Service honours soldier at heart of solved mystery
Former Windsor autoworker killed in Second World War finally gets his due
Vincent Sature was like most of the more than one million Canadians who enlisted to fight during the Second World War.
“He was just an ordinary guy,” said Chuck Konkel, a Toronto Police Service staff sergeant who has spent years trying to find out more about this particular soldier.
Nobody appears to have known the soldier who went by that name, a tail gunner in a Whitley bomber shot down over the North Sea on Oct. 31, 1941, on the return leg of a mission targeting a Hamburg shipyard. That’s because Konkel, later joined in his search by Colleen Callegari — a City of Windsor filing clerk — discovered that, until he had enlisted in Bomber Command a short time before his death, the former Windsor Chrysler worker’s real name was Vincent Korzydlowski.
More than seven decades later, the two amateur historical sleuths and others aiding their search have not found anybody who can remember Vincent Korzydlowski, born in 1904 in Poland, where he previously served in the military before immigrating to Canada in 1926.
Quite a sendoff is being planned, however, for this ordinary guy.
Neither family nor friend has ever visited Sature’s gravesite on tiny Texel Island, off the coast of the Netherlands, but five different nations will be represented at a mass on Friday at Windsor’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in South Windsor, including diplomats and soldiers, to give thanks for Sature’s sacrifice.
The mass itself, to be conducted in Callegari’s church at 8:30 a.m. by her priest, the Rev. Michael Parent, will be for the repose of the soul of Sature and “for all soldiers, sailors and airmen who died for freedom and lie buried on a foreign field.”
“His story has hit the right note with a lot of people,” Konkel said in reference to an ordinary soldier getting his due decades after his death.
Konkel will represent the Toronto Police Service and will be joined by Windsor police officers.
Poland’s consul general in Toronto will be attending.
The Netherlands is sending its military attache.
Members of a British historical society dedicated to Sature’s former No. 51 Squadron are flying in from England, and representatives from the Royal Air Force and Canada’s Department of National Defence will be attending, as well as members of the Canadian Historical Aircraft Association.
The president of the Canadian Polish Congress and other dignitaries also are expected. Poland’s national broadcasting station is sending a videographer, and media from Canada and Michigan will document the event.