A Special Duty (16 page)

General Strokacz ordered Kunicki, in that same telegram of the 24
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May, to keep the airmen out of danger, and Kunicki took his orders seriously. Tom was genuinely grateful for this protection, but when asked the inevitable question about the purpose and destination of his flight over Poland, he did not give a truthful account, but instead gave one that was likely to impress. The secret nature of their work had been so drummed-in to the crews that Tom did not reveal the complete nature of the flight to anyone, though he came closest when talking to the partisans of the AK forest unit, who already knew about the supply flights from Italy. He seems to have adjusted his story according to the level of trust he felt, and he told Kunicki the same fanciful story he had come up with for the NOW partisans of Father John’s unit
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– that his Squadron had been ordered to bomb the oil wells at Drohobych
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, and while over Poland his aircraft had been attacked and damaged by eight Messerschmitt. He claimed to have shot down three of the enemy aircraft before receiving a hit in one of his engines, and then a second engine failed, which forced him to jettison the bomb load. He said he had tried to reach the Soviet lines between Kovel and Lvov, but had to order the crew to bale out when a third engine started to fail, finally jumping himself. He stuck to this fictional account, which had just enough truthful information to be plausible though it would not have fooled anyone with knowledge of the firepower of a special duty Halifax. Kunicki, dubious though he may have been about this colourful account, would certainly have liked the idea of Allied planes bombing the Drohobych oil wells, being under orders himself to destroy similar installations. Strokacz, having received Shangin’s report, knew that the aircraft had been on a supply mission, and this was the information he passed on to Stalin.

Left to Right: Keen, Kunicki, Hughes, Storey, Ducia, Stradling

The airmen began to settle into the routine of the Russian camp with renewed hope of rescue, and were reassured by the knowledge that Kmicic, who had been reluctant to hand them over, had set up his camp a short distance away in order to keep an eye on them. They struggled to understand or be understood by this comradely band of Uzbeks, Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians and Hungarian Jews, though George remained with them and did his best to interpret and Tom could talk to Kunicki in German so that orders were understood and obeyed. Because of Strokacz’ order to keep the men safe, Kunicki made sure that they were always with him and, since he rarely moved without Ducia and the portable wireless set that was strapped to her back, they formed a tight group of six. Kunicki had around two hundred partisans in his unit, many of whom had escaped from German prisons or forced labour camps, and their ranks were augmented by officers sent directly from Russia. One of these was the political commissar, who was responsible for the education of the unit on behalf of the Communist Party, holding weekly lectures on the subject of Party ideology and principles. He also appeared to be keeping a sharp eye on the new arrivals, and took every opportunity to engage them in conversation about their activities in Poland. The female partisans, about twenty five in number, served mostly as cooks or wireless operators, and were treated exactly the same as the men, even sleeping in the commander’s tent, but the British boys were not used to women soldiers and found them rather formidable, later recalling: “They were vicious – real partisans!”
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Seventeen-year-old Ducia wore a uniform and was treated as an officer, rarely leaving Kunicki’s side, but she would not reach her eighteenth birthday. Her lifespan could be measured in weeks, not months, and her death was certainly that of a ‘real partisan’. Injured in the battle for Porytowe Hill on the 14th June 1944, she shot herself rather than be captured.

Tom and Kunicki left the camp on horseback every day to search for a suitable area to prepare as a landing strip for a Dakota. They needed firm ground or a stubble field that could be cleared and flattened, and which could be defended during the period the aircraft was on the ground; a tall order in this boggy, forested terrain, and several times when they found a suitable strip they had to abandon it when German troops moved too close for safety. Kunicki was philosophical about the search. If they found suitable ground, all well and good, if not, then he had four extra partisans for his unit. Tom’s main recollection of these daily treks was the awkward horse he was given to ride, which rubbed up against every tree and gatepost it could find in an effort to dismount him. The horse had been given to the unit by a farmer, who had been unable to control it, and nobody in the unit had managed to ride it until Patrick Stradling asked to be allowed to try. Kunicki was reluctant at first, mindful of his orders to keep the men safe, but eventually agreed and Patrick jumped on the horse and fought with it until it became calm, at which point he dismounted and gave the reins to Kunicki saying: “Now it will listen”.

The everyday routine for the unit involved foraging for food, outpost duties, raids on local towns, and the relentless sabotage of rail links, so that there were never more than fifty men in the camp at any one time. The blowing up of trains was the main military focus during May 1944, and the unit chalked up ninety-eight hits by the time the airmen left them. An attack on a train would be launched on receipt of a radio message, and the unit would set off to intercept either a troop or a supply train, sometimes using stick dynamite on the track (which partisans would detonate as the engine went over it), and sometimes laying a landmine on the track (which detonated with the weight of the engine). If it was a supply train they stayed to retrieve whatever stores or equipment they could from the wreckage, but if it was a troop train they disappeared very quickly back into the woods.
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The airmen were still not allowed to take an active part in the raids, but witnessed at least one train being blown up and were issued with Russian tommy guns and given ‘alarm’ posts.

