Moon Squadron (9 page)

In December, 1943, the Polish Flight based on Brindisi was given the new style of No. 1586 Special Duty Flight. It had ten air crews, three Halifaxes and three Liberators, all maintained by an exclusively Polish technical staff.
The way to the liberation of Poland seemed now to be coming within the particular powers of the Polish crews; direct help in appreciable measure could at last be flown to the Home Army.

Squadron-Leader E. Arciuszkiewicz described his first sortie in a Halifax from Brindisi. In a windless sky, the aircraft took off before dark, crossed the Yugoslav coast near Dubrovnik and rose to 10,000 feet. He could see the conglomeration of peaks and chasms and, amongst them, the twinkling lights of the camp fires of the Yugoslav resistance forces. Lower on the slopes he could see the fires of patrols guarding the routes up to the mountain groups. The moon came up and the snake
d course of the Danube could be seen, the double bend near Vienna identified. He then set course for the Tatras and saw the foothills flowing up to the Low Tatras with the snow peaks of the High Tatras cutting into the night sky. He was now over Poland and clearly making out the valleys and lakes and small towns so familiar to him. Then came the crossing of the Vistula and he tells how he recited to himself verses learned from his English lessons: "Breathes there a man ..."

At 2000 feet he could see the woods and fields and cottages. His heart went down to them. The reception point was a clearing in the middle of a great forest near Pelica. He made a signal and it was immediately answered with five flares to mark the exact spot and also to indicate the direction of the wind. The first drop was made accurately and then, as the aircraft came down to 200
feet, the landing spot was lost sight of for a moment. But it came into view again and the rest of the containers were dropped. The Halifax flew off and the joyful committee flashed the ‘V’ sign in Morse. But within a distance of a few miles of that rendezvous, two villages were seen suddenly to burst into flames. The yellow fire licked from house to house. The Germans, as was their custom, were making reprisals. Nothing could be done to help, nothing. The aircraft had sternly to make the return flight to come back another day. Over the Tatras again, flak came up slightly to the east of Budapest and yet more flak was encountered towards Durazzo. It only did light and finely distributed damage. The aircraft survived to come down in bright sunlight.

In April 1944, the Flight made as many as a hundred sorties to Poland. In May, an equal number were made. To measure up to these intensive efforts, normal flying regulations had to be cast to the winds, and so they were. The certainty of overstrain and fatigue was almost recklessly assumed by captains and crews. Such passionate endeavour gave the greatest moral satisfaction to these single-minded men. By physical exhaustion, by heart strain and by sweat, they acquired a sense of true fulfilment. The liberation of their country was the highest purpose of their lives and in their work and will, they showed their valiance at its highest inspiration.

In June, the crews were briefed for sorties to Yugoslavia and to Italy, missions which were in harmony with and conformed to the general needs of the Italian campaign. The following month, to the great joy of the Poles, the supply sorties to their homeland were renewed. What had happened during this interruption should have made these flights less hazardous. In fact, events had made them far more difficult and far more dangerous. In a flood t
ide, the Red Army had advanced and the Russians imposed the most severe strictures on flights over areas now occupied by their troops. Polish aircraft, flying in what was still cynically described as ‘our common cause, the defeat of Hitlerism’ were liable to be shot down out of hand by the Soviet gunners. Representations to the Russian High Command were ignored. Here was yet another glimpse of the Stalinist cloven hoof, so soon to be fully revealed. If the Poles survived the menace of our Soviet allies, there were new dangers. German flak concentrations in the Budapest area had been vastly strengthened as they had in the Cracow-Nowysacz-Deblin region. Repeated British advice that stated the perils of these flights far outweighed their usefulness were listened to with courtesy. But the answer was always the same.

"Please, we are wishing to be flying to Poland."

