The last living WWI veteran Frank Buckles of West Virginia died Sunday at age 110. His death was not unexpected. Buckles was born in Missouri. At age 16, he wiggled his way into the military by lying about his age. 90 years later, he had the distinction of being the only surviving WWI veteran,
The Washington Post reports:
In 1917 and 1918, close to 5 million Americans served in World War I, and Mr. Buckles, a cordial fellow of gentle humor, was the last known survivor. “I knew there’d be only one someday,” he said a few years back. “I didn’t think it would be me.”
His daughter, Susannah Buckles Flanagan, said Mr. Buckles, a widower, died of natural causes on his West Virginia farm, where she had been caring for him.
Buckles’ distant generation was the first to witness the awful toll of modern, mechanized warfare. As time thinned the ranks of those long-ago U.S. veterans, the nation hardly noticed them vanishing, until the roster dwindled to one ex-soldier, embraced in his final years by an appreciative public.
“Frank was a history book in and of himself, the kind you can’t get at the library,” said his friend, Muriel Sue Kerr. Having lived from the dawn of the 20th century, he seemed to never tire of sharing his and the country’s old memories – of the First World War, of roaring prosperity and epic depression, and of a second, far more cataclysmic global conflict, which he barely survived
Another piece of living history has been lost to the annals of time. There are no living survivors of WWI. How long before we will be forced to say the same about those who served in WWII?
RIP old soldier.
Even though Frank Buckles lived a long, productive live and even had a fan club, there is just something so sad about his passing. There is just such finality.
George needs to stop by and give him a good send off. George!!!!!
🙁
Whenever the subject of WWI is raised, it reminds me of the final scene in that old film version of “All Quiet on the Western Front”: a young German soldier in a trench reaching out suddenly toward a little white flower which has survived in the churned up mud of the battlefield. And then the fateful bullet comes…. What a terrible butchery that was. Almost entire generations of young men from France and Britain and Belgium and Germany were lost. All those troopers from Australia and New Zealand dying for The Empire on the blood-soaked beaches at Gallipoli. Almost everywhere you go in England, on the green in villages and towns all across the land, you can find the old crosses of remembrance bearing name after name after name — Englishmen, Welshmen, Highlanders and Lowlanders, high born and low born, young nobility and young workingmen, all sharing the same old cross. And so few left who actually knew and remember them as they once were. And now we also have nothng left but a few scattered memories of that American Expeditionary Force (AEF) which went “over there.” Yes, indeed, Moon, it is “such finality.”
Thank you for contributing, Wolverine. You made my eye balls sweat, as my husband would say. The very last person. You and I probably knew people who fought in that war in our youth but it has been many years ago, but those people are dead and gone. Such a waste.
And in the words of the folks song so popular in our day…Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing. Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago. Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
We haven’t. I guess it is part of the human condition to want to kill each other, I am sorry to say.
We missed you yesterday. I kept looking for you and Mrs. W to come through the door of Mama Mias.