Last WWI Veterans Get Their Due

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Dec. 2, 2006 — -- His eyes have seen more than most do in a lifetime. At 105 years old, Frank Buckles is a tough, old bird who lives atop a hill in Charles Town, West Virginia.

He grew up a Missouri farm boy, and like so many in his generation, he is also a veteran -- of World War I. He's now one of just 12 veterans of the "Great War" still living.

Buckles was only 16 when he enlisted. He went overseas in December 1917 on the Carpathia; the same ship that rescued survivors of the Titanic.

Frank and his fellow soldiers fought in a conflict that has long been eclipsed by World War II. But this week, officials at the brand new National World War I Museum in Kansas City are trying to restore the First World War to its rightful place in history.

The $27 million museum, opening today, is fully interactive. One exhibit allows visitors to walk around inside a bomb crater. Another lets them sense the confines of the battlefield trenches that ran from the North Sea to the Alps, and experience the horror of the no-man's land in between.

World War I began in the summer of 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a 19 year old Bosnian Serb. The United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, after Germany intensified submarine attacks on U.S. shipping. President Woodrow Wilson called it "a war to end all wars," and believed the U.S. was entering a struggle to save democracy.

The Great War was the first battled in air. It was also the first to use tanks, the first fought extensively underwater, and the first to have -- and use -- weapons of mass destruction.

In 1915, Germans were the first to use poison gases -- mustard and chlorine gases, in particular. Gases were dangerous to attackers and defenders alike, because the gas sometimes wafted back toward the attackers or engulfed them as they moved into enemy lines.

Saddam Hussein used mustard gas on Kurds in northern Iraq during a campaign known as the Anfal in 1987 and 1988. In one attack on a Kurdish village, mustard gas and Sarin killed 5,000 people and left 65,000 more with diseases, abnormal rates of cancer and birth defects.