An epic and bloody flight for freedom

By Kevin Ritchie

The Star

Propaganda exercise cost many South African lives, writes Kevin Ritchie

Warsaw was burning. The capital of occupied Poland had risen against the Nazi German invaders as the Russian Red Army cynically waited merely 20km away.

The uprising had begun on August 1 1944, when the Polish Home Army (AK) had been ordered to rise up against the Nazis, believing the Red Army would come to its assistance.

Within five days, the AK had retaken almost three-quarters of the city, for the first time since 1939.

But without reinforcements or more arms and ammunition, the tide slowly began to turn in the Germans' favour.

The Polish government in exile in Britain appealed to Prime Minister Winston Churchill for help.

Churchill was in a quandary; the quickest way to help would be to drop supplies to the defenders, but the most direct route would take the Royal Air Force (RAF) over the most heavily defended parts of the Third Reich - there and back. Plotting a course to avoid these defences would mean a round trip of 3 520km, an impossible feat for the bombers.

The alternative, which was marginally shorter, lay over northern Italy. But here, too, a route which avoided most of the heavily defended German cities would mean a round trip of 3 200km.

Senior RAF officers warned Churchill that the trip would achieve very little militarily. It would only serve as a propaganda exercise - at an inordinate cost in life and equipment.

Churchill would not be moved. And so, between August 4 and the middle of September, there would be 196 trips to Warsaw, flying into the target at rooftop height to drop canisters packed with light machine guns, ammunition, medical supplies, radios and critically needed food.

The aircraft were drawn from two South African Air Force (SAAF) squadrons, Nos 31 and 34; two RAF squadrons, which were partly crewed by South Africans serving in the RAF; US Air Force bombers; and a special flight of Polish bombers under the command of the RAF in Italy.

The flight was epic in more ways than one: an 11-hour flight over the Carpathian mountain range, and from there, treetop height to Warsaw.

The cost was high: 168 airmen lie buried in the Allied Airmen's cemetery in Krakow, southern Poland. They were killed in the six weeks that the airlift flew. Eighty of the graves are South African.

As Bob Steele, one of the SAAF pilots remembered, on the first night of the airlift, 16 of the 25 aircraft were shot down in southern Poland and over Warsaw.

In all, a fifth of all the aircraft would be destroyed and less than half of all the planes would ever make it to their destination.

Another SAAF pilot, Second Lieutenant Bob Burgess, became the youngest ever winner of a DSO (Distinguished Service Order) when his actual pilot, without telling him or the crew, jumped out of the Liberator bomber - his nerve gone - to parachute to safety. Burgess nursed the crippled aircraft home.

Bob Klette, the commander of another of the SAAF Liberators, remembered the rigours of the trip, "plunging into a brute of a cumulo-nimbus, vicious turbulence rocking, swinging and bumping the Liberator. It was like riding in a rodeo, the compasses spinning in all directions."

As Klette and his crew crossed the Carpathian Mountains they dropped down to follow the Vistula at 1 000ft, straight into the glow of Warsaw at  war.

Dropping their load at 500ft, after flying through intense anti-aircraft fire with two of the four engines shot out, Klette turned for home.

What followed would be written into the annals of the SAAF. His control panel was blank, all his gauges and instruments were broken. The moonless night was pitch black.

Suddenly there was a rough jarring and scraping under the aircraft's  belly.

Klette felt he was about to die.

"Had we crashed? Was I dead and in heaven?" Klette wrote after the war.

Looking to the left and then to the right, he was astonished to see the aircraft had made a perfect belly landing. "My God, we're alive," he yelled, but the intercom was dead.

Emerging from the plain's wreckage, Klette was astounded to discover that fate had landed them in the middle of Warsaw Airport.

The uprising was over by October 2, when what remained of the AK surrendered. The butcher's bill was steep; 17 000 members of the underground, 3 500 regular Polish soldiers and 5 000 civilians had been killed.

Six months later the war in Europe would be over.

Back in South Africa, many Poles fighting for the Allies had found themselves invalided south to be treated for tuberculosis at the then named Imperial Military Hospital, Baragwanath.

They formed the nucleus of what would become the South African Polish Organisation. By 1947, the first flypast and parade at the Joburg cenotaph would take place - and every year thereafter.

The Poles, exiled from their homeland which had become occupied by Russia after World War II, would remember both the Warsaw Uprising and the airlift every year with a mass at the cathedral in the centre of Joburg, laying a wreath at the cenotaph followed by a reception at the Polish Club.

The venue changed in 1981, with the erection of the Katyn Memorial in the James and Ethel Gray Park in Melrose, Joburg. Here the annual commemoration would remember not just the flights and the gallant efforts of the AK, but the massacre of 4 143 members of the cream of the Polish intelligentsia by the Nazis in the Katyn forest in 1940 and the ongoing suppression of a free Poland.

By 1993, Poland would finally be free and 11 years later was finally admitted to the European Union, the first time in a millennium that the country had been returned to Europe.

As Steele remembered: "If our flight brought only a faint glimmer of hope to those on the ground, then our flights through the fiery skies of Poland would not have been in vain. Democracy did not die in the flames of Warsaw, and now once more Poland is free."

Most of the survivors of the raid lived to see it, but their numbers are fast dwindling. Steele died last month and today there are just six South African survivors: Brian Jones, Klette's navigator on that fateful night, and Fred Austin, both of whom live in Joburg; Frances Murray and John Colman in Cape Town; Dirk Nel, the squadron commander who was deemed too senior to fly in the risky missions, who lives in Somerset West; and Pieter du Preez, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross over Warsaw and lives in Pretoria.

Jones remembers walking away from the wreckage at Warsaw Airport 63 years ago:

"I knelt on the ground, stunned and said: 'Lord, for saving me, I will devote the rest of my life to you."

After the war he held a number of senior managerial positions before becoming ordained as a pastor in the Rosebank Union Church in Joburg.

"It took a bit of time, but eventually I made good on that promise."