THE KOCIUSZKO SQUADRON:
FORGOTTEN HEROES
OF WORLD WAR II
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407096636
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published in the United Kindom in 2003 by William Heinemann
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2003 by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud
Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other thatn that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in the US, under the title A Question of Honor, by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
William Heinemann The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SWIV 2SA
Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia
Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield Auckland 10, New Zealand
Random House (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing process conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin
ISBN 0 434 00868 0
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Ltd, Chatham, Kent
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
By the Same Author
A Few Words About the Polish Language
Prologue
PART ONE: EXODUS
ONE: Into the Air
TWO: “This Race Which Would Not Die”
THREE: Poland “Will Fight”
FOUR: “We Are Waiting...”
FIVE: “Sikorski’s Tourists”
SIX: “When Will We Start Flying?”
SEVEN: The Battle of Northolt
EIGHT: “My God, They Are Doing It!”
NINE: “The Credit That Is Their Due”
TEN: “The Glamor Boys of England”
PART TWO: BETRAYAL
ELEVEN: “The Cold-Blooded Murder of a Nation”
TWELVE: “Are There Any Frozen Children?”
THIRTEEN: “I Can Handle Stalin Better”
FOURTEEN: “Speak of Them Never”
FIFTEEN: “The War Is in Poland”
SIXTEEN: A Question of Honor
SEVENTEEN: “People of Warsaw! To Arms!”
EIGHTEEN: “A Tale of Two Cities”
NINETEEN: “A Distant View on the Polish Question”
TWENTY: Light and Darkness
TWENTY-ONE: “For Your Freedom and Ours”
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note On The Type
Index
For the people of Poland
ALSO BY LYNNE OLSON AND STANLEY CLOUD
The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism
ALSO BY LYNNE OLSON
Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970
There is one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies. This guide is called honour.
—Winston Churchill
To non-Polish eyes, written Polish, with its agglomerations of consonants, can seem daunting. It isn’t quite as bad as it looks. The common combination sz, for example, is simply pronounced “sh.” And cz is “ch.” Joined as the startling but also very common szcz, the pronunciation, predictably, is “sh-ch” as in the Russian name KhruSHCHev, or the English words “freSH CHeese.” Otherwise, with a few exceptions, those letters in the thirty-two-letter Polish alphabet that have English equivalents are pronounced more or less the same as in English, albeit somewhat more softly (a, for instance, is pronounced as in “waft.”) As for the exceptions and extra letters, here is an abbreviated and somewhat simplified pronunciation guide:
• or (as opposed to the a with no tail) stands for a somewhat nasal “awn” sound, as in “awning.”
• c is “ts” as in “cats” (the Polish spelling of “tsar” is thus car).
• is “ch” as in “church” (only a Pole can tell the difference between the “ch” of and the “ch” of cz).
• ch is a guttural “kh” sound, as in the Scottish “loch.”
• Ę or ę is a somewhat nasal “en,” except before a b or p, when it becomes “em.”
• i is “ee” as in “feet.”
• j is a “y” sound, as in “yellow.”
• or is pronounced like the “w” in “warm.”
• or is a soft “n” that often sounds almost like “ing” with the “g” nearly silent.
• Ó or ó is “oo” as in “soot” (not“oo” as in “boot”).
• or is “sh” (again, the difference between this and the “sh” of sz is discernible only to Poles).
• W is “v” (thus, in Polish, Warsaw, which is spelled Warszawa, is pronounced “var-SHA-va”). At the end of a word, w is pronounced as an “f.”
• Ż or ż is a “zh” sound like the “s” in “leisure” or the “j” in “soup du jour.”
In Polish, virtually all multisyllabic words are accented on the penultimate syllable. For that reason, “Katyn,” which seems to be more a Ukranian word than a Polish one, is pronounced “KA-tyn” in Polish and “ka-TYN” in Ukranian and Russian.
Here is the correct pronunciation of a few of the other words and names that appear in this book:
• Wadisaw is “vwa-DIS-waf.”
• Lwów is “lvuf.”
• Kraków is “KRAK-uf.”
• Gdask is “gdainsk.”
• Pozna is “POZ-nine.”
• Sejm is “seim.”
• Lech Waęsa is “lekh va-WEN-sa.”
• Dęblin is “DEM-blin.”
• Wojciech Jaruzelski is “VOI-tsiekh yar-u-ZEL-ski.”
• And, most important for our purposes, Kociuszko is “kosh-TSYUSH-ko” or, if that’s a little awkward, just “kosh-TYUSH-ko” will do.
One final note: The family names of Polish women often have endings different from those of their husbands or male relatives. In most cases, a female’s name ends in a (“ah”) or owa (“ova”). Thus, Zdzisaw Krasnodębski’s wife is Wanda Krasnodębska.
