The Air War: The Pursuit Brigade, the Bomber Brigade and the Kościuszko Squadron

On the morning of 1 September 1939 the Luftwaffe set out to destroy the Polish Air Force on its airfields, and German communiqués soon announced that it had done so. It had not. In the last days of August the Polish fighter and bomber squadrons had slipped away to meadows and farm fields that the Germans did not know about, and for more than two weeks some four hundred mostly obsolescent aircraft fought an air force several times their size. This chapter tells the story of that fight: the Pursuit Brigade over Warsaw, the Bomber Brigade against the panzer columns, and the 111th “Kościuszko” Escadrille, a squadron founded by American volunteers in 1919 whose badge would reappear over London a year later.

Why it mattered

September 1939 was the first air campaign of the Second World War, and the first time the Luftwaffe that would later fight over France, Britain and Russia went to war in full strength. It was not a fair fight and was never expected to be one. Poland went to war with about 400 combat aircraft in its front-line units, most of them designed in the early 1930s, against a German force several times larger and a generation newer. The Polish fighters were slower than some of the German bombers they were sent to catch.

What the Polish airmen did with those aircraft is one of the better-documented stories of the campaign, and also one of the most distorted. German propaganda claimed within days that the Polish air force had been wiped out on its airfields in the first hours of the war, and that claim passed into many Western histories. The record shows something different: an air force that had dispersed before the first bomb fell, fought for more than two weeks, inflicted real losses on the Luftwaffe and then, when the Soviet invasion of 17 September ended any hope of continuing, flew its surviving aircraft across the border so that its men could fight again.

Those men mattered far beyond Poland. Several thousand Polish airmen reached France and then Britain, and in the summer of 1940 two Polish fighter squadrons and dozens of Polish pilots in RAF squadrons fought in the Battle of Britain. The most famous of them, No. 303 Squadron, carried the badge of an escadrille that had defended Warsaw in September 1939 and that had been founded, twenty years earlier, by a handful of American volunteers who had come to Poland to repay a debt to Tadeusz Kościuszko. That story begins in this chapter and ends in Chapter 9.

An air force built for 1934

Polish military aviation in 1939 was not an independent air force in the British or German sense. The Lotnictwo Wojskowe, “Military Aviation,” was a branch of the army, and its organization reflected that. In peacetime its squadrons were grouped in six air regiments based at Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Toruń, Lida and Lwów (Lviv). On mobilization the regiments were broken up. Most of their escadrilles, the basic flying units of about ten aircraft, were assigned to the field armies as army aviation, and the rest were concentrated in two brigades under the direct command of the commander in chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły: the Pursuit Brigade (Brygada Pościgowa) to defend Warsaw and the Bomber Brigade (Brygada Bombowa) to strike at the enemy’s advance (Cynk; Zaloga).

The fighter force was built around one design. The PZL P.11, a gull-winged, all-metal monoplane designed by Zygmunt Puławski at the state aircraft works, Państwowe Zakłady Lotnicze (PZL), in Warsaw, had been one of the best fighters in the world when the P.11c version entered service in 1934. The 111th Escadrille in Warsaw was the first unit to receive it. By 1939 it was outclassed. It had a fixed undercarriage, an open cockpit and a top speed of about 375–390 km/h at altitude, and most P.11c fighters carried only two rifle-caliber machine guns; some had four. The older PZL P.7a, with a Jupiter engine of less than 500 hp, was slower still. On 1 September the front-line units had 109 P.11c, 20 P.11a and 30 P.7a fighters, about 159 in all, with 43 more P.11c in reserve or under repair (Cynk, Polish Aircraft 1893–1939, as summarized by Wikipedia, “PZL P.11”).

There was an irony in this. PZL had developed a more powerful successor, the P.24, with a cannon-armed version, and sold it abroad to Turkey, Romania, Greece and Bulgaria to earn foreign currency. Some of the best Polish-designed fighters of 1939 were serving in other countries’ air forces while Polish pilots flew the P.11c. The bomber force was more modern. The PZL.37 Łoś (“Elk”), designed by Jerzy Dąbrowski and first flown on 13 December 1936, was a fast, clean twin-engine monoplane that could carry more than two and a half tons of bombs, a remarkable load for its size (IPN, via dlapilota.pl, 13 December 2024). But only 36 were in combat units on 1 September. The workhorse was the single-engine PZL.23 Karaś (“Crucian carp”), a three-seat light bomber and reconnaissance aircraft of 1936 vintage, of which 114 were in the front line (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.23 Karaś”).

Counting the aircraft is less straightforward than it sounds. The Polish Air Force Memorial Committee, following Cynk’s official history, gives 392 combat aircraft in front-line units: 158 fighters, 114 light bombers, 36 bombers and 83 reconnaissance aircraft. E. R. Hooton gives 397, and Chief of Staff Wacław Stachiewicz, in his memoirs, counted 421 aircraft in combat formations out of 771 on hand, the rest being in schools, reserve or repair (Polish Air Force Memorial Committee; Hooton; Stachiewicz, as cited by Wikipedia, “History of the Polish Air Force”). The differences come from what is counted as “combat” and “front-line,” and whether observation aircraft and reserves are included. All the serious figures cluster around 400.

The fighters that never came

Polish commanders knew that their fighters were aging. The intended replacement was the PZL.50 Jastrząb (“Hawk”), a low-wing monoplane with retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit designed by Wsiewołod Jakimiuk from late 1936. It ran into trouble almost at once. The Bristol Mercury VIII engine chosen for it did not deliver its full power at first, the retractable landing gear ordered from Dowty in Britain arrived late, and the more powerful engines planned for later versions were themselves delayed. The first prototype did not fly until February 1939, and after modifications it reached about 442 km/h, still too slow to satisfy the test pilots. A planned order of 300 was cut back in April 1939 to about 200, and none were ever delivered. The first prototype was flown east on 6 September and crash-landed near Rawa Ruska after running out of fuel; the incomplete airframes in Warsaw fell to the Germans (Cynk; Glass, as summarized by Wikipedia, “PZL.50 Jastrząb”).

