The Allies

Flags of the major Allies in the First World War.  The United States did not join the Allies until 1917, but the presence of American soldiers, including Alf Leonard, in France in time to stop the German army's offensive in the spring of 1918 was a major factor in the Allies ultimate victory.

By the time that Alf Leonard joined the 15th Cavalry at either the beginning or the end of 1917, the rest of the world was already long at war.  His fellow Great War veterans Cyril Hatchard, a Legion comrade of Leonard’s who arrived in Nakina in 1923, and William A. Grant, who would lend his name to the branch, had already been serving in the trenches of France and Flanders for over two years.  Millions others were already casualties.  At the 1916 Battle of the Somme alone, 146 431 Allied soldiers had been killed, nearly 30 000 more than the number of American soldiers killed in the slightly more than 19 months that the United States was at war.  Nevertheless, the arrival of American Doughboys -- the origin of this nickname for American soldiers is unclear, though I prefer the quip that they were "kneaded" in 1914 but didn't rise until 1917 -- at the rate of 10 000 per day helped to stem the Ludendorff offensive in the spring of 1918 and to drive the German armies back to the Hindenburg Line.  

Slow to rise they might have been, but the Doughboys helped ensure that the First World War did not drag on into 1919.  If I was to be successful in my efforts to ensure the commemoration of Leonard’s service in this war, I too would have to rely on American aid.

Once I had resigned myself to seeking assistance, I planned to do so in my typical fashion.  That is to say, in the least personable and most antiquated method I could think of: I sent a letter.  Specifically, sent a letter to the editor of the Berkshire Eagle, the newspaper serving the northwest corner of Massachusetts that includes Leonard’s birthplace of Williamstown.  The letter included all of the information, and most of the prose, of the first entry in this blog, ending with the appeal “Anyone with information about… Leonard is encouraged to contact [me]… Your knowledge may be the key to completing his story and to ensuring that his heroism and adventures… continue to be remembered and honoured.”   As of the time of publishing, no word has been heard from either the Eagle or its readers.  Perhaps the letter was not printed.  Perhaps, as in the case of Nakina, there just aren’t enough people left who remember him.

American State Teachers of the Year and science, technology
and engineering teachers from around the world at
International Space Camp for Educators at the US Space
and Rocket Center in Huntsville AL.  I am third from the right 
in the back row.

My attempt to remain reclusive having been stymied, I reached out across the border to people I knew were equally proud of their nation as they were of their vocation as public educators.  In the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity of a lifetime: with a contingent of two high school students, I represented Canada at International Space Camp at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville AL, home of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the once and future production location of the world’s most powerful rockets.  I joined teachers and students from a myriad of countries across the world, from Australia to Norway and from India to Bulgaria, as well as nearly every American state and territory.  Throughout the course of a weeklong immersion in space missions, astronaut simulations and roundtables on the latest pedagogical methodology, I worked with a team of dedicated international science, technology, engineering and mathematics teachers as well as what one Space Camp crew leader referred to as “The Extroverts.”  These were the Teachers of the Year, the absolute finest representatives of the American public education profession.

Founded in 1952, the National Teacher of the Year (abbreviated as NTOY) Program is the oldest and most prestigious honour for American teachers.  Chosen from among the State Teachers of the Year by a National Selection Committee, the National Teacher of the Year is equal parts spokesperson and role model and represents the best of the initiative, caring and dedicated exemplified by public school teachers throughout the United States.  I knew that if I needed Leonard to have an advocate in his home country, the state Teachers of the Year were the people that I needed in my corner.

Audrey Jackson, Massachusetts's 2016
Teacher of the Year.  Jackson attended college
in Leonard's hometown of Williamstown MA.

