Orphaned at 10. Killed at 19 at Passchendaele
Act of remembrance unites medals with family of soldier who never wore them
Frank McKinnon grew up poor and was orphaned ST. CLEMENTS, ONT.— 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 missing 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 over the objections of Sir Arthur Currie, the Canadian commander.
As Currie feared, Canada suffered terrible losses: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, Ont., making artillery shells in a munitions factory.
A family photograph shows him standing in his uniform beside his girlfriend, Pearl. She’s despondent, dressed in black 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 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 was19, 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.
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, perhaps sometime 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 involved, but agreed to forward a letter. 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.
But after hearing from Haber again, the collector said, “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 greatuncle’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.
“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.
The102nd 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 Nov. 11 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 an impoverished 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.