Lost soldier found again through recovered medals
A stranger’s grace means a hero from the Passchendaele hell is never forgotten
ST. CLEMENTS — Frank McKinnon grew up poor and was orphaned before the enemy killed him in combat at 19. He has no grave.
A sister kept his war medals but they disappeared long ago. Now an extraordinary act of remembrance has reunited his family with the medals he never got to wear … while revealing something special about his death, 100 years later.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Don Haber, 89, the
soldier’s nephew. His mother who lost the medals “would be so elated right now. She’d be in tears.”
How his medals came home and what it means to his family is a story of curious kin, online sleuthing, fortuitous timing and a stranger’s grace.
In November 1917 Frank McKinnon huddled in a trench at Passchendaele in Belgium, facing the German enemy on the Western Front. He’d been at the front for less than three months after reaching France in August.
The Allies threw Canadian soldiers into the Passchendaele offensive in October 1917 over the objections of Lt.-Gen. Arthur Currie, the Canadian commander. As Currie feared, Canada suffered 15,654 killed or wounded on a muddy battlefield that was little more than an open graveyard.
“They knew sending these guys in that they were sending them into a bloodbath,” said Bill Haber, 55, a retired Kitchener school principal who lives in St. Clements. McKinnon was his great uncle.
McKinnon, an infantry private, enlisted in February 1917, days after turning 19. He was working as a machinist in Brantford making artillery shells in a munitions factory.
A family photograph shows him standing in his uniform beside his girlfriend, Pearl. She seems despondent, dressed darkly as if already in mourning.
McKinnon grew up poor in Brantford. He was orphaned by 10. Tuberculosis killed his mother. His father died in a workplace accident, buried alive when a trench collapsed.
What drove him to enlist? Was he a patriot? Was it the private’s pay at $1.10 per day? Was it the adventure? Bill Haber is uncertain after researching McKinnon’s hardscrabble life.
“At what point when he was over there did he realize this is a really, really horrible place to be?” Haber wonders.
The army put McKinnon in the 102nd infantry battalion. It had a supporting role at Passchendaele, spared the worst combat but never out of harm’s way.
When McKinnon got there it was wet and cold. The Germans shelled his battalion nightly and fired poison gas. Soldiers struggled to move in mud deep enough to swallow a man up to his armpits.
The Allies launched their offensive known as the Third Battle of Ypres in July 1917. It sputtered to a close by Nov. 10, 1917, after Canadian troops captured the village of Passchendaele. The Allies moved the front slightly but failed to break through at a cost of almost 500,000 dead or wounded, counting both sides.
On Nov. 12 McKinnon’s battalion was ordered to a supporting area near the front line. Soldiers formed stretcher parties to search for dead and wounded. The enemy shelled them steadily. Enemy airplanes filled the skies, seemingly unopposed
On Nov. 16 his battalion was sent into the front line to relieve another tired unit. The Germans shelled them heavily for two days, killing a dozen battalion troops on Nov. 17.
The morning of Nov. 18 found McKinnon in the trenches. A German shell exploded, killing him instantly when a piece of its casing tore into his head, a casualty record reveals. The same day, enemy bombs killed three comrades and wounded seven others.
Hours later the battalion withdrew from the front, relieved at 5 p.m. by a British unit. Sent to the rear, the troops enjoyed a hot meal and rum. The battalion’s daily war diary notes: “The 102nd battalion has the honour of being the last Canadian unit to leave Passchendaele.”
McKinnon’s hometown newspaper announced his death with few facts in five lines. He was 19, left two sisters and a brother, and worked in a munitions factory. “He had been in France but for two months before being killed,” the Brantford Expositor said.
His younger sister, Ethel, kept his service medals and rarely spoke of him. What relatives heard is that Ethel thought Frank was nice and that he did not survive long.
“She was very, very stiff upper lip when it came to talking about the past,” said Bill Haber, her grandson. He recalls asking his grandmother about her lost brother. “It was like pulling teeth out of an alligator.”
Eventually, Ethel lost track of her brother’s medals. Family lore is that she loaned them to a cousin who did not return them. This might have happened in the 1940s.
Then Bill Haber made a startling discovery.
Searching online last February, he discovered an auction of military memorabilia out of London, Ont. There, for the asking price of $200, he found the medals of Pte. F.A. McKinnon, 102nd Canadian infantry, killed in action Nov. 18, 1917. This stunned Haber. “I didn’t even know they existed,” he said.
For five years he’s been planning a pilgrimage to Passchendaele this November. He’s pondered the motivations of his great uncle, the controversial battle that killed him, the legacy of the Great War and the meaning of remembrance. And suddenly his great uncle’s long-missing medals resurface?
Startled, Haber contacted auctioneer Wendy Hoare to find that the medals put up for sale by one collector had already been sold to a different collector for $400. Hoare would not reveal the parties but agreed to forward a letter.
Haber wrote to the new owner in February asking to buy the medals. He explained that he planned to visit Passchendaele to honour Frank’s memory. He wrote that the family wants the medals “so they may be reunited with the little memory and artifacts we have on Frank’s life and to remain part of our family history for generations to come. I believe Frank would like that.”
Hearing nothing back, Haber reached out to the auctioneer again in October.
A letter arrived Nov. 1. In five handwritten pages the veteran collector said he was torn by Haber’s request in part because the McKinnon medals may be significant.
“I saw the possibility of him being the last Canadian killed at Passchendaele,” the collector wrote.
The collector wondered if the medals might be better placed with the Canadian War Museum, where they might be displayed, rather than returning to a family that might not cherish them. But after hearing from Haber again, “I am only too happy, in fact, very happy to GIFT the medals with my blessings to you and your family.”
The collector, who wants to remain anonymous, asked that Haber forward a video of his Passchendaele pilgrimage, and that he consider taking the medals to schools on Remembrance Day “for a show and tell of your experience and the importance of Frank’s journey through his short life.”
Haber intends to do this. It seems spiritual to him that the medals found their way home days before the 100th anniversary of his great uncle’s death. “He never got to wear his medals,” he said.
It has long bothered Haber that his great uncle passed through the world so little noticed, poor, orphaned, and killed far from home with no grave. To know he was among the last Canadians killed at Passchendaele provides at least a small measure of historical recognition.
“I just want to give him a life,” Haber said. “It’s almost like he’s forgotten. For me I thought, he deserves better.”
Passchendaele is difficult to comprehend. The battle is widely regarded as proof of Great War futility. Five months after McKinnon died, the Germans recovered all the ground they lost there and more.
The 102nd Battalion “gained no particular honour or glory there,” Sgt. Leonard Gould wrote after the war. “We had just done the little that we had been set to do, but had suffered casualties out of all proportion to our task, and that it is which makes the memory of Passchendaele a nightmare.”
It distresses Haber to think his great uncle’s life was wasted. He reasons instead that if Canada hadn’t joined the war and the Germans had won, Canadians might not know the same freedoms and opportunity. Passchendaele by this argument “was every bit as worthy as every other battle they fought.”
On Remembrance Day, he will stand at Ypres in Belgium with the medals. He plans to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate Memorial where his great uncle is among more than 54,000 names on a wall.
Haber and his wife, Lisa Rutherford, have hired an expert guide to tour the Passchendaele battlefield. They want to know where Frank died.
There on Nov. 18, 100 years after he was killed, they will reflect on a poor orphan whose sacrifice was almost forgotten until curiosity and a stranger’s grace helped restore him in memory. “I want him to know we came back for him,” Haber said.
Frank McKinnon was lost and now is found.