As a stopgap, PZL fitted a P.11c with an 840 hp Mercury VIII, an enclosed cockpit and four improved machine guns as the P.11g Kobuz. Its prototype first flew on 15 August 1939, two weeks before the war, and an order for 100 came too late to matter (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL P.11”). The air force also looked abroad. In the spring and summer of 1939, with British and French credits after the Anglo-Polish guarantee, Poland ordered 160 Morane-Saulnier MS.406 fighters from France and a batch of Hawker Hurricanes and 100 Fairey Battle light bombers from Britain (Cynk; Wikipedia, “PZL.50 Jastrząb,” “Fairey Battle,” “History of the Polish Air Force”). None of them reached Polish squadrons. The first 22 Battles were shipped in early September for the Romanian port of Constanța, where Polish crews were to receive them; the ships were recalled at Istanbul when Poland’s defeat became certain, and the aircraft were offered to Turkey. The Hurricanes went to Turkey as well (Wikipedia, “Fairey Battle,” “List of Hawker Hurricane operators”).

The undelivered orders had a direct effect on the campaign’s last days. When the Polish high command ordered its airmen to Romania after 17 September, one reason given was that new aircraft from France were expected to arrive there to re-equip them. The convoy came too late, and the airmen were interned instead (IPN, Nie tylko Dywizjon 303). Whether such deliveries could have changed the outcome in September is doubtful. A few dozen modern fighters arriving in mid-September, without spare parts, trained crews or intact airfields, would at most have prolonged the air war by days. But the orders show that Poland’s planners understood the problem and ran out of time to solve it. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance puts the scale of the mismatch starkly: Poland’s air budget in 1939 was roughly 1/150th of Germany’s (IPN, Nie tylko Dywizjon 303).

The Luftwaffe in the east

Against Poland the Luftwaffe committed two of its four air fleets. Luftflotte 1, under Gen. Albert Kesselring, headquartered near Berlin, supported Army Group North and the attacks from Pomerania and East Prussia; it included the 1st Air Division and the Luftwaffe’s instructional division (Lehrdivision), whose Lehrgeschwader 1 flew Bf 110 heavy fighters and bombers over Warsaw. Luftflotte 4, under Gen. Alexander Löhr, an Austrian who had commanded the Austrian air force before the Anschluss, supported Army Group South from Silesia and Slovakia. Within it, Maj. Gen. Wolfram von Richthofen’s close-support command, with most of the Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, worked directly with the Tenth Army’s panzer and motorized divisions on the main axis toward Warsaw (Hooton; Zaloga). Germany also had about 4,000 aircraft in all, so it could afford to keep strong fighter forces in the west against Britain and France.

How many German aircraft fought in Poland depends, again, on what is counted. Hooton’s figures, as summarized in the Wikipedia article on Luftwaffe operations, give 807 aircraft in Luftflotte 1 and 627 in Luftflotte 4, a total of 1,434, plus 92 naval seaplanes, 30 aircraft of the Slovak air force and 333 reconnaissance aircraft attached to the army (Hooton, via Wikipedia, “Operational history of the Luftwaffe”). Adding those categories gives about 1,890. The Polish Air Force Memorial Committee gives 1,941, and the broadest count, of every aircraft assigned to the operation including transports, reaches 2,315 (Wikipedia, “Invasion of Poland”). A Polish Aviation Museum article of 2026 speaks of “more than 3,000” German aircraft, a figure that appears to include the whole Luftwaffe’s reserves rather than the force in action. A fair summary is about 1,400–1,500 combat aircraft in the two air fleets and 1,900–2,000 including army reconnaissance, naval and allied aircraft: four to five times the Polish front-line strength.

The quality gap was as large as the numerical one. The Messerschmitt Bf 109E was some 150 km/h faster than the P.11c, and the twin-engine Bf 110 heavy fighter, making its combat debut, had cannon and long range. The Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17 medium bombers were nearly as fast as the Polish fighters at the altitudes where they usually flew, so the P.11 pilots often had a single chance at an interception: a diving attack from above, after which the bombers could simply outrun them. The Junkers Ju 87 Stuka was slow and vulnerable to fighters, but it was devastatingly accurate against bridges, rail junctions and troops in the open. The Luftwaffe also had the advantage of a war plan written for it. Its first task was to destroy the Polish Air Force; its second was to support the army; and an all-out raid on Warsaw, code-named Operation Wasserkante, was planned for the first day of the war but postponed because of bad weather over the target (Hooton).

Into the meadows: the secret field airfields

The Polish command expected the Luftwaffe’s opening move. Its planners assumed that the main air bases at Warsaw-Okęcie, Kraków-Rakowice, Poznań-Ławica, Toruń, Lida, Lwów and the air force school at Dęblin would be hit in the first hours of war. The answer was dispersal. In the last days of August the combat escadrilles left their peacetime bases for prepared field airfields, usually stretches of meadow or pasture near a village, with fuel and ammunition stocks, a few tents and a telephone line, and with the aircraft hidden under trees or camouflage nets at the edges of the field (Cynk; Zaloga).

For the Pursuit Brigade, Polish accounts date the move to the period from 27 August, when its P.11c and P.7a fighters began flying out to field airfields at Zielonka, northeast of Warsaw, where the brigade staff set up, and Poniatów, north of the city near Jabłonna (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak; Polish Wikipedia, “Brygada Pościgowa,” citing Pawlak and Zawilski). III/1 Fighter Squadron went to Zielonka and IV/1 to Poniatów, and the brigade fought from those fields from 1 to 3 September. The Bomber Brigade’s bombers likewise moved to improvised rural airfields, which protected them from the attacks on the main bases but limited what they could carry: from the soft, short fields a Łoś could usually take off with only about 800 kg of bombs, typically eight 100 kg bombs, less than a third of its maximum load (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.37 Łoś”).

What remained at the permanent bases were mostly training aircraft, aircraft under repair and reserve machines that could not yet be issued. On 1 September and in the following days the Luftwaffe bombed them all. Okęcie, Warsaw’s airport and the site of the PZL factories, was bombed on the first morning and repeatedly afterward; Rakowice in Kraków, Ławica in Poznań, Toruń and Bydgoszcz were hit before noon on 1 September; and the bomber base at Małaszewicze, near Brześć (Brest), where the bomber training group and reserve Łoś bombers were based, was caught unprepared and lost seven Łoś bombers in the first raid, with 12 soldiers killed and 35 wounded (dlapilota.pl, “Zagłada baz lotniczych,” after Pawlak and Cynk). Over the campaign, the Łoś force alone lost 18 unfinished, training or reserve aircraft bombed at Małaszewicze and at the Okęcie factory (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.37 Łoś”). Those wrecks were what German reconnaissance photographs showed.

