Lost story of RCAF airman finally coming to light
Windsor’s Vincent Sature did not have to return to war.
But he did, and he pushed for one of the most dangerous assignments in the Second World War, and now he lies in a near-forgotten grave on a tiny island in the North Sea.
A Chrysler mechanic in his mid30s when he enlisted in Canada’s military in 1940, Sature was already a decommissioned and medal-honoured officer who had served three years in the Polish army, helping repel an invading Red Army from the young Soviet Union two decades earlier. He was still a child when he enlisted for that conflict.
Sature immigrated to Canada in 1926, but now his home country and the family he had left behind were again under attack, this time from Nazi Germany. Armed with glowing recommendation letters from Chrysler and from an earlier employer, Nessel’s Department Store in Walkerville, where he had worked in sales, Sature took his previous field gunnery expertise to the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he was trained as an air gunner for bomber duty.
Just months into his European stint in Bomber Command — one of the most vital but deadliest Allied assignments of the Second World War — Sature’s Whitley Mk. V was returning from a night bombing raid over Hamburg when it was targeted by Nazi Luftwaffe fighter ace Paul Gildner and shot down over the North Sea on Oct. 31, 1941, killing all five crew.
Flight Sgt. Vincent Sature’s grave in a war cemetery on tiny Texel Island off the coast of the Netherlands has remained largely forgotten over the decades, never visited by family or friend.
Six years ago, Toronto Police Service Staff Sgt. Chuck Konkel, who has made it a personal mission in life to connect Texel’s forgotten soldiers to their families, began digging into the mystery of Vincent Sature. When the search ran cold two years ago, Konkel approached the Windsor Star and the Chicago Tribune — an uncle was believed to have lived in Chicago — with those bits of Sature’s story he had been able to uncover in hopes a bit of publicity might re-energize his search.
It took about a year, but then Colleen Callegari, a City of Windsor filing clerk who also spends her off-hours researching veterans she feels need more attention, spotted the Star story and joined the hunt.
“I was enthralled — it was a mystery, and this story wasn’t complete,” said Callegari. “He risked his life and died trying to free Poland and his family from the Nazis — someone should acknowledge they know him, go visit him and place some flowers on his grave.”
Scouring online military records and using ancestry database tools, Callegari uncovered a key part of the mystery, namely why nobody in Windsor or Poland appeared to know anyone by that name.
Callegari said she loves history and researching the stories of the local veterans whose bare-bone life milestones she spots on the obituary pages trigger her detective work. The longtime city filing clerk feels she owes it to them and their families to flesh out the details of their service to country.
“They all have a story, they shouldn’t be forgotten,” she said.
Callegari discovered that Saturnin Kobylanski, who studied two years in university in Warsaw in the 1920s after the war with the Soviet Union, lived alone at 1118 Drouillard Rd. while in Windsor and was a board member of the Polish-Canadian Students Club of Windsor, founded in 1930.
Konkel had tapped into Canadian, American, Polish and British sources for any information on Vincent Sature, and he obtained documentation that he was “likely born” under the name Vincenty Sheurmin Korzydlowski, the surname being that of his father.
But Callegari discovered that when Vincent Sature fought in Poland and when he immigrated to Canada, when he worked in Windsor and enlisted in the RCAF, he went by the name Saturnin Kobylanski.
It was only after he joined the Canadian military and was on the path to becoming an RCAF airman that Saturnin Kobylanski became Vincent Sature.
“He changed his name to Sature so that, if he got captured by the Germans, they wouldn’t know he was Polish,” said Callegari. She said Bomber Command recruits would have known about the extreme risks of their work — only the Nazi U-boat force suffered heavier casualties — and there would have been some knowledge about how the Nazis treated prisoners from occupied lands.
It was Callegari, whose father was a Second World War veteran, who discovered Sature’s previous military background. She was less successful in tracking down ancestors, including the status of four younger siblings — three sisters and a brother. Sature’s father, Wladyslaw, a baker, was taken prisoner by the Nazis in Poland in 1942, but Callegari said she couldn’t find any further records on him.
“I did quite a bit of running around — at night, at home — trying to find relatives,” she said, adding that included communications with Dutch consular staff and Polish officials. She wrote to the family’s church in the central Polish town of Lask, even sending money and a request for the priest there to mention Sature/Kobylanski in a future mass.
“I don’t think there’s anyone left in his family who would be interested in this,” she said, adding those she has contacted who might have a connection “either don’t know their family history or feel they’re not related.
“Some people care, some people don’t care.”
On Dec. 1, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic church, 4401 Mt. Royal Dr. in Windsor, will hold a mass for Vincent Sature, whose name is included on an RCAF memorial in the city’s waterfront Dieppe Gardens.
He risked his life and died trying to free Poland and his family from the Nazis — someone should acknowledge they know him ... and place some flowers on his grave.