THEY MARCHED, twelve abreast and in perfect step, through the heart of bomb-pocked London. American troops, who were in a place of honor at the head of the nine-mile parade, were followed—in a kaleidoscope of uniforms, flags, and martial music—by Czechs and Norwegians, Chinese and Dutch, French and Iranians, Belgians and Australians, Canadians and South Africans. There were Sikhs in turbans, high-stepping Greek evzoni in pom-pommed shoes and white pleated skirts, Arabs in fezzes and kaffiyehs, grenadiers from Luxembourg, gunners from Brazil. And at the end of the parade, in a crowd-pleasing, Union Jack-waving climax, came at least 10,000 men and women from the armed forces and civilian services of His Britannic Majesty, King George VI.
Nearly a year earlier, the most terrible war in the history of the world—six years of fire, devastation, and unimaginable death—had finally ended. At the time there had been wild, spontaneous celebrations in cities all over the globe. But on this grey and damp June day in 1946, Britain and its invited guests, representing more than thirty victorious Allied nations, joined in formal commemoration of their collective victory and of those, living and dead, who had contributed to it. As church bells pealed and bagpipes skirled, veterans of Tobruk, the Battle of Britain, Guadalcanal, Midway, Normandy, the Ardennes, Monte Cassino, Arnhem, and scores of less famous fights were cheered and applauded by more than 2 million onlookers, many waving flags and tooting toy trumpets. The marchers snapped off salutes as they passed the reviewing platform on the Mall, where the king, his queen, and their two daughters stood. Prime Minister Clement Attlee was alongside the royal family, but the attention of many was focused on Attlee’s predecessor, Winston Churchill, who had led and inspired Britain through the final five years of the war.
As the Victory Parade’s last contingents marched by, a thunderous roar was heard overhead. The crowds stared up at the leaden sky, transfixed, as a massive armada of aircraft—bombers, fighters, flying boats, transports—approached from the east at nearly rooftop level. Leading the fly-past was a single, camouflaged fighter—a Hawker Hurricane, looking small and insignificant compared to the lumbering giants that flew in its wake. The Hurricane’s pride of place, however, was unchallenged. If it had not been for this sturdy little single-seater and its more celebrated cousin, the Spitfire, the Victory Parade and the triumph it celebrated might never have occurred. In the summer and fall of 1940, RAF pilots had flown Hurricanes and Spitfires against Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe and had won the Battle of Britain. In so doing, they changed the course of the war and the very nature of history.
Standing along the parade route that day was a tall, slender, fair-haired man with the difficult name of Witold Urbanowicz. As he watched the Hurricane flash by overhead, a flood of memories returned to him. He had been up there in a Hurricane during the Battle of Britain. He had gazed down on this city when it was blazing with fire. His squadron had become a legend of the battle. On the first day of the London Blitz—Hitler’s attempt to bomb the British civilian population into submission—Urbanowicz’s squadron was credited with shooting down no fewer than fourteen German aircraft, a Royal Air Force record.
Setting records had already become a habit for 303 Squadron—or the “Kociuszko Squadron,” as it was also known. In its first eight days of combat, the squadron destroyed nearly forty enemy planes. By the Battle of Britain’s end, it was credited with downing more German aircraft than any other squadron attached to the RAF. Nine of its pilots, including Urbanowicz, were formally designated as aces. Writing in Collier’s three years after the battle, an American fighter pilot described 303 as “the best sky fighters I saw anywhere.”
Yet, despite its accomplishments in the war, none of 303’s pilots took part in the fly-past. None marched in the parade. For they were all Polish—and Poles who had fought under British command were deliberately and specifically barred from the celebration by the British government, for fear of offending Joseph Stalin. A week earlier, ten members of Parliament had written a letter of protest against the exclusion. “Ethiopians will be there,” the letter declared. “Mexicans will be there. The Fiji Medical Corps, the Labuan Police and the Seychelles Pioneer Corps will [march]—and rightly, too. But the Poles will not be there. Have we lost not only our sense of perspective, but our sense of gratitude as well?”
ON A JUNE day six years earlier, Winston Churchill had risen in the House of Commons to declare: “The battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin.” From the first, the new prime minister, who had been in office barely a month, made clear that Britain would not follow France into ignominy: there would be no British capitulation to Germany. “We shall fight on the beaches,” Churchill famously said. “We shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
The courage and character that Churchill pledged for Britain had already been demonstrated by Poland. It was the first country to experience the terror of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the first to fight back, the first to say—and mean—“We shall never surrender.” Poland fell in October 1939, but its government and military refused then, and refused for the rest of the war, to capitulate. In a remarkable odyssey, scores of thousands of Polish pilots, soldiers, and sailors escaped Poland—some on foot; some in cars, trucks, and buses; some in airplanes; some in ships and submarines. They made their various ways first to France, thence to Britain to continue the fight. For the first full year of the war, Poland, whose government-in-exile operated from London, was Britain’s most important declared ally.
