A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
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Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died on Thursday in a nursing home in Western Australia. He was 110.There is one known veteran left alive: Florence Green. She was in the Women's RAF.
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5 comments:
I'm just old enough that when I was in grade school, we used to get this little newspaper type thing geared to kids called the Weekly Reader. I remember an article in one about the last three surviving veterans of the Civil War. That was in the late '50s. I believe one of them survived into the '60s reaching 118.
My grandkids will likely observe the last of the WWII vets when their time comes. We're losing them at a rapid rate. My dad left in 1995, age 76—my mother is still alive at nearly 92. Yes, my mother wore Army boots. All six grands are well acquainted with Great Grandma Mil-Mil.
LRod
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired
The last Union Civil War veteran died in 1956. The last verified Confederate veteran died before that, though there were some who claimed to be the last man, but most were false. All them them were dead by 1960.
I guess sources vary. I immediately did a search and came up with a 20 December 1959 date for the last CW vet (Confederate). My memory is crystal clear on this. The Weekly Reader article cited three remaining vets—one Union, two Confederates.
Now, as to the exact date, I'm not so clear, but it's not hard to reconstruct. I was in 3rd grade in 1954/55. I'm quite sure it wasn't then. 4th grade—1955/56, same school—is a better prospect. 5th grade—1956/57—I was in a different school for just one year and I'm quite confident it was not then. 6th grade was yet another school (although the same one I attended K-2) and I wouldn't have ruled that year out.
However, based on the newspaper report cited above, I'm willing to concede it couldn't, in fact, have been 6th grade. I'll settle for 4th. I would have sworn, however, that one of them had lived into the '60s. Missed it by eleven days.
Nevertheless, the knowledge of three veterans still living in my lifetime from a war so far in the past was beyond my comprehension at age ten. Clearly it was memorable.
Oh, almost forgot: I knew a guy who enlisted in the Marines at age 14 during WW2. So they weren't terribly picky about age documentation.
Story I heard was that he didn't like boot camp and wrote his dad to please send proof of his age so they'd send him home. His dad wrote back: "Boy, you got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out of it."
He did. Thirty years later.
" ........ someday no one will march there at all."
Eric Bogle
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