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"Poland shall be treated like a colony, the Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German World Empire." -- Generalgouverneur für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete Hans Frank, 3 October 1939 "We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow their avengers... in the form of their children to grow up." -- Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, 6 October 1943 The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes like to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. -- W H Auden, "The Shield of Achilles" And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport: and they set him between the pillars. And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them. Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport. And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. -- Judges 16:25-28 (King James Version) POLAND'S WARRIORS OF THE AIR LIKE KNIGHTS OF OLD DEFEND THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD -- Wladyslaw Theodore Benda, Polish War Relief Poster, c.1942. I know, I know, I know. Everyone wanted to see me build a Liberator. Except it's so cold here (-15 C) and it gets dark so soon and I'm so tired all of the time. And Mrs P is pregnant again (like, two weeks pregnant, so don't tell anyone, but my work is no longer sending me to the Zika-infested shores of Miami so that my [potential] kid doesn't have an inappropriately-sized noodle), which means I ain't seen nuthin' yet in terms of being tired, and not just in nine months, because quite frankly Mrs P is fairly unpleasant when pregnant, and and and annnnd I'm trying to lose some of the forty pounds I gained since I got married, which means I'm running again, which means I'm in quite incredible pain a lot of the time, even before you factor in crawling around on the floor picking up vinyl farm animals discarded by my now-sprinting little scream factory. So there's a lot on my plate. Also, last year, I didn't build a single Spitfire, and somehow that meant that the universe set the controls for the heart of the sun and locked the tiller. So clearly Spitfire builds are like the copper wall penning in Gog and Magog: all that stands between us and destruction. It's a bit late now, but Spitfires are good about arriving when things look bleakest and flipping the script. It's impossible not to love an aircraft with so thorough an understanding of dramatic requirements. Almost all of my books are still in storage as we continue, with no indications and little likelihood of success, to try and sell our house. I managed to come across a copy of Richard Whittle's Spit and Polish, about Polish Spitfires based at Chailey in Sussex. It's an interesting little book, and I was struck by a short sidebar piece on the standard of the Polish Air Force in Exile: It was made in secret in Wilno in 1940, then under Soviet occupation, with the work split between many people. Despite the wartime scarcity of many of the materials involved (damask, gold thread, etc) it was completed and smuggled out in a Japanese(!!!) diplomatic bag. It had been intended to be presented to the Free Polish pilots in France, which is why the French Saint Therese of Lisieux's portrait is at the center of it (she's also the patron saint of aviators), but events overtook it, and it was ultimately officially presented in Great Britain (which the Poles called "Wyspa Ostatniej Nadziei," "Island of Last Hope") in July of 1941. The three words beneath St Therese are: Miłość Żąda Ofiary Which means "Love demands sacrifice". And sacrifice they did: by July of 1945, 26,830 Free Polish servicemembers -- who had escaped the shipwreck of their homeland and could have lived out their days however they saw fit -- were killed in action, died of wounds received on the field of battle, or were missing, believed killed. At their peak, the Free Polish forces only ever incorporated 228,000 men, so this meant that worse than one out of ten would be lost forever to the war, far from home. Whittle's book also made an interesting point about the phrasing on the other side of the standard, which are: Bóg Honor Ojczyzna Meaning God, Honour, Country. Whittle contrasts this with the Waffen-SS's motto, "Meine Ehre heißt Treue" ("My Honour Is Loyalty") and the Wehermacht belt buckle inscription "Gott Mit Uns" ("God is with us"). If you, like me, are fond of the perhaps outdated notion that words mean something, as does the way they're arranged, you might consider with interest that the Poles felt their devotion to a higher calling and then to their personal honour came before the demands of their country. I think it's safe to say that the Nazis could never have embraced that notion. The Standard remained in Great Britain after the war for many, many years, until finally in 1992 it was bestowed upon the Polish Air Force in front of the tomb of Poland's Unknown Soldier. It now resides in Dęblin at the Polish Air Force College. Symbols like this, which in ordinary times people scarcely ever think about, are always of great interest to me. They form the background noise of our lives, and say something subtle about where we come from, who we are, what we can bear -- and what we can