The lucky Donald Duck, flying ace in war and mercenary in Africa

They jokingly called him Donald Duck (or Donald Duck) and so he chose the Disney character as his personal badge by having it painted on the fuselage of his Hawker Hurricane and then on his Spitfire V with RF-D on the sides of the RAF cockade. For the German pilots, however, there was very little to joke about when Jan Eugeniusz Ludwik Zumbach’s fighter plane intercepted them over the English skies. In addition to the ever-present Donald Duck, he soon had 13 black crosses painted in succession: one for each Luftwaffe aircraft shot down. Born in a village near Warsaw in 1915, Zumbach had Swiss citizenship which he inherited through his father Eugeniusz from his grandfather who had settled in Poland, and throughout his life he used a Swiss passport. This did not prevent him from becoming a famous Polish air force ace incorporated into the British Royal Air Force.

Volunteer in the Air Force forging his mother’s signature

His passion for flying had come to him since he was a child, observing the evolution of a Fokker triplane in the skies of the family estate in Brunowo, near an aircraft factory. Despite being protected from military service because he was a Swiss citizen, by forging his mother’s signature Halina volunteered in 1934 but in the army, in the infantry, and was then admitted to the officer aviation school in 1936, where he obtained a pilot’s license and was assigned in 1938 to an elite fighter unit, the 111th squadron. When Poland was attacked by Hitler in September 1939, he was convalescing from the serious consequences of an accident that occurred in May which had led him to crash the plane into a service car on the edge of the runway during landing after a night exercise. But “Donald Duck” Zumbach, unlike Walt Disney’s character, is always lucky, and no subsequent accident will penalize him in his overwhelming career as an ace. Having lost contact with his unit, unreachable with a leg in plaster, he took a small tourist plane to Romania where he avoided internment, and subsequently to France, where he joined the Armée de l’Air, but on 12 June 1940, on the yoke of a Morane-Saulnier 406, he was shot down by a Messerschmitt Me 109. He jumped with a parachute and landed unharmed.

Highly decorated hero of the Battle of Britain

He was evacuated to Great Britain where the Polish second lieutenant fought hard until he obtained a Hurricane from the 303rd Squadron with which on 7 September he achieved his first victory by shooting down a twin-engine Dornier Do 17, followed on the same day by another bomber; on the 9th, 11th and 15th he shot down three Me 109s, on the 26th a Heinkel He 111 and another Me 109, and the following day yet another Messerschmitt fighter. Donald Duck is implacable, angry and determined as he appears in the coat of arms painted on the left side of the fuselage. In December he was awarded the Victoria Medal and in February 1941 the Warrant Knight Medal. Zumbach would continue to shoot down Luftwaffe planes, add black crosses to his fighters, chest decorations and rank advancements, becoming commander of the already legendary 303rd Squadron of RAF records in May 1942. He will be the first pilot to engage in a duel with the very fearsome Focke Wulf FW 190, with his Spitfire Mk V RF-E where near the cockpit stands the inevitable angry Donald Duck with a stick in his hand and a cigarette in his beak. Not surprisingly: Zumbach is a chain smoker. Assigned to the Polish headquarters with the insignia of a lieutenant colonel, on 7 April 1945 during a transfer to the Netherlands for an inspection of the 84th Group the two Auster light liaison planes, one of which was Zumbach, lost their orientation and were forced to crash land in an area occupied by the Germans who took everyone prisoner. Donald Duck’s career as a hunter of the skies ends like this: the black crosses of the confirmed kills will remain 13, and so will the five red Balkankreutz edged in white for the unconfirmed ones, under the feet of the furious duck. The pilots were released in May, at the end of the war, and in October 1946 the Polish ace was discharged from the RAF.

Mister Brown’s Swiss passport and the spectacular raids for Katanga and Biafra

Since a return to communist Poland was unthinkable, unlike his fellow countrymen who had become stateless, Zumbach made use of the Swiss passport to move freely in Europe and thus secretly started a profitable and lucrative business of smuggling gold, money, cigarettes, diamonds, Swiss watches and even Jews helped to enter clandestinely into Palestine, as well as arms trafficking facilitated by the enormous availability on the black market, with banks in the turbulent Middle East. He also opened a nightclub in Paris in 1951, the Club de l’Etoile. In the 1960s Zumbach, who had made his fortune, closed the nightclub, liquidated his business and left for Africa as a mercenary: in 1962, Katanga, which wanted to break away from the Congo, entrusted him, who traded in used planes, with the task of creating an air force (Avikat) starting from tourist planes, with which he carried out reckless strafing raids at low altitude. The same thing will happen in 1967 with Biafra seceding from Nigeria. The former World War II ace, who calls himself John Brown or Mister Brown, not only sets up a mini-fleet of a few obsolete planes adventurously found along the unfathomable African trade routes, bypassing international controls, but he himself commands a remnant twin-engine Douglas B-26 Invader handcraftedly converted into a bomber, from which he drops homemade bombs also made with pots as containers. The surprise attack on Makurdi airport in Nigeria is sensational, with the destruction of several vehicles stopped on the runway and the killing of the chief of staff whose sudden loss paralyzes the Nigerian army.

Death mysteries in Paris and the iconic Spitfire with Donald Duck on the fuselage

In the same year, however, Zumbach returned to France, where he spent the rest of his life in activities that were never well clarified. He died at the age of seventy on 3 January 1986 and, with such an adventurous curriculum behind him and mysterious relationships with the secret services of numerous countries, it was even hypothesized by those who knew him well that he might have been killed, but the French authorities hastily closed the investigation, without even revealing the outcome of the autopsy. The pilot’s remains will be welcomed with full honors in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw. Zumbach had been awarded the Virtuti Militari and four brave crosses, as well as the British Distinguished Flying Cross with two bars. No one ever knew why he was nicknamed Donald Duck, nor did he leave it written in his memoirs “The Last Battle” translated into several languages ​​which, also considering the character and his popular experience, had a certain editorial success at the time. His Spitfire Mk V marked with the initials RF-D and with angry Donald Duck painted on the fuselage is a true icon of the Second World War.