The Immortal Beaver. Sean Rossiter

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