When dozens of Polish fighter pilots, including 303 Squadron, took to the air during the Battle of Britain, the RAF already had lost hundreds of its own fliers, replaced in many cases by neophytes who barely knew how to fly, much less fight. The contribution of the combat-hardened Poles, especially the men of 303, was vital. Indeed, many believe it was decisive. “If Poland had not stood with us in those days . . . the candle of freedom might have been snuffed out,” Queen Elizabeth remarked in 1996.
In all, some 17,000 Polish airmen fought alongside the RAF during the war. But the pilots and air crews were not the only Poles to play an important part in the conflict. The small Polish navy participated in several important operations. Polish infantry and airborne units fought in Norway, North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany. By the war’s end, Poland was the fourth largest contributor to the Allied effort in Europe, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain and its Commonwealth. “If it had been given to me to choose the soldiers I would like to command,” said Field Marshal Harold Alexander, commander of the Allied forces in North Africa and Italy, “I would have chosen the Poles.”
Perhaps as significant as its role in combat was Poland’s contribution to the Allies’ greatest intelligence coup—deciphering the German military codes generated by the Enigma machine. Only Churchill and a handful of other British officials knew at the time of the Victory Parade that Polish cryptographers had provided the initial breakthrough for cracking Enigma—with incalculable importance to the outcome of the war.
And what did the Poles want in return? “We wanted Poland back,” said Witold Urbanowicz. Throughout the war, Winston Churchill, moved by the Poles’ valor, grateful for their help, and horrified by the Nazis’ unprecedented savagery in their homeland, promised they would get it. “We shall conquer together or we shall die together,” Churchill vowed to the Polish prime minister, General Wadysaw Sikorski, after the fall of France. Meeting Polish troops as they arrived in England in June 1940, British war secretary Anthony Eden declared: “We shall not abandon your sacred cause and shall continue this war until your beloved country be returned to her faithful sons.”
Yet, as the great long line of marchers proceeded down the Mall on that June morning in 1946, and as the crowds cheered and basked in the postwar world’s rebirth of freedom, proud Poland remained in the shadows. Despite Eden’s pledge, its “sacred cause” had been abandoned by its two closest allies, Britain and the United States. One occupier, Hitler, had been replaced by another, Joseph Stalin. And on that gala day, Polish war heroes like Urbanowicz and his fellow 303 pilots—once called “the Glamor Boys of England”—were forced to stand on London sidewalks and watch.
One young Polish pilot looked on in silence while the parade passed. Then he turned to walk away. An old woman standing next to him looked at him quizzically. “Why are you crying, young man?” she asked.
THE NIGHT before the barnstormers came to Jan Zumbach’s hometown, he was so excited he couldn’t sleep. No flying machine had set down in little Brodnica before, and thirteen-year-old Jan, in the spring of 1928, had never laid eyes on one of those aviators he had heard and read so much about. When the sun finally rose the next morning, Jan and his family proceeded to the large meadow outside of town. It was National Defense Week in ever threatened, ever patriotic Poland, and nearly all the men, women, and children in Brodnica were on hand for the celebration. Flags were flying, tents had been erected for local officials and honored guests, a military band was working its way through its repertoire of polkas, marches, waltzes, and mazurkas, with a little opera thrown in for variety’s sake. On the edge of the meadow, behind a cordon of uniformed soldiers, sat two gleaming Polish-built Potez 25 biplanes. Just looking at them made Jan all the more eager for the band to desist and the show to begin.
At long last, the bandleader laid down his baton. The crowd hushed. Jan and the other youngsters pressed forward as far as they could. The pilots, four of them, adjusted their leather helmets, pulled down their goggles, and climbed into their twin, open-cockpit two-seaters. With cool and practiced waves to the spellbound audience, they started off in a white blast of exhaust and a tractorlike roar. The propwash whipped off men’s hats and fluttered women’s skirts. Wingtip-to-wingtip, the two planes bounced over the meadow, then lifted and soared, taking Jan’s heart with them as they climbed. Seconds later, still in close formation, they swooped low over the crowd.
Jan was one of the few who did not hurl himself facedown on the grass. Transfixed, he watched as the planes climbed again, looped-the-loop, then plunged into twin, heart-stopping nosedives. When they were what seemed only a few feet from the hard earth, they pulled up and were gone, vanished over the eastern horizon. In their place were silence and a gentle late-spring breeze. Then, while the crowd still gaped and began to wonder if the show was over, the Potez 25s exploded out of the west in a gut-wrenching, tree-level grand finale that had the men cheering at the top of their lungs and the women nervously fanning themselves.
And it was there and then, in that meadow, at that instant, that young Jan Zumbach, hovering somewhere between laughter and tears, “swore by all the saints that I must, I would, be a pilot.”
