SARASOTA, Fla., Jan. 4 (UPI) -- Zdislaw Starostecki, a Polish soldier in World War II who became a U.S. engineer and one of the designers of the Patriot missile, has died at 91.
His son, Andrew, told the Polish news agency PAP, his father died minutes before midnight Dec. 31. Starostecki had been living in Sarasota, Fla., with his wife, Irene, the Patch news service reported.
Starostecki, who was awarded the rank of general in 2009 by President Lech Kaczynski, fought twice in the Polish Army. He was captured by the Soviets, sent to a labor camp, released after the German invasion of the Soviet Union ended the Hitler-Stalin pact and then wounded in Italy fighting for the Allies.
After coming to the United States, he received an engineering degree from Stevens Tech in Hoboken, N.J., in 1960 and worked for the Defense Research Center in Dover, N.J. In the 1980s, he headed a 40-member team working on the warhead for what became known as the Patriot missile.
"I can claim the authorship of (75 percent to 80 percent) of the design," he told an interviewer in 2007. "My idea was, inter alia, the gyroscope, encoder and decoder."
