Warrant Officer 1st Class James Henry Munroe was one of the first assistant bell captains at the Lord Elgin Hotel when it opened in July 1941. He worked there for two months until he followed another calling.
Munroe went to 90 O’Connor St., a five-minute walk from the hotel, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) on Sept. 11, 1941, to join the Allies in the Second World War.
Though Munroe didn’t work at the Lord Elgin for long, on Thursday morning, the 75th anniversary of D-Day, his photo was hung in the hotel’s lobby, immortalizing him as one of the most important employees the Lord Elgin may have ever had.
An estimated 4,414 Allies were killed on D-Day, including 359 Canadians.
23-year-old Munroe, an air gunner from Pembroke, was one of them.
On June 6, 1944, at 7:10 p.m., Munroe and five other crew members joined the fight on D-Day, streaming into battle in a Stirling aircraft.
They never returned.
Members on the same operation as Munroe’s crew reported seeing their Stirling plane get struck by enemy fire. It crashed into the French sea and exploded.
The bodies of four of Munroe’s crewmates were retrieved in the following days.
Munroe’s body was never found.
“James is one of those forgotten men,” Michael Robinson, Munroe’s 71-year-old nephew, said. “Only through research have we discovered that (he) even exists.”
In the 1970s, Robinson asked his aunt about his family’s genealogy. She told him they had a family member who died in the Second World War.
He scrawled, “James Munroe died WW2” on a piece of paper and didn’t revisit it until two years ago when he found Munroe’s military records on Ancestry.com. Prior to this discovery, Robinson admits he knew nothing about his uncle.
“(He) was totally forgotten in the family lore because there is no family anymore,” Robinson said.
Though Robinson doesn’t want to make any assumptions about his uncle’s character, the documents provide glimpses into who Munroe might have been.
He liked hockey, football and photography. He worked as a bellboy in Niagara for four years before leaving for what he wrote was a “better position” at the Lord Elgin. He married Dorothy Olga Robinson, Robinson’s aunt, in June 1941. They had a daughter on Oct. 14, one month after Munroe enlisted.
The interviewing officer at the recruiting centre wrote that Munroe was a “clean, bright lad” who was confident and dressed neatly.
Upon enlisting, Munroe received air and ground training in Ontario. On his training reports, officers described him as “quiet and likeable,” a person who “always gives his best,” but could be “inclined to be careless.”
Munroe was transferred to England in April 1943 where he joined the Allies as an air gunner for the RCAF’s 299 squadron.
Over a year later, on May 23, 1944, he was promoted to warrant officer first class. Two weeks after that, he was gone, presumed lost at sea.
For the complete story, head to the Ottawa Citizen, where the article was originally published.
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