Last known WWI veteran dies at 110.

[robby]

Years ago, I met an old fellow who had served in WW1. He was with an American artillery unit, fighting in France, and he described to me how he used a team of horses to maneuver cannons through the thick mud. A different era, and now they are all gone.

Comments

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

My great-uncle Doug, was an airman in WWI. From a blimp.

I heard the UK lost more guys in WWI than WWII. I hate Google lately, the idea of it. What's fun, is not knowing if that could be true.

Ever see The Great War on PBS? Want to buy it. So much footage. I'd never seen any of it.

The whole Mideast came out of WWI. Turkey, a creation of WWI, just took awhile. Thank you for this.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I've heard that the best young men of France were slaughtered in WW1, and France has never really recovered. My father, in the US Army infantry during WW2, described how able-bodied Frenchmen would be watching and smoking cigarettes as allied troops liberated French towns.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

I believe it. A lot.

DeGaulle, walking into Notre Dame with snipers still firing at him, the great leader, six feet plus ... he knew the French during the war had gleefully turned in their neighbors to the Germans, to steal all their stuff. All those French girls you see in pictures, kissing the Americans on tanks rolling into Paris --cynics. Pragmatists without any values except themselves. Yeah there were Free French. Operated outside the country. Inside the country, the one group with a sterling record of hitting the Krauts again and again was the Communists.

So much of what I was taught in school about the end of WWII, I've since found out was a myth. Especially where Israel is concerned. Israel was much less some noble effort to repatriate exiles, than a sugarcoated offloading of refugees their own countrymen had this tendency to kill if they tried to take their houses back. In some ways Israel can be realized as the world's largest refugee camp under constant attack by the neighbors. Kinda reframes the idea of Zionism. Why didn't France nobly take back the Jewish refugees, why didn't Poland, Hungary ... endless propaganda. The French in particular, towers of lies.

Hey the guy who came in second, in the Mr. LES contest, same last name as you! I think?

[robby.livejournal.com]

It's not widely known that there was widespread Nazi resistance to the Allied occupation of postwar Germany. My dad was a military policeman at Army headquarters, after the war, and these incidents were never made public.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

1946.

Tough job.

[robby.livejournal.com]

The war in Europe ended in May 1945, and I believe these incidents were later that same year. He, himself, was fired on after the war was officially over, and many, many similar instances were happening throughout occupied Germany.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

That is some story. Glad I never got drafted. Did you serve, yourself?

I don't know much about your family. Do you have brothers and sisters?