Francis Anthony Garbas

Francis Anthony “Frank” Garbas was born on 13 July 1922 in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of Stanley and Mary Garbas, Polish immigrants to Canada, and one of nine children. After leaving Cathedral High School, where he was a keen sportsman, he worked for Otis Elevators before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force soon after the outbreak of war, qualifying as a wireless operator and air gunner before being sent to England in the summer of 1942. There he trained at the gunnery school at RAF Stormy Down and a heavy conversion unit at RAF Wigsley — where he was reunited with his Hamilton friend Albert Garshowitz — and joined the crew of Flight Lieutenant Bill Astell, which flew with 57 Squadron from February 1943 before transferring to the newly formed No. 617 Squadron at RAF Scampton on 25 March. As front gunner aboard Lancaster ED864, coded AJ-B, Garbas set out on the night of 16/17 May 1943 with the first wave of Operation Chastise, the attack on the German dams. The aircraft never reached its target: outbound over Germany it struck a high-tension electricity pylon and crashed in flames near Marbeck shortly after midnight, killing the entire crew. Garbas, who died a little under two months short of his twenty-first birthday, was first buried at Borken and, after the war, reinterred with his comrades in the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery, where he is commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.