Patrick James Garland

Patrick James Garland was the eldest of four brothers, all of whom joined the Royal Air Force and all of whom died in its service. The family came from Ballinacor in County Wicklow, Ireland; their father was Dr Patrick Joseph Garland, CMG. Born in 1908, Patrick was by 1945 a Flight Lieutenant and a married man, the husband of Mary Elizabeth Garland of East Finchley in Middlesex.

He flew with No. 2 Squadron, a fighter-reconnaissance unit of the Second Tactical Air Force operating Spitfires over the advancing Allied front in north-west Europe. On 1 January 1945 he was killed flying Spitfire RM803, lost from the squadron’s base at Gilze-Rijen in the recently liberated southern Netherlands. He was 36 years old, the last of the four brothers to fall, and was buried at Bergen-op-Zoom War Cemetery.

The most famous of the brothers was Flying Officer Donald Edward Garland, who had been killed nearly five years earlier, on 12 May 1940, leading a low-level attack by Fairey Battles of No. 12 Squadron against the bridges over the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt in Belgium. For pressing home that attack through intense fire he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. The two remaining brothers also died on active service — Pilot Officer Desmond William Garland in Belgium on 5 June 1942, and Flight Lieutenant John Cuthbert Garland on 28 February 1943 — a loss of four sons from one family that stands among the most severe borne by any household in the war.