Poland's air force was not wiped out on the ground in 1939
German propaganda claimed Poland's warplanes were smashed on their runways on the first day of the 1939 invasion. In fact the combat aircraft had already been dispersed to secondary fields; the planes bombed on the ground were mostly trainers. Many Polish pilots later escaped abroad and kept fighting from France and then Britain.
Polish military flying began before the country regained independence on 11 November 1918. In 1917, as the Russian Revolution loosened the tsar's grip, Polish airmen who had served in Russian, German or Austro-Hungarian forces formed their own improvised units in places including present-day Belarus and southern Ukraine. The first air arm of the new state relied on German and Austrian machines left behind or captured, and on 2 November 1918 Stefan Bastyr flew its first combat sortie from Lwów, now Lviv.
During the war with Soviet Russia from 1920, the force mixed ex-German aircraft with newly bought Allied types such as French Breguet 14 bombers. Between 1918 and 1924 it counted 2,160 aircraft in total, though not all could fly. French designs dominated the 1920s until home-grown ones appeared: the PWS-10 fighter in 1930, then Zygmunt Puławski's all-metal PZL P.7a in 1933 and the PZL P.11c in 1935, which remained Poland's only fighter until 1939. The PZL.37 Łoś bomber, with a payload of 2,580 kilograms, was modern, but only about 100 had been delivered when war came.
The invasion that began on 1 September 1939 found Polish fighters obsolete but not idle. About 70 percent of the aircraft were eventually destroyed, and after the Soviet invasion on 17 September most pilots escaped through Romania and Hungary. In France they formed a squadron flying Caudron light fighters and joined French units, and after France fell in 1940 many reached Britain.
There, within the Royal Air Force, four Polish squadrons were raised: 300 and 301 flew bombers, while 302 and 303 flew Hawker Hurricanes. Polish airmen also later served alongside Soviet forces. The modern service took its current name in July 2004; in 2014 it had about 26,000 personnel and roughly 475 aircraft spread across ten bases.
Source: Polish Air Force
