Urbanowicz, Witold
(Mar. 30, 1908 - Aug. 17, 1996)In their book, A Question of Honor as good a history of the Kosciuszko Squadron - Forgotten Heroes of World War II - as you will find in the English language, Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, who are married to each other, wrote in 2003: "Myths about Poles and Poland abound - from tasteless Polish jokes to the preposterous notion that Poland in some way collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. In fact, Poland was the only European country invaded and defeated by the Germans that neither surrendered nor collaborated."
In fact, the authors were themselves inconsistent with the truth, to my knowledge, in two cases. They continued the myth that the great-great grandfather of Merian C. Cooper, who generated the Kosciuszko Squadron, fought with General Casimir Pulaski in the American Revolution and carried the wounded Polish hero to Captain Bulfinch's ship, Wasp, on which Pulaski died, and they buried him at sea. Another person fabricated the same story in the guise of Major Matthew Rogowski. Other variations abound. Actually, the captain of the Wasp buried Pulaski on Jane Bowen's plantation in what is now Savannah, Georgia, three miles from British troops, on October 15, 1779, and sailed at high tide the next day to Charleston, South Carolina, without the immortal cavalry officer.
In the other case, the wife of Witold Urbanowicz, whose maiden name was Jadwiga Gluchowski, was not portrayed very well. Had the authors of "A Question of Honor" checked Bolek's "Who's Who in Polish America," they would have found the person was born in Detroit, Michigan, where her father was the editor of a Polish daily newspaper, Dziennik Polski, and when she grew up, her mother, also named Jadwiga, took the two children of Casimir Gluchowski to Poland for their education until they fled back to United States in 1939. Most likely the children attended the gymnasium at Chyrow, Poland, from which their father graduated.
Not much is known of the parentage and early life of Witold Urbanowicz. You have to wonder what he wanted to be when he was growing up in Olszanka, a fishing village near Augustow, in the voivod with the most lakes in Poland. Airplanes and flying were not always thought of. When he was 21 years old, according to records of the Scandinavian-America Line, he was an engineer's helper on an 18,000-ton Danish steamship, Frederik VIII, and sailed to New York on August 5, 1929, to drop off passengers from Denmark, Norway and surrounding countries and pick up human cargo to go back to Europe. The steamship line gave travelers from these countries an opportunity to go to the United States without having to go to Germany or England. It introduced for the first time small cabins, two or four passengers in each one, instead of steerage space, where passengers, who traveled at the cheapest rate, were previously squeezed together like sardines in a can. In addition, the Frederik VIII carried an orchestra of skilled musicians and every person on board was treated to daily concerts.
The youth of Poland, in the years between the two world wars, were always looking for new opportunities to make life easier for themselves and their families. It was not any wonder in 1930, five years after the Polish Air Force Officers School was opened at Deblin, that Witold Urbanowicz was sent there to get his hands on military planes. Ironically, before the establishment of the flying school, Deblin was built on beautiful land at the point where Wieprz joins the Vistula River that Czar Nicholas l gave to a Polish general who crushed the uprising of his own people in 1831. After his death, the Polish laborers who built a huge fortress on the right bank of the Vistula and Jewish merchants also built Deblin. Its population grew and grew. After the First World War, new houses were built to serve more soldiers at the garrison and the builders of a bridge across the Vistula about 70 miles south of Warsaw.
Except for another training program at Grudziadz and a brief tour of duty in Warsaw, Urbanowicz owed eight years of his life, the first two as a student, to the flying school at Deblin. Beginning in 1936, he trained many future heroes of the Second World War in aerial warfare. In addition, in his spare time he became acquainted with the normal life of the Deblin people and institutions. Everybody was satisfied that Deblin was still in existence after various uprisings, wars, and Russian partition of their country.