First blood over Kraków

The first air combat of the war, by most reckonings, took place over the countryside northwest of Kraków a little before 7:00 on 1 September. The Kraków Army’s fighter group, III/2 Fighter Squadron, was dispersed to a field airfield at Balice, west of the city. Its commander, Capt. Mieczysław Medwecki, took off shortly before 7:00 in a PZL P.11c, leading a flight of the 121st Escadrille to patrol the Chrzanów–Wadowice area. Just after take-off the Polish fighters were caught by Ju 87 dive-bombers of I./StG 2 “Immelmann,” returning from a raid on Kraków-Rakowice. A Stuka flown by Lt. Frank Neubert shot down Medwecki, who crashed in the fields near Morawica. He is generally regarded as the first Polish airman, and the first Allied airman, killed in the Second World War, and Neubert’s shot as probably the first aerial victory of the war (Polish Aviation Museum, Kraków, via dlapilota.pl, 19 November 2018; Cynk).

Medwecki’s wingman, 2nd Lt. Władysław Gnyś, escaped with a hard left turn. Minutes later, flying low toward Olkusz, he came on two Dornier Do 17E bombers of KG 77 returning from a raid on Kraków, attacked them and hit both. He lost sight of them and landed without knowing what had happened. Both bombers crashed at the village of Żurada, south of Olkusz. One of them was coded 3Z+FR, and all six crewmen of the two aircraft were killed (Cynk, Polskie lotnictwo myśliwskie w boju wrześniowym, 2000, pp. 157–159, as summarized by Wikipedia, “Władysław Gnyś”). These are generally counted as the first Allied air victories of the Second World War.

The details have been argued over for decades, and the argument is a good example of how difficult air-combat claims are to verify. In September 1939 the Polish authorities misidentified the bombers as He 111s and credited Gnyś with one and an unknown pilot with the other. The German researcher Marius Emmerling, using German records, concluded that the two Do 17s of 7./KG 77 went down because one, damaged by Polish anti-aircraft fire, collided with the other during evasive maneuvers. Cynk, using Gnyś’s wartime report and the testimony of witnesses at Żurada, concluded that Gnyś was responsible for both. Gnyś’s later memoir also claimed that he had shot at or down one of the Stukas after Medwecki’s death, but Cynk found no evidence for that and noted that the Stuka unit recorded no loss (Wikipedia, “Władysław Gnyś,” citing Cynk and Emmerling, Lotnictwo Wojskowe 5/2002). Kraków’s Polish Aviation Museum, while honoring Gnyś as the first pilot to shoot down German aircraft over Poland, notes Emmerling’s view and the possibility that Gnyś damaged one bomber, which then collided with the other.

The Pursuit Brigade over Warsaw

The Pursuit Brigade was formed in May 1939 from the fighter units of the 1st Air Regiment in Warsaw. Its mission was to intercept enemy bombers before they reached the capital, operating beyond the zone covered by Warsaw’s anti-aircraft artillery, so that the guns and the fighters would not get in each other’s way (Polish Wikipedia, “Brygada Pościgowa,” citing Pawlak). It had two fighter squadrons (dywizjony). III/1, under Capt. Zdzisław Krasnodębski, comprised the 111th and 112th Escadrilles; IV/1, under Capt. Adam Kowalczyk, the 113th and 114th, to which the 123rd Escadrille, with P.7a fighters from the 2nd Air Regiment at Kraków, was added on 31 August. In all the brigade had 54 fighters, a mixture of P.11c, P.11a and P.7a, plus three RWD-8 liaison aircraft, an anti-aircraft machine-gun company and a signals company (Polish Wikipedia, “Brygada Pościgowa”; Zaloga). Its warning system was primitive: observation posts around the city telephoned sightings of enemy aircraft to the brigade’s headquarters, and the area around Warsaw was divided into sixteen surveillance sectors (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak).

The first raid on Warsaw came from East Prussia on the morning of 1 September: twin-engine bombers escorted by Bf 110s. The brigade went up in full strength and met them near Nieporęt, north of the city, at about 7:00 (Polish Wikipedia, “Brygada Pościgowa,” citing Zawilski). The interception went well for the Poles. Several bombers jettisoned their loads short of the city, and Polish accounts credit Lt. Aleksander Gabszewicz with the brigade’s first German aircraft shot down over Warsaw (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak). A second raid came around noon and a third at about 16:30. By then the German escorts had learned to engage the Polish fighters before they reached the bombers, and the brigade’s losses mounted. In one of the afternoon fights, by Polish accounts, Bf 110s caught a flight of the 123rd Escadrille’s P.7a fighters, and its commander, Capt. Mieczysław Olszewski, was killed.

At the end of the first day the brigade claimed 14 German aircraft destroyed, 5 probably destroyed and 10 damaged. It had lost 2 pilots killed, 5 missing and 8 wounded, with 10 fighters destroyed and 24 damaged and unfit to fly the next day (Polish Wikipedia, “Brygada Pościgowa,” citing Pawlak, Brygada Pościgowa – Alarm!, 1977, p. 38). Zaloga gives 16 German aircraft shot down for 10 Polish losses (Zaloga, pp. 51–52, as cited by Wikipedia, “Pursuit Brigade”). Either way, a third of the brigade’s strength had been lost or put out of action in a single day. On 2 September, with fog over Warsaw for most of the day, only about 20 of its fighters were ready for action, and the ground crews used the respite to repair what they could (Polish Wikipedia; Korzeniowski).

The fighting on 3 September brought the first large fighter-against-fighter battle of the campaign over Warsaw, as Bf 109s and Bf 110s swept over the brigade’s airfields (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak). With German fighters now hunting for its bases, the brigade moved on 4 September to new field airfields west of Warsaw: III/1 to Zaborów and IV/1 to Radzików (Polish Wikipedia). Spare parts, fuel and even food were running short, telephone lines were being cut by bombing and by the German advance, and an improvised observation post had to be set up on top of the Prudential building, Warsaw’s tallest, to watch for raids. On 6 September German bombs destroyed the telephone exchange on which the warning network depended (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak).

