Nicholas Krawciw (MG, USA), 1935-2021

I just found out this weekend that Nicholas Stephen Hordij Krawciw passed away on 29 September at Ft. Belvoir. He was 85 years old.

Nick Krawciw replaced Trevor Dupuy as the head of The Dupuy Institute in 1995 after the untimely death of Trevor Dupuy. He continued as head until 2005, when I was promoted to President and he continued as the Chairman of the Board. He continued in that role until 2015, when the Institute was transferred to me.

Nick Krawciw had a long and distinguished career in the army and a life that looked like it came out of a Hollywood movie.

He was born it Lvov, then part of Poland on 28 November 1935. His father was a Ukrainian journalist and writer. When the Soviet Union occupied that part of Poland in 1939, his father had to leave to avoid arrest (other relatives had been arrested and executed by the Soviet Union on an earlier trip to Russia). Nick Krawciw and his family followed shortly thereafter, except they were intercepted by Soviet patrols while crossing the Sian River, and Nick Krawciw, at the age of five, first came under machinegun fire.  

He then spent most of World War II in Germany. They were in Berlin when their kitchen was destroyed by an allied bomb. So his mother applied for them to be farm laborers and the entire family moved to a family farm in southern Germany.

That area of Germany was then occupied in 1945 by the U. S. Army, but not before Nick Krawciw had come under artillery bombardment from them. His family, thanks to connections in the United States, then migrated to United States in 1949. He grew up in Philadelphia.

At his initiative, he went to a military high school in New Jersey, accruing a debt to pay for it, and then went to West Point, graduating second in his class in 1959.

He then served two tours in Vietnam and ended up as the senior U.N. peacekeeping forces representative in Middle East during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. He was the commanding general of the 3rd Infantry Division from 1987-1989.

He choose to retire from the army in 1990 because of health issues. He then started working with the DOD on Ukrainian issues and became a vice-president at The Dupuy Institute in 1995. He took over running the Institute after Trevor Dupuy passed away.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Krawciw

West Point Warriors (Chapter 9 is about Nick): West Point Warriors

West Point: Nicholas S. Krawciw 1959

Article from 2014: Retired Ukraine military expert speaks on homeland

I did work for and with Nick Krawciw for over twenty years. It is hard to select from a long list of superlatives those which I would use to describe him. He displayed the finest traditions and standards of a U.S. Army officer and was a caring, loving family man.  All who worked with him and knew him held him in the highest regard.