I began by contacting Audrey Jackson, the 2016 Massachusetts state Teacher of the Year.  A celebrated and empathetic educator specializing in the teaching of children who have experienced emotional trauma, Jackson is an alumna of Williams College, a liberal arts college in Leonard’s birthplace of Williamstown and was eager to help when I contacted her.  She enlisted the help of Ryan Kaiser, Maryland’s 2016 Teacher of the year who, in Jackson’s words, “teaches social studies and is a history/records guru.... [and would] be happy to help look into [Leonard’s records]...”  Kaiser, a 16-year veteran teacher working in Baltimore who serves as the communications coordinator for the Maryland Council for Social Studies, is presently working with the American Battle Monuments Commission on similar projects, and enthusiastically -- “This is incredibly awesome!” were his exact words -- lent his assistance.

Ryan Kaiser, 2016 Maryland Teacher of the Year
and history/records  guru who set me on
the right path looking for Leonard's records.

Kasier contacted Mr. John Jewitt of the Maryland State Library Resource Center.  Jewitt is the manager of the Social Science and History Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and not the sailor of the same name who was captured and kept for twenty-eight months as a slave from 1803-1805 by the Nookta of what is now Canada’s British Columbia province.  Jewitt was an immeasurable help, quickly making contact to inform me that he had “found an Alfred Leonard born on the same date in the same town [Williamstown MA] as your individual, listed with parents and siblings.”

Truthfully, I was almost disappointed.  Even at this time, Leonard had become for me a compulsion, a mystery deep and compelling, and part of the intrigue was undoubtedly the idea that the mystery might never be solved.  There is great satisfaction to be had in solving mysteries, but in doing so, something intangible is irrevocably lost: the fate of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition is still enthralling, but not as much as before his two ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, were found in the waters off King William Island in Canada’s arctic, and if Atlantis is ever found, the legends and the wonder will almost certainly not measure up to reality.  Leonard’s mystery, however, was not quite so easily solved.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library, home of the immeasurably
helpful John Jewitt and one of the oldest free public
libraries in the United States.

“He only appears in a birth record,” Jewitt continued, “and in the 1910 census, at the age of 10. His mother dies [sic] in 1911.”  After that point, Leonard disappears from the record.  

“He may…” said Jewitt, “have changed his location and / or the household he was living in, either before the war or certainly... afterwards.”

According to his Legion applications, Leonard enlisted in the US Army sometime in 1917 and served in Mexico and France as well as in the United States before being discharged at Camp Devins MA in 1919.  His burial certificate proves that he died in Geraldton, the largest of the communities that make up Greenstone ON and the site of the closest hospital to Nakina where he lived out his days, in 1982.  Apart from a few tantalizing photos and rumours that would place him in Canada, at least temporarily, before 1936, there is no further record of his life until then.

NB: This blog installment depicts events in the search for Alf Leonard’s record of service as they occurred.  I am pleased to say that additional information on Leonard has been unearthed -- deliciously, this only adds to the mysteriousness of the case -- and this will be reflected in future posts.  At time, the investigation has outpaced my ability to document the events thereof.  In other words, read on.

The Applications

Field Marshal Douglas Haig visiting Newfoundland, then a British colony separate from Canada, in 1924.  Haig, known as "Master of the Field" to some and "Butcher," to others, was a driving force behind the unification of First World War veterans advocacy groups which led to the establishment of the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League, later the Royal Canadian Legion.

In my hands, I held two documents completed by Alf Leonard more than fifty years ago. Both were membership documents for the Legion -- of which I had, in a moment of desperation, been elected vice president and poppy chairman and which was supporting my efforts to ensure that Leonard’s dilapidated headboard was replaced with a permanent stone marker -- though they were completed nearly twenty years apart.
The first document, a wallet size card worn and stained with time and dated 10 June 1946, was an “Application for Membership [in] The Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League” (BESL). The Canadian Legion was one of fifteen organizations representing Great War veterans in Canada by the end of that conflict.  Along with various regimental associations, each advocating for their own former comrades in arms, the efforts of this multitude of organization and fragmentary and inefficient at best.  

