Every May, the town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight remembers a Polish warship. There is a plaque, a street named after her captain, and an annual commemoration.
The reason is one night in 1942, and the ship is still afloat.
Out of Poland, four days early
On 30 August 1939, three Polish destroyers left Gdynia and sailed for Britain. The operation was called Peking, and its logic was blunt: the Polish navy could not survive in the Baltic, so the ships were better used anywhere else.
Germany invaded two days later. Błyskawica — the name means Lightning — spent the rest of the war under Polish command in British waters, escorting convoys and hunting submarines.
The night of 4 May 1942
She was back where she had been built. Błyskawica was laid down in 1935 at the Samuel White yard in Cowes, and in the spring of 1942 she was there again for a refit — guns partly dismantled, ammunition removed, crew ashore.
Her commander, Wojciech Francki, had a bad feeling about the night. He ordered the ammunition brought back aboard, the anti-aircraft guns reassembled, and the ship moved from her berth.
He was right. That night around 160 German bombers attacked Cowes, targeting the shipyards. Błyskawica was the only substantial anti-aircraft platform in the harbour. She fired for hours, moving position repeatedly, and laid a smoke screen over the town — partly to hide the yards, partly to hide the houses. Her barrels overheated and had to be cooled with wet rags and seawater.
The raid killed around seventy people. Without the ship, Cowes believes the number would have been much higher. The town has not forgotten: Francki was made an honorary citizen, and the commemoration continues to this day.
Still there
Błyskawica returned to Poland after the war and is now a museum ship in Gdynia, open to visitors. She is often described as the oldest preserved destroyer in the world — launched in 1936 and still afloat, ninety years later.
She is also the only ship to have been awarded Poland's highest military decoration, the Virtuti Militari.
The model
COBI's ORP Błyskawica, set 4865, is a model of the destroyer in the Historical Collection, with printed markings rather than stickers and a display stand.
It is in stock and ships from our own shelves.
Leave a comment