Bloody Foreigners: The Untold Battle of Britain, Channel Four
Wednesday, 30 June 2010 01:10 Written by Adam Sweeting
Polish pilots of 303 Squadron at RAF Northolt, taking a break from decimating the Luftwaffe
The part played by Polish fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain has hardly gone undocumented, and the Hun-zapping exploits of the Polish 303 Squadron will be familiar to anyone with a historical interest in the subject, so you’d have to say that calling this film The Untold Battle of Britain was a wee bit of an exaggeration. Guy Hamilton’s 1969 Battle of Britain movie must be due for its umpteenth TV airing soon, and does of course feature the RAF’s Polish contingent, depicted as itching to get into action but being held back by grouchy group captains and sarcastic squadron leaders.
Those sequences didn’t reappear in The Untold…, though several other dollops of the movie did, featuring Spitfires, Hurricanes, Heinkels and those famously not-quite-right-looking Messerschmitt 109s. Slightly questionable, surely, to shove uncredited lumps of a fictional (albeit factually based) movie into a supposedly historical story, though I suppose it’s a measure of the way the movie has been absorbed into our Island Story and granted a kind of honorary degree in authenticity.
Anyway, as the nation celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain this summer, who could deny that the story of the heroic Polish pilots deserves wider exposure? With poignant timing, 303 squadron became fully operational on 31 August, 1940 - the first anniversary of the German invasion of Poland. Having been shredded by the superior machinery of the Luftwaffe over their home turf, many of the Polish pilots had then fought in France as the Blitzkrieg thundered towards the English Channel (picture above right: Lt Jan Zumbach of 303 Squadron). That didn’t go too well either, but finally the Battle of Britain offered them the chance to hit back at Jerry on more equal terms. Even though they were equipped with Hurricanes rather than the more glamorous but less numerous Spitfires, they tore into the huge German formations with malice palpably aforethought, almost welcoming the Germans’ numerical superiority because it gave them more targets to shoot at. Where home-grown pilots might start firing at the enemy when they were 400 yards away, the Poles reckoned 100 yards was about right – if you got that close, your quarry became quite difficult to miss. As British pilot Billy Drake commented, while the Brits merely wanted to shoot down the German aircraft, “the Poles wanted to kill anybody that was in those aeroplanes.”
They achieved this with merciless efficiency. Historians and statisticians have made subsequent revisions of the numbers, but according to the programme, it took less than a month for 303 Squadron to record its 100th “kill”. The squadron shot down six German aircraft on its first official combat sortie, and on 7 September 1940, 303 shot down 16 planes in less than 15 minutes. Józef František, a Czech pilot flying with the Poles, was credited with 17 kills and was the highest-scoring Allied ace in the Battle of Britain.
The English girls loved the Poles, the newspapers raved about their exploits, and King George VI visited them at their Northolt base and signed his name in the squadron diary (the royal visit, pictured left). But this programme was part of a series called Bloody Foreigners, and there was a bitter sting to the tale. The Polish flyers thought they were fighting for their own post-war freedom, only to find that the Western allies had sold them out to Stalin at the Yalta conference. Pilots who returned home were liquidated by Poland’s new Communist administration. When the British held a huge multi-nation victory parade in London in 1946, the Poles weren’t invited because apparently our government was afraid of upsetting Stalin. “We watch with sorrow the strange outcome of our endeavours,” said Winston Churchill. “Strange” doesn’t seem quite adequate, somehow.:canada:
The Untold Battle of Britain
Programme Navigation
Witold Urbanowicz Interview
Interviews
Wednesday 16 June 2010
An interview with the son of the decorated leader of 303 Squadron.
The Polish 303 Squadron was the most successful in the Battle of Britain, and Witold Urbanowicz was their decorated Squadron Leader. Read this interview with his son, also called Witold.
The Battle of Britain is rightly heralded as one of the proudest moments in British history - a time when 'the few' performed unimaginable heroics in the face of overwhelming odds and, in a few short weeks, very probably changed the outcome of the war. But what is less well known is that a significant minority of those pilots flying for the RAF were not British at all, but Polish. They were also brilliant pilots - as the statistics verify. One Polish squadron, 303, was the most successful squadron in the whole of the Battle of Britain.
The Poles came to continue their fight against Hitler after the fall of Poland. Initially kept grounded by RAF top brass, they subsequently proved themselves in dramatic fashion. But their dream of a liberated Poland was shattered when, at the end of the war, the allies handed over Poland to Stalin.
Now, the story of 303 squadron is told in The Untold Battle of Britain, part of the Bloody Foreigners season on Channel 4. One of those pilots featured is Witold Urbanowicz, who was the Squadron Leader and one of the most successful Polish air aces of the war. Here, his son, also called Witold, tells his extraordinary story, and reveals why we all owe a debt of gratitude to men like his father.
What did your father do in Poland before war broke out?
Before the war my father was at the equivalent of the Polish Air Force academy. He was an instructor of fighter pilots. He was flying all the time. Then war broke out, and before Poland fell they were fighting over there. Then they had to go to Romania, and then through France, and finally to England, and that's when he and the rest of the squadron volunteered for the RAF.
Who did he leave behind in Poland?
He left his father, his mother, his brothers.
Did he have misgivings about leaving?
Absolutely. But when he left, he had every intention of returning. Of course he didn't want to leave his family, but he did what he felt he had to do.