A visit to Canada in 1925 by Field Marshall Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces (including the 418,052 troops of the Canadian Corps) on the Western Front for most of World War I, included an appeal for unity among groups advocating for veterans.  Haig, whose “epic but costly offensives at the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) have become,” according to the Canadian War Museum, “nearly synonymous with the carnage and futility of First World War battles,” dedicated the remainder of his life after leaving military service to the welfare of veterans.  He was a driving force in the foundation of the British Legion in 1921, surprisingly egalitarian in his refusal to accept a separate organization solely for officers, and established both the Haig Fund to provide financial support to ex-servicemen and Haig Homes to ensure that they were properly sheltered.  Both of these organizations still exist today and Haig Homes which still provides veterans in need with access to over 1 300 properties in the United Kingdom.  Cynics would say that Haig was trying to atone for the over two million British and Imperial casualties that were suffered under his command; ex-servicemen who relied on his charity would not have cared.

Haig seemed to have a soft spot for Canadian troops, calling them “really fine disciplined soldiers… and so smart and clean" compared to Australians, as WWI historian Gary Sheffield recalls in his 2011 book The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army, and he was troubled by the discord that he witnessed among the various advocacy groups in Canada.  In an address to assembled veterans, as reported by The Globe on 29 June 1925, Haig urged them to “pay tribute anew to that sense of unity, of mutual loyalty and common allegiance which rallied the British Commonwealth of Nations as a single people to meet and overcome a common danger” by joining together into a singlorganization.  Later that year, the Dominion Veterans Alliance was created for this purpose, and by 1926, Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League had been incorporated by a special act of parliament.  Thirty four year later, its numbers having swelled by the influx of Second World War veterans, the organization was self-supporting and was rebranded as the Royal Canadian Legion.
Leonard’s initial application to join the Legion, written almost entirely in block letters, records his name as simply “A. LEONARD.”  He attests that he enlisted at North Adams, Massachusetts, just five miles to the east of his hometown of Williamstown, on Christmas Day 1917.  Having served as a private in Troop A of the 15th Cavalry in the United States as well as Mexico and France for just under a year and a half, Leonard was, according to the BESL application, discharged at Camp Devins -- now Fort Devins, it had been established forty miles northwest of Boston for the purpose of training troops during World War I -- in June of 1919.
The second document, dated May of 1965, however, told a different story.

A comparison of Leonard's 1946 (left) and 1965
(right) applications.  Note the inconsistency of his rank.

It is not known at the present time why Leonard re-submitted an application two decades after the first: it may be that, for whatever reason, Leonard had let his membership status lapse. Applications to join the Legion -- by 1965 independent from the BESL and celebrating HM the Queen’s patronage as the Royal Canadian Legion -- had changed since 1946. So too, apparently, had some key information.  His date of discharge, for example, was five days earlier: 19 June 1919, rather than 24 June. Confusingly, his enlistment date is stated on his 1965 application to be “Jan 20, 1917,” 340 days earlier than the information on his 1946 application.  While the weather on 20 January and 25 December are likely to be similar, it is difficult to imagine that he would have confused Christmas Day with any other day of the year.  
The curiosities continue: his “Rank on Discharge” on the 1965 application is Sergeant, three grades higher than the rank of private indicated in 1946. No mention is made of any deployment in Mexico or stateside: his service states simply “U. S. Expeditionary Force -- France.”  Born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Leonard would have been a natural-born citizen of the United States, courtesy of jus soli citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment.  He may, alternately, have become a Canadian citizen (Canadian citizenship came into force on 1 January 1947; prior to that, Canadian nationals were a subcategory of British subjecthood) by 1965.  However,  under “Nationality” on his application, Leonard wrote “Irish.” It is possible, though unlikely, that Leonard was referring to Irish heritage, but there is no evidence at this time to support that theory. Even his name was inconsistent: rather than stating his name as “A. Leonard” as on his 1946 application, in 1965 he wrote “Leonard, Thomas Alfred” before signing “A. T. Leonard.”

