Paris - The last surviving veteran of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign in the Dardanelles, Ernest Stocanne, has died at the age of 105, his family announced on Saturday.
Stocanne was born on January 6, 1894, one of his daughters said, and was the last survivor of any of the French, British, Australian, New Zealand and Turkish forces who fought for control of the Dardanelles during World War I.
The Franco-Commonwealth expeditionary force hoped to force Turkey out of the war by sealing off the narrow straits linking the Aegean to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.
On November 11, 1998, during the ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of the armistice at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Stocanne and 10 other former servicemen met Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and French President Jacques Chirac.
He was an officer of the Legion d'Honneur and won the Military Medal, the 1914-1918 Croix de Guerre and the City of Paris' Medaille de Vermeil.
Fewer than 800 French former combatants from World War I are still alive, one last battalion of the 8,5-million soldiers who fought and of whom 1,4-million were killed in action.
The youngest are already centenarians and the oldest, 108-year-old Raymond Abescat, of Puteaux in central France, is probably the oldest soldier of any of the nations which took part in the conflict. - Sapa-AFP