BOHDAN
A decorated squadron commander, increasingly disillusioned with Poland's wartime leadership. Wounded and dependent on morphine, he becomes entangled in a mysterious incident involving General Sikorski.
SZCZEPAN
A disciplined officer whose faith in duty and country survives years as a German POW. He returns to Poland after the war, rises rapidly, and is ultimately destroyed in the Stalinist purges.
MIETEK
A former LOT pilot driven more by his love of flying than by ideology. He survives war and exile, only to find himself gradually left behind by the post-war world.
THE WIVES AND FAMILIES
While the airmen fight abroad, their wives and children struggle to protect their families and preserve a sense of normal life under war and occupation in Poland.
The story unfolds largely in flashback, framed by the Polish Air Force Association in London in 1956. Each episode moves between past and present as the lives of the three airmen converge, separate, and ultimately lead to very different fates.
EPISODE 1 — DECOMMISSIONED PLANES
In 1931, young Polish airmen set out to ferry obsolete biplanes from Lida to the Air Force Academy in Dęblin. Their journey combines youthful adventure, light comedy and the very real dangers of early aviation. A wartime Wellington ditching in the North Sea frames the episode and reveals an unexpected connection between the two stories.
EPISODE 2 — LEAVING POLAND
As France collapses in 1940, Polish airmen continue the fight after the loss of their country. The episode follows both career military airmen and former civilian pilots as their separate journeys through Poland, Romania, North Africa and France converge in exile. At Bayonne, Bohdan refuses a French general’s order to surrender, revealing both his courage and his growing distrust of Allied leadership.
EPISODE 3 — 305 BOMBER SQUADRON
In Britain, the three airmen come together in 305 Polish Bomber Squadron, flying dangerous night operations while becoming part of a close-knit community of aircrew and ground crews. Between missions they drink, dance, form relationships and mourn friends who fail to return. But when Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union suddenly turns Poland’s former aggressor into an Allied partner, the political compromises that follow are met with disbelief and growing distrust among men whose families have already suffered under Soviet occupation.
EPISODE 4 — THE FLARE
Wounded and increasingly dependent on morphine, Bohdan becomes entangled in a mysterious incident involving a signal flare aboard General Sikorski’s aircraft. Did he thwart an assassination attempt, was it an accident—or something Bohdan himself had done? His psychological disintegration is contrasted with 305 Squadron’s participation in the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne.
EPISODE 5 — THE WIVES
The perspective shifts to the wives and families left behind in Poland. A warm Christmas gathering of pilots and their families in 1938 contrasts with the same women sheltering with their children during the Warsaw Uprising six years later.
EPISODE 6 — JUDGMENT
With the war over, Szczepan chooses to return to Poland and help rebuild its air force, rising to command the Air Force Academy at Dęblin before becoming a victim of the Stalinist purges. In Britain, Mietek struggles to find his place in a post-war world that is rapidly leaving him behind.
