It’s a poignant but largely overlooked moment in a nation’s history when the very last soldier from a long-gone war dies. World War One might as well be the War of the Roses, or maybe the Punic Wars, for what it evokes in a very large portion of the American populace, but to a smaller and steadily-shrinking portion, it was a very real war, one that brings memories of real horrors, real tears, real despair, real pride, real joy, and all the other myriad emotions that accompany all wars.
In the summer of 1917, one of those Americans was a young man/boy named Frank Woodruff Buckles. Frank was a farm boy, from the tiny Corn Belt town of Bethany, in northern Missouri. He was just 16 years old, and like so many young men and boys of his era, he wanted to join the millions of American men who had gone to fight in “The War To End All Wars.” America’s involvement in that war was just four months old in August 1917, but it had been raging for more than three years, and throughout those years Americans had heard news story after chilling news story about the horrors going on across the Atlantic: the prolonged agony that was trench warfare; the unimaginable terror of mustard gas; and almost unbelievable tales of single battles waged by armies of millions, where tens of thousands of soldiers died in just days, and hundreds of thousands—hundreds of thousands—perished in the course of just a few months.
Still, Frank wanted to go. He tried the Marines first, lying, telling them he was 18, not 16. They wouldn’t take him. He tried the Army. No luck. He tried the Marines again, then the Navy, then the Army again. No luck again. But he kept trying:
I was just 16 and didn’t look a day older. I confess to you that I lied to more than one recruiter. I gave them my solemn word that I was 18, but I’d left my birth certificate back home in the family Bible. They’d take one look at me and laugh and tell me to go home before my mother noticed I was gone. Somehow I got the idea that telling an even bigger whopper was the way to go. So I told the next recruiter that I was 21 and darned if he didn’t sign me up on the spot! I enlisted in the Army on 14 August 1917.
His whopper having worked, 16-year-old Private Frank Buckles was shipped to England in December 1917. He was assigned to work as a motorcycle driver, shuffling officers here and there. That was not what he had signed up for:
I let any person who had any influence at all know that I wanted to go to France.
France was where the big fighting was, and Frank wanted to be part of it. He finally got his wish in mid-1918, and was eventually promoted to the rank of Corporal along the way, but still never got into the fight, and the war ended five months later, in November 1918. Frank spent several more months in Europe, escorting German POWs back to Germany, and in 1920 he finally went back home, at the ripe old age of 18. That was 91 years ago.
Frank Buckles died on Sunday, on his farm in West Virginia. He was 110 years old, and he was the very last living American veteran of World War One.
So long, Frank Buckles. Thanks for being who you were, for doing what you did, and for living so dang long so we could hear about it all. Our deepest condolences to your family and your friends.
A final thought from author Richard Rubin, who wrote about this moment in history on Veterans Day in 2007:
It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.
P.S. Frank had more than a few adventures left in him after the Great War, including a long stay in a Japanese POW camp during the next “great” war. You can read about them at the links in the story. And he seemed like a funny bugger, too: When asked once about the secret of his long life, he answered, ”When you start to die, don’t.”
