HIERONYM STAWICKI

He was born on 25th September 1914 at Szamotuly near Poznan. In 1935 he was conscripted into the army and joined an aviation regiment and a year later he transferred to the Aviation Technical Training School in Bydgoszcz.

After his military service he worked in an engineering factory but at the end of August 1939 he received instructions to report to 6 Air Regiment in Lvov due to the imminence of war with Germany. His time there was very short following heavy German bombing of the city and air base and he was transferred to Siedlce in Eastern Poland, soon after transferring to 161 Squadron based in Lublin. On 18th September 1939 they all crossed into Romania at Sniatyn (now Ukraine) where they were interned by the authorities.

He survived the German bombing of the airport and escaped to Romania where he was interned but he escaped in January 1940 and reached the Polish Embassy where he was given money and false papers in the name of Jan Krzyszowski. He took a ship at Constanta to France via Athens (Greece), Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), Malta and Salerno (Italy), arriving at Marseilles in early March 1940. He worked in Toulouse at the Dewoitine aircraft factory whilst awaiting military service then was taken to Port Vendres by train and on to Casablanca in Morocco on a French destroyer. From there he made his way to Gibraltar and took ship to Glasgow.

By early August 1940 he had gone through all the preliminary training and was assigned as a mechanic to the newly forming 304 Squadron at RAF Bramcote in Warwickshire. Around the end of January 1941 he was posted to 306 Squadron at RAF Northolt, Middlesex for about three years and then on to the No 16 Service Training Flying School at RAF Newton at Nottingham. In 1944 he applied for pilot training; he was accepted and started training on heavy four engine bombers. He was promoted to Sergeant and transferred to 300 Squadron where he made several bombing missions over Germany and many more humanitarian food drops to the Belgian and Dutch people.

He was demobilised in December 1947 and returned to his wife and children in Poland. He had two more children but his wife died in May 1952. He remarried in 1959 and they had another child. He died in Poznan on 3rd August 2001 and was buried in Junikowskim Cemetery.