of last uk veteran of world war 1 dies at 111 (hatch patch)

Last UK veteran of WWI trench battles dies at 111: Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, has died at age 111.


[photo via BBC]

Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.

Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."

Patch was one of the last living links to "the war to end all wars," which killed about 20 million people in years of fighting between the Allied Powers _ including Britain, France and the United States _ and Germany and its allies. The Ministry of Defense said he was the last soldier of any nationality to have fought in the brutal trench warfare that has become the enduring image of the conflict.

There are no French or German veterans of the war left alive. The last known U.S. veteran is Frank Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia, 108, who drove ambulances in France for the U.S. Army.

Born in southwest England in 1898, Patch was a teenage apprentice plumber when he was called up for military service in 1916.