Anna Leska – ATA Pilot
Born on the 4th November 1910, Anna Zofia Marta Leska grew up with a love of flying. She learned to fly gliders and hot air balloons at the Warsaw Aeroclub. In the late 1930s, she and fellow pilot Stefania Wojtulanis had had their applications to the Polish Air Force turned down, but the onset of war in 1939 changed that overnight.
Anna and Stefania were assigned and to the personal flight of General Jozef Zajac, the Polish Air Force’s Commander-in-Chief. Flying in commandeered, unarmed aircraft, they managed to stay ahead of the invading Wehrmacht. They hid their aircraft in the woods at night to prevent them from being discovered. While the Polish Army surrendered on the 27th September, General Zajac ordered his staff south and to escape Poland to carry on the fight.
Fellow ATA pilot, Diana Barnardo-Walker recounted how Anna had told her of her escape from Poland. Anna escaped with a friend by sneaking onto an occupied airfield at night and stealing a plane. In the pitch black, they refused to give anything away by turning on a light, and without checking how much fuel they had in their tanks, they took off, rather startling the German aerodrome guards. They made it to Romania when their fuel ran out. Other versions of this tale have Anna escaping with four passengers in the Wedel Chocolate Company’s three-seat aircraft. Regardless, Anna’s escape made her one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who escaped Poland to carry on the fight against the Nazis. On arriving in Romania, these refugees would find a less than warm welcome. They had their aircraft impounded and many Polish soldiers would spend the freezing winter of 1939 in internment camps where thousands would perish. Anna was luckier and was taken in by a local police chief and his wife.
The Poles did not wait around in Romania and General Zajac was especially keen to get his Air Force out and back into the fight. With spies and Gestapo crawling all over Romania, escape was difficult, but Anna received a note to dress in a skirt and meet a car at a certain time. She was whisked to Bucharest and after seven months of travel, arrived in France. Anna had no idea what had happened to her family, but when he checked into a hotel in Menton, near Nice, she saw that her father had stayed in the same hotel, only days before on his way to England. Anna, though, headed for Paris, where the Polish Air Force had set up its headquarters. There, she met up again with Stefania Wojtulanis and with two other female pilots, they were, as Stefania would record, commissioned as Pilot Officers and allowed to wear the full steel blue Polish Air Force pilots’ uniforms with a star on each epaulette. Paris loved them.
But Anna’s race to stay ahead of the Germans was not yet complete. When France fell in June 1940, Anna was sent to St Jean de Luz where she was whisked to Plymouth. From there, she made her way to the Polish General Staff building, located on Buckingham Palace Road. There she met a friend who advised her to head up to room 303. When she knocked on the door, it was opened by her father.
Anna’s brother, Kazimierz Leski, would remain in Poland, join the Musekteers as the head of counterintelligence and lead the “Bradl” company of the Home Army’s Miłosz battalion during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
The Air Transport Auxiliary was formed on 15th February 1940 as a civilian organisation to release pilots from ferrying duties so that they could serve in active squadrons. Their motto was Aetheris Avidi, “Eager for the Air”. But, ATA was quickly, very unofficially, acknowledged to mean “Anything to Anywhere” and over the course of the war, the men and women of the ATA, from 25 countries, would ferry 309,000 aircraft of 147 types all over Britain. These aircraft would be flown in all weather and without radios and minimal, if any instrumentation. Under the leadership of Commander Pauline Gower, later MBE, the women’s section would be stood up. Following a few months as an interpreter at the Air Ministry, Anna joined the ATA in January 1941 along with compatriot Barbara Wojtulanis. They would later be joined by a third Polish pilot, Jadwiga Pilsudska, the youngest daughter of Marshal Józef Piłsudski. When Jadwiga and her family fled Poland, they took her father’s uniform with them.
