Aeronautics: Kosciuszko Squadron

Biggest war since the Versailles Peace Conference was between Russia and Poland, 1919-1921. Few people know that throughout that war a squadron of U. S. aviators fought in the Polish air forces. The story of the Kosciuszko Squadron (named for the Polish patriot who fought in the American Revolution) is told for the first time by Kenneth Malcolm Murray, one of the pilots, in Wings Over Poland, currently published by D. Appleton & Co.

Just out of a German prison camp and serving with Herbert Hoover’s relief administration, U. S. Pilot Merian Coldwell Cooper was deeply shocked when a Russian cavalry detachment swooped down on a group of meanly-armed youths defending the fortified city of Lwow, sabered to death all but a handful. Pilot Cooper persuaded Polish authorities to let him recruit a squadron of War-trained pilots still loafing in Paris cafes. Back to Warsaw he took ten crack flyers. Major Cedric E. Fauntleroy had been chief test and ordnance pilot of the A. E. F., later flew with Rickenbacker’s famed “Hat in the Ring Squadron.” Captain Edward C. Corsi had been a chasse pilot for France. Several had served with Britain’s Royal Flying Corps. The Polish unit with which they were merged was commanded by Germany’s Wartime chief of air forces in Turkey, Col. Ludomil Rayski, now head of Poland’s air force. The few Poles in the Squadron were former Austrian and Imperial Russian pilots.

The Kosciuszko Squadron was the first military aviation unit to base on a railroad train. Headquarters, repair shops, bunks were set up in box cars to provide the mobility that Polish campaigns demanded. Receiving equivalent rank in the Polish army, the U. S. pilots were paid on the same basis as the Poles. First casualty occurred when Lieut. Graves flew the wings off his Albatross during a review for bushy-browed Marshal Pilsudski, plummeted to his death in the midst of Lwow.

Because Russia’s air force was negligible (during two years’ fighting the Squadron saw but one enemy plane), it was at first thought that reconnoitering would be the Kosciuszko unit’s principal job. But as the sweeping, open warfare grew more intense, individual battles between airmen and Russian troops became of prime importance. So vicious was the Squadron’s strafing that the Soviet Commissars put a price of 12,500 gold rubles on the U. S. flyers’ heads, later doubled it. Hawking over enemy territory, pilots would bore down out of the sun, both machine guns bucking. If the concentration was heavy, they would let fly the plane’s two bombs.

The Russians fought back from the ground with rifle and machine gun fire, occasionally with anti-aircraft ordnance. Though the planes were often riddled, only two members, Arthur H. Kelly, T. V. McCallum, were killed in action.

When the advance reached the Dnieper River, the Poles found themselves badly overextended. Thirty thousand Cossack horsemen under General Simeon Mikhailevich Budenny, fresh from triumphs over

Denikin’s, Kolchak’s and Petlura’s White armies, struck the naked Polish flank. The Poles began a retreat which did not halt until the Russians were at the gates of Warsaw. Day after day for two months the Squadron fought a 400-mi. rear-guard action, covering the evacuation of towns, hindering and harassing Budenny at every turn. Often their base train would slip out of the west of a town as the Cossacks clattered in at the east. Once they were forced to burn planes that failed at the last moment, the pilots escaping on foot. Like other Russian troops, Budenny’s men had been promised a four-day loot of Warsaw, took no officers prisoners. Each Kosciuszko pilot carried a vial of potassium cyanide in case of capture.

Pilot Cooper was shot down in the retreat but when surrounded by Cossacks he said he was an enlisted man, showed his hands, calloused and blistered from overhauling motors. After a year in foul Russian prisons, he miraculously escaped and returned to the unit. Pilot Cooper later wrote for the New York Times, then set out to film Grass, epic migration of a remote Persian tribe. This he followed with the immensely profitable Chang, filmed in. Siam. A descendant of Count Casimir, Pulaski’s second-in-command at the Battle of Savannah, affable Pilot Cooper is now an associate producer of Radio-Keith-Orpheum in charge of adventure pictures. Including replacements and the six Polish members the Squadron had a roster of 23. Founder Cooper is the only U. S. member who has made a name for himself in private life. Several of the Poles are high in Polish aviation circles. Author Murray is the only one who still fliescommercially. A transport pilot (unemployed), he once went treasure-hunting by air in Yucatan. Though he has written many a tale for pulp magazines, his story of the Kosciuszko Squadron is his first book. Lean, bronzed, reserved, Author-Pilot Murray is married, has one child, lives in Tuckahoe, N. Y.