Florence Green, the last known veteran of the First World War, has died in Britain, two weeks shy of her 111th birthday.
At 17 Green joined the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1918. She worked as a waitress in the officers’ mess at a base in eastern England until the end of the war. In an interview in 2008 she said though her service was brief “in many ways, I had the time of my life.”
With her passing “we mark another significant milestone in the history of the First World War, said Steven Blaney, minister of veterans affairs. It “is another reminder that all of us must continue to remember and honour the sacrifices of all veterans.”
The last known combat veteran of the ‘war to end all wars’ was Claude Choules, who died last year in Perth, Australia. He, too, was 110.
John Babcock, the last known Canadian First World War veteran, died in 2010. More than 650,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders served in the war; more than 66,000 died and nearly 140,000 were wounded.
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