At just about this same time, in a town called Ostrów Wielkopolski, 100 or so miles southwest of Brodnica, thirteen-year-old Miroslaw Feri was haunting the local aeroklub, watching planes take off and land, waiting impatiently for the day when he would be in the cockpit. Mika Feri had always enjoyed testing gravity’s limits. From an early age, he liked to teeter—arms outstretched like a tightrope walker’s—on the narrow iron railing around the fourth-floor balcony of his family’s apartment. Sometimes, he would swing by one arm from the same railing, terrifying his mother as she worked in her little garden, thirty or forty feet below. Mika, the mischievous ringleader of a group of neighborhood boys, was always the one to come up with daredevil games somewhere above ground level—scaling the red-tile roofs of other buildings in the apartment complex, or leaping to the ground from the garden sheds in back. “He was absolutely fearless,” said Edward Idzior, Mika’s closest childhood chum.
Budding aviators like Jan Zumbach and Mika Feri (and more than a few girls) were everywhere in Poland in those days. Indeed, by the late 1920s, the mere idea of flying, of a perfect escape from the mundane realities of life, was captivating young minds and souls all over the globe. Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop, transatlantic solo flight from Long Island to Paris in 1927 epitomized the romanticism and excitement of aviation. But other countries had lesser Lindberghs. Two years before the Lone Eagle landed at Orly, for instance, a young Polish military pilot named Boleslaw Orliski flew solo (with several stops) from Warsaw to Tokyo—a distance of about 4,000 miles. Orliski’s feat didn’t come close to matching Lindbergh’s, but he and others like him were local heroes all the same.
The fascination of young Poles with airplanes and flying was to have significant implications for the Polish military, for Polish society in general, and, in World War II, for the world. Historically, Poland’s most dashing figures had come from the cavalry. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Poland was a great power, mounted warriors were the key to its military might. Foreign armies, from the Turks to the Teutonic Knights, envied and feared the Polish cavalry. Of particular renown were the Husaria, who rode caparisoned steeds into battle and wore plumed helmets, jewel-encrusted breastplates, and large arcs of eagle feathers that seemed to rise, winglike, out of their backs. (The feather-covered steel frames were actually attached to their saddles.) In their day, the Husaria were the equivalent of Hitler’s Panzer units: heavily armed, highly mobile, intended to crush enemy defenses in lightning charges. In one famous seventeenth-century battle, a Polish force of 3,500, including some 2,500 Husaria, crushed a Swedish army of 11,000.
To generations of young people, Poland was the Husaria. But to those who came of age after World War I—when the country was finally freed from more than a century of subjugation by the Germans, Austrians, and Russians—the cavalry had become a relic. The sons and daughters of a reborn nation were looking for new, more modern heroes. They found them in the air.
That the romance of flying attracted women as well as men made aviation all the more appealing to the men. In 1928, Witold Urbanowicz was a promising young military cadet from a modestly well-off family who was headed, as was expected of him, into the cavalry. One day, he and several classmates were at a restaurant near the Warsaw aerodrome. Sitting on the restaurant terrace, they watched as a Polish Air Force plane performed complicated, low-altitude maneuvers overhead. Witold and his companions could not help noticing that the pilot and his aerobatics had the full and admiring attention of a group of attractive young women at a nearby table. One of the women cast a jaundiced eye Urbanowicz’s way. “You can’t do such things on a horse!” she observed. It wasn’t long before Urbanowicz decided to forget the cavalry and throw in his lot with the air force.
Unlike the cavalry, regarded by wealthy landowners and their sons as their private domain, aviation, in the more egalitarian Polish society of the 1920s, was open to just about anyone. Government-sponsored aeroklubs had been established all over the country, offering gliders, airplanes, and free lessons to those who wanted to fly. Among the teenagers who took advantage of the opportunity was Jadwiga Pisudska, the pretty teenage daughter of Poland’s chief of state, Marshal Józef Pisudski. A cavalryman, Pisudski did not approve of his daughter’s soaring ambition, and he was not the only parent who felt that way. The mothers of Zumbach, Feri, and countless other would-be pilots were similarly appalled.
When Zumbach first announced his aerial plans, his mother, the widow of a wealthy landowner, exploded. Aviators were drunkards and madmen! Jan’s duty was to help his brothers manage their late father’s large estate. “Yet, try as she might, my mother lost her battle to make me forget about flying,” Zumbach reported. “She never stood a chance.” At nineteen, he forged her signature on papers authorizing him to enlist in the military. After a few months of training in the infantry, he was accepted into the Polish Air Force academy at Dęblin. Mika Feri’s mother, a teacher whose Croatian husband had abandoned the family, was similarly horrified at her son’s fascination with flying, and, as with Mrs. Zumbach, the first she heard of her son’s application to Dęblin was after he had been accepted.
DĘBLIN SITS on a flat, grassy plain about 70 miles south of Warsaw, rimmed in the far distance by the low Bobrowniki Hills. The academy’s headquarters is an eighteenth-century manor house that Tsar Nicholas I seized in 1825 after exiling the nobleman-owner to Siberia for plotting a Polish rebellion against Russia. Five years later, the tsar gave the white-columned house to a Russian general who had suppressed yet another uprising against the Russian occupiers. When Poland regained its independence in 1918, the new government turned the house and its magnificent lawns and gardens over to the air force.
