Ceremony pays tribute to long forgotten soldier
Soldier who was buried on North Sea island ‘given the gratitude he deserved’
Family, friends, photos — none of those were ever found by researchers looking into the mysterious case of a former Windsor Chrysler worker buried in a Second World War grave on a tiny island in the North Sea.
But Vincent Sature is no longer the lost soldier.
“For so many years he was forgotten — today, we try to make up for that loss,” Father Mike Parent said during a Friday mass at Mount Carmel Catholic Church in South Windsor. “Vincent has not really been given the gratitude he deserved. It’s the reason we are here.”
It wasn’t your typical morning mass. Diplomats and military attaches from Poland, the Netherlands and Great Britain sat in the pews, alongside uniformed officers from the Department of National Defence, Windsor and Toronto police services and representatives of the Royal Canadian Air Force, the British Royal Air Force, Canadian Historical Aircraft Association and others. The mass concluded, those assembled stood and sang the Canadian national anthem, which was followed by the Polish national anthem sung by special guests, including the president of the Canadian Polish Congress.
The churchgoers were then joined outside by hundreds of students from adjacent Mount Carmel school as a bright-yellow vintage Harvard aircraft did several flypasts in the sunny blue sky, the crowd waving as the pilot, retired RCAF Lt. Col. Ron Holden, dipped the aircraft’s wings in salute.
“We have brought closure to his life,” said Toronto police Staff Sgt. Chuck Konkel, for whom this week’s service ends a seven-year search.
He said Sgt. Vincent Sature, an airgunner with No. 51 Squadron, was the last of 167 Second World War Commonwealth airmen buried on Texel Island whose family and background have finally been identified. Research by Konkel and Windsor’s Colleen Callegari uncovered the fact that few people would have known Sature, who was born Vincent Korzydlowski in 1904 in Poland and immigrated to Canada in 1926.
He fought with Polish forces against the Soviets in the 1920s and enlisted with the Canadian military after Nazi Germany invaded his homeland. He only changed his last name to Sature on joining Bomber Command a short time before his Whitley Mk. V was shot down on the return leg of a night bombing mission over Hamburg on Oct. 31, 1941.
Ward 7 Coun. Irek Kusmierczyk, representing the city, told a reception that followed the mass that Sature “remains emblematic of Windsor ... decent, hard-working people” who enlisted to fight in the Second World War out of a selfless sense of duty.
“In the end, it’s the regular, normal people who do the work and who are in those graves,” said Ton Linssen, the Netherlands’ defence, military, naval and air attache to Canada.
Those who attended the mass and reception later took flowers to Windsor’s Jackson Park Air Memorial featuring mounted Second World War Spitfire and Hurricane fighters.