Escaping in a destroyer that sailed to Britain the day before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Tadeusz Lesisz served as a gunnery officer from the very first day of the Second World War until its end. Serving in Polish warships under the command of the Royal Navy, he participated in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Arctic convoys, Operation Torch in November 1942 and the Normandy landings in June 1944.

Remaining in Britain after the war, he established himself as a partner in a Lancashire architectural practice. As chairman of the Manchester branch of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, he dedicated much of his spare time to serving the Polish community that had settled in northwest England after the war.

Tadeusz Lesisz was born in Kozienice, 100km south of Warsaw, in 1918. He joined the cadet corps at 13, graduating five years later. Unlike his three brothers, who chose the army, he continued his studies in the naval officers’ school in Torun, then Gdynia. His choice of the navy proved fortuitous: none of his brothers was to survive the war, one murdered by the Gestapo in Dachau, two by the Russians in Katyn.

Lesisz was serving as a second lieutenant in the destroyer Burza (Storm) when, on the day before German forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, she sailed secretly to Britain with other ships of the Polish fleet, to continue the fight. After Royal Navy courses in anti-submarine warfare and gunnery in July 1940 he was appointed second-in-command of S3, one of several motor gun boats assigned to Polish crews.

Based at Fowey in Cornwall, the Polish-crewed boats were charged with protecting shipping in the Channel and reconnoitring the approaches to the French ports. Duels with the more powerful German E-boats were frequent — though S3’s career came to an end when she hit a German mine outside Fowey harbour.

In January 1941 he joined the Cowes-built Polish destroyer Blyskawica, (Lightning) — affectionately known as “Bottle of whisky” by British sailors. In her, Lesisz saw action in the Atlantic, protecting Allied convoys on the Northwestern approaches.

Blyskawica was in harbour at Cowes when on the night of May 4-5, 1942, the town was raided by 160 bombers. Blyskawica threw up a dense barrage and smokescreen. Sailors not needed on the ship’s guns fought fires in Cowes and brought first aid to the wounded. In gratitude, Blyskawica was given the freedom of the town, whose main square was later named after the destroyer’s captain, Wojciech Francki.

In October 1942 Blyskawica was escorting the liner Queen Mary as she carried American troops to Britain, and witnessed the tragedy that befell another escort, the anti-aircraft cruiser Curacoa, sunk when inadvertently rammed by the liner. Blyskawica next took part in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, escorting landing craft and troopships.

In July 1943 Lesisz was appointed to the cruiser Dragon (a 1917 vintage RN cruiser transferred to the Polish Navy) as second gunnery officer. After escort duty on a Murmansk convoy, she was assigned to the naval forces for Operation Neptune, the naval assault phase of Operation Overlord. On D-Day Dragon shelled German positions behind Sword Beach, destroying an artillery battery at Colleville-sur-Orne with the third salvo of her six-inch guns. In the evening of D-Day she moved to Juno Beach to support the advancing Allied troops and the following day she shelled German positions in and around Caen. After numerous artillery duels in the subsequent days, the cruiser was badly damaged by a torpedo from a German Neger human torpedo that had broken through the Allied cordon.

Therafter Dragon was used as a blockship and Lesisz returned to Blyskawica as first gunnery officer. In September 1944 she was sent to patrol the coast of southwest France, liaising with Resistance units on shore. She continued until the last weeks of the war to patrol the Bay of Biscay and the approaches to the Gironde, which was still heavily mined and where German shore batteries were still active.

After Germany’s capitulation Blyskawica was assigned to Operation Deadlight, the scuttling of about 120 of the U-boats that had been surrendered in 1945. In late 1945 and early 1946 the U-boats were towed out into the Atlantic and sunk in deep water.

Blyskawica later escorted a flotilla of smaller German vessels from Norway and Denmark to Kiel in German waters. When she returned to Rosyth in February 1946 Lesisz was demobilised.

Blyskawica sailed back to Poland in July 1947, remaining in service with the Polish People’s Navy until 1975. Today she is a floating museum in Gdynia.

Like many of his shipmates Lesisz was torn between returning home and fear of going back to a country that had exchanged a German occupant for a Soviet one. With about 160,000 other Poles who found themselves in Britain after the war, he chose to stay.

In March 1947 he rejoined the Royal Navy as Fleet Maintenance Officer with the rank of lieutenant-commander, supervising the mothballing of landing ships and landing craft. Inspired by Penguin paperbacks on architecture that he read off duty, he decided to become an architect. He was offered a scholarship at the Oxford School of Architecture by the Committee for the Education of Poles in Great Britain, and after qualifying in 1954 he joined Greenhalgh & Williams in Bolton, becoming a partner in 1963. He designed schools, churches and local authority housing across the North West and Midlands, and also an epilepsy centre in Much Hadham, Herts.

In Manchester Lesisz oversaw the reworking of the church, on Lloyd Street North, which the Polish community bought from Welsh Baptists in 1958, designing the interior and most of the stained glass windows. Inside the church are urns containing soil from the Polish and European battlefields in which parishioners fought during the Second World War.

As the leader of the Polish community in Manchester, he supervised many activities and commemorations that held the community together, passing on traditions to a new generation born on British soil.

Lesisz was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta (IVth and Vth class), the Valour Cross, the Gold Cross of Merit and numerous British campaign medals.

He is survived by his wife, Wanda, who took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as a medical orderly and whom he married in 1956, and by two daughters.

Lieutenant-Commander Tadeusz Lesisz, naval officer and architect, was born on February 10, 1918. He died on September 23, 2009, aged 91