SMGP-1499 Witold Urbanowicz RAF Polish ACE signature 303 Squadron

A desirable allied signature! On a 5×8 photo copied print with an authentic post war signature in blue fine tip felt tip pen.

GENERAL WITOLD URBANOWICZ RAF, Dunkirk, Battle of Britain, Normandy invasion! Historical and vintage item! If you are a Collector of RAF Ace memorabilia, or of the of the Polish 303 Squadron, you’ll want this piece for your collection. General Urbanowicz passed away in 1996. Among the few, desperate British heroes tearing ass through the skies, one unsung bad dude of the Battle of Britain looms large – Witold Urbanowicz, the all-out commander of the famous 303 Squadron – a unit of Polish pilots who escaped Hitler’s destruction of their homeland and made a point of taking out their pent up murder-rage on the unsuspecting chumps of the Luftwaffe by pulling up behind their Messerschmitts and cramming eight machine guns’ worth of ammunition straight into the enemy pilot’s butts. In the short, incredibly bloody battle, 303 Squadron recorded three times the number of kills of the average RAF unit, while sustaining just one-third of the losses. Urbanowicz was the man behind this super-heroic kill ratio, and a hell of a bad dude in his own right. Now Listen Up! Witold’s story starts back in 1939, when Urbanowicz was a 31 year-old instructor at the Polish Air Force College when war started ripping Poland a new rear end, and, while he wanted to stand and fight the invaders, Witold was ordered to get his cadets the hell out of Poland before the future of the Polish Air Force found themselves staring face-to-barrel with a phalanx of Panzers. In a daring adventure across the war-torn Polish countryside, Urbanowicz somehow led a class of thirty-something 18 year-old cadets through Poland and across the border into Romania, where he stashed them in a safehouse under the protection of a fellow Polish officer. As soon as he learned that they were going to be protected, Urbanowicz left Romania, went back into Poland, and started mulching the hell out of Germans with a machine gun, fighting alongside a resistance unit. When his ragtag squad was overrun, he was taken prisoner, but he busted out of a soul-crushing prison the first night of his imprisonment, evaded capture, made it all the way back to Romania, and re-grouped with his cadets less than a week after he’d left them! When the crap got a little too hot in Romania, he led them down south into Syria, where he loaded them on a boat and took them to France to be incorporated in the French Air Force. As we all love to joke, however, the French didn’t fare a whole lot better than the Polish once the Nazis aimed their black machines Westward. Paris fell within a month. But Urbanowicz still hadn’t satisfied his thirst for Nazi blood, nor was his quest for ultimate Fascist-crushing vengeance anywhere near complete. He kept his fighting spirit alive, participated in the British evacuation at Dunkirk, made it across the channel, and joined on with a Royal Air Force unit just in time for the Battle of Britain. While he was a talented pilot and well-versed in aerial combat strategy, Urbanowicz didn’t have a whole lot of hands-on battle experience. Of course, it’s not like he let something like that slow him down – in his first battle with the RAF he was serving as the rear guard for a formation of Hawker Hurricanes when suddenly he noticed a flight of four Messerschmitt-109 fighters coming up fast from the rear and he decided he was going to make his first encounter with enemy fighters one that would be remembered forever. Without warning, Urbanowicz pulled an amazing 180-degree turn, nearly blacking out from pulling so many gut-crunching Gs, and then strafed all four of those Krauts until their 109’s vaguely resembled cheese graters. By the time the rest of the Hurricanes reached the combat zone, the four… hide