her new book, THAT BURNING SUMMER, is set in July 1940 as the Battle of Britain was raging over Kent. Sixteen-year old Peggy faces a test of love and loyalty when a young Polish pilot crash-lands near the family farm. 

“That Burning Summer” emerged, layer by layer, almost entirely from the place in which it’s set. Years of mooching around Romney Marsh (cycling between its pubs and churches, and walking, windswept, along that peculiar triangle of Kent coast which juts out towards Boulogne, made me see the summer of 1940 in an entirely new light. The more I dug, the more intrigued I became by the ‘underbelly’ of the Battle of Britain: all those elements of wartime life which the propaganda posters are precisely designed to cover up. The uncomfortable truths.

Posters like this have supplied our most enduring images of the era. Propaganda deals in myth of course, and wartime myths - invariably more palatable than the reality – quickly and powerfully come to dominate memory and imagination. So in my childhood, like most Britons, I’d absorbed a fairly standard narrative of World War II: ‘we’ won. It was the ‘good’ war, the ‘just’ war, unlike the futile one that preceded it, and “Britons never, never will be…”

And I here I stop. Because one subversive grandmother (London Granny) used to finish this song off with ‘marrai-ed to the mermai-eds at the bottom of the deep blue sea’ while the other (Country Granny) memorably brought me up short one day in conversation in her kitchen when I was about ten years old with the information that she and everyone else on the South coast of England were firmly convinced in 1940 that Hitler actually would invade. For the first time in my life, I learned that the prospect of losing the war was at one time extremely real. I was shocked. I’d really had no idea.

One half term, exploring a flooded pillbox on the Royal Military Canal (http://www.royalmilitarycanal.com/pages/index.asp) with my children, that conversation suddenly came back to me. The Canal, which curves efficiently from Hythe to Rye, was originally built to repel Napoleonic invaders, and also to control smugglers. It was the first effective line of defense in these parts in 1940, when German invaders were anticipated at every moment. What would it have been like, I wondered, to live on the Marsh then, between canal and coast, listening to the guns as France fell, knowing that your turn was coming next? I imagined the vast and beautiful skies above scribbled over with vapour trails left by dogfights. I pictured a parachute descending, a falling plane, an unknown airman…

These thoughts were mostly prompted by that fact that one of my children was deep in the grip of an obsession with flight, and World War Two with it. After several years of intense discussions of the relative merits of mangonels and trebuchets, we’d moved on to Merlin engines, Hawker Hurricanes and Heinkels. Words like ‘aileron’ had suddenly entered my vocabulary. Eventually, I took my place in the back of a frail 4-seater plane and my ten- year-old son flew me 2,000 feet over the Marsh: his tenth birthday present was a flying lesson. Seeing the Marsh from this height was, unsurprisingly, a revelation.

An even more significant revelation for That Burning Summer came from below the ground. In Brenzett Aeronautical Museum (http://www.brenzettaero.co.uk/Brenzett_Aeronautical_Museum_Trust/Home.html) I first encountered the discoveries of another generation of obsessives: the amateur aviation archaeologists of the 1970s and 80s. Unlike the RAF, they refused to give up their efforts to trace long-lost pilots and planes. In a slightly ramshackle building that once housed land girls, we peered at a scorched German parachute [IMAGE: ‘Remains of German parachute] treasured for years by the girl whose brother had rescued it from a tree, read stories of pilots who’d bailed out of burning planes only to be mistaken for the enemy, and were simply amazed at the sight of aircraft parts that had been buried in the Marsh for decades.

Hurricane cockpit

It seemed unbelievable. How could entire aircraft simply be swallowed up like that, invisible and untouched for decades?

Not just aircraft, but often their pilots too.

Arthur William Clarke, a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain, was listed as ‘missing, presumed dead’ at the age of 20. In a letter to Arthur’s mother, grimly typed a week after his disappearance, his Squadron Leader strikes a weary note:

‘I am afraid that there is very little hope of hearing from him now. We were on Patrol over Kent, when we intercepted about 30 Enemy Bombers with Escort Fighters and attacked about 10 miles west of Folkestone, we went into attack three at a time and your son was in the second three to attack, nobody saw anything happen to him and after the attack we were split up and returned home separately as usually happens, as nobody saw anything one really cannot say what happened.

It is conceivably possible that he jumped out by Parachute and was carried by the wind out into the Channel where he might have been taken prisoner by a German Torpedo Boat, but I am afraid that is very unlikely…I am sorry I cannot tell you anything more than this, but nobody saw anything. I am afraid this is often the case in these Air Battles.’

Arthur Clarke’s Hurricane had come down unseen, to vanish immediately into Romney Marsh. Forty-six years later, the dogged work of a freelance aviation historian made it possible for his family to put up this memorial near this lonely spot not far from the tiny village of Newchurch. Like many families in the same position, they decided to leave his mortal remains in peace.

‘Nobody saw anything.’ That stuck with me. If a plane could just disappear like that, its pilot with it, and nobody see, what else could happen? What if you were a pilot who had got to a point that you actually wanted to disappear? What if you bailed out just in time, and realised that nothing, nothing on earth, could make you get back into a cockpit? Surely not every fighter pilot was as brave as the smiling young Englishmen celebrated in Churchill’s famous speech, with its electrifyingly Shakespearean echoes. What if you simply lost your nerve? What happened to the Unhappy Few?

Here’s another lonely memorial.

We came across it one day walking with friends at Dungeness, heading east into scrubland, lighthouse and power station at our backs.

