Turn me on, dead man! 
Coming in late:
How about, the first person to die in WWII? Someone on 1 Sept 1939 had to be first among 60 million*. Look at all they missed! And now are nothing but a statistic, an unknowable statistic at that. What would they have thought, if they could have known?
And who was the last person to die in the war. Missed it by that much!
*a number that is in itself unknowable.
This book is not about the last WWII death, but the last of USAAF’s WWII combat deaths:
It’s an interesting and sobering read for anyone, but especially for somebody in the biz.
Another factor:
For an op as large as WWII, soldiers of each participant nation were dying in accidents every day even after the war was over and nobody was trying to hurt anyone.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me came out the same year as the first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. There was an Austin Powers trailer that said something like, “If you see only one movie this year, it’ll be Star Wars. But if you see two, see Austin Powers also.”
In 1964 for some reason people began calling into the local radio station and claiming to have seen a certain number of alligators at some specific location. A disc jockey started it somehow and encouraged it. Over the weeks the numbers and locations got more and more crazy. I managed to get through one night and claimed like 200 alligators in Beaver Creek (Amherst, Ohio).
Why am I mentioning this? Because in my high school yearbook the funny caption for me is “Counting alligators at 2:00 am”. Future researchers are going to have a hell of a time figuring that out.
“They died the same way they lived: counting alligators at 2:00 a.m.”
“They were very weird.”
The hard part there is defining the precise end of the war. By some standards, the Korean War was just a continuation of World War II, and the Korean War still hasn’t ended. Pin down the precise end, and you can probably pin down the last casualty.
Oh, and you also need to decide whether to include people who were injured in the war, but who then died of those injuries sometime later.