The arithmetic of attrition caught up with the brigade within a week. Over 1–3 September it flew about 250 sorties, and over 4–6 September only about 110 (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak). By the evening of 6 September it had been credited with 42 or 43 German aircraft in six days and had lost 38 of its 54 fighters (Zaloga, via Wikipedia, “Pursuit Brigade”). That evening it was ordered to the Lublin region, and on 7 September it left Warsaw with about 18 serviceable fighters. The German army took Okęcie airfield on 8 September (dlapilota.pl, “Zagłada baz lotniczych”). From then on Warsaw’s air defense depended on its anti-aircraft artillery, a story continued in Chapter 6.

The Kościuszko Squadron: from Lwów to Warsaw

One of the Pursuit Brigade’s escadrilles carried a badge unlike any other in the Polish air force, and a history that began in the United States. In 1919, as the new Polish state fought for its borders, an American officer named Merian C. Cooper, working for the American Relief Administration in Poland, met the Polish head of state, Józef Piłsudski, and offered to raise a squadron of American pilots (HistoryNet; IPN, Przystanek Historia). Cooper, born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1893, had been a bomber pilot with the U.S. 20th Aero Squadron and had been shot down in flames and captured during the Meuse-Argonne offensive on 26 September 1918 (HistoryNet). His first recruit was Maj. Cedric Fauntleroy, a fellow American Expeditionary Force flyer from the 94th Aero Squadron who had stayed in Europe evaluating aircraft for the Polish purchasing commission (IPN, Przystanek Historia).

The volunteers said they had come to repay the nation that had given America Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, the Polish officers who fought for American independence, and they named their group the Kościuszko Squadron (IPN, Przystanek Historia, “Scythes on planes”). The first of them set out for Poland in September 1919, met Piłsudski on 14 October, and were assigned to the 7th Air Escadrille at Lwów, a unit that had already flown nearly 200 combat sorties against the Ukrainians. Fauntleroy took command on 18 October 1919, and the escadrille formally adopted the Kościuszko name on 31 December (IPN; Wikipedia, “7th Air Escadrille”). Some 21 American pilots served with it in all, alongside Polish pilots and an entirely Polish ground crew. The Polish historian Janusz Cisek’s history of the squadron is titled, after Pershing’s famous line about Lafayette, Kosciuszko, We Are Here! (Cisek, 2002).

The squadron’s war was not a war of dogfights. When the Polish army advanced into Ukraine in April 1920, the escadrille, flying Austrian-built Albatros D.III and Italian Ansaldo Balilla fighters, found almost no enemy aircraft and turned to reconnaissance and ground attack, strafing the Red Army’s First Cavalry Army under Semyon Budyonny at low level. In the defense of Lwów in August 1920, with only five uninjured pilots left, it flew 18 ground-attack sorties a day on 16 and 17 August; in all it flew more than 400 combat sorties that year (Wikipedia, “7th Air Escadrille,” citing Cooper, Murray and Cisek). The Americans paid for it. Lt. Edmund Graves, a Harvard graduate, was killed on 22 November 1919 when his aircraft broke up during an exhibition flight over Lwów; Arthur H. Kelly was shot down and killed in July 1920; and Edwin Noble was badly wounded (IPN, Przystanek Historia; HistoryNet). Cooper himself was brought down on 13 July 1920 when a Cossack bullet hit his engine; captured, he gave a false name, was held in Moscow and finally escaped with two Polish officers on the night of 12 April 1921, crossing into Latvia on 23 April (HistoryNet). Poland awarded him and Fauntleroy the Virtuti Militari, its highest military decoration.

Cooper went on to a career in Hollywood. With Ernest B. Schoedsack he co-directed King Kong (1933), and the two men appear on screen as the pilot and gunner of the aircraft that shoot the ape off the Empire State Building (HistoryNet). In the Second World War he returned to uniform and served in China and the Pacific, including as chief of staff of the Fifth Air Force (IPN, Przystanek Historia). It is one of the stranger connections of the war: the man who made King Kong had founded the squadron whose badge Polish pilots carried over Warsaw in 1939.

The squadron’s emblem was designed by one of the Americans, Lt. Elliott Chess. It combined the red and white stripes and thirteen stars of the American flag, standing for Kościuszko’s part in the American Revolution, with the crossed scythes and the four-cornered Kraków cap (krakuska) of the peasant scythemen who fought in Kościuszko’s uprising of 1794 (IPN, Przystanek Historia, “Scythes on planes”). The pilots called it “the Scythe” and themselves “the Scythemen.” When the Americans went home after the war, Polish pilots took over, and the unit was renumbered more than once, becoming the 111th Fighter Escadrille of the 1st Air Regiment in Warsaw. Through the reorganizations of the 1920s and 1930s, when other units adopted simple geometric markings, the 111th kept the Kościuszko badge (IPN, “Scythes on planes”; Wikipedia, “7th Air Escadrille”).

In September 1939 the 111th Escadrille was part of III/1 Squadron of the Pursuit Brigade, flying from Zielonka. It had nine aircraft on 1 September, seven P.11c and two P.11a, under Capt. Gustaw Sidorowicz, with Lt. Wojciech Januszewicz as his deputy and sixteen other pilots, among them 2nd Lt. Mirosław Ferić, later one of the best-known pilots of No. 303 Squadron (Wikipedia, “111th Fighter Escadrille,” citing Pawlak, Polskie eskadry w Wojnie Obronnej 1939). On 1 September 2nd Lt. Jerzy Palusiński was credited with a Do 17 and was wounded, and in a later fight that day Sidorowicz was credited with a German fighter before he was shot down and wounded, leaving Januszewicz in command. On 3 September Januszewicz and Cpl. Stanisław Karubin were credited with two Bf 110s over Wyszków; claims followed on 4, 5 and 6 September against Ju 87s and Bf 110s. After the move east on 7 September, Ferić was credited with a Henschel Hs 126 reconnaissance aircraft on 9 September and Lt. Wróblewski with an He 111 on 11 September, the escadrille’s last confirmed victory. In all it was credited with 8 German aircraft (7½ in some counts) and lost 9 P.11c fighters. It crossed into Romania after 17 September with its four remaining aircraft (Wikipedia, “111th Fighter Escadrille,” citing Pawlak).