With so many young Poles interested in aviation, Dęblin had a wealth of applicants in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1936, the year Zumbach and Feri entered the school, more than 6,000 young men were competing for only 90 places. The new cadets came from every level of society. Landowners’ sons joined the sons of peasants, teachers, miners, and artists. As soon as they arrived, these young men who represented Poland’s future found themselves immersed in Poland’s past. They dined in the 200-year-old manor house, with its parquet floors and crystal chandeliers, and received instruction in the art of being a gentleman as well as in the art of flying. They were taught that an officer, gentleman, and pilot always brings flowers when calling on a lady and always kisses the lady’s hand—just so—on arrival and departure. An officer, gentleman, and pilot did not gamble, drink to excess, boast, or issue IOUs. At glittering formal balls in the academy’s ballroom, the cadets practiced what they learned. They waltzed and danced the mazurka with fashionable young ladies. They kissed the women’s hands and spoke of gentlemanly things. “Remember,” the Cadet’s Code declared, “that you are a worthy successor of the Husaria and of the pioneers of Polish aviation. Remember to be chivalrous always and everywhere.”
Dęblin graduates appear to have taken most of their social training to heart—even if some did cut corners on the code’s more puritanical aspects. Although discipline at the academy was famously strict, many cadets managed to become as well known for their off-duty escapades and for thumbing their noses at military authority as for their flying skills. To show off for girlfriends, cadet pilots were known to fly under bridges and between church spires, and if, while airborne, they happened to spot any stuffy, self-important cavalry officers riding through the countryside, they might buzz them to spook their mounts.
Prominent among the hell-raisers at Dęblin in the late 1930s were Zumbach, Feri, and Witold okuciewski, a former cavalry officer with the dark, boyish good looks of a movie star and the raffish attitude of a born gambler. okuciewski, who came from an old landed family in eastern Poland, had been one of those cavalrymen whose horses were deliberately panicked by low-flying planes from Dęblin. But instead of cursing the pilots, as others did, okuciewski (who wasn’t particularly fond of horses to begin with) dreamed of shedding his equine, earth-bound existence and taking to the sky. When he got the chance to go to Dęblin, he grabbed it.
Known as “the Three Musketeers” during World War II, Zumbach, Feri, and okuciewski were in almost constant trouble during their days as cadets. Class standing was based in part on a cadet’s personal conduct and his willingness to follow orders. In the class of 1938, okuciewski finished next to last, Feri eighth from last, and Zumbach thirty-eighth from last. According to a Polish Air Force historian, while “the Three Musketeers” were at Dęblin their main interests were “wine, women, song—and only then study.”
But, oh, how they could fly! They not only survived their Dęblin training—which was as grueling and difficult as any flight training on earth—they excelled at it. After rigorous classroom courses in aerodynamics, navigation, physics, and mechanics, they learned to operate a variety of aircraft. But the primitive, open-cockpit trainers they flew tended to be old and were prone to malfunction—all of which, in a kind of aeronautical Darwinism, made better pilots of those who managed to survive. Of necessity, staying alert, using one’s eyes, and improvisation were important parts of a Polish pilot’s training. “We were trained to scan the sky, to look everywhere, not just in front of us,” said one Polish flier. “At one time, I could turn my head almost a hundred and eighty degrees—really! a hundred and eighty!—watching for the enemy.” American and British pilots who later flew with the Poles testified that they seemed to see the sky—the whole sky—better than anyone else.
Polish pilots also learned to be daring. In one exercise, Jan Zumbach was ordered to fly in a close, wing-to-wing formation with another aircraft, then to turn back and head directly at a third plane—nose-to-nose, at full speed. He was not to veer off until it was just short of too late. Following orders, Zumbach barreled toward the other plane. He waited . . . and waited . . . until he thought he could see the other pilot’s eyes. Only then did he swerve—another tenth of a second, he believed, and they would have collided. After he landed, proud of his coolness under pressure, he was confronted by his commanding officer, who snapped: “Zumbach, you turned too damn soon!”
After Dęblin, the cadets were sent to air force squadrons throughout the country for more intense instruction. Zumbach and Feri were told to report to the Kociuszko Squadron in Warsaw, a choice assignment. In the romantic, daredevil world of the Polish Air Force, the Kociuszko Squadron was unique. It had been formed in 1919 by a group of American pilots, come to Poland to volunteer in a nasty little war that the newly independent Poles were having with newly created Soviet Russia. Among the Yank volunteers were a former Harvard law student, a star football player from Lehigh, and a graduate of Yale.
The man who brought them all to Poland was a twenty-eight-year-old war hero with a thick Southern drawl named Merian C. Cooper.
