Categories: Death in Popular Culture

With Babcock dead there’s just one living doughboy left in North America

With the recent death of Jack Babcock, Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last living World War One veteran in North America. He is 109 and lives on a farm in West Virginia.

Jack Babcock joined the Canadian Army at age 15 and in 1916 shipped to England to fight in the Great War. Because he was underage Babcock was forced to train with a group of teens that had also lied about their age called the Boys Battalion.

With the recent death of Jack Babcock, Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last living World War One veteran in North America. He is 109 and lives on a farm in West Virginia.

The war ended before he saw action but more than 60,000 Canadian soldiers were killed, just under ten percent of the 650,000 that served. Babcock, who passed away last month at the age of 109, was the last one to die.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there were approximately 9,750,103 military deaths in World War One and more than 65 million personal participated in the war. With Babcock gone, there are just three verified World War One vets still alive; Claude Stanley Choules, who served in the British Royal Navy, Florence Beatrice Green who served as a waitress in the Women’s Royal Air Force and is the last surviving female vet and Frank Woodruff Buckles, who was a driver during the war and now lives on a farm in West Virginia.

Frank Buckles has his own website, which offers educational materials for teachers and students and asks viewers to sign a petition calling for the creation of a World War One Memorial on the Mall in Washington D.C. His story has been featured in Smithsonian magazine as well as on CNN and BBC. Buckles first tried to enlist at the Kansas State Fair in Wichita during the summer of 1917 but was told he was too young. He was 16, and tried again in Oklahoma City. Both the Marines and the Navy turned him down. An Army captain asked for his birth certificate. “I explained that when I was born in Missouri, birth certificates were not a public record,” Buckles told Smithsonian. “It would be in the family Bible…You wouldn’t want me to bring the family Bible down here, would you?”

The recruiter let him join. Buckles became part of the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment and traveled to England in December 1917. While General Pershing was leading the fight against the Germans in France Buckles was escorting dignitaries in England on a motorcycle with a sidecar. On occasion, he drove an ambulance but his real ambition was to get to the front. In 1918 he finally got to France, with an assignment to drive an American dentist to Bordeaux. Shortly thereafter the war ended. “I wasn’t disappointed that the war ended,” Buckles recalled, “[But] I would have liked to accomplish what I had started out for.”

A few months later he saw some action when his unit was ordered to escort 650 prisoners of war back to Germany. They were friendly and cultured, said Buckles; a few former conductors even helped stage a concert. But one night Buckles nearly came to blows with a young prisoner. The scrap was broken up and in January of 1920 Buckles shipped for home. He worked on steamships in Toronto, New York City and Southeast Asia. In December 1941, he was taken prisoner in the Philippines by the Japanese. He spent 39 months in a prison camp, eating nothing but a small cup of beans, rice and worm filled mush each day. His weight dropped to 100 pounds and he developed beriberi, a degenerative disease caused by malnutrition. In February of 1945, on the same day he was supposed to be executed, he was rescued by the 11th Airborne Division of the U.S. Army.

Buckles returned home, got married and bought more than 300 acres of land near Charles Town, West Virginia. He worked the tractor until he was 102 and several years ago was invited to the White House to meet President Bush. A Wikipedia entry devoted to the oldest living World War One veterans talks about Buckles but also mentions some of his comrades. Lazare Ponticelli, the last poilu, or French World War One vet, died in March of 2008, at the age of 110. Two months later, Franz Kunstler, of Austria-Hungary, the Last Central Powers veteran, died at the age of 107.

Then there is the case of Douglas Edward Terrey, who is 106 and claims to have served as a bicycle courier for the British Army Ordnance Corps. His records have not been verified by a government-sanctioned body. Jozef Kowalski, of Poland, fought with the Polish Army in World War One but joined after Armistice Day (but before the Treaty of Versailles). In World War II Kowalski was held in a concentration camp, he is presently Poland’s oldest man. Emiliano Mercado del Toro, of Puerto Rico, died in January of 2007 at the age of 115. He is the oldest authenticated veteran, from any conflict, ever to have lived.