do. The Nazis certainly believed so, and whether there was any malignant power in those spiderlike hooked crosses or not, they compelled men and women to do things beneath and for their banners. Wilhelm Brasse, an inmate at Auschwitz forced to take photographs of new arrivals, remembers the case of Czesława Kwoka: "She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn't understand why she was there and she couldn't understand what was being said to her. "So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. "Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn't interfere. It would have been fatal for me. You could never say anything." Czesława Kwoka died in Auschwitz aged fourteen on 12 March 1943, forty years and three days before I was born. She is one of over five million Polish noncombatants killed by the Germans through 1945 after the Polish surrender on 6 October 1939. Not every Pole was a helpless victim, however. Many fought the German occupation at home and many paid the ultimate price. I'm certainly a bit of a hard-liner on many aspects of the war, but my personal feeling is that when you send in convicts lead by a convicted child rapist to bayonet infants, an act so evil as to be almost cartoonish because otherwise we would have to accept the enormity of it, you have tacitly accepted that anything can and must be done to stop you. We're going to be building two of the Poles who, having escaped their despoiled homeland, resolved to avenge it: Stanisław Skalski (18 11/12 victories), and Aleksander "Gabby" Gabszewicz (9 1/2 victories), both of them using Eduard Spitfire kits. A K "Gabby" Gabszewicz was an old man during WWII for a fighter pilot -- he was born in 1911 -- and bears the rare distinction of shooting down German aircraft while flying under three different sets of national markings: He shared a Heinkel 111 on 1 September 1939 while with IV/1 Dywizjon Brygady Poscigowej, a Do 215 while flying a Bloch 151 on 24 May 1940; thereafter, all of his victories were scored in British machines (three of them in April 1942 against Fw 190s while flying the Spitfire Vb -- he must have been a formidable pilot). After the war, he remained in the United Kingdom and died in 1983 in Malvern, His grave is in Newark, but in 1992, his ashes were taken to Poland and scattered over the airfields at Deblin and Warsaw. "I have fought a good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith." Skalski is a rather different character. He was born in 1915 and in 1939 was serving with 142 Eskadrze Myśliwskiej III/4 Dywizjonu Myśliwskiego w Toruniu, where he became, according to some sources (including himself) the first Allied ace of the war, with six victories by 16 September 1939, on which date he fled Poland. (He's officially credited with 4.5 victories during this time.) In the Battle of Britain, he served with 501 Squadron, claiming three 109s and an He 111 before being shot down and badly injured on 5 September 1940. In 1942, he famously was asked to lead the crack Polish Fighting Team, a hand-picked group of Polish pilots attached to 145 Squadron in March of 1943. By the end of the month, they had been issued brand-new Spitfire IXs, and by the time the Germans in North Africa surrendered in May, they had shot down 25 enemy aircraft for a single loss. By the end of the war, Skalski was Poland's highest-scoring ace, and he had every right to expect a hero's welcome when he returned home. Instead, in 1948 he was hauled out of the Polish Air Force, thrown in prison, tortured, and sentenced to death (subsequently commuted to life in prison), and only finally released in 1956. He remained in Poland and rejoined the air force, retiring in 1967 or 1972, depending on which obituary you want to believe, and died in 2004. Unfortunately, there is a discreditable episode later on in his life -- when Solidarnosc was growing in strength in the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland trotted out a weak sub-rosa attempt at a countervailing force, the Grunwald Patriotic Union, an overtly anti-Semitic pro-government "patriotic association". Skalski's association with it can most charitably be ascribed to the fact that Grunwald blamed the "excesses" of the security services (which he himself had endured) to the allegedly disproportionate number of Jews in the secret police. Regardless of why he chose to associate himself with them and their stupid nonsense, it only served to diminish his wartime greatness during the twilight years of his life, and more's the pity. I'm building Gabszewicz's Spitfire NH214/SZ-G "City of Warsaw", which he flew in 1943. I'll be using a Techmod sheet, but Techmod blows, so I will be stealing as many decals as I can from Eduard's markings for EN526/SZ-G. The colour profile in no way does Gabszewicz's personal emblem (seen here on a Spitfire XVI at the end of the war) justice: Eduard has markings in the Quatro combo (I misunderstood -- badly -- and bought four boxes worth) for an earlier SZ-G, but I wanted to do one with the bigger intake. I'll also be doing Skalski's famous EN315/ZX-6: NB the profile is wrong and the aircraft has the small intake. I really wanted to test out my new Colourcoats Azure blue, as I've never used enamels before. So, ready? Right! Good!