To each of them, the old man could only shake his head. ‘Gone! All gone! Everything gone!’
They sat among the ruins of their home, their country, their world. Finally Mike said, ‘We must go!’
‘Go? Go where?’
‘I’m going to join the Air Force.’
‘But there is no Air Force any more. The war is over.’
‘No,’ said Mike, ‘The war is just beginning. England and France are at war now. They’ll need pilots. Our pilots will have to leave their planes in Rumania, but they should be able to get to France, and that’s what I intend to do.’
The old man shook his head. ‘I doubt if the French and British want untrained volunteers, but there is another possibility. You were born in New York, while your mother was visiting her sister. You don’t have an American passport, but anyone born in the United States has the right to be an American citizen. The problem is that you are also a Polish soldier, and before you could get a passport, the Germans would have you as a prisoner of war. One thing we have always kept is this.’
He took a black folded paper from his pocket. ‘It’s a photocopy of your American birth certificate. It might help. No one wants to offend the Americans! If you get into real trouble, insist on seeing the American Ambassador. Take this too, it’s the address of your Aunt Nydia and her husband, Harry Bruno in New York. He could help you. He has connections in aviation.’
Mike took the precious papers. ‘And you?’ he asked.
The older man shook his head. ‘You have a chance. I don’t. Your life is just beginning. Mine is over.’
‘No!’ said Mike, ‘Now that France and England are fighting Germany, the war will soon be over. I’ll be back before you know it!’
The old man nodded. He didn’t believe it. Neither did Mike.
When Mike told me the story, I said: ‘God knows how you got from Warsaw to New York!’
He looked at me solemnly. ‘What makes you think God knows?’
It took months. He got through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Istanbul, that age-old gateway for refugees, and finally, against all odds, he found himself standing outside the door of Harry Bruno’s apartment at 400 East 57th Street, New York City.
Harry Bruno had spent his life in aviation. At the age of seventeen, he and his brother had built a glider, at eighteen, he volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps to fly for the British in World War I. The war was over before he flew in combat, but, back in the States, he became the first aviation public relations consultant. He was an intimate friend of every important aviation figure in the world, and wrote about them in his classic book, Wings Over America. I met him when I got back from the war. He was organising a hero’s tour, and explained that he was a public relations consultant.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m just a simple fly-boy. I don’t think I know what that means.’
‘Who do you think was the first man to fly the Atlantic?’ he asked.
‘Charles Lindbergh.’
‘That’s what nearly everyone would say. Lindy was about the twenty-sixth man to fly the Atlantic. The difference is that I handled his public relations.’
Mike couldn’t have had a better uncle, and he was in the right place, at the right time. Within weeks, Mike was in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
But Mike had to call on Harry again. We had survived primary training on the wonderful little Fleet biplanes. Our instructor had been Sparks, a jolly American, who taught us flying, but, much more, he injected us with his own joy of flying. We got to know and love the little Fleets, and felt we could do anything with them.
So we moved on to advanced training; but this was a different story. When we saw the shining American Harvard Advanced trainers, they looked enormous. When we climbed into the cockpit and gazed at the mass of instruments, we realised the big leap forward we had to make. The sweet smell of the high octane fuel, and the new paint added to the sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs.
The instructor was different too. Young Gerry Fuller was also one of the American instructors, but his methods were those of a man who probably realised how tough the war was going to be, and how ill-prepared were the kids going into it. He believed the slogan often repeated to those who asked for more time and patience: ‘Given time, we could teach monkeys to fly, but we don’t have time.’ He played it tough because he knew only the tough would survive. He shouted and barked his orders from the back cockpit, and had no patience with any mistakes. This worked with pilots like our friend Ray Fuchs, who had had some training in the US Air Force and been washed out, or like Pappy Dunn who had some civilian flying time, or Phil Gofton, the Canadian from Winnipeg who paid no attention to his ranting and raving. But with Mike and me, it only made matters worse. He was only a sergeant, so couldn’t wash us out before we’d had a final check flight with a senior officer. Mike’s turn came first.