In the darkness over Deblin on September 1, 1939, while Urbanowicz was giving a flying lesson to a cadet, he escaped bullets from a Messerschmidt, one of the fastest planes the German Luftwaffe had in stock, and did not know until he landed that he was the first target of the war in Poland. For days to come the Luftwaffe, which Hitler established in 1935 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, pounded Deblin and other cities of Poland. The Polish pilots had no planes to stop the waves of German bombers over their cities. For awhile Urbanowicz and other instructors made futile attempts to save their school and two provincial airfields. After Deblin was left in rubble, he received orders to pick up at least fifty British planes in Romania and bring them to Poland. He packed fifty cadets on a bus and rumbled out of the country like a team going to a football game. What he did know until he crossed the border was that Romania, supposedly a neutral country, would not accept the shipments of British planes to deliver to Polish pilots. Romanian soldiers would arrest them. Somehow h´ discovered that other Polish officers were arrested and he ran away from the bus, leaving the cadets to fend for themselves, and h´ slipped back into Poland. Russian soldiers captured him and placed him in a cell without another prisoner. After the guard fell asleep, the two men, who helped each other untie their knots, managed to escape, only to find Urbanowicz again in Romania with his cadets. Someone developed a plan - exactly who is a mystery - to hand each one money, a false identity card, and an escape route to France. Without going into detail, the Polish fliers literally melted away until they became thorns briefly in France and longer in England. None of the Polish fliers and soldiers who came from France in June of 1940 were surprised that Urbanowicz languished in the Royal Air Force since the beginning of the year.
Although he had more fights with the Luftwaffe than a lot of British fliers, he needed to learn English and adjust to the British way of doing things. The British command hesitated to integrate the first contingent of Polish fliers into the Royal Air Force, and Urbanowicz refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British king. In the middle of August, owing to a shortage of native-born fliers, the British command allowed most of the Polish fliers in the RAF to withdraw and, together with new arrivals from other countries, to form the Kosciuszko Squadron and 302, also known as the Poznan Squadron. Each one was divided into groups and were used to patrol parts of the United Kingdom. Occasionally, in August of 1940, the Kosciuszko Squadron was used to protect airfields. Then one of the Polish fliers in an English plane, known as a Hurricane, broke the rules and shot down a Messerschmidt. With the loss of 100 British fliers right after that incident, the Kosciuszko Squadron was now free for the first time to fire on German aircraft.
"If it goes on like this," one of them wrote in his diary, "we shall fill volumes." Urbanowicz was still in the British 145th Squadron. He was transferred to the Kosciuszko Squadron and on September 7, when the squadron leader was shot down after knocking seven German planes out of the sky, he took over the group. The youngest squadron leader in the RAF with the rank of Polish lieutenant. Then day after day Urbanowicz downed more German planes than any other flier in his group, and on September 18, 1940, three days after the bombing of London momentarily stopped, was awarded Poland's highest decoration for valor, the Order of Virtuti Militari. Throughout the Battle of Britain, Urbanowicz shot down more German planes - 15 in all - than any other Polish pilot, and was awarded the Disguised Flying Cross, the highest decoration of the RAF, as were four other Polish pilots. The Kosciuszko Squadron lost no pilots, compared to 14 British pilots and 39 planes, during 57 straight days of bombing in England between August and October of 1940. Thousands of Londoners, of course, were killed. There would be more deaths in the future in London and other English cities.
Many months after his departure from the Kosciuszko Squadron, Urbanowicz spent the summer of 1941 in Canada and the United States, mostly recruiting pilots in the guise of a lecture tour, and working under General Wladyslaw Sikorski, head of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Subsequently, in 1942, the Polish ambassador to the United States, Jan Ciechanowski, requested the transfer of Urbanowicz to the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C. During the time he was assistant air attache at the Polish Embassy, he met Jadwiga Gluchowski, whose father died Sept. 15, 1941, in Windsor, Canada, and they were married March 3, 1943. It is difficult, owing to privacy laws, to discuss their son and other family matters.
