Florence Green was only 17 years old when she signed up for the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1918. She worked at the military airfields in Norfolk.

Mrs Green spent her war days working ”all hours” serving officers breakfast, lunch and dinner and would often spend time wandering the base simply ”admiring the pilots”.

Before her death she said: ”I enjoyed my time in the WRAF. There were plenty of people at the airfields where I worked and they were all very good company.

”I would work every hour God sent but I had dozens of friends on the base and we had a great deal of fun in our spare time. In many ways I had the time of my life.

”I met dozens of pilots and would go on dates. I had the opportunity to go up in one of the planes but I was scared of flying.

”It was a lovely experience and I’m very proud.”

Mrs. Green was a couple weeks short of 111 years old. Link -via reddit

My favorite section details how the British responded when it turned out they had a drastic shortage of binoculars, which at that time were very important for fighting the war. They turned to the world’s leading manufacturer of “precision optics,” namely Germany. The German War Office immediately supplied 8,000 to 10,000 binoculars to Britain, directly intended and designed for military use. Further orders consisted of many thousands more and the Germans told the British to examine the equipment they had been capturing, to figure out which orders they wished to place.

The Germans in turn demanded rubber from the British, which was needed for their war effort. It was delivered to Germany at the Swiss border.

Cowen offers a few possible explanations for this transaction at the link.

Link | Amazon Link | Photo: Imperial War Museum

Strategic bombing during World War I worried the French enough that they decided to build a fake Paris outside of the real one to distract German pilots. They hoped that this series of sheds, lights and roads would lure the enemy away from their capital. Although the French began construction, the war ended it before completion. Ptak Science Books has copies of a 1920 article from the Illustrated London News about the project.

Link -via io9

I was astonished by the story, too, though not because of the strangeness of the coincidence. It bothered me, because the details are new (you’ll struggle to find a telling of the tale that dates to before 2003), and because it simply doesn’t ring true. That’s not because the modern version isn’t broadly faithful to the facts; it’s not even utterly implausible that Princip might have stopped off at Schiller’s for a bite to eat. No, the problem is that the story is suspiciously neat–and that the sandwich is a quintessentially Anglo-American convenience food. The dish was named in the 1760s for John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who was in the habit of requesting his meat placed between two slices of toast so he could lunch at his desk. But it took time for the idea to cross the Channel, and I find it hard to believe the sandwich would have featured on a Bosnian menu as early as 1914.

Dash found the surprising origin of the story, which gives us a glimpse of how, and why, our understanding of history tends to change over time. Read the entire account at the Smithsonian history blog Past Imperfect. Link

World War I was raging when Choules began training with the British Royal Navy, just one month after he turned 14. In 1917, he joined the battleship HMS Revenge, from which he watched the 1918 surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, the main battle fleet of the German Navy during the war.

“There was no sign of fight left in the Germans as they came out of the mist at about 10 a.m.,” Choules wrote in his autobiography. The German flag, he recalled, was hauled down at sunset.

“So ended the most momentous day in the annals of naval warfare,” he wrote. “A fleet of ships surrendered without firing a shot.”

Millions died in the war, which lasted from 1914-1918. Choules and another Briton, Florence Green, became the war’s last known surviving service members after the death of American Frank Buckles in February, according to the Order of the First World War, a U.S.-based group that tracks veterans.

Choules’ autobiography is entitled The Last of the Last. Link -via reddit

(Image credit: LSIS Nadia Monteith,AP Photo/Royal Australian Navy)

Frank W. Buckles

Buckles, who served as a U.S. Army ambulance driver in Europe during what became known as the “Great War,” rose to the rank of corporal before the war ended. He came to prominence in recent years, in part because of the work of DeJonge, a Michigan portrait photographer who had undertaken a project to document the last surviving veterans of that war.

As the years continued, all but Buckles had passed away, leaving him the “last man standing” among U.S. troops who were called “The Doughboys.”