Repairs to aircraft, employed continuously and used almost to breaking point, were, of necessity, sketchy. There was no time, in these intensive operations, for thorough overhaul. If the aircraft were fatigued, the men who flew them were fuller of zest than ever. The accident rate rose to a very high level. The Polish crews smiled apologetically and fingered their bandages.

"Please, we are wishing to be flying to Poland."

But the sombre drama of Poland and Warsaw was mounting to another crisis. Before this ultimate tragedy came to pass, a desperate and heroic act was accomplished.

For a long time, it had been known that the Germans were conducting intensive research into the possibilities of two secret weapons: the pilotless aircraft and the long-range rocket. So much was known for certain. Details were contradictory, for what was going on at the experimental station at Peenemiinde on the Baltic coast was a dark and ominous secret. Between the end of 1942 and April, 1943, five further reports filtered through, causing even more profound disquiet. Discreet air reconnaissance revealed that the Germans were intensifying their efforts, that large rockets were lying alongside a firing point. Frequent actual firings had already taken place and it was estimated that these machines of war would have a range of something between ninety to a hundred and thirty miles. Most sinister of all, work of an unexplained nature was going on feverishly in North-West France; railway sidings, turntables, buildings and concrete erections were being set up, all of them within the estimated range of the rockets of Peenemiinde. It was decided, as a matter of the most urgent priority, that a very heavy raid should be mounted and Peenemiinde blasted.

On the night of August 17th
1943, Air-Marshal Harris, Chief of Bomber Command, struck moonlight with five hundred and seventy-one bombers. The raid was successful and costly. German fighters were deceived at first by a feint attack on Berlin but all too soon realised what the R.A.F.'s true target was. Forty of our bombers failed to return. I quote from Volume V of Sir Winston Churchill's masterly
The
Second
World
War
.

"The results were of capital importance. The raid had a far-reaching influence on events. All the constructional drawings just completed for issue to the workshops were burned and the start of large-scale manufacture was considerably delayed. The fear of attacks on factories producing the rocket elsewhere led the Germans to concentrate manufacture in underground works in the Hartz mountains. They also decided to shift their experimental activities to an establishment in Poland beyond the range of our bombers. There
, our Polish agents kept vigilant watch . . ."

Five God-given months passed before the Germans were ready once again to launch their rockets experimentally. Everything about them was watched by Polish eyes, by the eyes of men, women and children. The
Morse tappers began to sound and information came to England of the weapon's range and trajectory. The rockets fell in open country, usually many miles apart from each other. German patrols stood by night and day ready to rush to the point of the explosion and pick up every single fragment before the Poles could get their hands on them. Then, one day, Fate intervened. The Germans launched a rocket which failed to explode. What combination of eddy, wind or haphazard current did guide it to the bank of the river Bug where, for a brief space, it lay intact? By the time the Germans arrived breathlessly, it had gone. There was no trace of it, or of any Pole. The countryside, bisected by the sullen river, was empty. The Germans searched until nightfall, combing the land like gun-dogs sniffing for their mechanical game. They flushed nothing. Then, under cover of Stygian darkness, the Poles crept out and, with block and tackle, heaved the rocket from the muddy depths of the river where they had rolled it. In mortal danger, not only from the object itself but from the Germans who surrounded them, a Polish engineer began the fearful task of dismantling it.

It is a scene to stir the imagination. The fringe of lookouts, peering always into the dark, their eardrums keyed to the pitch of an enemy footfall; the cowshed where the surgery was done, with spanners for scalpels, with guttering candles for shadow
-less lights; the rocket itself, gigantic in size, lethal in intent, yielding up, one by one, the secrets of its intestines, its bowels and its malevolent brain, its warhead. Consider a surgeon operating in these circumstances, in the knowledge that, from split second to split second, his patient may disintegrate in flame and thunder. By dawn, the task was done, the autopsy- thank God, proved to be completed. The dissected components were ready for delivery to London. The filleted cadaver, having been weighed, measured and photographed, was sunk once again in the river. It lies there to this day.

