The Oldest Living Veterans of WWII

Laïd Ouadah served with the French Army during World War II (Algeria was a French colony at the time). He participated in the invasion of Italy and said that once he got to Germany he fought alongside soldiers from the United States.

Moon Fun Chin, Born China, was brought to Seattle and then Baltimore by his family in the early 1900s. He moved back to China in 1933 and became a mechanic at the state-owned Chinese National Aviation Corp. During World War II, he volunteered to rescue those on military missions and saved the lives of U.S. military personnel, among them Lt. Col. James Doolittle, who led the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942. Fun Chin, one of just two CNAC pilots alive, flew over “The Hump” (the eastern end of the Himalayas) 500 times during World War II.

After the war, Fun Chin started his own air carrier called Foshing Airline in Taiwan.

Pierre Pineau came from a farm in Avennerie to join the French army at the outbreak of World War II. He was captured during the Battle of France. Although there are no precise estimates, it is believed that about 1.8 million French soldiers were taken prisoner during that conflict, which raged between May and June 1940. After the war, Pineau took over running the farm until he retired in 1973.

Ethel Small resides in an assisted-living facility in Randolph, New Jersey, after spending 73 years in the same Stuyvesant Town apartment in Manhattan. She served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) for more than two years, eventually rising to the rank of sergeant.

Rudy Thompson, the oldest American veteran of World War II, was born to Norwegian immigrants on a farm in Toledo, Oregon. Thompson survived the so-called Spanish flu of 1918 and went on to serve in the U.S. Navy.