THE SON OF a prominent Florida lawyer, Merian Cooper had been bewitched by Poland for as long as he could remember. Growing up in Jacksonville at the turn of the century, he had listened to stories about the friendship between his great-great-grandfather, Colonel John Cooper, and Kazimierz Puaski, a Polish hero of the American Revolution. The tales of Poland’s glorious but tragic past, told to Colonel Cooper by Puaski, were passed down to later generations of the Cooper family. There was no more eager audience than young Merian.
SET ON A vast plain in Central Europe, Poland is protected on the north by the Baltic Sea and on the south by the Carpathian Mountains, with little natural protection to the east and west. Linguistically, the country is Slavic, but its culture, religion, and economics have long linked it to the West—at first mainly to Italy and France, later to Great Britain and America. For more than 200 years, from the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, the Poles were a great European power with a mighty army. They had combined with Lithuania to form a vast multilingual and multiethnic commonwealth that eventually covered nearly a third of Europe, including Byelorussia and much of the Ukraine.
From the fourteenth century to the Age of Reason, Poland was probably continental Europe’s most progressive country and certainly its most tolerant. Although predominantly Roman Catholic, Poland offered unrestricted religious freedom to anyone living within its boundaries, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, who had been welcomed there when other European nations were persecuting them. By the seventeenth century, more than four fifths of the world’s Jews lived in Poland, mostly in separate, self-governing communities. There were times of animosity and tension between Christians and Jews, but in general, Polish Jews were able to live for several centuries in relative peace (and, for some, prosperity).
Among the Polish people’s most striking characteristics is their devotion to personal freedom, rooted in a conviction that the state exists to serve the individual, rather than the reverse. By the late 1500s, when rigid autocracy still reigned in the rest of Europe, Poland had emerged as a limited parliamentary democracy, offering many of its citizens an unparalleled degree of constitutional, intellectual, and religious liberty. Poland’s kings were elected and their powers limited by the szlachta, the country’s gentry (a uniquely Polish institution of high- and lowborn, wealthy and poor, landed and landless).* Later, as the Bill of Rights was being tacked onto the U.S. Constitution, Poland produced a written constitution of its own—the first in Europe and only the second in the world.
By then, however, the Polish commonwealth had already disintegrated. Corruption, rural poverty and ignorance, as well as a reluctance to adapt Polish governmental and social structures to the requirements of modern life, all took their toll. Meanwhile, as Poland slowly lost its ability to shape its own destiny, powerful absolutist states were growing up around it. Poles were increasingly scorned and ridiculed by these hostile and aggressive neighbors, who now felt more or less free to paw over Polish territory at will.
Between the last half of the eighteenth century and 1989, Poland was essentially naked to its enemies. The most prominent and persistent of these were the Russians, Austrians, and Germans in all their various geopolitical guises—Russia, the Soviet Union, Austria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and the unified Germany of Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Adolf Hitler. In 1772, Russia, Prussia, and Austria combined to partition Poland, dividing large parts of the commonwealth’s territory among themselves and gradually replacing Polish governance with their own. This was the beginning of one of the darkest periods in Polish history. The Poles rose up repeatedly against their oppressors—particularly the Russians—and repeatedly were crushed.
Yet, through it all, they somehow managed to retain their sense of themselves, their language, their culture, their patriotic zeal, their progressive instincts—and to take heart from news of uprisings and revolutions elsewhere. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the Polish slogan, “For Your Freedom and Ours,” implying Polish unity with all lovers of liberty, became a virtual creed. In the late 1770s, more than a hundred Poles crossed the Atlantic to fight with the American colonists in their struggle against the British crown. Among those who made the journey were two officers who would take their place in both the American and Polish pantheons: Kazimierz Puaski and Tadeusz Kociuszko.
YOUNG MERIAN COOPER knew a great deal about Puaski: How this brilliant cavalry officer had been sent into exile in 1776, after helping lead one of his country’s many failed uprisings against its occupiers. How Puaski arrived in Paris and met Benjamin Franklin, America’s minister to France, who was trying to recruit Europeans into George Washington’s Continental Army. How Franklin had written to Washington, urging him to make room in the army for this young Polish officer, “famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in the defence of the liberties of his country.” How the Continental Congress in 1777 authorized a brigadier’s commission for Puaski and charged him with organizing, equipping, and commanding America’s first cavalry unit.
Resplendent in his hussar’s uniform with its plumed helmet and yards of glittering gold braid, the fiery Puaski stood out like a peacock against the grey of much of Washington’s bedraggled army. Expert in guerrilla warfare and an excellent organizer, he transformed a motley bunch of colonial horsemen into “the Puaski Legion”—a disciplined cavalry that covered Washington’s many tactical retreats, spied on and harried advancing British columns, slowed their pursuit, and time and again saved the Continental Army from destruction.