Initially, being a Polish pilot in Britain was quite frustrating. They were kept out of battle, weren't they?
Yes, they were. On one occasion Air Chief Marshall Dowding came out to the base to visit to give a 'Let's go troops!' sort of speech, and at the end he said 'Any questions?' and my father said 'When are we going to get to fly?' And he said 'Well, we're thinking about when the right time for that would be,' and my father's response was basically 'We didn't come here to sit on our backsides.' They were very frustrated.
When the Polish pilots in 303 Squadron finally did get into battle, they had an astonishing impact, didn't they?
Absolutely. They were battle-seasoned. They had learned to fly on inferior, antiquated machines. You really had to be an incredible flyer to make a difference on those machines. Then they had flown the underpowered and less manoeuvrable French planes. By the time they came to England and started flying the Hurricanes, they were in heaven. And after their first sorties, once the British top brass began to realise what they could do, it was all different. They realised these guys were the real deal.
So it was the inferiority of the aircraft they'd flown previously that meant they were such good pilots, in a sense?
That was certainly one part of it. It was also their training. There's a story about one of the Polish pilots recalling his training. When they were being trained, they had to fly at each other and play chicken until the very, very last moment. And when this guy was learning to fly, he had got so close he could actually see the eyes of the pilot he was going straight at, and he pulled out at the very last moment, and thought 'Oh my God, I never believed I could do that.' He got to the ground, and the instructor chewed him out for pulling out to soon.
How many planes did your father shoot down?
He had 17 confirmed in the Battle of Britain, and then another two in China when he was flying with the Flying Tigers. He was one of the top 10 pilots in the Battle of Britain, and the top Polish ace during the battle.
What were your father's impressions of the British people?
He loved the Brits. He absolutely loved them. He had problems in terms of frustration, and things he wanted to get done, and he was never a man to hold back in terms of what he felt, regardless of who he was talking to. But he was a huge Anglophile, he had a great love for this country and its people.
The King came to congratulate the 303 Squadron, didn't he?
Yes, there are pictures of my father shaking hands with the King. It was a great honour for him, as it was for all of them. And moments after the pictures were taken, the klaxon went off and they had to scramble and go to take on the Germans, so the whole thing was interrupted.
Was the Battle of Britain the most intense time of the war for your father?
From a combat standpoint, yes. But don't forget, they took on the Germans back in Poland, so that was an intense experience. They were under-manned and under-powered. And getting out of Poland, after it fell, and over to France, was difficult as well. But I would say the Battle of Britain was the most intense, because the scale of it was phenomenal. The dogfights were just extraordinary. My father would have one or two enemy planes in front, one on his tail, watching the others in his squadron in the same situation, people were parachuting, there was debris from exploding planes, it was incredible.
Did your father talk about his wartime experiences much?
In the United States, where my father went after the war, a lot of people just locked away their wartime experiences. It was perhaps partly post-traumatic stress. They didn't really open up until the very end of their lives. I guess they had some internal sense that it was time to pass the story on. My father was a very, very cut-and-dried person. They did what they had to do, they did it well, they succeeded, and now it was time to get on with the rest of his life. So I was aware of what he'd done in the war because of the artefacts around the house, but he didn't really talk about it very much at all until his mid-80s. He didn't brag about it, it was his duty, and that was it.
The Battle of Britain was incredibly finely balanced. It's no exaggeration to say that the polish pilots probably made the crucial difference, is it?
Yes, I think you could absolutely say that. If you think of the sheer number of pilots involved in the battle, and then you look at the number of Polish pilots involved, and the number of kills that the Polish fighters contributed, without those additional kills and those additional missions it would all have been different. You could say that without them they would not have won the war. But it was also down to another man. I'm here in London for the installation of the statue at Trafalgar Square on the fourth plinth for Sir Keith Park - he commanded the 11th, which was the Group that defended London and southern England. And what I learned about him was that while the Poles were fantastic and made the difference against the Germans, without the strategic understanding of Park it wouldn't have been successful.
In spite of the extraordinary contribution made by the Polish pilots, after the war, Poland was simply handed to the Russians. That must have felt like a dreadful betrayal.
Absolutely, no question about it. My father felt very bitter about it, especially with Attlee and Roosevelt, because they were the ones who gave it away, not Churchill. It was all done in the name of appeasing the Russians. The Great Victory March down the Mall that took place in 1946 had every allied country represented except the Poles, who had to stand on the side. They weren't invited to participate, in case it angered the Russians.
Was your father present, literally watching from the sidelines?
Yes, he was. It broke his heart. It was absolutely horrible, and something he had to live with for the rest of his life.
Did your father ever return to Poland?
He went back in the mid-to-late 1940s to visit his mother. From what I understand, he was arrested in charges of espionage, and either he was broken out by the British underground, or he was let go due to diplomatic negotiations - there are different versions of the story. After that, he didn't go back until way into the 1980s, when they made him a General, after the Berlin Wall fell and Lech Walesa became president of Poland. It was a complete validation of his life.
He's something of a celebrated figure in Poland, isn't he?
Very much so. Last year was the 100th anniversary of my father's birth. The War Museum in Poland had a huge exhibition about him, which I worked to help them prepare for, and donated a lot of his artefacts. He's a very well-known figure back in Poland. He also wrote seven books about his experiences, covering everything from his experiences with the Flying Tigers in China, to the Battle of Britain, to his becoming a pilot in the first place.
