and readiness. Only once, on 21 January, the unit took part in an offensive sortie over France, when one Flight joined 2 Polish Fighter Wing in a sweep over Abbeville-Le Touquet.

Next month brought more operations. The busiest was February 26th, when the unit flew two full strength "Roadstead" missions, escorting bombers raiding the port of Dunkirk.

During the first half of March, the 303 flew several sorties for the joined maneuvers of the Army, Navy and Air Force coded "Spartan". Then the pilots were rejuvenated when orders were received for several "Rhubarb" and "Rodeo" missions. One of those was a sortie done by section of F/Lt Drobinski. Pilots successfully strafed multiple targets. As usual, that did not happen without facing strong AA fire, what resulted in a serious damagedone to Sgt Gorny's Spitfire. Despite being seriously wounded, he brought back the plane, which he crashed loosing consciousness during landing. Those operations continued in April.

During all this time, Poles did not encounter German planes. Only on three occasions in May, the 303 pilots had a chance to fight; on one of them S/Ldr Bienkowski claimed one FW190 damaged.

Right: Spitfire V flown by S/Ldr Bienkowski on May 17, 1943 leading the escort to B-17 with General Montgomery on board. On June 1st, the unit returned to Northolt, and once again became part of the 1 Polish Fighter Wing. The squadron began conversion to Spitfire Mk IX, a new version designed to match performance of the German Focke Wulf 190. The new version had almost twice the range of