The AIF Project

Alfred Olaf JOHNSON

Regimental number3376
Place of birthMackay, Queensland
SchoolWest End State School, Brisbane, Queensland
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationCannistermaker
AddressHillview, Logan Road, Dunnellan Estate, south Brisbane, Queensland
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinMother, Mrs Maria Johnson, Hillview, Logan Road, Dunnellan Estate, south Brisbane, Queensland
Previous military serviceServed as a Cadet, Boy Scout, Junior Cadet, Snr Cadet, Citizens Forces and AIEF 9/52 MGS.
Enlistment date18 December 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name52nd Battalion 9th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/69/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A33 Ayrshire on 24 January 1917
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll52nd Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularOffered his services to the Impire F Lines but rejected through being 1/2 inch below standard chest measurement. Physical Exercises brought him up to Standard. Passed. 1 week in camp only, last 2 months training at Codford Street, Mary, England before going to the Front.
FateKilled in Action 23 September 1916
Place of death or woundingGarter Point, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death20
Age at death from cemetery records20
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 29), 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
155
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Sergeant Major John Peter and Marie Antonette JOHNSON, "Garter Point", City View, Logan Road, South Brisbane
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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