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Canada's most decorated military hero, the First World War flying ace William Barker, will be honoured next week in Toronto with a gravesite monument aimed at reviving knowledge of his unmatched exploits above Europe's battlefields nearly a century ago.
Barker, a Manitoba farm boy who went on to be awarded the Victoria Cross, three Military Crosses and a host of other medals for his wartime feats, was credited with destroying 50 enemy aircraft in just the last two years of the 1914-18 war.
He later became the founding director of the Royal Canadian Air Force - a designation recently restored to the aviation branch of Canada's military - before dying tragically, at age 35, in a 1930 crash on the frozen Ottawa River while demonstrating a new aircraft in Canada's capital.
Barker was a well-known war hero in this country during his lifetime. His public funeral in Toronto attracted a startling 50,000 mourners.
But his renown as a pilot was later overshadowed by the fame of his friend and fellow Canadian ace Billy Bishop, a Victoria Cross winner who - despite his own impressive record - considered Barker the greatest of all First World War flyers.
Bishop once described Barker as "the deadliest air fighter who ever lived," a quote to be etched in the new monument.
Barker was "the heroes' hero," says author Wayne Ralph, whose 1997 biography of the man first highlighted the fact that Canada's most decorated war hero lies unheralded in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery - inside his wife's family's mausoleum, behind the inscribed surname Smith.
"It's not so much that Barker faded to insignificance," Ralph told Postmedia News Thursday. "It's just that Bishop became a supernova."
He said books and plays about Bishop, who lived until 1956, stoked popular interest in his achievements, which have come to be seen by most historians - including Ralph - as somewhat exaggerated.
Meanwhile, after the end of the Second World War, knowledge of Barker's remarkable record was largely forgotten.
Ralph marvels at what he calls "the paradox, the sad metaphor" that Canada's "most illustrious war hero" became, in death, a largely anonymous figure lying in a place akin to the "tomb of the unknown soldier - a crypt with the name Smith on the door."
It's a fate partly explained, notes Ralph, by Barker's own "modest, self-effacing" personality, something the biographer says further qualifies the pilot as a classic, "smaller-than-life" Canadian hero.
Among the many fans of Ralph's book was John Wright, the well-known Toronto pollster who recently contacted the author with the idea of rescuing Barker's reputation from obscurity.
Wright then spearheaded a plan to erect a proper gravesite memorial befitting the most medal-bedecked military figure in Canadian history.
In fact, it was soon discovered, Barker qualifies as the most decorated serviceman in the history of the entire Commonwealth - a fact that will be inscribed on the new Barker monument that's to be unveiled next Thursday at the Toronto cemetery.
Ontario Lt.-Gov. David Onley and three of Barker's grandsons are scheduled to jointly dedicate the new memorial, which includes a detailed plaque and a bronze airplane propeller rising out of the granite steps of the burial chamber that holds Barker's remains.
Wright, who also serves as honourary colonel to a Toronto-based military regiment, told Postmedia News that despite Barker's sterling record as a fighter pilot, "very little exists today acknowledging his accomplishment - for the most part because he died at an early age."
Barker, whose wartime wounds left him in constant pain in the 1920s, struggled to adjust to postwar life and eventually fell into alcoholism before his death.
The VC winner briefly held the position of president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, an honour bestowed on Barker by his fellow war veteran, Conn Smythe, the legendary Toronto businessman and hockey baron.
The new memorial at his once-obscure gravesite will describe Barker - proudly and unambiguously - as "the most decorated war hero in the history of Canada, the British Empire, and the Commonwealth of Nations."
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