I waited in the empty pilots’ locker room for him to come back. He came in. I looked at him. He shook his head. He had been washed out. I put my hand on his shoulder. He shook it off.
‘Let’s go!’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘To call Harry Bruno!’ he said.
Canada’s greatest pilot was Billy Bishop, the First World War ace, and a close friend of Harry’s. The next day Harry was on the phone to him. He told him Mike’s story. He explained Mike’s problem understanding and speaking English. Most of all, he told him of Mike’s vow.
Billy Bishop understood. The next day Mike was back in training.
My turn came next. The checking officer was the CO himself. He was a young English fighter pilot who had been shot down and wounded early in the war. Over his RAF wings he wore one purple and white ribbon, the DFC. To us he was God.
He said nothing as he climbed into the rear cockpit. After that the instructions were short and sweet. ‘Take off.’
I taxied out, turning to right and left to make sure the way was clear ahead. I stopped at the runway to go through a meticulous check-list. I looked right and left to make sure no planes were landing, pulled onto the runway and opened the throttle. I let the plane lift gradually on its own, and raised the undercarriage. As I turned left at five hundred feet, the engine suddenly stopped. Nothing but silence and the swish of the wind. Automatically I put the nose down. Then I realised he had cut the switch to force me to do a practice forced landing. I picked out a likely looking field, kept the plane at the proper gliding speed, and waited for him to tell me to switch on the engine again. He didn’t. As we got down close to the field, I turned into wind. I dropped flap, but was still a little high and to the right. I banked to the left and applied opposite rudder to put it into a side-slip, and straightened out. I could see the leaves on the trees. Still no order to restart the engine. I was desperate, so I waited. At the last minute, as I was flattening out, it came.
‘Restart the engine!’
I still think we were lucky that the engine roared into life. I waited a bit before raising the flaps, then climbed to fifteen thousand feet.
‘Want to try some aerobatics?’ he asked laconically.
‘Slow roll,’ I said. I looked around, put the nose down to pick up speed, pulled it up again and applied rudder. Slowly we rolled over. As we got on our back, I gradually pushed the stick forward to keep the nose well up. The dust and dirt came down from the floor. Then opposite rudder and we were back straight and level again.
‘Loop!’ I said.
More speed this time, then stick back slowly to keep the loop perfect, easing off at the top and bringing it back again as the horizon appeared again above us, and cutting the engine back as we came around.
‘Roll off the top!’
This was the trickiest. We needed just enough speed at the top of the loop to roll out without stalling upside down. It was OK.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said.
I headed for the base. Suddenly he shouted: ‘Break right!’
I whipped the stick over right and back into
my stomach, stomping right rudder. I was forced into my seat, thrown to the left, and nearly blacked out. I continued the tight turn, and then straightened out, still at full throttle.
‘What are you doing now?’ he asked.
‘We were just jumped by an Me109. We out-turned him. He’s now diving away, and we’re on his tail.’
‘Land,’ he said.
Back on the ground, we climbed down from the cockpit. ‘Did you enjoy that?’ he asked.
I showed my surprise, then answered enthusiastically. ‘Yes, sir!’
‘So did I,’ he said.
He walked away, then turned around. ‘It’s OK. You’re a fighter pilot.’
Much later I met Gerry Fuller again. As commander of 336 Squadron of the Fourth Fighter Group, I flew into Atcham to interview replacement pilots. The Fourth got the pick of the pack, and most of them gave the Fourth as their preference. This time, I was God, and the eager but anxious candidates came in to the office one by one and stood in a rigid brace. I went through the files, and recognised a name.
‘I’d like to interview this one,’ I said.
He was in a US uniform now, but wore the RCAF wings over his left breast pocket. It was Gerry Fuller.
‘Why do you want to join our squadron?’ I asked.
‘I know it’s the best, sir,’ he said.