The curious reference to Irish nationality.  Leonard may have
been referring to Irish heritage, but there is no evidence
at this time that indicates that this was true.

As I stood in the record room of the Legion, the two very different applications dated nineteen years apart illuminated by the single lightbulb hanging from a cord, I wondered again, “Who was this man?”  With the sinking realization that obtaining a permanent marker for Leonard would be neither so easy nor so straightforward as I had hoped, I committed myself to a course of action that would be as uncharacteristic of me as it would be difficult: I was going to have to ask for help.

The Why and Wherefore

Nakina's Hillcrest Cemetery, where my part in the story begins.  Hillcrest Cemetery is technically and parochially two separate cemeteries: St. Brigid Catholic Cemetery is to the left, while the Protestant Hillcrest Cemetery proper is to the right.  Identifying as United (Presbetyrian), Leonard is buried to the right, near the large tree just right of the centre of the photograph.

I have a thing for cemeteries.  I have for as long as I can recall.  My affinity for cemeteries is  neither ghoulish nor gothic.  It is, in fact, just the opposite.  I have always felt that cemeteries were wonderful, life-affirming, if sombre, places.  

As a child I was, and still am now, comforted by the idea that everyone gets a small monument, a testament -- literally etched in stone -- that  declares for all who care to read the epitaph that a life has been lived and is here remembered.  My grandmother would often take me walking in the large cemetery in which she herself is now interred.  We spent hours amid the rows of markers: stones that declared that the people whose remains rested nearby were beloved wives and husbands,  brothers and sisters, sons and daughters.  The cemetery seemed vast, limitless, an infinite connection between us and the past.  At the other end of the spectrum, east of my hometown, a lonely cemetery is the only remnant of the pioneer community of Mizpah.  What was intended by its founders to be a new Jerusalem in the wilderness of central Ontario, Canada, is now a patch of hallowed ground whose only hint of its former glory and promise are eight graves, once nearly forgotten and now lovingly tended by local residents and cottagers.  Among the eight are “McGineses, Neilsons, Halls and An Unknown Indian with a Blanket for a shroud….”  Also resting there is Thomas Alvin Hart, a mere three years and five months old when he died on 15 September 1886.  His marker asks that since “We loved them in life -- let us not forget them in death.”

Thomas Alvin Hart's grave at the
Mizpah Cemetery near Huntsville ON

In this spirit, I approached the Royal Canadian Legion in Nakina ON.  Nakina’s W. A. “Bill” Grant Branch 116 of this veterans’ organization, whose beer halls and cenotaphs are centres of community activity across Canada, includes in their number, in addition to a wide assortment of civic-minded citizens of the town, an Afghan War veteran who fought the Taliban in 2004, a French Canadian veteran of the Canadian Guards -- the infantry regiment which was disbanded in 1970 for being, according to its colonel, Strome Galloway, “'too British' in uniform and character to pass muster with the Francophone[s]...” -- and me.  In what must have been a moment of sheer desperation and a textbook example of barrel bottom scraping, I had earlier that year been elected the branch’s Second Vice President and Poppy Committee Chairman, and it was in this capacity that I spoke at the branch’s monthly meeting.

“A guided tour of the cemetery,” I said.  “There are veterans of at least three wars buried in Hillcrest Cemetery, but my students don’t know their stories.  I don’t know their stories, for that matter.  If I take my students to the cemetery, will you share the stories of the veterans there?”

Two members quickly volunteered: Brian, who also serves on the Nakina Heritage Corporation, and Frank, the aforementioned Francophone veteran of the “too British” regiment.  With muted prayers that the unusually warm weather would hold and we would miss the usual November mix of bitterly cold winds, sunless skies and driving snow.  As it happened, our prayers were not answered, but despite the grousing of students and the griping of some of the other teachers, the tour went ahead as planned.  