In recent years, Buckles became an advocate for a memorial in Washington to honor those who served in the “Great War”. Link -via Fark

Today is the holiday we call Veterans Day in the US and Remembrance Day in Canada, but it was once Armistice Day, a day commemorating the end of World War I. How much do you know about the holiday and its history? Find out in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I scored 80%, better than the current average of 59%. Link

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.[...]

“On Sunday the last bill is due and the First World War finally, financially at least, terminates for Germany,” said Bild, the country’s biggest selling newspaper.

Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles, where Germany was made to sign the ‘war guilt’ clause, accepting blame for the war.

Link | Photo: State of Virginia

“We went on a scout camping expedition to Wetteren and I remember now that it was an old military camp,” Maité recalls very slowly. She has tiny dreadlocks that hang down her slim face and a silver ring in her nose – not the usual face of a First World War victim. “It was July 6th, 1992. I knew nothing about war. I remember we all built a fire using bricks round the outside and the other kids starting throwing logs on it. I was tired and so I went a few metres from the fire so I could sleep. Then there was a sudden explosion – I woke up and saw sparks from the explosion. Everyone was running and shouting and I tried to get up and I couldn’t. Everyone was looking at me and I looked down – and I saw that my left leg was hanging by a piece of skin.”

Roël is under the care of the Belgian Institute for Veterans’ Affairs and War Victims. She has no interest in learning about the war that affected her life. Link -via YesButNoButYes

(image credit: Laurent Lenclud)

"The War to End All Wars" ended 91 years ago on the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month in 1918. This became known as Armistice Day, and later as Veteran’s Day. For many, especially Americans, World War I has been practically forgotten as it is overshadowed by WWII in history classes, but WWI had a great impact on the 20th century and that impact lingers to this day. The nation of Iraq was created in the aftermath of the war, for example.

World War I in many ways was the “War to end all Wars” in that it was every war past and future rolled up into one. There were Napoleonic charges, aerial bombardment, a few misguided cavalry charges with actual horses, tanks, machine guns, artillery barrages, air combat, poison gas attacks, flamethrowers, submarine warfare, and primitive hand-to-hand fighting that came down to knives, sharpened spades, and clubs.

The trenches were hell on earth – mud, water, snipers, artillery barrages, barbed wire, machine gun fire, and the rotting corpses of those who fell in No-Man’s Land, the deadly area between the opposing armies’ trenches. Plus there was rampant disease, lice, and rats grown fat from feeding off of corpses.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by samuraidave.

Photo: pyza* [Flickr]

This week’s Neatorama and Hobotopia’s Caption Monkey photo of a hamster named Piórko came to us via the always awesome Cute Overload. I think there’s more to this hamster than meets the eye.

As usual, the funniest caption will win a free black and white custom Monkey drawing from Adam "Ape Lad" Koford. Game rules are simple: place your caption in the comment. One caption per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you’d like.

And "You shall not pass" is taken, mmkay? Oh, by the way, that phrase is a variation of a World War I propaganda slogan "They shall not pass" made famous in the Battle of Verdun on the Western Front. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, was himself a soldier who fought during World War I.

Be sure to check out Adam’s blog for inspiration. Good luck!

Update 6/23/09 – Adam has picked the winner! Congratulations to JB who won with this caption: I don’t mind the baths, but do you have to BLOW DRY?!?

The Independent newspaper in the UK has released some newly discovered portraits of British soldiers from World War I. 

Hidden in a French barn for ninety years, these pictures are a telling record of soldiers in preparation for the Battle of the Somme. 

Over 400 glass plates have been discovered and collected by photography enthusiasts Bernard Gardin and Dominique Zanardi, in hopes of identifying the soldiers:

A treasure trove of First World War photographs was discovered recently in France. Published here for the first time, they show British soldiers on their way to the Somme. But who took them? And who were these Tommies marching off to die?

Link – via webphemera

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.