100-year-old Spitfire ace
Jan joined the RAF to fight Hitler
ONE of Britain’s last wartime Spitfire pilots has told his amazing story – as he turns 100.
Flight Sgt Jan Iwanowski’s epic tale of survival against the odds began in the autumn of 1939 as a soldier in the Polish Army. He was captured by the Soviets, storming in from the East as Hitler’s army invaded from the West.
After a spell in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison, he spent two terrible years as a forced labourer in Siberia felling trees.
He was then handed to the British with other Poles and ended up in a transit camp in North Africa, where he got new clothes and shoes, as he was in nothing but rags.
Widower Jan recalls: “The British didn’t know what to do with us but in the end took us to Britain”. Determined to repay the country that gave him freedom, he trained as an RAF pilot.
He had arrived in 1942 and was soon flying above London to fight Luftwaffe raids.
Speaking from home near St
Just, Cornwall, Jan said: “I don’t remember how many missions I did. It’s so
MEMORIES Jan now long ago. I’d shoot at German planes and when you hit them there’d be smoke coming out. You hoped they would go down. Flying was a passion.
“I knew that, when their planes went down, we were taking out their best.”
Awarded the Air Force Medal for Gallantry, he stayed in the RAF until 1947. He met Beatrice at a dance in Wolverhampton and they wed in 1949. Jan became a British citizen and opened a hairdressers, until they moved to Cornwall. The couple ran St Erth Post Office until retiring.
Jan, born in eastern Poland, was one of eight children. He said: “Until 1952, I thought my entire family was dead. That’s when the Red Cross located them. One brother was in Siberia, my sisters had been taken to Germany and forced to work in factories. My mother collected them all. They all went back to Poland.” Asked why he never joined them, Jan says he felt proud to feel British.
Jan lives with his daughter, Frania, who now looks after him at home. He has two grandchildren and three
great-grandchildren. Couple wed in 1947