Last surviving combat veteran of the First World War who witnessed the surrender of the German Fleet
The last British-born combat veteran of the First World War, Claude Choules witnessed the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet to the Royal Navy in 1918, and was subsequently present when its ships were scuttled at Scapa Flow in June the following year.
After the war he went to Australia in the wake of his two brothers, and continued a naval career in the Royal Australian Navy, with which he served during the Second World War.
When told of the death of the 111-year old Harry Patch (obituary, July 27, 2009), Britain’s last soldier who fought in the trenches of the Great War, and that he was therefore the last survivor, Choules remarked cryptically: “Everything comes to those who wait and wait.”
Claude Stanley Choules was born in Pershore, Worcestershire, in 1901. He had two brothers who had settled in Perth, Western Australia, before the war and were already soldiers fighting in France and at Gallipoli when, aged 13, he tried to enlist in the British Army but was turned away as much too young.
Determined to serve King and country, he joined the navy as a boy seaman aged 14 and after a period in the training ship Impregnable at Devonport, he went to the battleship Revenge. Newly built, Revenge had recently taken part in the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, undamaged and without casualties.
Choules’s war service was relatively uneventful as further excursions by the German High Seas Fleet were few and feeble and did not challenge the British Grand Fleet and its supremacy in modern Dreadnought battleships.
Choules was on board when the Grand Fleet departed its base to meet the battered and mutinous German High Seas Fleet off the Firth of Forth and accept its surrender. In order to witness the event, King George V, Queen Mary and Edward, Prince of Wales, visited the battlecruiser Lion, the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief, David Beatty, and Revenge, the flagship of the second-in-command. Queen Mary took tea in Revenge.
Choules was to witness a further historic event when at Scapa Flow, Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, disturbed at the way that the Versailles peace negotiations were going and concerned that his fleet would be ignominiously traded off or scrapped, issued the order to the interned German High Seas Fleet to scuttle all 74 ships.
After the success of this dramatic move, which he had prepared for some time in advance, von Reuter was brought to the quarterdeck of Revenge, flagship of Admiral Fremantle, and accused of breaching naval honour. Von Reuter replied to the accusation: “I am convinced that any English naval officer, placed as I was, would have acted in the same way.” Although vilified in Britain and made a prisoner of war, von Reuter became a hero in Germany.
Choules went to Australia in 1926 on exchange with an Australian rating and on taking up his posting with the Royal Australian Navy was promoted to acting petty officer. He served on the staff of Flinders naval depot and after two years decided to transfer permanently to the Royal Australian Navy, persuaded by the attractions of the Australian way of life.
He returned to England to take a torpedo instructor’s course and join the construction and commissioning on Clydebank of the heavy cruiser HMAS Canberra.
After a brief period as a civilian in 1931, he rejoined and was promoted in 1932, to chief petty officer torpedo and anti-submarine instructor (TASI), a breed of men who rivalled even the famed naval gunnery instructors (GIs) in professionalism and reputation and who, besides anti-submarine warfare, were also practical experts in mine warfare and demolition by explosives.
Choules became the torpedo officer of the port of Fremantle during the Second World War and was responsible for the placement and supervision of demolition charges around the harbour installations and oil storage tanks that were to be activated in the event of a Japanese invasion. He was also responsible for making safe or detonating mines that had come ashore on the coasts of Western Australia and clearing wartime debris as far north as Broome, which had been attacked by Japanese aircraft in March 1942.
After the war he transferred to the Naval Dockyard Police where the later retirement age allowed him to remain in service until 1956.
His many jobs thereafter included cray fishing and kangaroo culling. He was a keen hunter and loved going shooting with the “ocker Aussie bushman” who lived next door to the family home.
He became an author at the age of 108 when his autobiography, The Last of the Last, was published.
He had met his wife-to-be, Ethel, on the six-week voyage to Australia when he was on loan from the Royal Navy. She died in 2003.
He is survived by three children, eleven grandchildren and twenty-one great-grandchildren. One of his grandchildren is the prize-winning and much exhibited painter Lindsay Pow.
Chief Petty Officer Claude Choules, veteran of the First World War, was born on March 3, 1901. He died on May 5, 2011, aged 110
Apostolos Santas
Greek Resistance hero who as a youth defied the occupying German Army by wrenching the swastika flag from the Acropolis
On the night of May 30, 1941, two teenage boys crept through the undergrowth at the foot of the Acropolis. Steeled by thoughts of the Spartan king Leonidas at Thermopylae, Apostolos Santas and Manolis Glezos were about to carry out an act of defiance that would make them folk heroes and come to symbolise the start of Greece’s resistance to rule by the Nazis.
