The American Plane

King Kong. But what does he have to do with the city? Exactly one hundred and one years ago the Bolsheviks occupied Bila Tserkva and all of Ukraine. The country was liberated by Ukrainian troops together with Polish ones. One of the units of the Polish army was the Kosciuszko Squadron, which consisted mainly of American pilots. The Americans wanted in this way to thank the Poles for their help in the American War of Independence. The initiator of forming this unit was the American Merian Cooper. After the liberation of Kyiv from the Bolsheviks, this unit was stationed in Bila Tserkva. From the airfield located on the present-day Kursova Street, the Americans carried out reconnaissance flights. Unfortunately, within a month the Bolsheviks gathered their forces and struck at the liberated Ukrainian lands. Later Cooper recalled with pleasure the Ukrainian evenings when young men and women in national dress gathered and sang folk songs. In July, during one of the battles with Budyonny’s units, the Bolsheviks shot down his plane, and he was taken prisoner. Budyonny promised a large sum for Cooper’s head, but the American managed to convince the Bolsheviks that he was an ordinary proletarian from Chicago who had been forced to fight. He made an unsuccessful attempt to escape captivity and for 9 months built a railway near Moscow. Yet Cooper managed to escape captivity and walk 700 km to Poland, where he was awarded an order. After returning to the USA, Cooper took up journalism and later producing in Hollywood. At one point in his life Cooper became interested in the life of gorillas, after which he wrote a script about a giant ape and its adventures in New York, and then became the producer of the film King Kong, which gained unprecedented fame and remains popular to this day. By the way, in the scene where King Kong smashes a building and is shot at from aircraft, the pilot of one of the planes was Cooper. This sculpture is located at a place directly connected with his professional activity.