Jan Stangryczuk

Born April 8th, 1922 (Chełm, Poland)

He arrived in Belfast in 1940 on a freighter, the Highland Chieftain, carrying a cargo of meat from Buenos Aires and other provisions for a nation at war. Black’s father had emigrated to Argentina five years earlier and Jan had spent his early teenage years on a South American farm. But then war broke out in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of his homeland.

“The English-language newspapers were carrying advertisements calling for volunteers to come and fight in Britain. I went down to Buenos Aires to sign up and there was a mix of people there from all over the place who wanted to fight,” Black says. He was given a medical exam, and three weeks later he received a letter at his farm, asking him to return to the capital and wait for his ship.

The voyage in the Highland Chieftain took four weeks as it zigzagged across the Atlantic dodging German U-boats. The human cargo, an international mix of 180 volunteer fighters, were ordered to wear their “Mae West” lifejackets at all times, even asleep in their hammocks.

From Belfast, the recruits were ferried to an induction centre in Scotland and asked to choose an armed service to fight in. Like most of the young men, Black chose the air force – “it seemed the most noble” – and ended up in a training base in Blackpool with hundreds of other Poles who had found their way across occupied Europe at the outbreak of war and on to ships still sailing out of Portugal. Everyone wanted to be a pilot, far more than there were slots, so Black settled for his second choice, a gunner, learning to identify the night silhouettes of friendly and enemy planes in a darkened Blackpool cinema.

The Battle of Britain was over by then and the RAF’s counter-attack had begun against the Nazi industrial base in occupied Europe. But Black’s first sorties as a rear-gunner in a Wellington bomber, as part of an operational training unit, were dropping propaganda leaflets over occupied France.