After Italy’s declaration of war on Greece in October 1940, Germany had invaded the country in early April 1941. By the 27th, its troops had occupied Athens and on the summit of the city’s focal point, the Acropolis, they replaced the Greek flag with that emblazoned with the swastika.
Santas, who was 19, and Glezos, 18, were friends and university students in the capital. Sitting in the gardens of the Zappeion one evening in late May, they resolved to do something about the flag which, as they put it, cast a shadow over the sunset. In the skies above they could see aircraft flying to attack the last free corner of Greece — Crete.
After consulting books in the National Library, the pair discovered that a little-known natural passageway ran under the Acropolis from the cave of Aglauros on its northern rim. They scouted the entrance the next day under the guise of visiting the Parthenon, and that evening heard that Crete had fallen. A third friend backed out of the adventure at the last moment, and at half past nine, carrying only a torch and a pocket knife, they set off. Near the monument they had to skirt a German guardroom, where they could hear the sentries carousing.
Entering the narrow cleft, the two youngsters edged and slithered their way upwards along a track that in ancient times was used as a way of escape. They emerged on to the peak near the Erechtheion temple. All appeared quiet in the dim moonlight but nonetheless they threw pebbles to see if the sound drew out any hidden soldiers. The wooden watchtower near the flagstaff proved to be deserted.
To their alarm they found that the swastika did not flutter merely from the halyards with which they had intended to lower it, but that the flag was also tethered to the top of the pole. This was some 50ft high and offered scant purchase. But undaunted, Santas and Glezos took it in turns to shin up the mast and hack at the links that held the flag in place. When they changed places, they also swapped jackets, as Santas’ was dark and so less visible.
Without realising what he was doing, Santas shouted with excitement when he severed the first of the three restraining ties. Finally, they managed to haul down the flag, which was more than 12ft long and 6ft high. They cut pieces from it as evidence of their deed and then rolled it into a bundle. Realising that they could never conceal it as they returned home, they decided to drop it into a deep well in the cave as they made their way back down.
The intrepid duo had spent more than three hours on the Acropolis. The only challenge came from a Greek policeman in the streets below the rock. Santas readied himself to stab the constable, but Glezos calmly talked their way out of danger.
When morning came, panic gripped the German garrison. That afternoon’s newspapers announced that the fingerprints of the unknown culprits had been found on the pole and that they had been sentenced to death. Senior Greek police officers were dismissed and a curfew imposed.
The next few years brought terrible suffering to Greece. Almost 10 per cent of the population — the highest of any occupied country — perished, largely through famine. Even so, the flame of hope kindled by the courage of Santas and Glezos was never extinguished, and Greece was eventually liberated at the end of 1944.
Born in Patras in 1922, Apostolos Philippos Santas was the son of an official in the Ministry of Agriculture. Commonly called by the diminutive Lakis, he began studying law in Athens in 1940.
After his exploit on the Acropolis, he became active in the student wing of the Resistance, putting up posters and suchlike. In 1942, however, he and Glezos were betrayed and arrested, but the identities of those behind their embarrassment still eluded the Axis powers. Accordingly, Santas was released in an amnesty and in 1943 he joined Elas, the pro-communist partisans. He fought with them in the mountains of central Greece and the next year was lightly wounded when a spent bullet struck him in the chest.
Although he resumed his degree at the end of the war, his troubles were not over. Greece was soon rent by civil war and Santas’ left-wing sympathies led to his arrest by the Government. He was sent into internal exile in 1946 and, while under threat of death, to the prison island of Makronisos two years later. He then managed to escape to Italy and was subsequently granted political asylum by Canada.
Having found a good position for himself there, he was reluctant to return to Greece but did so in 1963 after being assured by his father that it had changed for the better. Yet four years later the Colonels seized power, and Santas was jailed once more.
By comparison with Glezos, who went on to a prominent career in politics and journalism, and is a figurehead for the current anti-austerity protests, Santas had a low public profile. In recent years, however, he and Glezos were honoured for their deed in 1941, and latterly a tablet commemorating it was affixed to the Acropolis.
Lakis Santas published a memoir, My Night on the Acropolis, last year.
His wife, Cleopatra, predeceased him and he is survived by their two daughters.
Apostolos Santas, hero of the Greek Resistance, was born on February 22, 1922. He died on April 30, 2011, aged 89