‘Any other reason?’
‘I know its Commander is the best, sir.’
‘Well, Lieutenant, he had a good instructor.’
I put him on the next mission. He had more flying hours than most of our pilots, and, after all that time as an instructor, he couldn’t wait to get into combat. It was an easy mission, but, as we came in to pick up the bombers, I spotted a gaggle of Me109’s at two o’clock high and told the squadron to watch them. I knew they would probably try to break us up so the others could attack the bombers.
When I saw four of them peel off and dive down on our Yellow section, I ordered them to break right. Yellow One, Yellow Two and Yellow Three broke violently into the attack. Yellow Four turned more slowly. ‘Yellow Four, break hard!’ I called. It still wasn’t hard enough or fast enough. It was his undoing. The leading 109 got on his tail and out-turned him. It was all over in seconds. Yellow Four was Gerry Fuller. I blamed myself, I should have yelled at him harder.
After Pearl Harbour, the three Eagle Squadrons transferred in September 1942 to the US Army Air Force. We painted the US star over the red, white and blue roundels of the RAF and continued to fly our beloved Spits; but eventually came the day when we had to turn them back to the RAF, and take over the huge American long-range P-47 Thunderbolts. We gazed up at these great, solid aircraft in amazement. They looked like whales and the nimble little Spitfires, like darting minnows.
No one, least of all Mike, liked the change. In vain I talked about the advantage the ‘Thunderjugs’ would give us and the bombers with their longer range, speed in the dive, and the invulnerability of their great air-cooled radial engines.
Gradually, the pilots learned to love and appreciate the new planes, but Mike was the last to give up. The day came when the last two Spitfires were due to leave. Mike and Bob Messenger took off for one last flight. Before they landed, every police force in Essex had phoned the base. They thought at least fifty planes had gone wild and were attacking everything in sight. In fact it was Sobanski and Messenger saying goodbye to their beloved Spitfires in the only way they considered befitting; by taking them on a ‘beat-up’ to end all ‘beat-ups’. They came screaming down in vertical dives, levelling off at the last minute to flash past farm houses at less than roof-top height, missing them by inches. They screamed under bridges; they clipped the tops off trees; they flattened the wheat in the fields; they shattered the glass in windows and the greenhouses around Bishop’s Stortford; they scattered cattle, chickens, men, women and children; and then they zoomed up into a loop, and came thundering down to start all over again.
Normally such conduct would have been considered childish, dangerous, and, above all, an offence against the friendly, long-suffering locals; and therefore subject to the most severe punishment. In this case it was different. Dusty Miller was their flight commander. He confined them to the base for a month, and assured them that their irresponsibility would be duly entered in their records. I doubt if it was. Years later Dusty and I met again at Debden to unveil a memorial which the British presented to honour the fallen Eagles. He talked about ‘the Great Beat-up’.
‘Yeah, you can laugh about it now!’ I said.
‘Hell! I laughed about it then!’
At the time, I saw nothing funny about it. ‘Why don’t you save all that for the Germans?’
‘Don’t worry!’ he said. ‘That was just a rehearsal!’
‘Great rehearsal if you’d flown into the ground! Come on! I’ll check you out in the Thunderjug.’
Later, Mike and I shared a room in well-built officers’ mess. The first night I was awakened by what I thought was a dribbling tap in the wash basin. I went over to turn it off, to find that the sibilant sounds came from Mike talking Polish in his sleep. I got to like the soft ‘s’ and ‘sh’ sounds. He even taught me a Polish version of ‘She sells sea-shells’, which concerned seventy-seven partridges, and consisted of a series of ‘s’, ‘sh’, ‘strps’ and ‘z’ sounds and no vowels.
Each night after a mission, without fail, Mike performed a solemn rite. He would take out a large black-paged photograph album and painstakingly print in white ink, the events of the day. Whenever possible the narrative was illustrated by photographs, which covered every phase of his service life: the planes he had flown, people he had known, and missions he had accomplished. Each time he had destroyed an enemy aircraft, either on the ground or in the air, he included a combat report, culminating in his fifth, when he wrote in large letters: ‘To-day I am an Ace!’
