Sunday, November 11, 2012 - North Shore News - A3
SUNDAY FOCUS
photos supplied
ROY Wozniak’s Spitfire V shows holes in the fuselage after taking cannon fire in a dogfight over northern France on June 2, 1942. The pilot, now a West Vancouver resident, poses for a wartime propaganda photograph on the wing of a Spitfire with “Lucy,” his squadron’s mascot.
70 YEARS LATER, A CANADIAN SPITFIRE PILOT THE RECALLS HEARTACHE AND HEROISM OF DIEPPE
A wing and a prayer
Martin Millerchip mmillerchip@nsnews.com
WEST Vancouver’s oldest living Spitfire pilot, Roman Roy “Wozzy” Wozniak, came closest to being shot down on June 2, 1942. It was the second sweep of the day for 403 “Wolf” Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force following an uneventful early-morning diversionary sweep over northern France when German fighters attacked it. Wozniak’s squadron was split into three sections of four planes— blue, red and yellow — each flying “finger four” formation. The next harrowing moments are recorded tersely in his logbook: “Flying Red 4 position when attacked by at least 45 Fokker Wolfe 190s and ME (Messerschmitt) 109s. Huns came from all directions trapping us inside of France. No escape. Sqdn. had to fight it out. I received cannon fire through fuselage, bullets in wings, engine and fuselage. Came home by myself and landed at home base.” The entry notes the names of six pilots out of 12 who failed to return home as well as one who was rescued from the English Channel. In fact, four of the six were captured by German troops after bailing out or crash-landing and spent the rest of the war as prisoners, a fact recorded in Peter Caygill’s book Spitfire Mark V in Action. Even so, it was a low point for Wolf Squadron: six pilots and eight aircraft lost. Wozniak’s brief log entry “came home by myself and landed at home base” doesn’t tell the whole story. The cannon shell that knocked his Spitfire Mark V into a spin left shrapnel in the armour plating of his seat and the heel of his shoe. When he came out of the spin, he had three German fighters on his tail. Twice, Wozniak broke sharply into the attacking fighters, the second time almost colliding with their leader, which was enough to make them break off the attack. But his troubles weren’t over. When he reached his Kenley (Surrey) base, the wheels on his plane wouldn’t drop. When this happened, pilots were instructed to dive and pull up, using gravity to release the wheel assemblies. But that day, Wozniak tried rocking his aircraft with the rudder first, and that did the trick. It turned
out to be a lucky decision: If he had tried the dive, he likely would never have pulled out of it. Shrapnel had sheared one of the two cables that ran from his joystick to the elevators on the Spitfire’s tail wing, and the other was partially sheared and stretched. Fortune then gave Wozniak a third pass that afternoon. Worried about the possibility of a stall because of the excess play in his controls, he flew straight in for a high-speed landing. But he came in too fast and realized he risked overshooting and hitting another plane at the end of the field. As he tried to add power to go around for a second landing attempt, his engine died. Wozniak didn’t know it, but a bullet had taken out one of the engine’s 12 cylinders. Out of choices, he touched down with almost no room left to avoid a collision, but as his wheels hit the ground, his aircraft suddenly swung itself around and came to a quick stop as if controlled by an unseen hand. Another German bullet had passed through his wing and punctured his right tire, causing his plane to dig in and turn of its own accord. As Caygill records Wozniak: “When I got out of the aircraft the medical officer asked me if I was OK. I said, ‘Just a moment,’ and looked up my pant legs to see if it was blood or sweat. Thank goodness it was sweat!” Recounting the landing 70 years later, Wozniak shakes his head and says, “Lucky, lucky.” He pauses. “You had to be lucky. I lost a lot of friends.” ••• Born June 29, 1919 in Saskatoon, Sask., Wozniak says his childhood was as normal as could be: two sisters, friends and lots of sports. His father was a maintenance worker for CN Rail. “We lived through the Depression years of course. The only trouble we got into was when we raided a neighbour’s garden for carrots or something like that.” Wozniak planned a career in pharmacy that, at the time, required a three-year apprenticeship and two years of university. He was in his second year of that apprenticeship with Ford’s Drugstore in Saskatoon when war was declared in 1939. He had recently taken his first commercial flight from Saskatoon to Regina with Air Canada in a plane “that held about six people.” The short trip had enthralled him, and he immediately volunteered as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
“The fellow at the recruiting office said to me, ‘We really want university grads for pilots. After all, we have the Maginot Line. I’ll take your name, and we’ll call you if we need you. “After Hitler walked around the Maginot Line, I got a callup.” However, the RCAF was ill prepared for training pilots, lacking both facilities and planes. Wozniak was eventually posted to RCAF Manning Pool in Toronto and then to guard duty at Hamilton airport. Elementary training finally began on March 29, 1941 at Fort William (Thunder Bay), where the instructors were mostly bush pilots and the planes mostly Tiger Moths. After 64 hours of dual and solo flying there and 100 hours of service flying in Manitoba, he graduated Aug. 8 — one of a few with a commission — and was earmarked for posting as a flight instructor. However, a friend of his was about to get married and Wozniak asked that his friend get the Canadian posting and that he should go to England. Wozniak was subsequently posted to #59 Operational Training Unit at Crosby-on-Eden, Cumberland, England, where he received six more weeks of training before being posted to RCAF 416 Squadron in Peterhead, Scotland in December. “So I get to Peterhead, a new airport that has a couple of strips of asphalt and a muddy field that’s a quagmire. I come in the adjutant’s office and there’s this beautiful blond WAAF officer behind the desk. I give her a snappy salute and report for 416 Squadron. “She asks where I was supposed to report, and I say Peterhead. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘this is Peterhead, but there’s no 416 Squadron.’ “Anyway she gets the CO (commanding officer), and he says, ‘I don’t know anything about 416 Squadron.’ “Then a couple more walk in, so he says, ‘Take their names and billet them.’ “I guess you could say it was early days.” The new 416 Squadron became the first line of defence against German bombers from Norway. As for that blond WAAF officer: “I spoke with her a few more times. Little did she know she was stuck with me.” See In War page 5