“What’s that flag?” one of us wondered out loud.

“Poland,” came my son’s authoritative reply. (There was slightly more of the flag to go by five years ago than there is today.)

Bogusław Mierzwa was killed here on 16th April 1941, after having flown missions in combat against the Luftwaffe since September 1939. This tattered flag made me want to find out more about the Polish pilots who took to the skies over Britain in the summer of 1940. They’ve been described as the ‘forgotten few’. The stories I discovered made me ashamed to have known so little about them before.

When the men of the Polish air force arrived in Britain – over 8,000 were evacuated - they had already experienced multiple invasions. In the first month of the war, Poland was invaded twice: by Germany and then the Soviet Union. Contrary to the myth that their planes were destroyed on the ground in the first days of the war, these men fought bravely then, and many went on to make dangerous odysseys halfway round the world, spending time in virtual prison camps en route, and fighting in the Battle of France too before reaching ‘the Island of Last Hope’. Probably the best-trained pilots in the world at the time, they then had a struggle to convince the RAF to let them fly. Before long, Polish pilots had a reputation in Britain for almost insane courage: they fought with the desperation of the already occupied.

The story I had begun to hatch about a pilot in hiding became suddenly more interesting. I discovered a chilling term: ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’. LMF was hastily introduced in April 1940 to deter aircrew from refusing to fly. Effectively, you were branded a coward. Historians have found RAF medical records on psychological welfare suspiciously incomplete, so I don’t know if any Poles were officially ‘diagnosed’, but I had reached the point by then where imagination could take over. I couldn’t imagine anything more shameful for a Polish pilot than a failure of courage. The character of Henryk began to take shape.

Can anyone know how he or she will respond when truly tested? In June 1940, every household was issued with a leaflet: ‘If the invader comes: what to do and how to do it’. I imagined a child becoming obsessed with the confusing advice it contained. Rule 2 (‘Do not believe rumours and do not spread them’) included the worrying advice to keep your head. Common sense was apparently the best way to tell whether ‘a military officer is really British or only pretending to be so.’ All very well, but what if you were one of those people whose senses weren’t like everyone else’s? I’d recently been finding out about dyspraxia. For various reasons, multiple instructions, short-term memory and organisation can be incredibly difficult for people with dyspraxia. It’s little understood even now. In wartime Britain, any child like that would probably have been automatically dismissed as ‘stupid’ or ‘lazy’. So how terrifying such a set of instructions would have appeared to a boy like Ernest, in That Burning Summer, a quiet, bird-watching boy who’d never had to be ‘manly’ before.

Rumour and the control of information were issues of huge concern to the Government in the months before the ‘Blitz spirit’ emerged. Two weeks after Dunkirk and five days before the fall of France, the over-crowded troopship Lancastria was sunk off the French coast, and as many as 6,000 lives may have been lost. It was the worst disaster in British maritime history but the news was kept secret for fear of its impact on morale. I’d interviewed a number of Lancastria survivors for a radio documentary many years ago, and found the contradictions between the ‘official’ war narrative and their own stories both moving and fascinating.

By 1940, up and down the country, people were (overheard) complaining about the increasingly heavy hand of the state. The pro-democracy Mass-Observation movement had become a tool of the Ministry of Information and ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ were quickly compared to the Gestapo. Meanwhile Mass-Observation diarists like Nella Last continued to record the kind of casual anti-Semitism we prefer to forget was rife in 1930s Britain, and Communist families on the South coast destroyed potentially incriminating papers in anticipation of invasion and imprisonment or worse. My London grandparents made preparations for a friend to look after my mother in case of their own arrest. Others stockpiled suicide medication and buried treasures of all kinds.

In this climate of mistrust, spyfever inevitably broke out. In playgrounds and post office queues, front parlours and cinemas, it was fed by radio programmes like ITMA and films like Contraband and The Spy in Black. On Romney Marsh itself, suspicions were confirmed by the appearance of four rather incompetent spies on the coast in early September.

But there was another secret threat: from Madrid, and the Spanish Civil War, came the fear of the Enemy Within – ‘The Fifth Column’, ready and waiting to support the invaders when they came. Oswald Mosley and 740 other active fascists were interned in May 1940, but that still left plenty of sympathisers at large to worry about.

Pacifists made easy targets. Orwell declared them pro-Fascist, the Daily Mail called for the Peace Pledge Union to be banned, and an article in the Sunday Pictorial soon after Dunkirk referred scathingly to our ‘national pansies’. Across the country, Conscientious Objectors were dismissed from teaching positions.

The more I read, the more torn I felt. I thoroughly admired the morality of their absolutist stand against war, and the complicated kind of courage it took to maintain. Yet the experience of writing A World Between Us, set among International Brigaders during the Spanish Civil War, had made me less sympathetic than ever with the disastrous policies of appeasement: the non-intervention agreement that turned a blind eye to Hitler and Mussolini’s support for Franco and enabled him to win the war was part of the same thinking. If I felt like this, now, how much harder must it have been to work out the right thing to do in the summer of 1940.

All these ideas kept swirling around my head as I wrote, and found their way into the isolated church on Romney Marsh where much of That Burning Summer is set, and some of it was actually written. You won’t find many direct references to them in the story that finally came out, the tale of ‘a girl, a boy and a crash-landing…’ - Peggy, Ernest and Henryk - but they’re there in the warp and weft of the novel. And I’ll never walk beside the ditches and across the fields of the Marsh and see them in quite the same way again.