Frank Vindis was nineteen when the Luftwaffe arrived over Duxford in the summer of 1940. He had been in England for less than a year, having reached it through the only route then available to a young Czech with flying ambitions: a journey through Poland, France, Algeria, and finally a troop-ship from Casablanca.

By the time he reached RAF Duxford in July, No. 310 (Czechoslovak) Squadron was being raised at speed. Aircraft, instructors and ground crew were assigned. The pilots — eighty per cent of them Czech, the rest Slovak, with British senior officers attached for liaison — were among the most experienced fighter pilots in Europe. They had been flying since long before the war and had nowhere else to fly to.

The first patrol

The squadron's first operational patrol launched on the 17th of August 1940 — thirteen days after the unit was officially activated. By the 26th of August it had its first kill. By the end of the Battle of Britain it had claimed thirty-seven enemy aircraft.

Czech and Polish pilots flew with a particular intensity in 1940. They were not fighting for an idea. They were fighting for a country they had already lost, against the people who had taken it.— A.G. RUSSELL, RAF DUXFORD STATION DIARY, OCTOBER 1940

Frank's logbook for 1940 is in a private collection. The entries are written in pencil, in clipped English, with the matter-of-factness common to fighter pilots of his generation. "Combat. Two enemy aircraft, one destroyed, one probable." "Scramble. No engagement." "Convoy patrol — bad weather, returned."

After the war

Frank chose not to return to Czechoslovakia. The country that emerged after 1945 was not the one he had left. He stayed in England, married, moved through a series of dealerships and franchises, and finally — in 1960 — opened his own, in Sawston.

He did not talk about the war much. The squadron's reunions, every September, were the exception; he would put on his blazer and disappear for the weekend. He kept his logbook, and a single faded photograph of NN-X — the Spitfire he flew most often — pinned above his desk at the dealership until the day he retired.

FURTHER READING

  • RAF Duxford and the Czech Squadrons, ed. R. Beauchamp (1994)
  • Imperial War Museum, Duxford — permanent exhibition
  • The 310 Squadron memorial, Brookwood Military Cemetery