Frank Buckles, who lied about his age to get into uniform during the World War I and lived to be the last surviving US veteran of that war, has died. He was 110.

Mr Buckles, who also survived being a civilian POW in the Philippines in the World War II, died peacefully of natural causes early yesterday at his home in Charles Town, biographer and family spokesman David DeJonge said in a statement.

Mr Buckles turned 110 on February 1 and had been advocating for a national memorial honouring veterans of the First World War I in Washington.

When asked in February 2008 how it felt to be the last of his kind, he said simply, “I realised that somebody had to be, and it was me.”

On November 11, 2008, the 90th anniversary of the end of the war, Mr Buckles attended a ceremony at the grave of the First World War General John Pershing in Arlington National Cemetery.

“I can see what they’re honouring, the veterans of World War I,” he told CNN.

He was back in Washington a year later to endorse a proposal to rededicate the existing First World War memorial on the National Mall as the official National World War I Memorial.

He told a Senate panel it was “an excellent idea”. The memorial was originally built to honour District of Columbia’s war dead.

Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Mr Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the US entered the “war to end all wars” in April 1917.

He was repeatedly rejected before convincing an Army captain he was 18. He was 16.