Last Known WW I Combat Veteran Passed Today [Ben]

On July 28, 1914 the deadliest war in European history began when Serbia did not comply with Austria-Hungary's ultimatum The ultimatum was issued because a Serbian assassin with TB shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. What came next was four years of trench warfare in Europe, jungle warfare in Africa and Asia, sea battles in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, starvation, privation, slaughter, homicide, democide and massive displacement of peoples.

Today the last combat veteran of that war, Claude Stanley Choules died some 93 years after it ended. He was 110 years old and had served in the Royal Navy.

World War I was raging when Mr. Choules began training with the British Royal Navy, just one month after he turned 14. In 1917 he joined the battleship HMS Revenge, from which he watched the 1918 surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, the main battle fleet of the German Navy during the war

He went on to settle in Austrialia and served in their navy as a torpedo officer in the Second World War. He will be missed not only by his family, but the world as he is the last survivor of a war that cost some fifteen to twenty million people thier lives and that shaped the bloody twentieth century that was to follow. Now, no living memory remains of the War to End All Wars.

*It should be noted that Vic was beyond the age of eligibility and therefore did not serve in the war.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:06 PM

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