Читать книгу The Immortal Beaver - Sean Rossiter - Страница 7

Facing page: This PZL P-II was an immediate forerunner of the P-IIc fighters flown by Capt. Mieczyslaw Medwecki and his wingman. Lt. Wladyslaw Gnys, when they took off at first light September 1, 1939, after hearing bombs explode in the distance. A development of the P-7, the P-II was an early product of Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, who supervised the team that designed the Beaver, A.U. SCHMIDT, VIA PETER. M. BOWERS

Impressive as rest pilot Russ Bannock’s wartime carter as an eleven-victory night-fighter ace was, it was not that much more distinguished than the careers of other members of the team that developed the Beaver. In fact, the chief engineer of the Beaver design team, Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, was part of aviation history long before the Beaver appeared. He was responsible for the first fighters to engage the Luftwaffe ay the dawn of the Second World War.

There is something Canadian in the Beaver having design origins so far from its Downsview birthplace—in a suburb of Warsaw, Poland, where the most advanced fighter planes of their time appeared in 1929. It is likely that no combat aircraft so advanced at is conception was as obsolete when called upon to fight as the PZL P-IIC Jedenastka (Eleventh) was in the minutes before first light, September 1, 1919, when the German pilots had been at work over western Poland for less than an hour.

The PZL’s superannuation makes its gallant record in the defence of Poland all the more noteworthy. The 1941 warplanes allocated Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe for Operation Ostmarkflug, the invasion of Poland, were much more modern. The Luftwaffe outnumbered Poland’s air force ten-to-one in aircraft and three-to-one in fighters.

The many reconnaissance flights that presaged the invasion showed that even Germany’s Dornier Do 17 bomber had a 20-km/hr speed advantage over the PZL. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter had a 150-km/hr edge and 2,000-metre higher ceiling, giving its pilot the oft-decisive advantage of initiating and breaking off combat at will.

At 05:30 hours, less than sixty minutes into the war, an open-cockpit gull-winged P-IIC piloted by Lieutenant Wladyslaw Gnys of 121 Eskadra, the “Winged Arrows,” shot down the first of 285 aerial raiders that Polish Military Aviation, the Lotnictwo Wojskowe, would destroy during the brief but intense resistance by the first of Hitler’s victims to fight back.

In his little P-IIC, Gnys—old for a fighter pilot at one week past his 29th birthday—had scarcely more firepower at his disposal than his World War I forebears. In fact, his mount was conceptually similar and nearly identical in layout to the Fokker D.VIII, the epitome of combat aircraft development in 1918. Through such advances as all-metal construction, structural detail development and the use of up-to-date licence-built engines developed in England, the PZL series established “new standards of aerodynamic cleanliness”¹ when the PZL P-I prototype first flew on September 25, 1929. (PZL stands for Panstwowe Zaklady Lotnicze, or State Aircraft Factory, which still exists.)

So rapid was combat aircraft development in the previous few years that, although Lieutenant Gnys’s P-IIC may have been built less than four years before, it was at least a generation behind Germany’s Messerschmitt Bf 109E and Britain’s Spitfire I, which were conceived in 1935 and had been continuously developed ever since—the Messerschmitt spurred by its operational testing during the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, the 175 P-IIC fighters of the Lotnictwo Wojskowe claimed the vast majority of the fighter force’s 126 confirmed victories during the sixteen-day invasion. This figure is thought to be only half the number of Luftwaffe aircraft the PZLS actually shot down.²

The opportunity for a leap forward in fighter design occurred, as it often does, because of the recent availability of advanced engines. Poland’s Skoda works had begun licence-building the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s Mercury radial engine in 1930.

Radials, so named because their cylinders radiate out from a central crankcase, are air-cooled engines. Their advantages include dispensing with the weight of liquid-cooling plumbing and the coolant itself, thus increasing payload. As fighter powerplants, radials are less susceptible to battle damage; a stray bullet through a radiator could disable a liquid-cooled fighter’s engine in seconds. The radial’s drawback was its need to be open to the air, causing drag. At that time, suitable methods of smoothing the airflow around a radial’s cylinders were only just being developed, so the liquid-cooled engine, which allows a nearly pointed nose profile, still held the aerodynamic advantage.

The Mercury was a de-stroked development of Bristol’s well-proven Pegasus radial; its shorter cylinders formed a smaller-diameter, if still blunt, nose.

On the airframe side, PZL, an expansion of the previous Central Aviation Workshops, was founded with a specific purpose in mind: to undertake the next step forward in aircrait structures by taking advantage of the lightness and strength of all-metal construction.

The series forerunner, the P-I, was designed under the leadership of Dipl.-Ing. Zygmunt Pulawski, who appears to have been a talented designer. He had produced a glider while at Warsaw Technical University, had won an apprenticeship at France’s Breguet plant by designing the third-place finisher in Poland’s 1924 contest for a combat aircraft design, and had learned to fly when the PZL organization was founded by Poland’s government the first day of 1928. But Pulawski, not yet thirty, died in an airplane crash March 31, 1931.³

With Pulawski’s death, the PZL fighter’s development was taken over at an early stage by his assistant, a big, cultured and worldly engineer named Wsiewolod J. Jakimiuk (pronounced Jaki-mook). Jaki, as he became known much later at Downsview, was a natural team leader. Physically imposing at over six feet and 200 pounds, with fine engineering credentials of his own, multilingual and an opera buff, Jakimiuk had easy social graces and was married to a talented French-English wife, Mary.

