On June 21, during a reception to celebrate the birthday of Elizabeth II, a ceremony will be held to commemorate Lithuanian pilot Romualdas Marcinkus, who fought with the British Royal Air Force.
British fighters will also fly over Vilnius as a tribute to Marcinkus.
Before the war, Marcinkus was the former captain of the Lithuanian national football team and was already a seasoned aviator in the Lithuanian air force.
He took part in the Lithuanian air force's 10,000 kilometer European tour in 1934. The Lithuanian-made ANBO IV fighters, then considered among the world's best military planes, visited many European cities in 1934.
Marcinkus was sent to France in 1939. At the outbreak of the war he was still there and volunteered with the French air force, with which he served until the invasion of France in May 1940.
He won the highest French medal, the Croix de Guerre. After the collapse of French resistance he escaped to the United Kingdom and volunteered again.
Marcinkus was accepted into the Royal Air Force Reserve in December 1940.
He passed an officers' training course on the British Hurricane fighter. In May 1941, he was appointed as a flight lieutenant in fighter squadron No. 1, with which he fought until he was shot down near Gravelines, Belgium in February 1942.
He was captured and imprisoned near Zagen, now in Poland.
Marcinkus was among some 80 allied pilots who escaped in 1944, but was recaptured and among 50 who were then shot. After the war, his remains were buried in the British Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery in Poznan, Poland.
His story was immortalized in the 1963 Hollywood film "The Great Escape," starring Lithuanian-American Charles Bronson, who played Marcinkus.
Because of the Soviet occupation, Marcinkus' relatives never received the three British medals – the 1939-1945 Star, the Aircrew Europe Star and the War Medal – that he was entitled to. But British officials have now found Marcinkus' nephew Alvydas Grebliunas, a retired deputy county administrator from Panevezys.
"In 1955 British officials got in contact with my grandmother and offered her a special pension. But she died soon afterwards and all contacts with Britain stopped," Grebliunas told The Baltic Times.
British Ambassador to Lithuania Christopher Robbins will present the medals to Grebliunas in the courtyard of the British Embassy on June 21. Current pilots from Marcinkus' squadron will fly Harrier jets over the British Embassy in Vilnius at 7 p.m..
They will fly in a "missing man" formation, with one aircraft trailing to the rear to represent a missing comrade. "It's a shame that Lt. Marcinkus, like so many others, was not given proper recognition after the war. I am delighted to be able to do this for him," the squadron's Wing Commander Scan Bell told a British tabloid.
Officials say the best place to watch the flyover is from the Zirmunu bridge or the Silo bridge.
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