The Last U.S. Soldier From the Great War

May 22, 2009— -- "Right from the start I was very conscious of the war being a very serious situation," says Frank Buckles of Chalres Town, W. Va. The war he's referring to is the First World War.

Buckles is the only known living American veteran of that war.

Though Buckles is now 108 years old, in 1917 at age 16 he was too young to enlist. So he said he lied to the army recruiter. "I didn't lie, I just misrepresented," he says with a laugh.

Buckles' misrepresentation worked and he became an U.S. Army corporal.

"I went overseas in December 1917 on the Carpathia the ship that came to the rescue of the Titanic," he said. The RMS Carpathia was bound for England but that wasn't where the action was.

"I was all gung ho to get to France," Buckles says. "A regular army sergeant said to get into France in a hurry, you go into the ambulance corp." Buckles had learned to drive on his family farm so he joined the motor pool and then escorted Germans back to Germany after the armistice.

The First World War was a global military conflict which involved almost all of the world's great powers. Over 70 million military personnel were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. Over 15 million people were killed during the conflict, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in human history.

The war didn't diminish Buckles' wanderlust. Soon after the war he got a job with an international shipping company. He was working in Manila when the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941. As the Japanese swept across the Pacific, Buckles was captured and spent three years in a prison camp.

As one of the last living veterans of World War One, Buckles has been feted by former President George W. Bush and Bob Dole, the former Republican senator from Kansas.

Though he is many decades removed from harm's way, Buckles says he has one more battle to fight. There is no World War One memorial in Washington, DC, only a dilapidated monument honoring area residents who died in the war. Buckles says he is fighting for his fellow veterans to be remembered on the National Mall.