During World War I almost 61 000 Canadian soldiers were killed, one of them being John Douglas Armstrong. He was an engineer from Ottawa who, in May of 1916 went across to Europe to fight in the war. He never made it home.

For this blog post we had to research a Canadian soldier who fought in World War I and make a journal entry as though we were him. Ms. Willemse gave us a link to a website where we could find a soldier who fought in World War I, and another page where if we type in their name it gave us even more information on the soldier. Sounds easy enough? Maybe not. See to get an understanding of who this person was we had to find a soldier with lots of information on them. Some people found soldiers right away with lots of sources, but I personally spent an hour searching before finding a soldier with more than two documents, he had 4 but they were two different documents each on the website twice. After hours of typing in random names and sifting through the soldiers trying to find one with quite a bit of resources I realized this meathod wasn’t working. So instead I decided to search by dates. I searched for all soldiers who died between April 9th and April 12th 1917, the dates of the Battle of Vimy Ridge because I thought it could be interesting to do research on a soldier who died during the greatest Canadian battle in WWI. And that’s how I came across Lieutenant John Douglas Armstrong.

I found out information about him using newspaper articles, his forms and a few other sources that were on the website given to me by Ms Willemse. I had quite a bit of information but felt like more would be better. I searched his name on google and came across a couple great pages that gave me more information on him. Here are the main sources I used for information.

Along with those I used this website, and this one. Together I used these sources to try to determine what he may have been thinking on April 8th 1917, the day before he died. Then I wrote this journal entry.

On April 9th 1917 John Douglas Armstrong was shot in the abdomen and passed away almost instantly. His last words were cautioning his friend not to advance to quickly, even when dying caring more about his friend’s safety than his own. He died with a smile on his face. John Douglas Armstrong is now buried in Villers Station Cemetery.