Last Surviving Polish Battle of Britain Pilot Dies

Brigadier General Tadeusz Sawicz died on 19 October at a nursing home in Toronto, Canada - he was 97 years old and was the last surviving Polish pilot to have fought with the RAF during the 1940 Battle of Britain. Sawicz was one of 145 Polish pilots who fought with the RAF during the Battle of Britain and was credited with three kills during his service with the RAF.

Overall, The Battle of Britain represented a disaster for the Luftwaffe and a blow to the prestige of the Wehrmacht as a whole.  In October 1940, when the formal threat of German invasion is considered to have conclusively ended for the year, the Luftwaffe mustered only one third of its front line fighter strength it held in July 1940 and it continued to bleed additional losses in attack aircraft well into 1941.  In one final ironic turn for the defeated Luftwaffe, the most proficient Fighter Command Squadron during the Battle, by claimed kills, was the RAF’s 303 Squadron; with 126 and one-half claims.  Polish pilots who had escaped from Poland the previous fall, equipped by the British with Hurricane fighters, filled 303 squadron and her sister 302 squadron’s ranks. Polish pilots ended up with 203 confirmed kills during the Battle of Britain, in spite of having entered the battle late due in part to preconceived British notions about what the Poles could actually do, while shooting down an average of 10.5 German aircraft for each Polish pilot lost; besting their British comrades by a rate of better than 2:1.