The AIF Project

George Alexander ARMSTRONG

Regimental number3007
Place of birthBethanga, Victoria
SchoolState School and Business College, Perth, Western Australia
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationJournalist
AddressPerth, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation31
Next of kinSister, Miss Margaret Elizabeth Armstrong, 191 Townsend Road, Subiaco, Western Australia
Enlistment date25 January 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll4 January 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name44th Battalion, 7th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/61/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Fremantle, Western Australia, on board HMAT A28 Miltiades on 29 January 1917
Rank from Nominal RollCorporal
Unit from Nominal Roll44th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularConnected with the West Australian Paper for about 10 years. Had a good position offered to him by a leading London Paper while in the AIF but preferred to be in active service first. After which he felt he would be more competent to write description articles on the war.
FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death33
Age at death from cemetery records33
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 27), Belgium

The Menin Gate Memorial (so named because the road led to the town of Menin) was constructed on the site of a gateway in the eastern walls of the old Flemish town of Ypres, Belgium, where hundreds of thousands of allied troops passed on their way to the front, the Ypres salient, the site from April 1915 to the end of the war of some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

The Memorial was conceived as a monument to the 350,000 men of the British Empire who fought in the campaign. Inside the arch, on tablets of Portland stone, are inscribed the names of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave.

The opening of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, at the entrance of which are two medieval stone lions presented to the Memorial by the City of Ypres in 1936.

Since the 1930s, with the brief interval of the German occupation in the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign.

Panel number, Roll of Honour,
  Australian War Memorial
137
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Son of Sarah WHITTEKER (as spelt) (formerly ARMSTRONG), and the late Alexander ARMSTRONG. Native of Bethanga, Victoria
Family/military connectionsCousins: Lt John Ellis POOLEY, 38th Bn, killed in action, 1 January 1917; and Pte YOUNG, killed in action.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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