What do you think your father would have made of this film?
He would have loved it. He would have been pleased as punch at the fact that this effort was made.
And what does it mean to you?
I think it's wonderful. Anybody who walks through this beautiful city [London] would not be walking through it as it is if it wasn't for people such as my father. I turned on the BBC this morning, and everyone was wearing poppies, not just people from that generation, but their children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great grandchildren. That legacy lives on, and it's so critical to have that memory, and to have pride in it. It says something for your character as a nation. I think this film brings another reminder of that. People can't conceive of the stakes, for all humanity, of that battle, and what a hair's breadth of a chance of victory we had. It's a very uplifting story.
By Benjie Goodhar
The Untold Battle of Britain
Programme Navigation
Witold Urbanowicz Interview
Interviews
Wednesday 16 June 2010
An interview with the son of the decorated leader of 303 Squadron.
The Polish 303 Squadron was the most successful in the Battle of Britain, and Witold Urbanowicz was their decorated Squadron Leader. Read this interview with his son, also called Witold.
The Battle of Britain is rightly heralded as one of the proudest moments in British history - a time when 'the few' performed unimaginable heroics in the face of overwhelming odds and, in a few short weeks, very probably changed the outcome of the war. But what is less well known is that a significant minority of those pilots flying for the RAF were not British at all, but Polish. They were also brilliant pilots - as the statistics verify. One Polish squadron, 303, was the most successful squadron in the whole of the Battle of Britain.
The Poles came to continue their fight against Hitler after the fall of Poland. Initially kept grounded by RAF top brass, they subsequently proved themselves in dramatic fashion. But their dream of a liberated Poland was shattered when, at the end of the war, the allies handed over Poland to Stalin.
Now, the story of 303 squadron is told in The Untold Battle of Britain, part of the Bloody Foreigners season on Channel 4. One of those pilots featured is Witold Urbanowicz, who was the Squadron Leader and one of the most successful Polish air aces of the war. Here, his son, also called Witold, tells his extraordinary story, and reveals why we all owe a debt of gratitude to men like his father.
What did your father do in Poland before war broke out?
Before the war my father was at the equivalent of the Polish Air Force academy. He was an instructor of fighter pilots. He was flying all the time. Then war broke out, and before Poland fell they were fighting over there. Then they had to go to Romania, and then through France, and finally to England, and that's when he and the rest of the squadron volunteered for the RAF.
Who did he leave behind in Poland?
He left his father, his mother, his brothers.
Did he have misgivings about leaving?
Absolutely. But when he left, he had every intention of returning. Of course he didn't want to leave his family, but he did what he felt he had to do.
Initially, being a Polish pilot in Britain was quite frustrating. They were kept out of battle, weren't they?
Yes, they were. On one occasion Air Chief Marshall Dowding came out to the base to visit to give a 'Let's go troops!' sort of speech, and at the end he said 'Any questions?' and my father said 'When are we going to get to fly?' And he said 'Well, we're thinking about when the right time for that would be,' and my father's response was basically 'We didn't come here to sit on our backsides.' They were very frustrated.
When the Polish pilots in 303 Squadron finally did get into battle, they had an astonishing impact, didn't they?
Absolutely. They were battle-seasoned. They had learned to fly on inferior, antiquated machines. You really had to be an incredible flyer to make a difference on those machines. Then they had flown the underpowered and less manoeuvrable French planes. By the time they came to England and started flying the Hurricanes, they were in heaven. And after their first sorties, once the British top brass began to realise what they could do, it was all different. They realised these guys were the real deal.
So it was the inferiority of the aircraft they'd flown previously that meant they were such good pilots, in a sense?
That was certainly one part of it. It was also their training. There's a story about one of the Polish pilots recalling his training. When they were being trained, they had to fly at each other and play chicken until the very, very last moment. And when this guy was learning to fly, he had got so close he could actually see the eyes of the pilot he was going straight at, and he pulled out at the very last moment, and thought 'Oh my God, I never believed I could do that.' He got to the ground, and the instructor chewed him out for pulling out to soon.
How many planes did your father shoot down?
He had 17 confirmed in the Battle of Britain, and then another two in China when he was flying with the Flying Tigers. He was one of the top 10 pilots in the Battle of Britain, and the top Polish ace during the battle.
What were your father's impressions of the British people?
He loved the Brits. He absolutely loved them. He had problems in terms of frustration, and things he wanted to get done, and he was never a man to hold back in terms of what he felt, regardless of who he was talking to. But he was a huge Anglophile, he had a great love for this country and its people.
The King came to congratulate the 303 Squadron, didn't he?
Yes, there are pictures of my father shaking hands with the King. It was a great honour for him, as it was for all of them. And moments after the pictures were taken, the klaxon went off and they had to scramble and go to take on the Germans, so the whole thing was interrupted.
Was the Battle of Britain the most intense time of the war for your father?
From a combat standpoint, yes. But don't forget, they took on the Germans back in Poland, so that was an intense experience. They were under-manned and under-powered. And getting out of Poland, after it fell, and over to France, was difficult as well. But I would say the Battle of Britain was the most intense, because the scale of it was phenomenal. The dogfights were just extraordinary. My father would have one or two enemy planes in front, one on his tail, watching the others in his squadron in the same situation, people were parachuting, there was debris from exploding planes, it was incredible.
Did your father talk about his wartime experiences much?