You can learn more about the remarkable, tragically short life, of Pauline Gower in our conversation with Pauline’s biographer Allison Hill in our podcast episode below:
Life in the ATA was busy, and the types of aircraft each pilot could fly were based on a category system. While the women initially could only fly non-combat aircraft, by August 1941, they were regularly delivering Spitfires and, by war’s end, would deliver every type of aircraft in the RAF’s armoury.
In April 1942, while at White Waltham, a young American photojournalist on her first assignment for Vogue snapped a picture of Anna in the cockpit of a Spitfire. Lee Miller’s photograph would become famous, as would Miller’s career as a War Photographer and Surrealist. The image of Anna in her Spitfire would become the lead photograph for the Imperial War Museum’s retrospective Lee Miller: A Woman’s War in 2016.
While Anna’s Polish compatriots would have digs in London and commute to the ATA’s base at White Waltham, Anna would live closer to the base. But, the lights of London would call and at one of the many rounds of parties, Anna met fellow Pole Mieczysław Daab, a navigator with 301 Squadron. Mieczysław would be shot down on August 18, 1942, in a Vickers Wellington and eventually end up in Stalag Luft III until liberation in January 1945. They would marry after the war.
Diana Barnado-Walker remembered Anna as a ‘much loved, fiery character’. Another friend remembered that her experiences escaping Poland had left her ‘deeply and permanently upset’. Anna would famously clash with another ‘fiery character’ in the form of Chilean Margot Duhalde. No one really knows how their feud began, but it reached its height in a ‘dogfight’ over Hamble. They were both in Spitfires and the story goes that Duhalde ‘jumped’ the queue while they were coming into land. Neither backed down, it was perhaps a good thing neither aircraft were armed. Duhalde would remember that they ‘fought’ over everything, on the ground, in the air. We would barge in front of each other when taxiing to take off or cut each other off when we were coming into land.’
They were shopped to their boss, Margot Gore, by Duhalde’s boyfriend at the time, Squadron Leader Gordon Scotter, who feared for their safety. Gore made Duhalde apologise to Anna, but she swore that she would knock Anna’s teeth out after the war! There is no record of whether the threat was ever attempted. They never patched things up. At a reception in the ATA’s honour many years later with the Duke of Kent as the guest of honour, they made pleasant to the Duke and promptly started arguing again.
Anna’s delivery life was not without incident. While landing a Hawker Typhoon at Eastleigh one day, she was hit by Squadron Leader Michael Graham in a Spitfire, who was landing after an air test. The landing ‘T’ had been changed, which Graham hadn’t noticed during his quick flight, and the two aircraft collided, making a mess of both. S/L Graham’s knowledge of Polish profanity, it is said, was greatly increased following the incident.
Anna Leska would retire from the ATA on 31st October 1945, the last of the Polish contingent to leave. By this time, she had delivered 1,295 aircraft of 93 types, including multi-engine aircraft, flying boats and 557 Supermarine Spitfires. Anna’s logbooks show she was airborne for 1,241 hours with the ATA. In recognition of her service, she received many Polish and British decorations, including the Polish Military Pilot Badge and the Royal Medal.
Anna and Mieczysław married and lived in London until 1977, when they returned to Poland. Mieczysław passed away in 1980, and Anna on January 21st, 1998, at the age of 87.
Anna Leska-Daab donated her papers and logbooks to the Polish Aviation Museum in Krakow, where they have digitised her logbooks for 1941 and 1945.
If you want to learn more about Lee Miller’s life, check out the interview Charly White and I did with Lee’s son, Anthony Penrose, and granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, for History Hack back in the day below.
Sources:
Spitfire Women of World War 2 by Giles Whittell
Spreading My Wings by Diana Barnato Walker
BBC’s Spitfire Women documentary 2010
http://platerki-wspomnienia.blogspot.com/2011/02/anna-leska-daab-1910-1998-pilotka.html
http://www.poles.org/db/w_names/Wojtulanis_KB/Wojtulanis_KB.html
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mieczys%C5%82aw_Daab
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Leski
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