Last Updated on February 6, 2022
It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And Florence Green was just 17 when she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force in the war’s final year, 1918.
With her passing on Saturday just weeks away from her 111th birthday, the world has lost the last-known veteran of World War I.
“I would work every hour God sent,” she said in a 2008 interview about her time as a waitress in the officers’ mess hall in eastern England. In many ways, she said, it was the time of her life.
In addition to her husband, who died three decades ago, she outlived World War I’s last-known combatant, Royal Navy vet Claude Choules, who died last year in Australia. She also outlived the United States’ last known WWI veteran, Frank Buckles of West Virginia, died about a year ago.
It’s sad to see one of these “last survivors” of something so significant pass away, because you can’t escape the feeling that a door to history has somehow been closed forever to us.
In 2009, when Millvina Dean passed away at 97, the world lost the last survivor of the Titanic disaster. Dean was only two months old at the time, so we had already lost the last person who could provide an eyewitness account. Even so, her passing closed that door.
The last surviving veteran of the Civil War died at age 109 in 1956.
I know of no one who’d want to live through those experiences firsthand. But there’s something in us, I think, that envies the concept of surviving such an ordeal and persevering so long past those dark moments of the past.
And maybe there’s a reminder for the rest of us of exactly how short life can be, even to someone who lives so long.