The Bomber Brigade against the panzers

The Bomber Brigade, commanded by Col. Władysław Heller, an observer officer, was formed just before the war and had not reached full readiness when it began. It had four squadrons of two escadrilles each. Two were equipped with the PZL.37 Łoś: X Squadron (211th and 212th Escadrilles) and XV Squadron (216th and 217th), with 36 bombers between them. Two flew the PZL.23 Karaś: II Squadron (21st and 22nd) and VI Squadron (64th and 65th), with 50 light bombers. The 55th Independent Bomber Escadrille, also with Karaś bombers, is listed with it in some reports, and the brigade had 21 support aircraft (Belcarz and Peczkowski, White Eagles, pp. 159–160, as summarized by Wikipedia, “Bomber Brigade”).

The brigade had been intended to strike at the German army’s rear, its railheads and supply columns, in a war that developed more slowly than this one. Instead it was thrown almost at once against the German armored spearheads breaking through in the southwest. The Karaś squadrons went into action first, on 2 September. Polish accounts credit a single Karaś of the 21st Escadrille with bombing a factory at Ohlau (Oława), near Breslau, that day, the first air attack of the war on a target inside Germany itself (Cynk, as summarized by Wikipedia, “PZL.23 Karaś”). The main effort, though, went against the German columns. The Karaś crews attacked at low altitude, the only way to hit moving vehicles with their simple bomb sights, and that put them within range of every machine gun and light flak gun in the column.

The Łoś squadrons began their attacks on 4 September. On that day and the next they bombed the German XVI Army Corps, the motorized corps whose 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions were driving through the Łódź Army’s southern flank toward Piotrków and Warsaw. Their attacks hampered the corps near Częstochowa and Radomsko (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.37 Łoś”). Some Polish accounts go further and claim that the bombers knocked out up to 30 percent of the German vehicles they attacked and delayed the corps by days; figures like these are hard to check against German records and are probably too high. The brigade’s later targets included German forces near Kamieńsk, Piotrków Trybunalski, Różan on the Narew, and Jarosław and Radymno on the San (IPN, via dlapilota.pl, 2024). The Łoś had been designed to bomb from medium altitude in formation. In September it flew in sections of three or fewer, without adequate fighter escort, against fleeting targets for which it had never been intended.

The Institute of National Remembrance’s account of the Łoś in combat is sober. Its attacks, it says, were chaotic: low-level runs by small formations without escort, against area targets rather than point targets, of limited effect and at heavy cost from flak and fighters. After 10 September, flying from field airfields in Volhynia with bombs and fuel running short, the Łoś crews flew mostly reconnaissance and only a few bombing missions. In all the type flew about 135 combat sorties, 25 of them reconnaissance, and dropped about 119 tons of bombs; its gunners claimed several German fighters, possibly five (IPN, via dlapilota.pl, 13 December 2024). For a bomber that cost as much as three fighters, the IPN calls the results “relatively very modest.” Of the roughly 46 Łoś bombers that saw combat, including reinforcements, the Bomber Brigade lost 10 to fighters, 5 to anti-aircraft fire, 2 bombed on the ground and 10 to other causes (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.37 Łoś”).

The Karaś units suffered even more. About 120 PZL.23s, 86 percent of the whole inventory, were destroyed in 1939, but Cynk found that only 67 were lost to enemy action; about 20 were wrecked in crash landings on rough improvised fields, and others were bombed, abandoned or burned (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.23 Karaś”). The Luftwaffe’s largest single success against the type came on 14 September, against the Bomber Brigade’s Karaś bombers at Hutniki airfield. Polish units of the Bomber Brigade dropped about 52–60 tons of bombs from their Karaś bombers, and the army escadrilles about 12 tons (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.23 Karaś”). Seen against the scale of the German advance, the bombing campaign was a gallant gesture rather than a decisive one. The brigade’s crews knew the odds; that they kept flying low over the panzer columns day after day is what Polish memory has kept.

Eyes of the armies

More than half of Polish military aviation did not belong to either brigade. Each of the field armies had its own air component: usually a fighter squadron or escadrille, a reconnaissance escadrille of Karaś aircraft and two observation escadrilles with RWD-14 Czapla and Lublin R-XIII aircraft. The Kraków Army had III/2 Fighter Squadron and the 24th Reconnaissance Escadrille; the Pomorze Army III/4; the Poznań Army III/3; the Łódź Army III/6; and the Modlin Army and the Narew Group in the northeast each had a single fighter escadrille of III/5 Squadron (Weal et al., as summarized by Wikipedia, “Polish Air Force order of battle in 1939”). By one count the army units held 246 combat and 42 support aircraft, against 146 combat aircraft in the commander in chief’s reserve.

The army fighters fought hard and sometimes very well. On 2 September, according to Polish records, nine P.11s of the 142nd Escadrille of the Pomorze Army shot down seven Do 17 bombers over the Vistula without loss (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL P.11”). The 132nd Escadrille’s alert pair at Poznań-Ławica claimed two Bf 109s over the base on the first day, before the bombing forced the unit to a field at Dzierżnica (dlapilota.pl, “Zagłada baz lotniczych”). As the armies retreated, though, their air units retreated with them, losing fields, fuel dumps and communications with every move.

The observation squadrons had the hardest war of all. The R-XIII, with a 220 hp engine and a top speed of well under 200 km/h, and the RWD-14, at 247 km/h, were slower than every German aircraft they might meet, and they flew low over the front to find the enemy’s columns, in reach of every rifle. About 40 R-XIIIs in the combat units were destroyed, by fighters, ground fire, bombing on their fields or burning by their own crews in retreat, and 35 RWD-14s were lost (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “Lublin R-XIII,” “RWD-14 Czapla”). Their work was essential to an army whose radio communications were thin and whose commanders often had no other way to learn where the panzers had gone; the observers’ reports, flown back and dropped or telephoned, were often the only intelligence a division had.

