Excerpt from the book: "A Fighter Pilot's Life"
by Francis Gabreski.

        On February 3, 1943, the mission was a circus to St. Omer, a French town inland from Calais and south of Dunkirk. The familiar hum of radio jamming was with us as we crossed the Strait of Dover and made landfall just west of Calais. A few bursts of flak welcomed us to occu­pied France, but they were well off to the left and below us.
My eyes were scanning a bank of clouds in front of us over St. Omer when the electrifying call came over the radio in Polish: “One-nineties, coming out of the sun!” My mind went blank in excitement for a split second before I could swivel my head around for a look. By then they were right on top of us and beginning to open fire.
Stick with your leader! I remembered Andersz just in time to follow him as he whipped his Spitfire into a tight turn. The crafty Luftwaffe pilots had caught us in a tight spot. Since they were above and behind us, there was no point in trying to dive away. That wasn’t the Poles’ style anyway, so Andersz turned to fight.

    The next few moments were a blur of motion. I stayed glued to Andersz as he dodged among the blunt-nosed German fighters, occasionally firing his guns. Then I heard his voice in my earphones:
    “Boy, do you see them? They’re right ahead of you. Shoot!”
    “No. I don’t see them,” I called back. I was too excited or too scared to make any sense out of what I was see­ing through the windscreen.
    “They’re right in front of you, right in front!” Andersz called again.
I concentrated harder and saw a group of dots way out in front of us. They must be the ones he’s talking about, I thought.
    “Shoot! Shoot!” Andersz called again, so I pointed my guns roughly in the direction of the dots and pressed on he trigger. Tracers danced out in front of me, but I didn’t see whether they were hitting anything.
Then in another heartbeat it was over. The planes in front of me rolled over and stuck their noses straight down, breaking off the engagement as they dove for mine. Andersz turned sharply to the left and I followed him. I looked around the sky and saw nothing. Our Spitfires were alone.
My heart was still pounding as we headed westward back across the Channel. I was drenched with sweat and more than a little perplexed. I had been in a fight with the enemy, and yet I had hardly seen a thing. How long would it take before I really knew what I was doing? How long until I developed the Polish eagle eyes that Andersz had?
    Back at Northolt, the pilots were in a state of excite­ment I hadn’t seen before. Everyone wanted to talk at once, and I was very glad my command of Polish was good or I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what any­one was saying. Once everything had been sorted out, it was determined we had shot down three 190s without losing anyone - a pretty good showing considering we had been surprised from above. Andersz and Sawicz praised me for holding my position throughout the en­gagement, but I was still disturbed.
    “Did you see that airplane underneath?” Andersz asked me.
    “Not really, but I saw the ones directly in front of me, and they’re the ones I shot at,” I replied.
    “No, there was one right under you that wouldn’t go away,” Andersz said. “You’ll see it on your film.”

    That evening we sat down to view the gun camera films of the scrap. Each Spitfire was equipped with a small movie camera in the wing that would take pictures whenever the guns were fired. It also was possible to shoot film without shooting the guns. The films were used as an aid to the intelligence officers in confirming pilots’ claims, and they provided a terrific training tool for critiquing pilots’ combat techniques. After the mis­sion, the exposed film would be processed and pieced together into a movie. Pilots could learn a lot by seeing what worked and what didn’t.
When we came to my film from the day I was in for a rude shock. There on the screen I could barely see the fleeing dots I had fired at, but in the lower corner of the screen, right under my nose, was a Focke-Wulf 190 that I hadn’t seen. It was big as a barn door!
    If I had seen him, all I’d have had to do was slip down a little bit and press the trigger. That would have been the end of him. This was the target Andersz had been yelling about.
Now as we talked about combat tactics I had a better frame of reference, and it began to make sense. You had to settle down and be calm about the situation when you were over enemy territory. When the fight started you obviously got excited, but you couldn’t let yourself stop looking around. Even if you got an enemy plane in your sights you couldn’t fix your attention on it. You had to remain completely aware of what was going on around you, and fire only when it was expedient. Otherwise, there might be someone else on one side or the other coming in on your tail.
In the case of my 190, I had no problem with anybody closing in on me, because the German pilot obviously hadn’t seen me either. Andersz advised me not to lose any sleep over it.
    “Well, that’s just natural,” he said. “We were all like that at first, kind of frozen.” Then he added something else that stuck with me throughout the war. “You’ve got to always respect your enemy. The Ger­mans have been at war for quite a while, and they have a lot of experience. So whatever encounter you may get into, always remember you have to respect their ability to shoot you down.”

    I learned a few more lessons from the February 3 mis­sion, not the least of which was the need for strict disci­pline on the radio during a fight. The Poles knew that you had to keep the channels as clear as possible so they could warn each other of danger or help each other get in firing position. I never heard them exclaim over making a kill or anything like that. They saved all the chitchat for the bar after they got home. In the air they were all business.
Another important lesson from the mission had to do with shooting. Like most novices, I was having trouble estimating the range of a target in front of me. Depth perception is very difficult at high altitudes because you have nothing to compare the target to. The Poles were well seasoned, and most of them knew to hold their fire until they came well into range, which was about 250 to 300 yards...

Together with his Polish friends in 56th group  of the 8th. From left: Boleslaw Gladych, Tadeusz Sawicz, Francis Gabreski, Kazimierz Rutkowski, Tadeusz Andersz and Witold Lanowski.

...The Poles of 315 Squadron all lived by this maxim and used the sun to their advantage every chance they got, yet on this day the 190s still had been able to surprise us by using the bright rays of the sun to shield their approach. It’s one thing to be told something like that, but quite another to actually experience it on the receiving end. One moment I had looked back into an empty sky above me, and the next moment it had been full of 1 90s that seemed to have come out of nowhere. I was lucky to have survived the lesson; a lot of inexperienced pilots didn’t.
I flew about two dozen more missions with the Poles, but we didn’t get into any more scraps with the Luftwaffe while I was at Northolt. As February neared its end my confidence was growing with each day, each mission...

...Within a few days I received orders transferring me to the 56th Fighter Group at Kings Cliffe airfield near Peter-borough. It was difficult to say goodbye to all the great friends I’d made in 315 Squadron, especially Andersz. We spent a raucous evening at the bar, and then it was time for me to go. “Remember, my friend,” Andersz said. “Don’t shoot until you’re close enough to make a sure kill.” Neither of us knew it at the time, but we would fly together again.

Tadeusz Sawicz, author and Francis Gabreski in 1999.