Soldier Record

Harry Johnson, known to his family as 'Pat', a Territorial Soldier, was mobilised immediately on the outbreak of the Great War and assigned to the newly formed 2/10th Battalion the Middlesex Regiment at Stamford Brook.

In July 1915, following a period of training, he sailed with the Battalion from Devonport to the Turkish island of Imbros on the Gallipoli peninsula, where on the night of August 6th, he took part in an amphibious landing at Suvla Bay as part of the August Offensive - the final British attempt to break the deadlock of the Battle of Gallipoli. Within a few weeks Harry contracted malaria, and in September he was transferred to a base hospital in Egypt.

In January 1916 he was invalided home to England aboard the hospital ship Aquitania, a converted White Star liner, but after a period of convalescence he was recalled. His mother considered him too ill to go, but by then the Somme offensive had begun and he was assigned to the 1/7th Battalion the Middlesex Regiment and sent to France.

During October 1916 Harry's Battalion left the Somme and moved north to relieve the 61st Division at the war-shattered village of Givenchy. On the night of 30th November he was part of a twelve man 'Garrison of the Duck's Bill' situated in a fortified mine crater in no man's land on the eastern edge of the village. This crater was connected to the British front line by a communication trench and was just forty yards from the enemy lines. That night, during a heavy bombardment, a German heavy trench mortar shell (or ‘moaning Minnie' as the British soldiers called them) exploded inside the crater killing Harry, his Commanding Officer and five others. Harry was just 21 years old.

On the following day Harry and the other men were buried in an apple orchard at Pont-Du-Hem and a wooden cross was erected over his grave. This was later replaced by the standard military headstone. He was awarded the 1914-15 Star, General Service and Victory Medals.

If it had not been for my grandmother we might never have known where or how Harry died. Upon receiving the telegram notifying her of her son's death she wrote to his Battalion asking for details, and got a reply from the Front in the form of a pencilled letter which included the following lines: 'Your son I am sorry to say was killed on Nov 30th. During a heavy bombardment he, his platoon officer Lt Wheeler and another man were killed by a heavy shell'. Years after her death it was possible to discover from the regimental history of the Middlesex Regiment what exactly Lt Wheeler and his men were doing on that night.

Harry's sister Winifred had a portrait photo of him which, with age, had developed some staining about the face. She told me that their mother believed that these marks showed that Harry was wounded in the head when he was killed.