Lieutenant, Monmouthshire Regiment
Born: November 16th 1917
Died: October 26th 1944
Age at Death: 26
Died of wounds, October 26th 1944
There have been few Old Brightonians with a background as exotic and grand as that of Prince Dimitri Galitzine, born on16 November 1917 in Kislovodsk, Russia, to Countess Marie, daughter of Duke Georg Alexander of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and Prince Boris Dmitrievich Galitzine, a captain in the Imperial Russian Army’s Hussar Guards.
By the age of two Prince Dimitri had lost his father in a fatal battle against the Bolsheviks, and his mother was forced to flee her homeland aboard a Royal Navy ship together with Dimitri and his baby sister. They settled eventually in England.
Galitzine enlisted in the British Army in 1939 and was commissioned as an officer, undertaking several training courses in guerrilla and irregular warfare. In July 1944 he was posted to the Monmouthshire Battalion in north-west Europe. In October 1944 the battalion took part in the successful liberation of the town of ’s Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, but it cost Galitzine his life – he was fatally wounded, and died the following day. He is buried at Uden War Cemetery.