The AIF Project

Albert Walker JOHNS

Regimental number2047
Place of birthLoy Yang, Victoria
Other NamesJOHNS, Albert Walter
SchoolSouth Yea and Stratford State Schools, Victoria
Other trainingShop assistant
ReligionMethodist
OccupationFarmer
AddressBrisbane, Queensland
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation26
Next of kinFather, Charles Johns, Mundubbera, Queensland
Previous military serviceServed in the 10th Australian Light Horse, Queensland.
Enlistment date12 October 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name2nd Light Horse Regiment, 14th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number10/7/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Brisbane, Queensland, on board HMAT A62 Wandilla on 31 January 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll47th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 7 June 1917
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death from cemetery records27
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
143
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Charles and Matilda Jane JOHNS, Mundubbera, Queensland. Native of Stratford, Victoria
Family/military connectionsCousin: Captain Godfrey George MANNING, 2nd Field Company Engineers, killed in action, 8 August 1918 (" ... who rose from the ranks and was killed within a month of the Armistice, from the landing at Gallipoli to the end "almost".]

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