A Question of Honor
Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 Vintage Books
ISBN: 037572625X

The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II.

A Question of Honor is the gripping, little-known, & brilliantly told story of the scores of Polish fighter pilots who helped save England during the Battle of Britain & of their stunning betrayal by the United States & England at the end of World War II.

Centering on five pilots of the renowned Kosciuszko Squadron: Miraslaw Feric, Witold Lokuciewski, Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, Jan Zumbach & Witold Urbanowicz, Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud show how the fliers, driven by their passionate desire to liberate their homeland, came to be counted among the most heroic & successful fighter pilots of World War II. Drawing on the Kosciuszko Squadron’s unofficial diary -– filled with the fliers’ personal experiences in combat -– & on letters, interviews, memoirs, histories, & photographs, Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud bring the men & battles of the squadron vividly to life.

We follow the principal characters from their training before the war, through their hair-raising escape from Poland to France & then, after the fall of France, to Britain. We see how, first treated with disdain by the RAF, the Polish pilots played a crucial role during the Battle of Britain, where their daredevil skill in engaging German Messerschmitts in close & deadly combat while protecting the planes in their own groups soon made them legendary. & we learn what happened to them after the war, when their country was abandoned & handed over to the Soviet Union.

A Question of Honor also gives us a revelatory history of Poland during World War II & of the many thousands in the Polish armed forces who fought with the Allies. It tells of the country's unending struggle against both Hitler & Stalin, its long battle for independence, & the tragic collapse of that dream in the “peace” that followed. Powerful, moving, deeply involving, A Question of Honor is an important addition to the literature of World War II.

It is a signal of the depth of British amnesia that all during my childhood when schools of that time steeped their students in the lore & legends of the War that had just been won, they addressed not one word -- not one mention -- not one memory of these valiant & tenacious Polish Aces, their crews & support personnel.

I only knew about the Kosciuszko Squadron because my oldest brother took me for a drive in his new hunter green Triumph one long ago weekend & we ended up in a dingy pub where the walls were covered with already fading black & white photos of handsome airmen beside their Spitfires & Hurricanes. We were there to pay homage to two of our Mater's brothers who “bought it” during the Battle of Britain. I had no idea all those men were Poles in exile because my mother's family, while British subjects, had been born in Portugal.

So when I cracked open A Question of Honor I was immediately transported back to a world & a time I recall only because I was a young girl who, clutching her a soft toy & her blankie while air raid sirens howled in the night, ran with all the other evacuee children out of the house to the air raid shelter under the tennis court, to drink hot, sweet chocolate, recite our times tables endlessly while outside a thunderstorm crashed & thumped all around. I really didn't understand what it was all about until many years later.

A Question of Honor is much, much more than a simple record of the exploits of a group of displaced airmen during a war: it is a detailed & riveting account of the romance of airplanes, boyhoods after World War I & the life & times of the Poles caught between the vise of land-hungry Germany & the mighty chaos of communist USSR.

Absolutely outstanding!

More from Stanley Cloud & Lynne Olson:
The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism with Stanley Cloud
Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.
(02/27/05)

Rebecca