As is the case with many small towns across Canada, tiny and remote Nakina seems to have offered more than her fair share in the great wars of the 20th century.  Five sons of Nakina -- Alphonse Levesque, Kurt Lovquist, Wally Luxton, Gerald Sorel and S. Ambrose Vasiloff -- are among those Canadians “who,” as it is recalled at Legions throughout the country,  “by sea, by land and in the air, laid down their lives for their Sovereign and Country.”  Well-attended community Remembrance Day services notwithstanding, few residents -- and even fewer of my students -- knew of the service and sacrifice of their fellow Nakinites.  Brian and Frank played their parts marvelously: Frank resplendent in his Legion uniform; Brian a font of compelling and obscure knowledge about our community.  The tour went so smoothly, in fact, that other than a brief reminder to some kindergarten students that a cemetery is not an appropriate place to play tag, there was precious little for me to offer.  I was thrilled, then, when I was able to provide an answer a question that Brian was not.

“Why do some of the gravestones all look the same?” a student asked.

“They’re Commonwealth War Graves Commission stones,” I replied.  “They’re the same pattern of headstone used at British Commonwealth military cemeteries all over the world.  Sometimes, if a veteran or their family can’t afford a permanent stone, the Commission or its partners will provide one for them.”

Leonard's elaborately carved but
quickly deteriorating wooden grave marker.

The tour continued passing, among other markers, a decaying wooden headboard engraved with the name LEONARD.  Alf Leonard, Brian told us, served in the American army during the First World War and moved to Canada later in his life.  After respects were paid, thanks were given to our docents and a rather awkward and decidedly not apropos round of applause ended, we started to walk back to the school.  As I fell in behind the line of students grumbling that the wind was now in their faces, Frank pulled me aside.

“It’s a shame, you know, about Leonard,” he said.  “That board of his looks worse every year.  Who knows how long it will last?  Could that commission do something about that?”

“The War Graves Commission?” I asked.  “I don’t know.  He was an American.  He wasn’t in the Imperial or Commonwealth forces.”

“No,” said Frank, “but he served his country just the same as the others.  And his country was on our side, wasn’t it?  He may not have been a Canadian, but he still deserves to be remembered.”

I promised Frank that I would look into the matter and see what could be done.  I contacted the Last Post Fund, a Canadian charity that works with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and whose mandate, in part, is to ensure that no Canadian or Allied veterans will lie in an unmarked grave in Canada.  They replied that all that was required to start the application to obtain a permanent marker was Leonard’s full name, date of birth and date of death.  Proof of his service would also be required.

The Royal Canadian Legion in Nakina ON,
of which Leonard was and I am a member and
which has lent its full support  to ensuring
Leonard's grave recieves a permanent marker. 

With the full backing of the Legion and of the municipal office, which promptly provided me with a copy of Leonard’s burial permit and date of death, I was hopeful that the entire process would be simple and brief.  The only caveat was that “The Last Post Fund does not have access to service records for those who served with the Allied Forces. Proof of service for Allied Veterans must be provided by the applicant.”  I assumed that Leonard’s proof of service could be found in his Legion membership file.

Therein, I found no official record of service but rather two membership applications: one dated 1965 to join the Legion and one nearly 20 years older to join the its predecessor, the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League.  It was then I started to notice the discrepancies.  The 1965 application attested that Leonard enlisted in the US Army on 20 January 1917 and was discharged on 19 June 1919 at the rank of sergeant.  The 1946 application, however, states that Private Leonard enlisted on Christmas Day 1917 and served until his discharge on 24 June 1919.  Even his name was inconsistent: “A. Leonard” in 1946 and “Leonard, Thomas Alfred” in 1965.
“Who was this man?” I wondered.