In the United States, where my father went after the war, a lot of people just locked away their wartime experiences. It was perhaps partly post-traumatic stress. They didn't really open up until the very end of their lives. I guess they had some internal sense that it was time to pass the story on. My father was a very, very cut-and-dried person. They did what they had to do, they did it well, they succeeded, and now it was time to get on with the rest of his life. So I was aware of what he'd done in the war because of the artefacts around the house, but he didn't really talk about it very much at all until his mid-80s. He didn't brag about it, it was his duty, and that was it.
The Battle of Britain was incredibly finely balanced. It's no exaggeration to say that the polish pilots probably made the crucial difference, is it?
Yes, I think you could absolutely say that. If you think of the sheer number of pilots involved in the battle, and then you look at the number of Polish pilots involved, and the number of kills that the Polish fighters contributed, without those additional kills and those additional missions it would all have been different. You could say that without them they would not have won the war. But it was also down to another man. I'm here in London for the installation of the statue at Trafalgar Square on the fourth plinth for Sir Keith Park - he commanded the 11th, which was the Group that defended London and southern England. And what I learned about him was that while the Poles were fantastic and made the difference against the Germans, without the strategic understanding of Park it wouldn't have been successful.
In spite of the extraordinary contribution made by the Polish pilots, after the war, Poland was simply handed to the Russians. That must have felt like a dreadful betrayal.
Absolutely, no question about it. My father felt very bitter about it, especially with Attlee and Roosevelt, because they were the ones who gave it away, not Churchill. It was all done in the name of appeasing the Russians. The Great Victory March down the Mall that took place in 1946 had every allied country represented except the Poles, who had to stand on the side. They weren't invited to participate, in case it angered the Russians.
Was your father present, literally watching from the sidelines?
Yes, he was. It broke his heart. It was absolutely horrible, and something he had to live with for the rest of his life.
Did your father ever return to Poland?
He went back in the mid-to-late 1940s to visit his mother. From what I understand, he was arrested in charges of espionage, and either he was broken out by the British underground, or he was let go due to diplomatic negotiations - there are different versions of the story. After that, he didn't go back until way into the 1980s, when they made him a General, after the Berlin Wall fell and Lech Walesa became president of Poland. It was a complete validation of his life.
He's something of a celebrated figure in Poland, isn't he?
Very much so. Last year was the 100th anniversary of my father's birth. The War Museum in Poland had a huge exhibition about him, which I worked to help them prepare for, and donated a lot of his artefacts. He's a very well-known figure back in Poland. He also wrote seven books about his experiences, covering everything from his experiences with the Flying Tigers in China, to the Battle of Britain, to his becoming a pilot in the first place.
What do you think your father would have made of this film?
He would have loved it. He would have been pleased as punch at the fact that this effort was made.
And what does it mean to you?
I think it's wonderful. Anybody who walks through this beautiful city [London] would not be walking through it as it is if it wasn't for people such as my father. I turned on the BBC this morning, and everyone was wearing poppies, not just people from that generation, but their children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great grandchildren. That legacy lives on, and it's so critical to have that memory, and to have pride in it. It says something for your character as a nation. I think this film brings another reminder of that. People can't conceive of the stakes, for all humanity, of that battle, and what a hair's breadth of a chance of victory we had. It's a very uplifting story.
By Benjie Goodhar
Canadian contribution
Many Canadians served in the fighter squadrons which repulsed the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940. In fact, although the RAF only recognises 83 Canadian pilots as flying on fighter operations during the Battle of Britain, the RCAF claims the actual figure was over 100, and that of those 23 died and 30 were killed later in the war.[12][13] Another 200 Canadian pilots fought with RAF Bomber Command and RAF Coastal Command during the period and approx 2,000 Canadians served as ground crew.
Of these, 26 were in No. 1 Squadron RCAF, flying Hurricanes. The squadron arrived in Britain soon after Dunkirk with 27 officers and 314 ground staff. This squadron would later be re-numbered as No. 401 "City of Westmount" Squadron RCAF, in line with Article XV of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which numbered Dominion air force units under RAF operational control in the 400-series, to avoid confusion with RAF units. (These squadron numbers are still used by Canadian squadrons, to honour their predecessors.)
No. 1 Squadron made an inauspicious start to its service with Fighter Command, when on 24 August 1940 two of its Hurricanes mistook a flight of Bristol Blenheims for Ju-88s, shooting one down with the loss of its crew — an example of what is now known as friendly fire. No. 1 became the first RCAF unit to engage enemy aircraft in battle when it met a formation of German bombers over southern England on 26 August 1940, claiming three kills and four damaged with the loss of one pilot and one aircraft. By mid-October the squadron had claimed 31 enemy aircraft destroyed and 43 probables or damaged for the loss of 16 aircraft and three pilots.
Other Canadians were spread across RAF squadrons, and on the second day of the Battle, 11 July, Canada suffered its first fighter casualty. In a Luftwaffe attack on the Royal Navy Dockyard naval base at Portland Harbour, Plt Off D. A. Hewitt of Saint John, New Brunswick, flying a Hurricane with No. 501 Squadron RAF, attacked a Dornier Do-17 bomber and was hit himself. His aircraft plunged into the sea. Another Canadian pilot, Richard Howley, died eight days later.
