Metroland
"Near, near at hand if by train you go,
Metroland, Metroland"
- George R. Sims
Royal Air Force Northolt is three years older than the Royal Air Force itself, having opened as a Royal Flying Corps base in May 1915. It is the oldest, permanently established, Royal Air Force station and the Royal Air Force is the oldest permanently established air force in the world.
However, there are a couple of air bases across the globe which can claim an even longer history than Northolt. Gilze-Rijen Air Base is the oldest airfield in the Netherlands and was first used as a landing ground for a Bleriot monoplane in 1910, with the military starting to use it in 1913. Royal Australian Air Force Base Point Cook, around sixteen miles from Melbourne, possibly even beats that, though, being established in March 1913 as the location for the RAAF's Central Flying School. This was the RAAF’s only airfield until 1925 so heaven alone knows where they flew to once they’d taken off. There and back again, I guess. It was in continuous operation as a flying training station until 1992 and was the place where all RAAF officers were trained until 2008. It is now home to the RAAF Museum and is actually seen as part of a bigger base which includes RAAF Laverton which is approximately four miles to the north and has no airfield. No, I don’t understand that, either. Together they are known as RAAF Williams in honour of Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, KBE, CB, DSO.
Williams had been born in Moonta Mines, South Australia in 1890 and was already a lieutenant in the Army when he learned to fly at Point Cook in 1914. He was the first ever military pilot to be trained in Australia which kind of begs the question: “Who taught him to fly?” After the First World War he campaigned for an air force which was separate from the army, and this was achieved in 1921. The following year, he became the Chief of the Air Staff at the age of just thirty-two and held the post three times, for thirteen of the next seventeen years.
In the late thirties, an adverse report on flight safety saw him lose the job of Chief of the Air Staff and get sent overseas to Britain. When the Second World War broke out, he was an Air Officer with the RAF’s Coastal Command. After the war was over, the RAAF retired almost all officers who were veterans of the two wars and Williams was appointed as Australia's Director-General of Civil Aviation. He died in 1980 but in 2005, his original Flying Corps wings, which are usually on display at the RAAF Museum in Point Cook, were carried into space on a shuttle flight by Australian-born astronaut Andy Thomas.
On the day of a different Space Shuttle launch, that of the ill-fated Challenger on 28th January 1986, it just happened to be the sixty-seventh birthday of another pilot; Francis Stanley Gabreski who had been born on that day in 1919 in Oil City, Pennsylvania. His parents, Stanislaw and Jozefa Kapica Gabryszewski, were both immigrants from Poland. In 1940, he enlisted as a flight cadet and completed his flight training in March 1941. He was posted to the 45th Pursuit Squadron, 15th Pursuit Group, at Wheeler Army Airfield in Hawaii where he flew Curtiss P-36 Hawks and P-40 Warhawks. He was based here when the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacked Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941.
In October 1942, and by now a Captain, he was posted to England and, due to his Polish heritage, he asked to be attached to a Polish fighter squadron. He was successful and was posted to 315 Squadron flying Supermarine Spitfires at RAF Northolt.
Northolt had already been the home to Polish squadrons for some time by then. One of the squadrons which flew Hawker Hurricanes from Northolt during the Battle of Britain was 303 Polish Squadron, the highest scoring allied squadron of the battle. The other units here at the height of the battle were 229 and 504 squadrons of the Royal Air Force and 1 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, all flying Hawker Hurricanes. There were also some Bolton Paul Defiants of 264 Squadron.
Ten of the thirty airmen from Northolt killed during the Battle of Britain were Polish and they are commemorated at the Polish War Memorial by the roundabout where the West End Road meets the A40, just on the edge of the station. I saw it during my visit to the base, it recalls the Polish airmen from fighter, bomber and reconnaissance squadrons who died during the war. The white stone monument stands like a massive, upturned capital T by a huge roundabout and slip roads and concrete flyovers. In front of it a small pond with four fountains and, either side, the flags of the United Kingdom and Poland.
Despite RAF Northolt being just across the road from Ruislip Gardens Underground station, it doesn’t feel like it’s in London. The roads around the outside of the base are filled with the interwar semis of the Metroland commuter belt. Immediate post-war aerial photographs of the area show large gaps in between the houses, now filled in with bungalows and low blocks of flats. It is however, and has been since Croydon Airport closed in 1959, the nearest airfield to central London with the obvious exception in more recent years of London City Airport, more of which later. That’s why Winston Churchill kept his personal aircraft here and why the station is still home to 32 (The Royal) Squadron who use the base for VIP transport.
Many components on an aircraft have a “life” which is determined by its chronological age or the number of hours it has been in service or by the number of times that it has been asked to do a certain thing. The aircraft manufacturers have come up with this “life” and have, obviously, played it safe. They don’t think: “Ah, it’ll probably be good for a couple of hundred hours, call it five hundred for cash.” In fact, quite the reverse, if they thought something would fail at five hundred hours, they’d give it a much shorter life.
On 32 (The Royal) Squadron, no component on an aircraft used by the royal family was ever allowed to go beyond half that “life”. That’s the kind of idiocy which follows the royals around, though. It also means that someone, somewhere thinks that the life of a person who has signed up to serve and possibly die for this country is worth, at best, half as much of that of an old man in a sparkly hat.
In case you were wondering what happened to Francis “Gabby” Gabreski, after his time at Northolt, he was posted back to a USAAF unit, the 61st Fighter Squadron, flying the Republic P-47C Thunderbolt and he took command of the squadron on 13th April 1944, by now he was a lieutenant colonel. By July 1944, he had shot down twenty-eight enemy fighters in aerial combat and destroyed another three on the ground, making him the leading American fighter ace at the time. After flying 193 successful combat missions, Gabby crash landed in Germany on 20th July 1944. He flew so low on a strafing run that the tips of his propeller blades hit the ground. He evaded capture for five days but was eventually caught and spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft I. Gabby Gabreski married Kay Cochran soon after his repatriation and they went on to have nine children.
After the war he remained a member of the Air National Guard and went on to serve in Korea where, flying F-86 Sabre jet fighters, he shot down six and a half Mig-15s. He actually shot down seven as you can't shoot half an aeroplane down, but one of his victories was shared with another pilot. In total he flew a hundred combat missions during the Korean War. He went on to fly and command units flying the F-100 Super Sabre and F-101 Voodoo. Francis "Gabby" Gabreski retired from the Air Force as a Colonel on 1st November 1967 having flown more combat missions than any other United States Air Force fighter pilot.
Two of Gabby's sons became U.S. Air Force pilots and his daughter-in-law, Lieutenant General Terry L. Gabreski, was the highest-ranking woman in the USAF at the time of her retirement in 2010.
In 1991, Suffolk County Airport, New York, was renamed Francis S. Gabreski Airport in his honour. He passed away on 31st January 2002 at the age of eighty-three. It’s good to know that his contribution to the war effort, and that of all his comrades at Northolt, isn’t forgotten. Over eight thousand Polish airman made their way to Britain following the invasion of their homeland by Nazi forces. Poles fought during the Battle of Britain and twenty-nine of their pilots lost their lives. Eight fighter squadrons, four bomber squadrons and one reconnaissance squadron would continue to serve into 1941. A total of 1,903 Polish airmen gave their lives before the end of the war, they are the ones remembered on the Polish War Memorial.