Colonel John Cooper was among Puaski’s senior officers (along with thirteen Poles) and soon became his close friend. In the Battle of Savannah in 1779, Cooper and Puaski were riding side by side during a charge when Puaski was cut down by British grapeshot. According to family lore, Colonel Cooper personally carried his mortally wounded friend from the battlefield to the Wasp, an American warship anchored in the Savannah River estuary. Two days later, as the Wasp was making for Charleston, Puaski died in Cooper’s arms and was buried at sea.
While Merian Cooper was most enthralled by the stories about his great-great-grandfather and Puaski, he was also well aware of the key role played in the Revolution by Puaski’s quiet and unassuming compatriot, Tadeusz Kociuszko. Kociuszko did not cut the same dashing figure as Puaski, the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron von Steuben, and some of the other foreign officers in Washington’s army. He did not lead troops into battle until late in the war, and then only briefly, during the fight for Charleston. What he did do was design and build fortifications, and he did it so brilliantly that he was given much of the credit for the American victory that proved to be the turning point of the Revolution.
An engineer whose specialty was defensive warfare, Kociuszko arrived in Philadelphia in 1776 and was made a colonel in Washington’s army. The following year, he used the lovely, rolling New York countryside near Saratoga to create a killing field: a series of ingenious wood and earthen defenses that lured the British army into a position where it could be surrounded and defeated by a considerably smaller force. The resultant American victory at Saratoga helped change the course of the war, giving new confidence to Washington’s army, and bringing France officially into the conflict on the American side. Afterward, General Horatio Gates, commander of the American forces at Saratoga, sought to deflect those who considered him to have been the hero of the battle. “Let us be honest . . . ,” he wrote. “The great tacticians of the campaign were the hills and forests which a young Polish Engineer was skillful enough to select for my encampment.”
In 1778, Kociuszko oversaw the construction of fortifications at West Point, on the high western bank of the Hudson River, a spot that Washington had called “the key to America.” Kociuszko’s impregnable fortress, which made the Hudson River impassable to British troops, protected the Hudson Valley and the rest of upstate New York from attack for the remainder of the war.
George Washington, who well understood the importance of Kociuszko’s contributions to the Revolution, was one of the Pole’s particular admirers. Unlike some of Washington’s other officers, the handsome, soft-spoken Kociuszko seemed without ego or overweening ambition. He even declined a promotion to brigadier for his work at West Point. In private correspondence, Washington frequently found reasons to extol Kociuszko and his deeds, in the process employing wonderfully creative spellings of the Pole’s tongue-twisting name. (Washington, who had trouble enough with the spelling of many English words, variously spelled the foreigner’s name as “Cosdusko,” “Koshiosko,” “Kosciousko,” “Kosciuisco,” and “Cosieski.”) Kociuszko’s manifold services to the American cause were formally heralded in 1783, when the Continental Congress granted him U.S. citizenship, a pension, title to various tracts of land, and the rank of brigadier general.
The next year, Kociuszko decided to return home and use the battlefield experience and strategic and tactical knowledge he had gained in America to renew the fight for freedom in Poland. He found, however, that his fellow countrymen were already preparing for rebellion. The partial partition of Poland twelve years earlier had only whetted the Polish appetite for independence.
On May 3, 1791, the Sejm (parliament) adopted a written constitution, modeled in part on the U.S. Constitution, that instituted sweeping social and political reforms. This act of Polish insolence could hardly fail to capture the attention of Catherine the Great, the autocratic Russian tsarina. Catherine did not think much of democratic impulses anywhere, and certainly not in what she regarded as her Slavic backyard. She promptly ordered the Russian army to put a stop to all this idealistic nonsense. The Poles’ own army, with Kociuszko among its top commanders, fought bravely but was hopelessly overmatched and soon defeated. With repressive order thus reestablished, Catherine wasted no time in canceling the Polish constitution and joining with her Prussian and Austrian partners to impose a second and more severe partition. When their work was finished in 1793, all that was left of Poland was an 80,000-square-mile area around Warsaw and Lublin, with a puppet king and a resident Russian garrison.
Undaunted, Kociuszko set out almost immediately to organize a new revolt. In 1794, he led a popular-front army of 6,000 soldiers, among them many peasants armed with scythes and pitchforks, that won several early and impressive victories over the Russians. (Polish uprisings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to be aimed primarily eastward, at the Russians, the harshest of Poland’s three main oppressors.) His early success emboldened Kociuszko to issue a startling new manifesto of freedom calling for, among other things, property rights for peasants and the abolition of both the monarchy and serfdom. Kociuszko’s manifesto, coming so soon after the second partition and after the revolutions in America and France, caused considerable distress among Europe’s monarchists, particularly those in Moscow, Berlin, and Vienna.
