21st Army Group

Lt-Col. A. Stefanowicz

/ Matthew K Barrett / Leave a comment

Lieutenant-Colonel Aleksander Stefanowicz
1st Armoured Regiment (Poland)

Gentlemen. Everything is lost. I do not believe the Canadians will manage to help us. We have only 110 men left, with 50 rounds per gun and 5 rounds per tank … Fight to the end! To surrender to the SS is senseless, you know it well. Gentlemen! Good luck – tonight, we will die for Poland and civilization. We will fight to the last platoon, to the last tank, then to the last man.

(Quoted in Roman Jarymowycz, Tank Tactics, 201)

Born on 20 December 1900 in Polewicze, Russian Empire, Aleksander Stefanowicz was a long-serving officer in the Polish Army. He joined in 1919 and fought with a cavalry regiment during the Polish-Soviet War. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1922, and after completing training courses on tank warfare, he became an instructor in the 1930s. After the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939, he went to France where he became adjutant to General Stanisław Maczek of 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade.

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21st Army Group

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More Second World War Battalion Commanders

For the past two years on this site I have profiled and caricatured nearly every Canadian infantry and armoured battalion commanding officer in the Second World War. In Normandy and North West Europe, First Canadian Army, however, was not exclusively composed of Canadian units – it included I British Corps and a Polish armoured division, and, at various times, other attached Allied troops. First Canadian Army along with British Second Army made up Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, meaning their are hundreds of Allied battalion commanders for me to still research, profile, and sketch.

I have created a useful index of the divisions, brigades, and battalions of 21st Army Group as a separate page, which can be found here. Lists of commanding officers for each battalion are pieced together from unit war diaries, regimental histories and many other sources. My project will now put names and faces to the lieutenant-colonels who led these British and Polish battalions during the eleven months from the landings at Normandy through to the invasion of Germany and the end of the war in Europe.

Formation badge of 21st Army Group, 1943–1945