conflict harry richard landis
John Henry Foster " Jack " Babcock ( July 23 , 1900  February 18 , 2010 ) was , at age 109 , the last known surviving veteran of the Canadian military to have served in the First ___MASK14___ and , after the death of Harry Patch , was the conflict ' s oldest surviving veteran . Babcock first attempted to join the army at the age of fifteen , but was turned down and sent to work in Halifax until he was placed in the Young Soldiers Battalion in August 1917 . Babcock was then transferred to the United Kingdom , where he continued his training until the end of the war . Harry Richard Landis ( 12 December 1899 -- 4 February 2008 ) was , at age 108 , the older of the last two American First ___MASK14___ veterans . The final one was Frank Buckles , who died in 2011 . John Babcock , a naturalized American , served in the Canadian Army during the war , and also survived Landis . Frank Woodruff Buckles ( born Wood Buckles , February 1 , 1901February 27 , 2011 ) was a United States Army soldier and the last surviving American veteran of ___MASK11___ . He enlisted in the U . S . Army in 1917 at the age of 16 and served with a detachment from Fort Riley , driving ambulances and motorcycles near the front lines in Europe . The United States Army ( USA ) is the largest branch of the United States Armed Forces and performs land - based military operations . It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States and is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution , Article 2 , Section 2 , Clause 1 and United States Code , Title 10 , Subtitle B , Chapter 301 , Section 3001 . As the largest and senior branch of the U . S . military , the modern U . S . Army has its roots in the Continental Army , which was formed ( 14 June 1775 ) to fight the ___MASK41___ ( 1775  1783 ) before the U . S . was established as a country . After the Revolutionary War , the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 , to replace the disbanded Continental Army . The United States Army considers itself descended from the Continental Army , and dates its institutional inception from the origin of that armed force in 1775 . ___MASK11___ ( WWI or WW1 ), also known as the First World War , or the Great War , was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918 . More than 70 million military personnel , including 60 million Europeans , were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history . Over nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a result of the war ( including the victims of a number of genocides ), a casualty rate exacerbated by the belligerents ' technological and industrial sophistication , and the tactical stalemate caused by gruelling trench warfare . It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history , and paved the way for major political changes , including revolutions in many of the nations involved . Henry John " Harry " Patch ( 17 June 1898  25 July 2009 ), dubbed in his later years " the Last Fighting Tommy ", was a British supercentenarian , briefly the oldest man in Europe and the last surviving combat soldier of the First ___MASK14___ from any country . He is known to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front . Patch was the longest surviving combat soldier of ___MASK11___ , but he was the fifth longest surviving veteran of any sort from ___MASK11___ , behind British veterans Claude Choules and Florence Green , Frank Buckles of the United States and John Babcock of Canada . At the time of his death , aged 111 years , 1 month , 1 week and 1 day , Patch was the third - oldest man in the world and the oldest man in Europe .