Ansaldo A.1 Balilla - Polish users, part one

We keep going with this Italian fighter, now we are centering in the Polish users. As Poland used this fighter so widely, we had to divide it into two parts.

A Polish purchasing commitee visited Italy in 1919 looking for new weapons, and they closed a deal for ten evaluation airplanes. Those were delivered to Warsaw in January 1920. Initally the impression caused, mainly from American volunteers was extremely good due to its' high speed, fuel capacity and maneuvrability. It's curious to point out that this last aspect was disdained by the Italian pilots.

On May 25th they were deployed on the front line (the Polish-Soviet war was active during those days) and all except one of them were destroyed during a Soviet counter-attack in Ukraine. However, the Polish commitee had already closed another contract to buy another 25 machines plus a license to locally build them. The new batch of airplanes arrived in Poland after hostilities ended and, in July 1921 the first of 36 machines were produced in the Lublin factory.

Anyway, we are going to cover the Lublin-built ones in the next post.

Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansaldo_A.1_Balilla
2. Salamander Books - The Complete book of fighters.