The dispersed Canadian airmen included one who flew with No. 303 (Polish) Squadron. A total of 12 Canadian pilots in the Royal Air Force flew with No. 242 Squadron RAF at various times through the Battle. On August 30, under the command of Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, nine 242 Squadron aircraft met 100 enemy aircraft over Essex. Attacking from above, the squadron claimed 12 victories for no loss.
Canadians also shared in repulsing the Luftwaffe's last major daylight attack. On 27 September, 303 Squadron and 1 Squadron RCAF attacked the first wave of enemy bombers. Seven enemy aircraft were claimed destroyed, one probably destroyed and seven damaged.
The top Canadian scorer during the Battle was Flt Lt H. C. Upton of No. 43 Squadron RAF, who claimed 10.25 aircraft shot down.
Re: Bloody Foreigners: Polish Battle of Britain
by Musashi on 01 Jul 2010, 12:29
I liked this film very much because it has been made by the Britons, so it cannot be considered self-advertising. It required a lot of balls to admit so many inconvenient facts for the British side and that's what I really admire.
Musashi Member
Posts: 3886Joined: 13 Dec 2002, 16:07Location: Coventry, West Midlands, the UK [it's one big roundabout]
Wednesday, 30 June 2010 01:10 Written by Adam Sweeting
Polish pilots of 303 Squadron at RAF Northolt, taking a break from decimating the Luftwaffe The part played by Polish fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain has hardly gone undocumented, and the Hun-zapping exploits of the Polish 303 Squadron will be familiar to anyone with a historical interest in the subject, so you’d have to say that calling this film The Untold Battle of Britain was a wee bit of an exaggeration. Guy Hamilton’s 1969 Battle of Britain movie must be due for its umpteenth TV airing soon, and does of course feature the RAF’s Polish contingent, depicted as itching to get into action but being held back by grouchy group captains and sarcastic squadron leaders.
Those sequences didn’t reappear in The Untold…, though several other dollops of the movie did, featuring Spitfires, Hurricanes, Heinkels and those famously not-quite-right-looking Messerschmitt 109s. Slightly questionable, surely, to shove uncredited lumps of a fictional (albeit factually based) movie into a supposedly historical story, though I suppose it’s a measure of the way the movie has been absorbed into our Island Story and granted a kind of honorary degree in authenticity.
They achieved this with merciless efficiency. Historians and statisticians have made subsequent revisions of the numbers, but according to the programme, it took less than a month for 303 Squadron to record its 100th “kill”. The squadron shot down six German aircraft on its first official combat sortie, and on 7 September 1940, 303 shot down 16 planes in less than 15 minutes. Józef František, a Czech pilot flying with the Poles, was credited with 17 kills and was the highest-scoring Allied ace in the Battle of Britain.
Programme Navigation
Witold Urbanowicz Interview
Interviews
Wednesday 16 June 2010
An interview with the son of the decorated leader of 303 Squadron.
The Polish 303 Squadron was the most successful in the Battle of Britain, and Witold Urbanowicz was their decorated Squadron Leader. Read this interview with his son, also called Witold.
The Battle of Britain is rightly heralded as one of the proudest moments in British history - a time when 'the few' performed unimaginable heroics in the face of overwhelming odds and, in a few short weeks, very probably changed the outcome of the war. But what is less well known is that a significant minority of those pilots flying for the RAF were not British at all, but Polish. They were also brilliant pilots - as the statistics verify. One Polish squadron, 303, was the most successful squadron in the whole of the Battle of Britain.
The Poles came to continue their fight against Hitler after the fall of Poland. Initially kept grounded by RAF top brass, they subsequently proved themselves in dramatic fashion. But their dream of a liberated Poland was shattered when, at the end of the war, the allies handed over Poland to Stalin.
Now, the story of 303 squadron is told in The Untold Battle of Britain, part of the Bloody Foreigners season on Channel 4. One of those pilots featured is Witold Urbanowicz, who was the Squadron Leader and one of the most successful Polish air aces of the war. Here, his son, also called Witold, tells his extraordinary story, and reveals why we all owe a debt of gratitude to men like his father.
What did your father do in Poland before war broke out?
Before the war my father was at the equivalent of the Polish Air Force academy. He was an instructor of fighter pilots. He was flying all the time. Then war broke out, and before Poland fell they were fighting over there. Then they had to go to Romania, and then through France, and finally to England, and that's when he and the rest of the squadron volunteered for the RAF.
Who did he leave behind in Poland?
He left his father, his mother, his brothers.
Did he have misgivings about leaving?
Absolutely. But when he left, he had every intention of returning. Of course he didn't want to leave his family, but he did what he felt he had to do.
Initially, being a Polish pilot in Britain was quite frustrating. They were kept out of battle, weren't they?
Yes, they were. On one occasion Air Chief Marshall Dowding came out to the base to visit to give a 'Let's go troops!' sort of speech, and at the end he said 'Any questions?' and my father said 'When are we going to get to fly?' And he said 'Well, we're thinking about when the right time for that would be,' and my father's response was basically 'We didn't come here to sit on our backsides.' They were very frustrated.
When the Polish pilots in 303 Squadron finally did get into battle, they had an astonishing impact, didn't they?
Absolutely. They were battle-seasoned. They had learned to fly on inferior, antiquated machines. You really had to be an incredible flyer to make a difference on those machines. Then they had flown the underpowered and less manoeuvrable French planes. By the time they came to England and started flying the Hurricanes, they were in heaven. And after their first sorties, once the British top brass began to realise what they could do, it was all different. They realised these guys were the real deal.