The Incomplete Story of Alf Leonard

Either "Thomas Alfred" or "Alfred Thomas" Leonard
Leonard is in US Army uniform
with an unidentified woman, once thought to be his mother.
(From the Leonard collection)

In the small northern Ontario village of Nakina, Canada, behind the eponymous crest of the hill in a small cemetery, a weathered wooden headboard is the only earthly monument to an extraordinary man.  With no known relatives and few remaining contemporaries, no one is left who is able to tell the story of the man known as either "Thomas Alfred" or "Alfred Thomas" Leonard, though it is a fascinating, if incomplete, story to tell.

Due to records that vary or have vanished, significant gaps exist in the record of Leonard’s life, and even his name is uncertain: on some documents he signed his name “Thomas Alfred Leonard,” while on others “A. T. Leonard.”  According to his burial permit, Leonard was born on 6 June 1900 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, one of at least two children (a sister, Mrs. W. Turgeon, is recorded as his next of kin) born to parents whose names have been forgotten.  Nothing is known at this time of his early life until his enlistment in the US Army at the age of 17 on either 20 January or 25 December of 1917 (records vary).  On applications to join first the British Empire Service League and, later, the Royal Canadian Legion, Leonard stated that he served in Troop A of the 15th Cavalry Regiment, fighting bandits and Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries in Mexico and the southwest United States and the Imperial German Army in France.  His applications alternately state his rank to have been private or sergeant.

At some point after his discharge at Camp Devins, Massachusetts, on either 19 June or 24 June -- again, records vary -- Leonard left the United States for Canada. For reasons now unknown, he ended up in Nakina, perhaps drawn to the area by a minor gold rush that gripped the regions northeast of Thunder Bay, Ontario, in 1934.  Today a ward within the larger Municipality of Greenstone and a gateway to remote wilderness, isolated aboriginal communities and potential, though stalled, mining developments, when Leonard arrived, Nakina would have been a busy, albeit small and remote, village serving a station railway yard on the transcontinental Canadian National Railway.

A HBC convoy of frieght heading for
distant trading posts in northern Ontario.
(Photo from the Leonard collection)

His life’s adventures did not end with his settlement in the remote village.  Leonard came into the employ of the French fur trading company Revillon Frères and, later, the Hudson’s Bay Company, which once held a monopoly over three million square miles of North America and absorbed Revillon Frères in 1936.  Leonard hauled freight to and beaver, otter, marten and other skins from some of the 101 HBC posts scattered across northern Ontario.  Photographs and a hand drawn map show that he travelled by barge, by canoe and by bush plane, at least as far afield at Fort Hope, now Eabametoong First Nation, 920 miles to the northwest of his hometown. 

After his service with the HBC, Leonard worked as a towerman for CN Rail -- controlling, at least in some small part, the movement of freight and passengers through the northern arteries of Canada’s railways -- and sometime fur trapper.  He was a man dedicated to his adopted community, as evidenced by his being awarded a Life Membership in the Royal Canadian Legion in 1977.  The citation reads that Leonard had “been a good member, devoted to the aims & objects of the Legion for many years,” and notes that he “served the branch well whenever… called upon to do so.”

Since his death on 7 October 1982, however, most visible relic of his extraordinary life is the ornately carved yet slowly decaying wooden headboard marking his grave.  But now a movement is underway to provide Leonard with a lasting memorial.

Barely visible above the driven snow,
Leonard’s deteriorating grave marker in
Hillcrest Cemetery, Nakina ON
(photo by the author)

For more than 20 years, the Last Post Fund, a Canadian non-profit organization and registered charity whose mission, according to their website, is to ensure that "no Veteran is denied a dignified funeral and burial, as well as a military grave

stone…”, has provided permanent military-style markers for Canadian and Allied Veterans who lie in unmarked graves. Unfortunately, without critical documentation including Leonard’s service records which could corroborate information and fill in gaps in his historical record.

Anyone with information about the life, legacy and, most importantly, the military service of Alfred Thomas Leonard is encouraged to contact the Royal Canadian Legion in Nakina ON or this blog.  Your knowledge may be the key to completing his story and to ensuring that his heroism and adventures spanning four nations and two continents continues to be remembered and honoured.