Whatever they were, the hero of the Battle of Britain decided to leave his post at the Polish Embassy and hook up with General Claire Chennault, then commander of the U.S. Air Force in China, and flew several combat missions with Chennault's Flying Tigers. He was the second oldest pilot in the group and flew a P-40 fighter plane. He escorted bombers and transport planes. He dropped food and ammunition to Chinese troops. He sank Japanese river boats and destroyed their planes in the air and on the ground. For his services with the 75th Squadron in China, he received the U.S. Air Medal. Early in 1944 he returned to London, instead of Washington, and was promoted in March to the rank of lieutenant colonel by the Polish Air Force, and then, on August 9, 1944, returned to the Polish Embassy in Washington and remained as air attache until July of 1945.
Unlike WW II veterans in the U.S. who were able to write a book or two under the G.I. Bill, Urbanowicz, on his own, wrote his memoirs, "Mysliwy," and found a publisher for it in Poland. The book was little read in the United States. To support his family, he worked one year as a statistician in the New York headquarters of American Overseas Airlines. Then he was, consecutively, secretary of the YMCA in New York and their representative in Poland, during which he visited Olszanka, where his grandfather took him hunting in his youth, and the rest of his family in Suwalki, which became the capital of the gubernia to which Olszanka belonged in the Russian partition of Poland. Urbanowicz eventually deposited his collection of papers, photographs, medals, and other materials in a Suwalki museum.
When he returned to the United States, he bought a little house in Astoria, across the East River from Manhattan, and worked in the aircraft industry until he retired in 1973 and wrote three more books in Polish. President Lech Walesa, who threw the Polish Communists out of power in 1985, promoted Urbanowicz by brevet to the rank of general in the Polish Air Force. He died in New York City on August 17, 1996, and was buried with other heroes of the Second World War in the cemetery of the shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, which a Polish monk of the Pauline Order started on a 40-acre farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The barn on the farm was turned into a chapel and named in honor and glory of the patroness of Poland. The shrine, with wooden benches and an oil painting of the saint, was opened to pilgrims on June 25, 1955. The painting, copy of the Miraculous one in Czestochowa, Poland, received blessings in Czestochowa, Poland, by Pope John XXIII in Rome, various Polish parishes in the United States, and was placed permanently in the large church of the shrine in the presence of President Lyndon B. Johnson and 100,000 pilgrims on October 16, 1966. Urbanowicz himself visited the shrine on many occasions and prayed to the patroness of Poland.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)
Witold Aleksander Urbanowicz
Air force officer
Born Mar. 30, 1908, Olszanka, Poland; came to U.S., 1942; son of Antoni and Bronistawa (Jurewicz); married Jadwiga (Gluchowska); child: Witold K.
Education: Polish Air Force Officer's College.
Career: air force officer, pilot, Polish Air Force, September '39 Campaign, French Campaign, 1940; commander, Polish Fighter Squadron 303, Battle of Britain, 1940; commander, Polish Fighter Wing, 1941; assistant air attache, Polish Embassy, Washington (DC), 1942; pilot, United States Air Force (USAF), Flying Tigers, China, 1943; air attache, Polish Embassy, Washington, 1944-45.
Author: 7 books; memoirs; numerous articles.
Member of: American Fighter Pilots Association; Canadian Fighter Pilots Association; Fighter Pilots of Battle of Britain 1940.
Honors: numerous Polish, American, British and Chinese war decorations.
Served with: Polish Air Force, 1930-45, British Royal Air Force, Battle of Britain (17 German aircraft shot down), 1940-42, United States Air Force (USAF), China (11 Japanese aircraft destroyed), 1943, colonel pilot.
Affiliation: Republican. Catholic.
Languages: Polish, English, Russian.
Hobbies: gardening, writing, travel.
Home: 7824 73rd Place, Glendale, NY 11385.
From: "Who's Who in Polish America" 1st Edition 1996-1997, Boleslaw Wierzbianski editor; Bicentennial Publishing Corporation, New York, NY, 1996.