The
Morse-sounders of Poland began to tap again.

On July 25
th
1944, nearly a year after the destroying raid on Peenemiinde, a British Dakota took off from Brindisi. The task of the pilot was to put down four passengers and about twenty suitcases at a certain point in Poland. He would pick up a number of parcels, each and all of them of the greatest possible value to H.M. Government, and one passenger. Of such momentous importance was this pick-up that an escort was allotted, an anti-night fighter, a Liberator from No. 1586 Polish Flight. The two aircraft took off casually. They flew, mercifully without incident, and saw, after many hours, the glimmer of a line of torches far below. The pilot flashed his recognition signal for Orange. From the ground came the answer: ‘N’ for Nuts. This flippant code, without meaning to any listening or watching Germans, was deliberate. It meant that the nuts waiting below were the nuts, the bolts and the essential mechanism of a weapon designed to pulverise London. The Dakota landed, stopped and ran back to turn into the wind while the Liberator kept thunderous patrol in the night sky. The four passengers jumped joyously to the ground, pausing only to kiss the soil beneath their feet. Swiftly the Dakota was loaded for the return flight. The packages, weighing more than a hundred pounds, contained the harvest of Polish researches into the V-2 rocket. Other parcels held drawings, photographs and technical documents, range calculations, trajectory curves and the like. The last person to enter the aircraft was the engineer Kocjan. It was he who had been responsible for the dissection of the rocket and for assembling the corpus of information.

The Dakota with its fabulous cargo staggered along the improvised runway. It failed to take off and returned to its starting point. While the weight was feverishly redistributed, the Liberator overhead circled and circled, ever watchful. But time was ebbing and soon the streaks of dawn would lie along the eastern horizon. Impelled not only by its own engines but by the prayers of the partisans, the Dakota bumped and slewed and slithered along the grass. This time, it was airborne. It made height and set course for base. Unmolested, the two aircraft flew back to Brindisi. In the knowledge that the aircraft had touched down on Polish soil, the ground crew picked the earth from the indentations of the tyres with their fingernails. It was dear to their touch. Refuelled, the Dakota took off for Tempsford. It arrived safely. Kocjan, the engineer, his job done, elected to return to his country.

"Please," he said, "I am immediately wishing to be flying again to Poland."

The work he had done was of incalculable importance to Britain. If any man had earned a respite from the hunger, the strain and the terror of Poland, he had. But, he repeated himself with mechanical persistence.

"Please, I am wishing to be flying again to Poland."

He went back to his own people. Within a matter of hours, he was spotted, stopped, arrested. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. With an immortal grin on his mouth, he was silent. The vilest and most bestial maltreatment of his body failed to stir this gallant man's tongue. Here was yet another voiceless Pole, as silent as he was contemptuous of those who tortured him. The Germans knew that he would never speak. Never.

What was left of him was riddled by a firing squad in Warsaw on August 13th, 1944.

R.I.P.

"Jastrzebiec" and five companions were parachuted into Poland on the night of July 29th, 1944. Already they had set out three times but had had to return to base. This time, very special prayers were said, fingers were cross
ed, wood was touched and eyes were averted from women with squints. This is Jastrzebiec's account of the journey.

"
Buona
notte
,
ma
bella
Italia
!
”
I was trying to make myself heard over the noise of the engines. At the same time I hoped that there would be no need for me to say
'Buon
giono'
the next day.

"We were in a Liberator and, as the
cabin was not very comfortable, we got ourselves spaced out as best we could, being careful to avoid complaining and swearing. God forbid that we should provoke the aeroplane in any way - it might take a dim view of us and carry us back to
bella
Italia
. On the contrary, although stiff and cramped, we stressed very loudly all its good points; we praised its speed, its manoeuvrability and the majestic power of its four motors. For a time, we looked at other planes fanning out in the sky. There were twenty of them, all on dropping missions that night; but we got tired of watching them and fell asleep.