A combined Russian-Prussian-Austrian force was hastily assembled and ordered to crush this latest example of Polish impudence. At the climactic Battle of Maciejowice, Kociuszko, wearing the white cloak and red, four-cornered hat of a peasant, was gravely wounded—slashed across the head with a saber, bayoneted three times as he lay on the ground, his leg shattered by a cannonball. The general survived, but his army was defeated, and Catherine ordered that “my poor beast of a Kostiushka,” as she dismissively referred to him, be thrown into a Russian prison. Without Kociuszko, the Polish army was leaderless, and the uprising lacked intellectual cohesion. The Russians advanced on Warsaw and, after a horrific bloodbath, overran it. Poland lay utterly prostrate.
Vowing to rid themselves of this troublesome nation once and forever, the victors ordered the third partition in twenty-three years. This time there were to be no half-measures: in 1795, Poland was simply erased from the map of Europe. Declared a Prussian state document: “It is the wish of [the] King, who is supported by the Empress of Russia, that from this day henceforth the word Poland never be used in any official document or spoken in any government circle. In our several portions, every effort must be made to stamp out the language [and] the history. . . .” It would be another century and a quarter before an independent Poland would emerge from behind this imperial shroud.
When Catherine the Great died in 1796, her son, Paul, the new tsar, who seems to have detested his mother even more than he detested the Poles, ordered Kociuszko released and sent into exile. Thus barred from returning home, the Polish general, whose wounds had never been treated properly by the Russians and who was unable to sit upright or walk unaided, returned to America for a visit, then moved to France and finally to Switzerland. All the while, he continued to work for Polish independence.
Shortly before his death of typhoid fever in 1817, Kociuszko wrote out his will. In it, this ardent champion of personal liberty freed all the serfs on his Polish estates. In a separate, earlier will disposing of his assets in America, he ordered that the property be sold and the proceeds be used to free and educate “in my name” as many American slaves as possible. He appointed his close friend Thomas Jefferson as executor and suggested that the proceeds from the sale of land be used to free some of Jefferson’s own slaves at Monticello. In a tribute to Kociuszko after his death, Jefferson declared him to have been “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” Be that as it may, Kociuszko’s directives regarding slaves were never carried out by Jefferson or anyone else.*
As the United States, having won its independence, embarked on an era of vigorous expansion, Poland faded into—and out of—memory. Throughout the world, there was sympathy for its plight, outrage toward the nations that had consumed it, and admiration for the heroics of Kociuszko and his followers. A Kociuszko craze swept English Romantic literary circles: Coleridge, Keats, and Byron were just a few of the literary figures who wrote paeans to Kociuszko in the early nineteenth century. Prominent American writers, including James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson, would also be swept up in outpourings of pro-Polish sentiment, and Edgar Allan Poe would go so far as to volunteer to fight with the Poles in their 1831 uprising against the Russians.
Yet, in spite of all the high-flown talk by foreign poets and politicians, nothing concrete was ever done to help this Central European country with its Western European mentality. No nation sent arms or financial aid; none marched to Poland’s rescue. As Edmund Burke, who championed the Polish cause in the British House of Commons, acknowledged, “Poland might be, in fact, considered . . . a country on the moon” as far as England and the rest of the West were concerned. With no fear of challenge, Poland’s two most ruthless occupiers, Russia and Prussia (which in 1871 became part of the German Empire), were free over the next 120 years to do their best to obliterate everything Polish. The Polish flag, national anthem, coat of arms, and other emblems of nationhood were branded as illegal and subversive. Russian troops confiscated the royal throne, and Prussian forces melted down the crown jewels. The singing of patriotic Polish songs was treason.
In an attempt to justify their actions, Russians and Germans promoted a highly distorted view of Polish history—one that has profoundly shaped Poland’s international image ever since. Wiped out were the centuries of Poland’s power and international prominence, its religious tolerance, its traditions of freedom and independence. Russian and German propagandists peddled a cartoon image of the Poles that has lasted into the twenty-first century: a hopelessly romantic, ignorant, and impractical people—gallant but emotional; expert at drinking, fighting, and dying bravely but congenitally unable to govern themselves. As the oppressors explained it, they were not persecuting this chaotic country, merely imposing some much-needed order and discipline.
Seen from the Poles’ perspective, however, the occupying powers were a tyranny to be resisted at all costs and at every turn. Regardless of which sector of their fragmented country they happened to occupy—the Russian, the German, or the Austrian—Poles clung stubbornly to their national identity and harbored thoughts of rebellion. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the advent of the Romantic movement in the arts struck a particularly responsive chord, serving to enhance the Poles’ sense of loss and to renew their hope that Poland might someday regain its lost glory. In 1831, and again in 1863, thousands of Poles rose up against Russia. Both times, the insurrections were brutally quashed. Many rebels were tortured and executed. Others were sentenced to life at hard labor, then chained together and forced to march to Siberia. Yet Polish nationalism endured.
THE STORIES OF Poland’s courage, struggle, and tragic failures were powerful stuff for young Merian Cooper, at home in Florida. By the time he reached adolescence, he was like a gun loaded and ready to fire. He wanted not only to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but also—somehow, somewhere, sometime—to repay what he saw as America’s 150-year-old debt to Poland.