One night, he seemed to be taking longer than usual.
‘For God’s sake come to bed. We’ve got an early briefing tomorrow. You can do that any time!’
‘No,’ he said in his slow deep voice. ‘This is important.’
‘What the hell is important about it?’
‘My family and friends in Poland don’t know where I am, or what I’m doing. It’s OK for you guys. Every time you shoot one down, or get promoted or decorated, it’s in your local newspaper. As far as my people know, I just ran away. That’s why this is important. I’ll show it to them after the war!’
‘I’m sure your family don’t think you goofed off!’
‘No, but they don’t know I’m a captain in the leading fighter group in the US Air Force.’
Then, after a pause, ‘Besides, there’s the girl I’m going to marry. I want her to see all this!’
‘If it’s that important to you, maybe you’d better give me her name and address, just in case.’
‘No,’ he said with conviction. ‘I know I’m going to survive this war. I know!’
Not long before D-Day, I was cursing Mike and his diary. In Holland, directly on the route the bombers took to the Ruhr and Berlin, was the Luftwaffe fighter base at Gilze-Rijn. It was so strategically placed that the Germans could get up to attack, and return to base for refuelling and rearming three times during one of our missions. It was therefore decided that the Fourth Group would attack the base, with 334 Squadron using the new dive-bombing techniques introduced by General Kepner. 335 and 336 Squadrons were to fly cover for 334, while they were bombing and strafing, and then dive down themselves to strafe and destroy what was left. It was an outstanding success. We left a trail of burned-out aircraft on the ground, and great black clouds of smoke from burning fuel stores; but we had stirred up a hornets’ nest, and we had to fight our way out as we climbed back up. 334 and 335 had used up most of their ammunition and we in 336 were not much better off. We were covering the other two squadrons as best we could as they headed for home, when I heard Mike’s deep, slow Polish accent.
‘I tink I go back and take some pictures
!’
I saw the lone Mustang diving back down into the smoke and wheeled 336 around to cover him. We picked him up as he climbed back out.
That night, he carefully penned his combat report into his album, and three days later he stuck two photographs into the spaces he had left for them. They showed wrecked German fighters on the ground, and the columns of black smoke rising into the air.
It was in the dark morning hours of 6 June 1944 that Mike and I dressed for our part in the invasion. As I waited for Mike at the door, he put his precious album on my bed, and handed me a scrap of paper: It contained a name and an address in Cracow, Poland.
I looked at him. He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. It was the last time I saw him. We had told Eisenhower and his staff that we could prevent the German air force and army from moving up to the beach-head during the hours of daylight, and we spent the day proving it. We attacked everything that moved on the roads and rails of Normandy leading to the landing area. The destruction was terrible. We strafed columns of trucks and light tanks, while the Germans leapt from their vehicles and drove into what cover they could find at the side of the roads, or desperately tried to set up flak guns before we could mow them down. We sprayed the columns of marching men and watched them fall as our eight machine-guns cut them down. The heavy tanks of the élite ‘Panzer Lehr’ based around Le Mans were not given the order to advance, apparently because Hitler thought the Normandy landings were not the main invasion force. In the early hours, we would have had difficulty in stopping them, but, by the time they finally moved, the roads were choked with wrecked vehicles, and the beach-head was already secured.
We flew non-stop that day from 3 a.m. till after midnight, returning to base three times for refuelling and rearming. On each mission, the Group, the squadrons and sections were split up as they went down to strafe or bomb. There was no time to reform; there was too much to be done. Anyway, to try to reform out of range of the murderous flak would have taken us up into the cloud cover. The Group lost six pilots that day, but because each pilot was fighting his own battle, we don’t know exactly what happened in every case.
Tumult in the Clouds Page 4