So it was the inferiority of the aircraft they'd flown previously that meant they were such good pilots, in a sense?
That was certainly one part of it. It was also their training. There's a story about one of the Polish pilots recalling his training. When they were being trained, they had to fly at each other and play chicken until the very, very last moment. And when this guy was learning to fly, he had got so close he could actually see the eyes of the pilot he was going straight at, and he pulled out at the very last moment, and thought 'Oh my God, I never believed I could do that.' He got to the ground, and the instructor chewed him out for pulling out to soon.
How many planes did your father shoot down?
He had 17 confirmed in the Battle of Britain, and then another two in China when he was flying with the Flying Tigers. He was one of the top 10 pilots in the Battle of Britain, and the top Polish ace during the battle.
What were your father's impressions of the British people?
He loved the Brits. He absolutely loved them. He had problems in terms of frustration, and things he wanted to get done, and he was never a man to hold back in terms of what he felt, regardless of who he was talking to. But he was a huge Anglophile, he had a great love for this country and its people.
The King came to congratulate the 303 Squadron, didn't he?
Yes, there are pictures of my father shaking hands with the King. It was a great honour for him, as it was for all of them. And moments after the pictures were taken, the klaxon went off and they had to scramble and go to take on the Germans, so the whole thing was interrupted.
Was the Battle of Britain the most intense time of the war for your father?
From a combat standpoint, yes. But don't forget, they took on the Germans back in Poland, so that was an intense experience. They were under-manned and under-powered. And getting out of Poland, after it fell, and over to France, was difficult as well. But I would say the Battle of Britain was the most intense, because the scale of it was phenomenal. The dogfights were just extraordinary. My father would have one or two enemy planes in front, one on his tail, watching the others in his squadron in the same situation, people were parachuting, there was debris from exploding planes, it was incredible.
Did your father talk about his wartime experiences much?
In the United States, where my father went after the war, a lot of people just locked away their wartime experiences. It was perhaps partly post-traumatic stress. They didn't really open up until the very end of their lives. I guess they had some internal sense that it was time to pass the story on. My father was a very, very cut-and-dried person. They did what they had to do, they did it well, they succeeded, and now it was time to get on with the rest of his life. So I was aware of what he'd done in the war because of the artefacts around the house, but he didn't really talk about it very much at all until his mid-80s. He didn't brag about it, it was his duty, and that was it.
The Battle of Britain was incredibly finely balanced. It's no exaggeration to say that the polish pilots probably made the crucial difference, is it?
Yes, I think you could absolutely say that. If you think of the sheer number of pilots involved in the battle, and then you look at the number of Polish pilots involved, and the number of kills that the Polish fighters contributed, without those additional kills and those additional missions it would all have been different. You could say that without them they would not have won the war. But it was also down to another man. I'm here in London for the installation of the statue at Trafalgar Square on the fourth plinth for Sir Keith Park - he commanded the 11th, which was the Group that defended London and southern England. And what I learned about him was that while the Poles were fantastic and made the difference against the Germans, without the strategic understanding of Park it wouldn't have been successful.
In spite of the extraordinary contribution made by the Polish pilots, after the war, Poland was simply handed to the Russians. That must have felt like a dreadful betrayal.
Absolutely, no question about it. My father felt very bitter about it, especially with Attlee and Roosevelt, because they were the ones who gave it away, not Churchill. It was all done in the name of appeasing the Russians. The Great Victory March down the Mall that took place in 1946 had every allied country represented except the Poles, who had to stand on the side. They weren't invited to participate, in case it angered the Russians.
Was your father present, literally watching from the sidelines?
Yes, he was. It broke his heart. It was absolutely horrible, and something he had to live with for the rest of his life.
Did your father ever return to Poland?
He went back in the mid-to-late 1940s to visit his mother. From what I understand, he was arrested in charges of espionage, and either he was broken out by the British underground, or he was let go due to diplomatic negotiations - there are different versions of the story. After that, he didn't go back until way into the 1980s, when they made him a General, after the Berlin Wall fell and Lech Walesa became president of Poland. It was a complete validation of his life.
He's something of a celebrated figure in Poland, isn't he?
Very much so. Last year was the 100th anniversary of my father's birth. The War Museum in Poland had a huge exhibition about him, which I worked to help them prepare for, and donated a lot of his artefacts. He's a very well-known figure back in Poland. He also wrote seven books about his experiences, covering everything from his experiences with the Flying Tigers in China, to the Battle of Britain, to his becoming a pilot in the first place.
What do you think your father would have made of this film?
He would have loved it. He would have been pleased as punch at the fact that this effort was made.
And what does it mean to you?
I think it's wonderful. Anybody who walks through this beautiful city [London] would not be walking through it as it is if it wasn't for people such as my father. I turned on the BBC this morning, and everyone was wearing poppies, not just people from that generation, but their children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great grandchildren. That legacy lives on, and it's so critical to have that memory, and to have pride in it. It says something for your character as a nation. I think this film brings another reminder of that. People can't conceive of the stakes, for all humanity, of that battle, and what a hair's breadth of a chance of victory we had. It's a very uplifting story.
By Benjie Goodhar
Programme Navigation
Witold Urbanowicz Interview
Interviews
Wednesday 16 June 2010
An interview with the son of the decorated leader of 303 Squadron.