In 1931 the P-I was the most advanced fighter plane in a world that would continue building its possible rivals out of wood, wire and linen for years to come. The first prototype had a neatly-streamlined, water-cooled Hispano-Suiza V-12 engine, and its high-set gull wing met the upper fuselage at the aerodynamically-optimum 90-degree angle before extending horizontally outward to its gracefully rounded tips. The engines in-line cylinder heads formed the same angle as that of the wing roots behind them, producing a forward view for the pilot over this shallow v wing centre-section and engine that was outstanding. The P-I won a fighter competition in Bucharest in 1931 over such contemporaries as the British Bristol Bulldog and the French Dewoitine D.17, and was extensively showcased for a year, appearing, among other places, at the 1932 National Air Races at Cleveland.

The P-I’s wing, covered with finely corrugated duralumin alloy grooved front-to-back, was imitated by at least seven European aircraft types.⁴ Pulawski took the basic P-I design through a number of beautifully-streamlined V-12-powered developments until, at the Polish military’s insistence, the P-6 was fitted with the more readily available licence-built Bristol radial near the time of his death.⁵ The 500-hp Jupiter radial (which also powered the Bulldog) was an important advance in powerplant technology in its day, but it altered some of the more desirable features of Pulawski’s original conception, such as the uninterrupted vision forward.

The Beaver would go more successfully through a similar design evolution from a more-streamlined but less-powerful in-line powerplant installation to a more-easily-available air-cooled radial, making it, like the PZL, more of a blunt object—louder, tougher, brawnier, more muscular. Moreover, the absence of liquid coolant was an obvious advantage in the frigid regions where the Beaver was intended to fly.

Renowned for its all-metal construction techniques by the late 1930s, the PZL factory hosted delegations from Romania and Britain, who spent long periods there learning their trade secrets. The Romanians, having licence-built the P-IIC for their own air force, spent six months at the Okesie-Paluch plant near Warsaw studying Jakimiuk’s design philosophy, borrowing dozens of his engineers, and ending up simply copying the characteristic PZL tail for the IAR-80 series fighters that became operational during the war.

In 1937, engineers from the de Havilland Aircraft Co. of Hatfield, England, arrived for the same purpose and got to know the charming “engineer’s engineer,” as de Havilland Canada employees of the time remember him.⁶ The de Havilland company, the oldest and most prolific aircraft manufacturer in England, had built some of the fastest airplanes in the world out of wood. But for the twelve-to-seven-teen-passenger airliner de Havilland had in mind for the late 1930s, all-metal was the way to go.

The DH.95 Flamingo was de Havilland’s first all-metal design when it first flew December 28, 1938, in the hands of Geoffrey de Havilland Jr., the son of the company’s founder, and George Gibbins. This was easily the most modern airliner built up to then in Britain. A Flamingo was used by Winston Churchill and his advisors for vital trips to France before Dunkirk. Had the Germans invaded Britain in 1940, the royal family would have been evacuated from London in one of the thirteen Flamingos built. An engineering-physics student from the University of Toronto, Dick Hiscocks, was doing his internship at the Hatfield plant.

Jakimiuk’s P-II model appeared later in 1931. While the first prototype flew in August of that year with a Jupiter engine, subsequent pre-production units had the more powerful Mercury IV radials that developed 800 hp for takeoff. Early P-IIS were introduced into service in 1935, the year the Bf 109 and Spitfire prototypes appeared.

The P-IIC, which reached Polish fighter units later in 1935, featured such small refinements as an exhaust-collecting engine cowling ring that minimized turbulent airflow around the bulky radial. Some P-IIS even carried four machine guns, with the addition of one in each wing panel. The Romanians built seventy P-IIS at their Industria Aeronautic Romana (IAR) plant during 1936—37.

A development of the P-II, the p-24 was an even greater export success for PZL and Jakimiuk. The P-24 had heavier armament, including two 20-mm Oerlikon cannon, and a fully-enclosed cockpit. Greece bought 36, Turkey 60, Bulgaria had received 36 of a 46-piane order at the outbreak of war, and old customer Romania had 50, 44 of them built by IAR.⁷

But P-24s in foreign hands were useless to the Poles in September 1939. With non-adjustable laminated wood propellers that compromised both takeoff and high-speed performance, drag-producing fixed landing gear, and open cockpits, the P-IIS Polish Military Aviation took to war were pressed to exceed 200 mph at anything under 8,000 feet, where most dogfights took place.

By February 1939 Jakimiuk and his team 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 anyhow...” and then going at the difficulty with redoubled effort. The Poles did that for DHC, and much, much more.