In the early hours of 1 September 1939, German bombs fell on Kraków. At a hidden airfield at Balice, just west of the city, two pilots of the 121st Fighter Escadrille ran to their aircraft: Captain Mieczysław Medwecki and Second Lieutenant Władysław Gnyś. Their fighters were PZL P.11c monoplanes, with open cockpits, fixed landing gear and a distinctive gull wing.

Medwecki was shot down by German Ju 87 Stukas moments after takeoff, one of the first Allied airmen to die in the Second World War. Gnyś dodged the attack, climbed away and caught two Dornier Do 17 bombers heading home. Both went down. They are widely credited as the first Allied aerial victories of the war, scored in a fighter that had been among the most advanced in the world only five years earlier.

Puławski’s gull wing

IL PZL P.11 was the last of a family of fighters drawn by the brilliant young Polish engineer Zygmunt Puławski. Starting with the P.1 of 1929, he broke with the wooden biplanes most air forces still flew. His fighters were all-metal monoplanes with a high wing that dipped down where it met the fuselage, giving the pilot a superb view forward and to the sides.

The layout drew so much attention abroad that it became known as the “Polish wing” or the “Puławski wing”. The wing was skinned in finely corrugated duralumin sheet, strong and light, and the main fuel tank could be jettisoned from the fuselage in case of fire.

Puławski did not live to see his best design fly. He was killed in a flying accident in 1931, and engineer Wsiewołod Jakimiuk carried on the work. The first P.11 prototype flew in August 1931, piloted by Bolesław Orliński, and was shown at the Paris Air Show in December 1934, where it impressed specialists. According to the Polish Aviation Museum, it was technologically several years ahead of contemporary designs.

The best fighter in the world, briefly

When the P.11 entered Polish service in 1934, its contemporaries were biplanes such as Britain’s Gloster Gauntlet and Germany’s Heinkel He 51. For a short time it was arguably the most advanced fighter in service anywhere.

An interim P.11a was followed by the main production model, the P.11c. Its engine sat lower in the nose and the pilot sat further back and higher, both for a better view. Power came from licence-built Bristol Mercury radials of around 600 hp driving a wooden two-bladed propeller, and armament was two 7.92 mm machine guns in the fuselage, with two more in the wings on some aircraft.

A PZL P.11 engine run, taxiing and towing, filmed by the Polish channel Zabytki Nieba.

Romania was the first export customer, ordering 50 P.11b fighters, and the Romanian company IAR went on to build the P.11f under licence. A further development for export, the PZL P.24, sold to several more countries. Other buyers circled too. In the autumn of 1936 the Republican government in Spain tried to buy 36 airframes, according to the Polish Aviation Museum, but Poland’s declaration of neutrality in the Spanish Civil War stopped the deal. Greece, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey also showed interest before several of them chose the P.24 instead.

But aviation was moving fast. By 1937, as other nations introduced low-wing monoplanes with retractable undercarriages and enclosed cockpits, the P.11 was already obsolete.

September 1939

Poland knew it. Its intended replacement, the PZL.50 Jastrząb, was badly delayed, and orders placed abroad for modern fighters were not delivered before the war. As a stopgap, PZL built the P.11g Kobuz, with a more powerful Mercury VIII and an enclosed cockpit. Only the prototype flew before the war, in August 1939, and even it managed only around 390 km/h. So when Germany invaded on 1 September 1939, the P.11c was still the Polish Air Force’s primary fighter, alongside a handful of older P.7s.

The odds were brutal. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 E Bf 110 were much faster and better armed, and even many German bombers could outrun the worn-out P.11s, whose top speed was well under 400 km/h. Few of the Polish fighters carried radios, so pilots relied on hand signals and pre-arranged manoeuvres. Only about a third of the P.11cs had the extra pair of wing guns. The fighters were split between a Pursuit Brigade defending Warsaw and escadrilles attached to the field armies, so groups of more than twenty aircraft rarely flew together.

What the P.11 had was agility, a rugged airframe, a good climb rate and the ability to operate from short, rough fields. The squadrons had been dispersed to improvised airfields before the invasion, which saved them from being destroyed on the ground. Polish pilots used every advantage they had, including the superb view from that gull wing.

The results were remarkable for an aircraft so outclassed. The Polish Aviation Museum credits the P.11 with around 120 kills during the September campaign. Losses were heavy too, and by the end of the fighting dozens of surviving P.11s had been flown to Romania, where they were taken over by the Romanian air force.

Stefan Gnyś tells the story of his father Władysław, the P.11 pilot credited with the first Allied air victories of the war.

The last of the Elevens

Today only one P.11c survives anywhere. Serial 8.63 flew with the 121st Escadrille of the 2nd Air Regiment in Kraków, the same unit as Medwecki and Gnyś, and it is now the centrepiece of the Polish Aviation Museum in Kraków. In 2018, Gnyś’s son Stefan unveiled a plaque there honouring both pilots.

Aviation Station Media on the PZL P.11 and its place in Polish aviation history.

The P.11 was a fighter of 1934 thrown into a war of 1939. It could not change the outcome of the invasion, and nobody expected it to. But for a few weeks its pilots made the Luftwaffe pay, in an aircraft that had once shown the rest of the world how a monoplane fighter could look.

Sources: Wikipedia (PZL P.11; Władysław Gnyś), Polish Aviation Museum Kraków, Aircrew Remembered, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Wikimedia Commons