Fighter!: The Story of Air Combat by Robert Jackson

Author:Robert Jackson [Jackson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

Fighters over the Desert

For the crew of the lone Junkers 88 reconnaissance aircraft, it seemed hard to believe that far below, among the scrub and sandy hills of Tunisia, men were fighting and dying; hard to believe that Erwin Rommel’s once-proud Afrika Korps, which had swept across Libya and into Egypt in triumph just a year earlier, was being crushed like a nut between General Montgomery’s Eighth Army, on the advance continually since the victory of El Alamein, and the Anglo-American forces which had landed in North Africa in November 1942.

Now, four months later, the end was in sight for German aspirations in North Africa. While RAF torpedo-bomber squadrons on Malta — the gallant George Cross island, which the might of Axis air power had tried so hard to break — hammered the Afrika Korps’ supply lines, British and American fighter squadrons roved the skies over Tripoli and Tunisia, hounding the remnants of the Luftwaffe to destruction.

The Junkers 88’s crew probably never saw the lone Spitfire that came swooping like a hawk out of the white Mediterranean sun. Cannon shells raked the Junkers from wingtip to wingtip and it fell burning, trailing sheets of fuel from ruptured tanks, to explode among the foothills of Kasserine.

Jubilantly, Squadron Leader Stanislaw Skalski circled the spot and then turned for home. It was a far cry from those desperate September days of 1939, when the smoke of Warsaw’s burning had filled the cockpit of his little P-11 fighter...

Skalski had enjoyed a hectic career since his arrival in the United Kingdom in January 1940. As a member of No. 501 Squadron, RAF, he had fought his way through the Battle of Britain, destroying four enemy aircraft and damaging two more before being shot down and wounded on 5 September 1940. In the summer of 1941, flying with No. 306 (Polish) Squadron, he destroyed four Messerschmitt 109s before becoming an instructor for six months. He claimed two Focke-Wulf 190s and damaged a Bf 109 in the spring of 1942, and was then appointed to command No. 317 Squadron. He arrived in North Africa early the following year, leading a unit of experienced pilots known as the Polish Fighting Team — or, more popularly, as 4 Skalski’s Circus’. Flying Spitfire Mk. 9s — the first unit to do so in North Africa — the Poles were attached to No. 145 Squadron, RAF, and in eight weeks of operations their exploits became legendary. During that two-month period, they shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Polish fighter unit in 1943, and the pilots achieved such reputations that they were subsequently offered posts as commanding officers of other RAF fighter squadrons. Skalski, who shot down two Bf 109s as well as the Junkers 88 over Tunisia, became the first Pole to command an RAF fighter squadron, the famous No. 601. Later, in 1944, he was promoted to wing commander and led No. 2 (Polish) Wing for the rest of his operational career, flying Mustangs. He ended the war with a score of nineteen enemy aircraft destroyed, four of them over Poland in 1939.

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