Lieutenant-Colonel Aleksander Nowaczyński
8th Rifle Battalion (Poland)

On the top of Hill 262 stands Lieut. Col Nowaczynski, the battalion commander, with the commander of the Canadian tanks, staring in silence at the battlefield. Over the khaki uniforms, at the emerald-blue lance pennons of the dead soldiers of the 8th Battalion, the disfigured faces, jutting jaws and teeth in deathly smiles, human parts — torsos, legs, bloodied stretchers, pieces of an anti-tank gun, and nearby a barrel of a broken mortar in the convulsive grip of a dead gunner. In the middle of a few blackened, smoking Shermans, on their turrets hangs a leaning torso, half scorched hands lying listlessly.

(Quoted in Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed, 484)

Born on 24 November 1900 in Urzędów, Aleksander Nowaczyński was active in the nationalist secret Polish Military Organization and witnessed the emergence of an independent Poland in November 1918 at the end of the First World War. He joined the newly created Polish Army and participated in the Polish–Ukrainian War then the Polish-Soviet War. He was commissioned a lieutenant in 1923 and by September 1939 was a major. He organized evacuation to Romania during the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland.

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