Attrition and the long retreat east

By the end of the first week the air war had changed character. The Luftwaffe had largely shifted from seeking out the Polish Air Force to supporting the army: bombing rail junctions, bridges and roads, attacking Polish columns on the move and pounding the forces fighting on the Bzura (see Chapter 6). The Polish units, meanwhile, were being driven east by the speed of the German advance. The Pursuit Brigade moved to the Lublin region on 6–7 September, and the 111th Escadrille’s path is typical: Kierz near Lublin, then briefly Ostrożec near Łuck (Lutsk) in Volhynia, then back to the Lublin area at Strzelce and Werba (Wikipedia, “111th Fighter Escadrille”). The bombers went to fields in Volhynia.

Each move cost aircraft that could not be repaired or fuelled, and each cost the squadrons their links to the high command. By Hooton’s count, the Polish air force’s initial strength of about 400 had fallen to 54 operational aircraft by 14 September (Hooton, as cited by Wikipedia, “Invasion of Poland”). The fighters that remained flew patrols, escorted reconnaissance aircraft and carried liaison officers and messages for the scattered command. The Pursuit Brigade claimed three more German aircraft in this period and, after 17 September, one Soviet aircraft (Korzeniowski, after Pawlak). By the time of the Soviet invasion, the IPN notes, the Polish air force had only a few dozen aircraft left, most of them liaison and reconnaissance types (IPN, Nie tylko Dywizjon 303).

Timeline

The air war, 1919–1940

1. 18 Oct 1919Maj. Cedric Fauntleroy takes command of the 7th Air Escadrille at Lwów, which the American volunteers name the Kościuszko Squadron; the name is adopted formally on 31 December.
2. 13 Jul 1920Merian C. Cooper is shot down and captured; he escapes from captivity near Moscow in April 1921.
3. 1934The 111th “Kościuszko” Escadrille becomes the first unit to receive the PZL P.11c.
4. 13 Dec 1936First flight of the PZL.37 Łoś prototype.
5. Feb 1939First flight of the PZL.50 Jastrząb prototype; the fighter never enters service.
6. Spring–summer 1939Poland orders 160 Morane-Saulnier MS.406 fighters from France and Hurricanes and 100 Fairey Battles from Britain; none arrive in time.
7. May 1939The Pursuit Brigade is formed from the 1st Air Regiment’s fighter units.
8. 27–31 Aug 1939Combat squadrons disperse to secret field airfields; the 123rd Escadrille joins the Pursuit Brigade on 31 August.
9. 1 Sep 1939, before 07:00Capt. Mieczysław Medwecki is shot down near Kraków; minutes later two Do 17s attacked by 2nd Lt. Władysław Gnyś crash at Żurada.
10. 1 Sep 1939, about 07:00The Pursuit Brigade meets the first raid on Warsaw near Nieporęt; two more raids follow at about 12:00 and 16:30.
11. 2 Sep 1939The Bomber Brigade’s Karaś squadrons go into action; a Karaś bombs Ohlau (Oława) in Germany, by Polish accounts.
12. 4–5 Sep 1939Łoś bombers attack the German XVI Army Corps near Częstochowa and Radomsko.
13. 6–7 Sep 1939The Pursuit Brigade, with about 18 serviceable fighters left of 54, is withdrawn to the Lublin region.
14. 14 Sep 1939The Luftwaffe’s heaviest blow against the Bomber Brigade’s Karaś bombers, at Hutniki; Polish operational strength is down to about 54 aircraft.
15. 17–18 Sep 1939After the Soviet invasion, surviving Polish aircraft are ordered to Romania and cross the border.
16. 2 Aug 1940No. 303 (Polish) “Kościuszko” Squadron is formed at RAF Northolt.

Across the border: Romania, France and Britain

The Soviet invasion of 17 September, described in Chapter 8, ended the Polish air war. The remaining aircraft were concentrated in the southeast, the area the Red Army was now entering from the east, with the Germans approaching from the west. The order came to fly to Romania, Poland’s ally, which was neutral and bordered the last corner of Polish territory between the Dniester and the Carpathians. Part of the reason, as noted above, was the expectation that aircraft from France would be delivered there (IPN, Nie tylko Dywizjon 303). On 17 and 18 September the surviving fighters, bombers, reconnaissance and liaison aircraft flew south across the border, many of them over the frontier towns of Kuty and Zaleszczyki that the Polish government also used in its own crossing (see Chapter 8). Gnyś crossed at Kuty on 18 September (dlapilota.pl, 2022). Ground crews followed by road.

About a hundred aircraft made it; Hooton gives 98 (Hooton, as cited by Wikipedia, “Invasion of Poland”). They included 17 to 19 Łoś bombers of the Bomber Brigade and about ten more from training units, at least 21 Karaś bombers, about a dozen P.7a fighters, 14 to 17 RWD-14s and about 17 R-XIIIs, as well as the 111th Escadrille’s four surviving P.11c fighters (Cynk and IPN, as summarized by the Wikipedia articles on each type). The Romanians interned the crews and kept the aircraft. In October 1940, after Romania had moved into the German orbit, it formally took them over; the Łoś bombers and Karaś light bombers later flew against the Soviet Union in Romanian markings from 22 June 1941 (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL.37 Łoś,” “PZL.23 Karaś”).

The men did not stay. Romania’s internment camps were not closely guarded, and with help from Polish diplomats and the French and British, Polish airmen slipped out in their thousands, most of them by ship from the Black Sea ports through the Mediterranean to Marseille. Others escaped overland, and more came out through Hungary, Lithuania and Latvia. About 8,500 Polish air force personnel of all ranks and trades reached France, and by mid-1940 more than 9,000 had reached the West, over 80 percent of the prewar air force’s personnel (Polish Air Force Memorial Committee; IPN, Nie tylko Dywizjon 303). In France they flew in a Polish fighter squadron, GC I/145, in small flights defending factories and with French squadrons: more than 130 Polish fighter pilots in all, credited with 52 German aircraft in May and June 1940 (IPN). After France fell, about 6,000 Polish airmen reached Britain (Polish Air Force Memorial Committee).

