had designed and flown a much more modern fighter, the P-50 Jastrzeb, or Hawk. The p-50 had retractable landing gear, a fully enclosed cockpit and, temporarily, an engine in the 900-horsepower class. Eventually, it was to have been powered by Bristol’s 1,375-hp Hercules radial. It looked much like a smaller P-47 Thunderbolt or the Italian Sagittario. An initial batch of thirty was under construction in September when the Germans arrived.8
With Poland’s collapse, Jakimiuk and a number of other distinguished Polish aero engineers made their way west, finding themselves by mid-1940 in Canada.
One account of Wladyslaw Gnys’s first combat that morning of September 1939 has him shooting down a Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber while its pilot concentrated on strafing a column of Polish horse-drawn transport.9 A subsequent account, published in the same journal by a Polish author, credits Gnys with a much more impressive feat. Actually, Gnys barely survived being shot at by Stukas before he even knew there was & war on, and lived to fight a few minutes later that day.10
His airfield, at Kijakow, was pounded first by Heinkel bombers, then by Stukas, and finally by Dornidr Do 17s. The Do 17 was known because of its narrow fuselage as the “Flying Pencil.” Gnys and his buddies sidestepped the bombardment. They had been detached, as a precaution, to a strip at nearby Balice. His unit, 122 Squadron, had not been alerted, and took off only after hearing bombs explode in the distance. Gnys took to the air as wingman to his CO, Captain Mieczyslaw Medwecki.
The PZL P-6 was the prototype of the radial-engine series that led to the wartime P-IIc models that first engaged the invading Luftwaffe at the dawn of the Second World War. This one, flown by test pilot Boleslaw Orlinski, performed an aerobatic routine at the 1931 National Air Races, Cleveland, that is remembered as a highlight of the event, PETER M. BOWERS
They had the misfortune to be intercepted on takeoff from behind by Stukas returning from Krakow. A Ju 87 piloted by Sergeant Frank Neubert opened fire on the right-hand PZL, Medwecki’s, which exploded in a ball of fire. Gnys, in P-II “5” with an abstract winged arrow ahead of the tail, broke left so violently that his airplane stalled while barely off the ground. He was fortunate to recover control before running out of altitude.
Soon after, Gnys spotted a pair of the Do 17s about 3,000 feet below him, also returning from Krakow. He attacked one Dornier to the rear, silencing its tail gunner and drawing translucent smoke from its left engine. The second Dornier intervened between Gnys and its crippled mate, and Gnys attacked it as well. After observing strikes from long bursts of fire on the second bomber, Gnys dived steeply to initiate a zoom-climb to overcome his airspeed disadvantage, and lost his opponents when he recovered altitude.
Polish soldiers were stopped on the Trzebinia—Olkusz road that morning in the village of Zurada, whose inhabitants tipped them that two German aircraft had crashed nearby. The soldiers found and photographed the smouldering wrecks of the Dorniers Gnys did not yet know he had shot down. Only one crew member had managed to take to his parachute, but it had become entangled in the wreckage.
Having shot down the first German aircraft of the war, Gnys escaped the collapsing Poland to become an ace with a Polish-manned French Armée de l’air unit. With France’s capitulation he joined 302 Squadron, Royal Air Force, with which he fought in the Battle of Britain. He served with three other Polish RAF squadrons, took command of 317 Squadron in 1944, and that same day was shot down for a third time and wounded by German soldiers. His second attempt to escape from his German hospital succeeded. He left the Polish Air Force in 1947 and immigrated to Canada.
By then Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, the man who developed the fighter in which Gnys scored the first Allied aerial victories of the war, was running the design department at the de Havilland Canada plant in Downsview. His introduction to Canada was indicative of the chaotic early stages of the country’s call to arms. After a hazardous journey through war-torn Europe from Poland, desperately needed by an aircraft industry not yet capable of building the kind of all-metal designs his PZL establishment had been mass-producing for eleven years, Jakimiuk found himself denied a permanent visa when he arrived in Canada.11
In war, as much as any other time, government’s left hand seldom knows what the right hand is doing. Despite one department’s agreement with the Polish government-in-exile to accept Jakimiuk and his colleagues, another department entangled the engineers over, among other matters, travel costs. These were considerable for the time, although the Poles had hardly travelled first-class.
The de Havilland Company at Hatfield, grateful for Jakimiuk’s expertise on the DH.95 airliner project, guaranteed the cost of transportation for him and an eventual total of forty Polish war guests who came to work at Downsview. The total bill, $200,000, was fully repaid by the Poles.12 Their largely unsung contributions far outweighed the costs of bringing them to Canada, and their talents took them to some of aviation’s far horizons after the war.
By the time his colleagues were establishing themselves elsewhere, Jakimiuk, who remained with DHC after the war, was laying the foundations for Canada’s greatest line of indigenous aircraft. By the end of 1946 Jakimiuk had already designed what is regarded as the first all-Canadian postwar aircraft, the DHC-I Chipmunk military trainer, and was supervising the design of the Beaver.
Many of those who were close to the Beaver’s design and development process draw a parallel with Jakimiuk’s PZLS, which did have a similar layout, if for different reasons. Likewise, the Beaver pioneered all-metal construction for bush planes.13
Moreover, “Jaki,” as he was known to his growing staff of engineers, had pulled off a personal coup for a newly arrived war refugee and expatriate Pole. With charm enough for three men, Jakimiuk had become a member of Toronto’s exclusive Granite Club, not otherwise known as a haven for refugees from overseas, soon after he arrived in Canada. Wartime de Havilland people recall Jakimiuk as “an almost opera-quality bass-baritone, [who could] sing a vast repertoire of songs from arias to folk melodies.14
Jakimiuk had the endearing quality of being able to laugh at himself, often by exaggerating his own Polish accent, which had in fact been refined under his wife’s influence into the kind of mid-Atlantic speech pattern that would have been at home on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of the time.
So the man who by the end of the war was DHC’s chief design engineer was a good fellow to have around during or after business hours. Just as he had got his professional break early in his career with the death of Zygmunt Pulawski, Jakimiuk recognized and prompted young talent.
Infected by Jakimiuk’s worldly bonhomie and that of the other Poles, Canadian-born engineers like Fred Buller would express their affection for their war guests by lapsing into cornball Polish accents at home and at work. Among the many expressions that originated with the Poles was a line Betty Buller attributes to W. Z. Stepniewski, the aerodynamicist, who, encountering some problem at the Downsview plant, exclaimed within earshot of some of the natives, “It is without any sense.” He then shrugged his shoulders and sighed “But anyhow...” and attacked the problem with renewed vigour.
There is something endearing about an aircraft manufacturer’s engineering department that, for a while at least, encountered the daily dilemmas of their work by saying out loud, in their caricatures of eastern European English, “It is without any sense,” shrugging their shoulders, adding “But
