On 11 April 1944, Royal Canadian Air Force navigator Grant Campbell was killed when his plane crashed near Cambrai, France.
After the war, his father, mother and younger brother traveled to Europe to see his grave. They were taken to the crash site by a police officer who had been the first on the scene. There, the officer gave the grieving parents “the remnants of the map and purse [the officer] took from [Grant’s] hand,” wrote Harvey Campbell, Grant’s father.
The parents recognized the change purse as “unmistakably the one we gave [Grant] for Christmas the year before he enlisted in the R.C.A.F.”
