Yes, RIP Mr Patch.

He was the last surviving to serve in the actual trenches.

I am glad to hear there is one left alive in Australia though!

corgi37 wrote on Jul 25^th, 2009 at 12:16pm:


the guy in question is English, but lives in Australia.

There are only 3 WW1 veterans left alive - the other two are Canadian and American.

Starbuck wrote on Jul 26^th, 2009 at 10:18pm:


What is the name of the film you're talking about ?

if true this is quite sobering about Mr. Allingham:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1202000/Feud-broke-heart-worlds-oldest-m...

corgi37 wrote on Jul 25^th, 2009 at 12:16pm:



Yep. I think WW1 takes the biscuit for most appalling loss of life for the most insignificant reason.

The Somme was our darkest ever hour in terms of casualties - especially where I come from, where one division (36th Ulster) sacrificed thousands, especially on the first day .

Check out the list of casualties in this one - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme

Over one million men killed in one four month battle. Just to gain an advance of a couple of miles.

Starbuck wrote on Jul 28^th, 2009 at 10:01am:


it wasnt a PALS battalion but a regular division, I supose.

The Somme is still widely commemorated in Ulster every year (1st July), even more so than in the rest of the UK because of the disproportionally high loss of life compared to other areas of the country - so yes, its a day of huge significance where I live.   Oddly enough, theres been more of a revival in this sort of thing in recent years.

A lot of people I know still make the trip to France for memorial services EVERY year to honour their ancestors. A lot of the streets near where I live are named after the battles fought around that time - Ypres, Passchendaele, Bapaume, Thiepval, Somme, etc. Unfortunately there's also a couple of streets nearby named after Earl Haig, but I try to draw a discreet veil over THAT one.

Its also been commemorated more in recent years in the Republic (thanks to a change in the political climate) as several thousand volunteers from there also served the British Army and were killed/wounded in that and other battles in WW1. 

Personally, I'd classify it as the most historically significant event in my country of the last century - thats even taking into account WW2 where we were bombed by the Luftwaffe and the 'troubles' which ran for over 25 years. 3,500 were killed in the Troubles. At the Somme we had 5,000 casualties (half of them killed) in the first two days. A lot for a tiny area of 1.5 million people.

Ade wrote on Jul 28^th, 2009 at 12:42pm:



with the death of Harry Patch, sadly, no one will ever get to have that experience again.

Ade, are you British?

strangely enough, the UK had twice the number of war dead in WWI than they did in WWII. that is a heck of a statistic!

By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
Published: August 6, 2009
WELLS, England — To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I

Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.

Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.

“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” Britain’s Press Association news agency said.

“Irrespective of the uniforms we wore,” he said, according to the BBC, “we were all victims.” His funeral came as British troops took record casualties alongside American, NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

In a show of changed times, Daniel Eichhorn and Michael Schmidt, both lance corporals from the Germany Defense Ministry guard force, marched behind the casket in light gray dress uniform. A German diplomat, Eckhard Lübkemeier, offered a New Testament reading that spoke of Christ’s “message of reconciliation.” French and Belgian diplomats also spoke at the ceremony.

In drizzling rain outside the cathedral, around 2,500 people watched the service on a giant screen, applauding as the casket was driven away for private burial. “We feel very strongly that the children should remember the First and Second World Wars — what their grandparents lived through, what they did for us and what they made possible for us to do,” said Teresa Gilbey, a 37-year-old teacher.

Mr. Patch had been a machine-gunner, drafted into the British army in 1916 to fight in one of the bloodiest battles of the war at Passchendaele near the Belgian town of Ypres in 1917.

The cathedral bells pealed 111 times Thursday to mark the passing of his funeral cortège from the nursing home where he died on July 25. He was to be buried at a private ceremony later on Thursday after a formal service in the Cathedral Church of St. Andrew and Wells, built between 1175 and 1490 as a masterpiece of Gothic architecture.

Although managed by the British Ministry of Defense, the service was designed by Mr. Patch’s friends and supporters to minimize military aspects. Even ceremonial weapons were barred.

Just a week before Mr. Patch died, the only other living Briton who served on the Western Front, Henry Allingham, died at the age of 113, and Mr. Patch briefly became Britain’s oldest warrior. The Defense Ministry in London called him “the last British survivor of the First World War” although another British-born survivor, Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal Navy, lives in Australia.

The congregation in the cathedral joined in the hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A lone chorister sang the folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” whose lyrics were the antiwar anthem of a much later generation in the 1960s.

Mr. Patch fought for three months at Passchendaele until a German shell exploded over the heads of his machine-gun crew in September 1917, killing three of his closest friends. He was badly wounded and sent home.

After the war, Mr. Patch returned to his job as an apprentice plumber and, like many other survivors constrained by Britain’s “stiff upper lip” culture, avoided speaking publicly about the war for eight decades. He said he never killed anybody during the fighting, recalling how he shot a German soldier advancing on him but aimed for the hand and leg to avoid a fatal shot.

Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, said at the service, “We have lost our last living link to the fighting in the trenches of the West Front and a member of a generation that stood firm in the face of extraordinary adversity and unimaginable suffering,” according to an advance text of his remarks provided by the Defense Ministry. “But today above all else, we give thanks for the life of a brave and inspirational man whose message of reconciliation and peace has reached and touched so many.”

Mr. Patch’s reticence about the war changed in 2002 when he returned to Belgium for the first time since the conflict. In 2004, he met and shook hands with Charles Küntz, a former German soldier from the same era. In 2007, he published a memoir, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” using the nickname of British soldiers in World War I.

Along with two other of the oldest veterans, Mr. Allingham and William Stone, he laid a wreath last year in London at the memorial commemorating the armistice that ended what President Woodrow Wilson had called “a war to end all wars” on November 11, 1918.

The royal family was represented at the funeral by the Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Camilla Parker-Bowles, the second wife of Prince Charles.

John F. Burns reported from Wells, England, and Alan Cowell from London