In Britain the Kościuszko tradition came back to life. No. 303 (Polish) Fighter Squadron was formed at RAF Northolt on 2 August 1940 and named for Kościuszko, and its Hurricanes carried the scythe-and-stars badge of the 111th Escadrille and the American volunteers of 1919. Many of its pilots had flown with the Pursuit Brigade over Warsaw, among them Krasnodębski, its first Polish commander, and Ferić (IPN, Nie tylko Dywizjon 303). In the Battle of Britain it became the RAF’s highest-scoring fighter squadron, with 126 confirmed victories in six weeks (Polish Air Force Memorial Committee). That story, and the memory of the Polish airmen after the war, is told in Chapter 9.

Losses and uncertainty

Few figures in the history of the campaign are as contested as the air losses, partly because the two sides counted in different ways and partly because both had reasons to round in their own favor.

German losses. The most authoritative figure comes from the Luftwaffe itself. A report of the Quartermaster General dated 28 September 1939 lists 285 aircraft lost to all causes in the Polish campaign, and a further 279 damaged by 10 percent or more, which were either written off or needed major repair. Aircrew losses were 189 dead, 126 wounded and 224 missing (Hooton and the quartermaster records, as summarized by Wikipedia, “Operational history of the Luftwaffe”). Other published totals are lower, such as the 246 aircraft in the summary of the Wikipedia article on the invasion, apparently because they count only aircraft lost in combat. The quartermaster’s figure includes accidents, which were numerous in a campaign fought from forward airfields, and losses to Polish ground fire, which accounted for many German aircraft. Some damaged German aircraft that came down in Polish territory were recovered after the campaign and returned to service, which also lowered later German counts.

Polish claims. Polish fighter pilots were officially credited with 126 German aircraft destroyed in 1939 (Polish Air Force Memorial Committee; IPN). Another tally, from Weal and colleagues, gives 134 victories by type of fighter: 125 by P.11 variants, 7 by P.7a and 2 by the single P.11g prototype pressed into service (as summarized by Wikipedia, “Polish Air Force order of battle in 1939”). Higher figures of “about 170” or “over 170” German aircraft shot down, still common in Polish popular writing, probably include anti-aircraft claims, probables and duplicated claims (Polish Aviation Museum, via dlapilota.pl, 2026). As with every air force, individual claims cannot always be matched to specific German losses, as the Gnyś case shows.

Polish losses. The Polish Air Force Memorial Committee gives 333 Polish aircraft lost; another common figure is 327 (Wikipedia, “Invasion of Poland,” infobox). Totals depend on whether training, liaison and reserve aircraft destroyed on the ground at the main bases are counted, and whether aircraft flown to Romania are counted as lost. The type figures show how much of the loss was not caused by enemy aircraft at all: of about 120 Karaś bombers destroyed, only 67 were lost to enemy action (Cynk). Cynk’s figures for fighters suggest that the P.11 force lost about 100 aircraft while claiming at least 110 victories (Cynk, via Wikipedia, “PZL P.11”). The air force’s losses in trained men were proportionally much smaller than its losses in aircraft, which is why so many of its pilots were available to fight again in 1940.

By the numbers

Strength and losses in the air, September 1939

Aircraft, by the most commonly cited figures (ranges in the text)

German aircraft in Luftflotten 1 and 41,434

Polish combat aircraft in front-line units392

Polish aircraft lost333

German aircraft lost, all causes285

German aircraft damaged 10% or more279

Victories credited to Polish fighter pilots126

Polish aircraft flown to Romania98

In their words

The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population … has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.

Roosevelt’s appeal went out on the first day of the war, and the governments’ replies pledged to limit air operations to military objectives. Within days the Polish president telegraphed Washington that German aircraft were bombing towns and villages with no military targets and killing thousands of civilians. Roosevelt answered that he was “deeply shocked” by the Polish statements and by the reports of American officials on the scene, and urged the belligerents to renew their orders against bombing civilians from the air (FRUS 1939, vol. I, doc. 590). The bombing of Wieluń, told in Chapter 3, and of Warsaw, told in Chapter 6, are the best-known examples. The Polish fighter pilots who rose over Warsaw on 1 September were the only force able to oppose those raids in the air, and they could do so for less than a week.

Questions readers ask

Was the Polish Air Force really destroyed on the ground on the first day?

No. The combat squadrons had moved to secret field airfields before 1 September, and the German raids on the main bases destroyed mostly training, reserve and unserviceable aircraft. Polish fighters and bombers fought until 17 September, and Polish fighter pilots were credited with 126 German aircraft. The story began as German wartime propaganda.

Who scored the first Allied air victory of the war?

Second Lt. Władysław Gnyś of the 121st Escadrille is generally credited with it. On the morning of 1 September 1939 he attacked two Do 17 bombers near Olkusz, which both crashed at Żurada. The German researcher Marius Emmerling has argued that the two bombers collided after one was hit by anti-aircraft fire; the Polish historian Jerzy Cynk concluded that Gnyś brought both down. The first aircraft shot down in the war was Polish: Capt. Mieczysław Medwecki’s P.11c, a few minutes earlier.

What is the American connection to the Kościuszko Squadron?

The squadron was named by American volunteer pilots, led by Merian C. Cooper and Cedric Fauntleroy, who joined the Polish 7th Air Escadrille at Lwów in 1919 to fight in the Polish-Soviet War. One of them, Elliott Chess, designed its badge with the stars and stripes of the American flag. The badge passed to the 111th Escadrille, which fought over Warsaw in 1939, and then to No. 303 Squadron in the Battle of Britain. Cooper later co-directed King Kong.

What happened to the Polish aircraft that escaped to Romania?

About a hundred aircraft crossed the border on 17–18 September. Romania interned the crews and kept the aircraft, formally taking them over in October 1940. Some of the PZL.37 Łoś and PZL.23 Karaś bombers later flew with the Romanian air force against the Soviet Union in 1941. Most of the airmen escaped from internment and reached France and then Britain.

How it connects

The diplomacy that left Poland facing Germany with an air force of 400 aircraft, and the British and French guarantees that brought the credits for the aircraft that never came, are told in Chapter 1. The Luftwaffe’s first bombs on the Polish frontier towns, above all Wieluń, belong to the frontier battles of Chapter 3, and the German armored drive the Bomber Brigade tried to slow continues in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, where the Luftwaffe’s role at the Bzura and over Warsaw is described. The naval air squadron at Puck belongs to the coastal war of Chapter 7. The Soviet invasion that ended the air war and sent the airmen into Romania is the subject of Chapter 8, and their road to France and Britain, with No. 303 Squadron and the memory of the Polish airmen, closes the collection in Chapter 9.