The Polish 303 Squadron was the most successful in the Battle of Britain, and Witold Urbanowicz was their decorated Squadron Leader. Read this interview with his son, also called Witold.
The Battle of Britain is rightly heralded as one of the proudest moments in British history - a time when 'the few' performed unimaginable heroics in the face of overwhelming odds and, in a few short weeks, very probably changed the outcome of the war. But what is less well known is that a significant minority of those pilots flying for the RAF were not British at all, but Polish. They were also brilliant pilots - as the statistics verify. One Polish squadron, 303, was the most successful squadron in the whole of the Battle of Britain.
The Poles came to continue their fight against Hitler after the fall of Poland. Initially kept grounded by RAF top brass, they subsequently proved themselves in dramatic fashion. But their dream of a liberated Poland was shattered when, at the end of the war, the allies handed over Poland to Stalin.
Now, the story of 303 squadron is told in The Untold Battle of Britain, part of the Bloody Foreigners season on Channel 4. One of those pilots featured is Witold Urbanowicz, who was the Squadron Leader and one of the most successful Polish air aces of the war. Here, his son, also called Witold, tells his extraordinary story, and reveals why we all owe a debt of gratitude to men like his father.
What did your father do in Poland before war broke out?
Before the war my father was at the equivalent of the Polish Air Force academy. He was an instructor of fighter pilots. He was flying all the time. Then war broke out, and before Poland fell they were fighting over there. Then they had to go to Romania, and then through France, and finally to England, and that's when he and the rest of the squadron volunteered for the RAF.
Who did he leave behind in Poland?
He left his father, his mother, his brothers.
Did he have misgivings about leaving?
Absolutely. But when he left, he had every intention of returning. Of course he didn't want to leave his family, but he did what he felt he had to do.
Initially, being a Polish pilot in Britain was quite frustrating. They were kept out of battle, weren't they?
Yes, they were. On one occasion Air Chief Marshall Dowding came out to the base to visit to give a 'Let's go troops!' sort of speech, and at the end he said 'Any questions?' and my father said 'When are we going to get to fly?' And he said 'Well, we're thinking about when the right time for that would be,' and my father's response was basically 'We didn't come here to sit on our backsides.' They were very frustrated.
When the Polish pilots in 303 Squadron finally did get into battle, they had an astonishing impact, didn't they?
Absolutely. They were battle-seasoned. They had learned to fly on inferior, antiquated machines. You really had to be an incredible flyer to make a difference on those machines. Then they had flown the underpowered and less manoeuvrable French planes. By the time they came to England and started flying the Hurricanes, they were in heaven. And after their first sorties, once the British top brass began to realise what they could do, it was all different. They realised these guys were the real deal.
So it was the inferiority of the aircraft they'd flown previously that meant they were such good pilots, in a sense?
That was certainly one part of it. It was also their training. There's a story about one of the Polish pilots recalling his training. When they were being trained, they had to fly at each other and play chicken until the very, very last moment. And when this guy was learning to fly, he had got so close he could actually see the eyes of the pilot he was going straight at, and he pulled out at the very last moment, and thought 'Oh my God, I never believed I could do that.' He got to the ground, and the instructor chewed him out for pulling out to soon.
How many planes did your father shoot down?
He had 17 confirmed in the Battle of Britain, and then another two in China when he was flying with the Flying Tigers. He was one of the top 10 pilots in the Battle of Britain, and the top Polish ace during the battle.
What were your father's impressions of the British people?
He loved the Brits. He absolutely loved them. He had problems in terms of frustration, and things he wanted to get done, and he was never a man to hold back in terms of what he felt, regardless of who he was talking to. But he was a huge Anglophile, he had a great love for this country and its people.
The King came to congratulate the 303 Squadron, didn't he?
Yes, there are pictures of my father shaking hands with the King. It was a great honour for him, as it was for all of them. And moments after the pictures were taken, the klaxon went off and they had to scramble and go to take on the Germans, so the whole thing was interrupted.
Was the Battle of Britain the most intense time of the war for your father?
From a combat standpoint, yes. But don't forget, they took on the Germans back in Poland, so that was an intense experience. They were under-manned and under-powered. And getting out of Poland, after it fell, and over to France, was difficult as well. But I would say the Battle of Britain was the most intense, because the scale of it was phenomenal. The dogfights were just extraordinary. My father would have one or two enemy planes in front, one on his tail, watching the others in his squadron in the same situation, people were parachuting, there was debris from exploding planes, it was incredible.
Did your father talk about his wartime experiences much?
In the United States, where my father went after the war, a lot of people just locked away their wartime experiences. It was perhaps partly post-traumatic stress. They didn't really open up until the very end of their lives. I guess they had some internal sense that it was time to pass the story on. My father was a very, very cut-and-dried person. They did what they had to do, they did it well, they succeeded, and now it was time to get on with the rest of his life. So I was aware of what he'd done in the war because of the artefacts around the house, but he didn't really talk about it very much at all until his mid-80s. He didn't brag about it, it was his duty, and that was it.
The Battle of Britain was incredibly finely balanced. It's no exaggeration to say that the polish pilots probably made the crucial difference, is it?
Yes, I think you could absolutely say that. If you think of the sheer number of pilots involved in the battle, and then you look at the number of Polish pilots involved, and the number of kills that the Polish fighters contributed, without those additional kills and those additional missions it would all have been different. You could say that without them they would not have won the war. But it was also down to another man. I'm here in London for the installation of the statue at Trafalgar Square on the fourth plinth for Sir Keith Park - he commanded the 11th, which was the Group that defended London and southern England. And what I learned about him was that while the Poles were fantastic and made the difference against the Germans, without the strategic understanding of Park it wouldn't have been successful.
