Not all heroes are racing drivers
Letter of the month
THE WONDERFULLY evocative article in Octane 212 about the pre-war Grands Prix held at Lwów in Poland had me checking personal recollections of my father, who was born in Lwów in 1915 and would have been at the very impressionable age of 15-18 years when they took place in 1930-33.
Father was Witold (Lanny) Lanowski – my mother remarried in the 1950s, so I have a different surname – and was one of the Polish flying aces of World War Two. He fought in the Polish, French, British and US air forces, racking up around 420 combat hours, and went on to fly around 50 different types of aircraft, including post-war jets such as the Hunter and Venom. His favourite and most successful was the P-47 Thunderbolt, which he flew with the 56th Fighter Group of the USAAF. It had .5in cannons, compared to the .303s of the Spitfire, which made it a 65% bigger hitter!
A book on his wartime experiences called was published in 2014, based on