Seeing it today

The best place to see the aircraft of 1939 is the Polish Aviation Museum (Muzeum Lotnictwa Polskiego) in Kraków, on the old Rakowice-Czyżyny airfield that the Stukas bombed on the morning of 1 September. It holds the only surviving PZL P.11c, displayed in its main hangar, and on its Wall of Memory a plaque unveiled on 17 November 2018 honors Medwecki and Gnyś, the first Polish airman killed and the first Polish pilot to shoot down German aircraft in the war (dlapilota.pl, 2018 and 2026). No PZL.37 Łoś is known to survive.

Near Kraków, the villages of Morawica, where Medwecki’s fighter came down, and Żurada, where the two Dorniers crashed, have schools named after the two pilots. At Gnyś’s birthplace, Sarnów in the gmina of Gniewoszów, a memorial plaque was unveiled on 15 May 2022 (dlapilota.pl, 2022). In Warsaw, the field airfields at Zielonka and Poniatów have long since returned to farmland and suburbs. In Britain, the Polish War Memorial at Northolt, beside the airfield from which No. 303 Squadron flew, lists the Polish airmen who died in the war; and at the Grainville-Langannerie Polish War Cemetery in Normandy lies Stefan Pawlikowski, the colonel who led the Pursuit Brigade over Warsaw.

Sources

• Jerzy B. Cynk, The Polish Air Force at War: The Official History, vol. 1, 1939–1943 (Schiffer, 1998); Polish Aircraft 1893–1939 (Putnam, 1971); Polskie lotnictwo myśliwskie w boju wrześniowym (2000). Figures attributed to Cynk in this chapter are taken from these works as summarized in the Wikipedia articles cited below unless otherwise noted.
• E. R. Hooton, Luftwaffe at War, vols. 1–2 (Chevron / Ian Allan, 2007), and Phoenix Triumphant (Arms and Armour, 1994); German strength and loss figures as summarized by Wikipedia.
• Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002), pp. 34, 51–52.
• Jerzy Pawlak, Brygada Pościgowa – Alarm! (MON, 1977) and Polskie eskadry w Wojnie Obronnej 1939 (WKiŁ, 1982), as cited by Polish and English Wikipedia; Apoloniusz Zawilski, Bitwy polskiego września (Znak, 2011), pp. 23–25, as cited by Polish Wikipedia, “Brygada Pościgowa”.
• Bartłomiej Belcarz and Robert Pęczkowski, White Eagles: The Aircraft, Men and Operations of the Polish Air Force 1918–1939 (Hikoki, 2001), pp. 159–160.
• Marius Emmerling, “Pierwszy zestrzał w kampanii wrześniowej 1939 r.,” Lotnictwo Wojskowe 5/2002; Władysław Gnyś, First Kill: A Fighter Pilot’s Autobiography (1981).
• Michael Alfred Peszke, article on Polish preparations for war in Military Affairs, as cited by Wikipedia, “Invasion of Poland.”
• Institute of National Remembrance (IPN): Mariusz Niestrawski, “The path of American volunteers to serve in the Polish Army” (Przystanek Historia, 18 April 2023); “Scythes on planes” (Przystanek Historia); Nie tylko Dywizjon 303 (educational publication, in Polish); “Stefan Pawlikowski” (100 bohaterów na 100-lecie); IPN article on the PZL.37 Łoś, republished by dlapilota.pl, 13 December 2024.
• Polish Aviation Museum, Kraków (Muzeum Lotnictwa Polskiego), via dlapilota.pl: plaque to Medwecki and Gnyś (19 November 2018); “Płk pil. Władysław Gnyś – bohater z Sarnowa” (2022); anniversary article (1 September 2026); “Zagłada baz lotniczych, część 1” (2016, after Pawlak and Cynk).
• Polish Air Force Memorial Committee, “Key facts”.
• U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1939, vol. I, doc. 564 (Roosevelt’s appeal against aerial bombardment, 1 September 1939) and doc. 590 (Roosevelt to the President of Poland).
• HistoryNet, article on Merian C. Cooper as a fighter pilot; Janusz Cisek, Kosciuszko, We Are Here! American Pilots of the Kościuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919–1921 (McFarland, 2002); Merian C. Cooper, Faunt-le-Roy i jego eskadra w Polsce (Chicago, 1922); Kenneth Malcolm Murray, Wings Over Poland (Appleton, 1932).
• Aircrew Remembered, “Pawlikowski, Stefan”; No. 315 Squadron 1943 chronicle (oocities.org/ratuszynski); Piotr Korzeniowski, “Bitwy Września: Brygada Pościgowa w akcji” (3 September 2018, after Pawlak).
• Wikipedia: “Pursuit Brigade”, “Bomber Brigade”, “111th Fighter Escadrille”, “7th Air Escadrille”, “Władysław Gnyś”, “PZL P.11”, “PZL P.7”, “PZL.37 Łoś”, “PZL.23 Karaś”, “PZL.50 Jastrząb”, “RWD-14 Czapla”, “Lublin R-XIII”, “Fairey Battle”, “Polish Air Force order of battle in 1939”, “History of the Polish Air Force”, “Operational history of the Luftwaffe (1939–1945)” and “Invasion of Poland.”
• Further reading: Roger Moorhouse, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Books, 2020); Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2012); Robert Forczyk, Case White: The Invasion of Poland 1939 (Osprey, 2019); Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, A Question of Honor: The Kościuszko Squadron (Knopf, 2003); Adam Zamoyski, The Forgotten Few: The Polish Air Force in World War II (1995).

Photographs: Polish press and archive photographs of 1936–1939 from the Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny and the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, public domain; Julien Bryan’s Warsaw photograph, public domain; German propaganda photographs from the Bundesarchiv (Heinrich Hoffmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) and the Nationaal Archief (CC0); modern photograph by Jakub Maciejewski (CC BY-SA 3.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. Insignia, badges and aircraft drawings marked “Illustration” are original reconstructions in the period style, not official emblems.