In spite of the extraordinary contribution made by the Polish pilots, after the war, Poland was simply handed to the Russians. That must have felt like a dreadful betrayal.
Absolutely, no question about it. My father felt very bitter about it, especially with Attlee and Roosevelt, because they were the ones who gave it away, not Churchill. It was all done in the name of appeasing the Russians. The Great Victory March down the Mall that took place in 1946 had every allied country represented except the Poles, who had to stand on the side. They weren't invited to participate, in case it angered the Russians.
Was your father present, literally watching from the sidelines?
Yes, he was. It broke his heart. It was absolutely horrible, and something he had to live with for the rest of his life.
Did your father ever return to Poland?
He went back in the mid-to-late 1940s to visit his mother. From what I understand, he was arrested in charges of espionage, and either he was broken out by the British underground, or he was let go due to diplomatic negotiations - there are different versions of the story. After that, he didn't go back until way into the 1980s, when they made him a General, after the Berlin Wall fell and Lech Walesa became president of Poland. It was a complete validation of his life.
He's something of a celebrated figure in Poland, isn't he?
Very much so. Last year was the 100th anniversary of my father's birth. The War Museum in Poland had a huge exhibition about him, which I worked to help them prepare for, and donated a lot of his artefacts. He's a very well-known figure back in Poland. He also wrote seven books about his experiences, covering everything from his experiences with the Flying Tigers in China, to the Battle of Britain, to his becoming a pilot in the first place.
What do you think your father would have made of this film?
He would have loved it. He would have been pleased as punch at the fact that this effort was made.
And what does it mean to you?
I think it's wonderful. Anybody who walks through this beautiful city [London] would not be walking through it as it is if it wasn't for people such as my father. I turned on the BBC this morning, and everyone was wearing poppies, not just people from that generation, but their children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great grandchildren. That legacy lives on, and it's so critical to have that memory, and to have pride in it. It says something for your character as a nation. I think this film brings another reminder of that. People can't conceive of the stakes, for all humanity, of that battle, and what a hair's breadth of a chance of victory we had. It's a very uplifting story.
By Benjie Goodhar
Canadian contribution
Many Canadians served in the fighter squadrons which repulsed the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940. In fact, although the RAF only recognises 83 Canadian pilots as flying on fighter operations during the Battle of Britain, the RCAF claims the actual figure was over 100, and that of those 23 died and 30 were killed later in the war.[12][13] Another 200 Canadian pilots fought with RAF Bomber Command and RAF Coastal Command during the period and approx 2,000 Canadians served as ground crew.
Of these, 26 were in No. 1 Squadron RCAF, flying Hurricanes. The squadron arrived in Britain soon after Dunkirk with 27 officers and 314 ground staff. This squadron would later be re-numbered as No. 401 "City of Westmount" Squadron RCAF, in line with Article XV of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which numbered Dominion air force units under RAF operational control in the 400-series, to avoid confusion with RAF units. (These squadron numbers are still used by Canadian squadrons, to honour their predecessors.)
No. 1 Squadron made an inauspicious start to its service with Fighter Command, when on 24 August 1940 two of its Hurricanes mistook a flight of Bristol Blenheims for Ju-88s, shooting one down with the loss of its crew — an example of what is now known as friendly fire. No. 1 became the first RCAF unit to engage enemy aircraft in battle when it met a formation of German bombers over southern England on 26 August 1940, claiming three kills and four damaged with the loss of one pilot and one aircraft. By mid-October the squadron had claimed 31 enemy aircraft destroyed and 43 probables or damaged for the loss of 16 aircraft and three pilots.
Other Canadians were spread across RAF squadrons, and on the second day of the Battle, 11 July, Canada suffered its first fighter casualty. In a Luftwaffe attack on the Royal Navy Dockyard naval base at Portland Harbour, Plt Off D. A. Hewitt of Saint John, New Brunswick, flying a Hurricane with No. 501 Squadron RAF, attacked a Dornier Do-17 bomber and was hit himself. His aircraft plunged into the sea. Another Canadian pilot, Richard Howley, died eight days later.
The dispersed Canadian airmen included one who flew with No. 303 (Polish) Squadron. A total of 12 Canadian pilots in the Royal Air Force flew with No. 242 Squadron RAF at various times through the Battle. On August 30, under the command of Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, nine 242 Squadron aircraft met 100 enemy aircraft over Essex. Attacking from above, the squadron claimed 12 victories for no loss.
Canadians also shared in repulsing the Luftwaffe's last major daylight attack. On 27 September, 303 Squadron and 1 Squadron RCAF attacked the first wave of enemy bombers. Seven enemy aircraft were claimed destroyed, one probably destroyed and seven damaged.
The top Canadian scorer during the Battle was Flt Lt H. C. Upton of No. 43 Squadron RAF, who claimed 10.25 aircraft shot down.
Re: Bloody Foreigners: Polish Battle of Britain
by Musashi on 01 Jul 2010, 12:29 I liked this film very much because it has been made by the Britons, so it cannot be considered self-advertising. It required a lot of balls to admit so many inconvenient facts for the British side and that's what I really admire.
Musashi Member