When not attacking trains, partisan groups were often away foraging, scouting, or raiding local towns, but when Kunicki moved, so did the airmen, with orders and instructions given to Tom in German. One particular day they were on the move with a one-hundred strong contingent of partisans when they came face-to-face with an equal number of bandits coming from the other direction. Like a scene from an old western, they met on the dusty main street of a village, and not a single safety catch was in place on their guns, but it was not in either group’s interests to get involved in a fight, and they passed each other in silence on the otherwise empty street. On another occasion they were spotted passing through a village, and information was passed to the Germans who sent in a Junkers 87 to bomb it flat. This was a pointless act because the partisan group was long-gone by the time the bombers arrived, and they watched from the safety of a nearby wood, consumed by anger as the bombs fell on yet another defenceless village. The next morning they walked back to find nothing but a pile of smouldering timbers. The long-suffering villagers not only lived in fear of such attacks, but constantly had their food and livestock plundered by just about every group in the district. The Soviet units were well equipped in most respects, but they received no food in their supply drops and so bought, stole, or requisitioned supplies from the towns and farms of the district. Kunicki, being polish himself, was sensitive to the plight of the local population and, unlike many of the Soviet and Ukrainian units, retained their goodwill by paying either in cash or kind for produce, and reporting back to Kiev incidents of serious abuse by other units. Two vital items that did not tumble out of a Soviet Dakota were vodka and a tobacco called ‘Machorka’, which was usually rolled and smoked in the ‘educational’ papers distributed by the political commissar. Most raids carried out locally were to obtain vodka, and it was seized in huge quantities – 80,000 litres in one raid alone, but the airmen were wary of the Russian drinking sessions. It was strong stuff, and they couldn’t risk their tongues being loosened by alcohol, so it became necessary to stick together and make sure that no one was left alone with the political commissar, with whom they felt very uneasy.

Kunicki issued the men with clean underwear, equipped them with automatic weapons and allowed Tom to write a daily diary. They were given permission to have their boots repaired by the unit’s shoemaker, and because of a lack of bedding, were issued with an old Russian parachute to cover themselves at night.
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Most aspects of partisan life were harsh, but the airmen were finding that it could feel good to share the hardship with such worthy comrades, and despite the ever-present language barrier, friendships developed though music – a pastime they all enjoyed. George sang and played the guitar, and spirits were always raised by the mixture of homespun British songs and the catchy, sometimes mournful, Russian folk songs popular in the camp. Kunicki told Tom that he often had to send his men on suicide missions, and, with orders coming directly from Russia, there was never any thought of disobeying. The lives of the airmen seemed to have enough value for them to be protected, but it was not so for their partisan comrades, whose lives were held cheap and for whom the life-and-death struggle was to get much harder in the coming weeks. Kunicki was scornful of Father John, commander of the NOW unit with whom he cooperated, for issuing his men with leave passes to visit their families, finding this incomprehensible in wartime. The men of his own unit, detached from home and family and exposed to a great deal of cruelty and death, were somewhat brutalised by the experience and meted out savage revenge on any Germans they captured. Tom described the way prisoners were treated:

“Prisoners were stripped to their underclothes and then shot. German spies, of which there were many, were taken by horse and cart to the neighbourhood of the nearest German garrison, where they were split open and filled with straw or eggs. The horse was then whipped up and the still-living man was carried into the garrison.”
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Such acts always prompted savage reprisals, but the Polish partisans did their best to protect the local community. Officers from the Polish camp regularly visited the Russian camp, always bringing with them a bottle of vodka (a gesture that was rarely reciprocated), and although these meetings were outwardly cordial, there were strong undercurrents of suspicion. The Russians accused the Polish of being bad neighbours in the past, and were contemptuous of their out-dated weapons and small-scale military exploits, belittling them at every opportunity. It was true that many of the Polish weapons were out-dated – Tom had watched them dig up an old Maxim gun that took four men to lift and must already have been an antique when it was buried in 1939. Resentment was fuelled when supply loads dropped by the Allies for the Poles were stolen by the Russians, and Tom saw for himself many British boots and watches in the Soviet camp, though they never touched the British automatic weapons which they despised, particularly the Sten gun, which they considered very inferior to their own.

At night the four crewmen slept together beneath their Russian parachute, changing position every couple of nights so that they equally shared the cold outside and the warmer inside positions. They woke up one morning to a hail of machinegun bullets thudding past their feet, fired from a Fieseler Storch which had spotted them on the ground. Most of the unit had already moved on and they were alone with Kunicki and Ducia when the attack came, sending them running for the trees. The continuous threat from the air prompted Kunicki to suggest that Tom temporarily move his crew to a gamekeepers’ lodge deep in the woods, where attacks were less frequent. There was little he could do about the growing numbers of German ground troops being mobilised. Polish officers who visited the camp brought news of 24,000 second-line SS troops massing in Bilgoraj
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to clear up the district, but added that their morale was low and they were mostly boys of fifteen to seventeen years-of-age. The good news was that Tom and Kunicki had found a field that they considered suitable for flattening into an airstrip, and this information was passed on to Kiev. Strokacz responded with a message to say that he would send an expert in airstrip construction by Dakota to check it out.
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On the night of the 28
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May, the airmen joined Kunicki and his men at a prearranged dropping ground to await the arrival of the Russian Dakota, which was carrying airstrip specialist Lieutenant Szylowski, two female radio operators, and supplies. When the distant sound of the engine was heard Kunicki ordered the signal fires to be lit, and the prepared ground turned into a blaze of lights. A vertical ‘Very’ light was fired, followed by a horizontal one along the flare path, and the men rushed for cover just in case the plane was not one of theirs. The terrain-hugging Dakota came in low over the trees, and one of the partisans shouted “Ours!” as the light from the fires picked out the markings of a Soviet aircraft. One-by-one the reinforced sack containers drifted to the ground suspended beneath white silk parachutes followed by two female radio operators and Lieutenant Szylowski, the airfield specialist. One of the radio operators landed so close to the fire that her parachute went up in flames, and Tom took careful note on the Russian dropping technique, which on this occasion was impressively accurate (though he felt that in general their dropping techniques were inferior to those used by his Squadron).