Vadim Komkov was born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in Poland after his parents died in the Bolshevik Revolution. He was a member of the Polish RAF during WWII. He was stationed at Hucknall Aerodrome, and was sent to RAF Wrexham to practice flying the Avro Lancaster and the Supermarine Spitfire. He later became a mechanical engineer in London, where he met and married his first wife Joyce Radford, of Long Eaton, England, in 1946. He received his Diplom Ingenieur from Warsaw Polytechnic in 1948. He and Joyce had their first child after the war and the family moved to emigrated to Zambia where he worked for the Rhokana Mining Company. They had two more children before emigrating to the United States in 1957.