Survivor of the Long March: Five Years As a Pow 1940-1945

Nothing prepares a man for war and Private Charles Waite, of the 2/7th Queen's Royal Regiment, was certainly ill-prepared when his convoy carrying supplies of petrol and ammunition on its way to Dunkirk took a wrong turning near Abbeville. They met half a dozen German tanks on the road and saw hundreds of German soldiers marching across fields towards them. 'The day I was captured, I had a rifle but no ammunition.' Charles lost his freedom that day in May 1940 and didn't regain it until May 1945 when he was finally picked up by the Americans, having walked 1600km from his prison camp attached to Stalag 20B in East Prussia. 'When I got back I couldn't tell anybody about what had happened during my years as a POW. I was ashamed. I hadn't won any medals; I had no stories of brave deeds. How could I be proud of breaking rocks for 12 hours day or pulling cabbages out of frozen ground at gunpoint? Would they have wanted to hear about the wounded soldiers dying in my arms, of the acts of cruelty I witnessed, and the terrible hunger and fatigue suffered on the Long March? Everybody wanted to forget the war and get on with rebuilding their lives.' Silent for 70 years, for the first time he has put his story on paper. He describes his first march from Abbeville to Trier and journey by cattle truck across Germany to the east; working in a stone quarry and years of farm labour; his period in solitary confinement for sabotage; and the Long March home in the one of the worst winters on record. His story is also about friendship, of physical and mental resilience, and of compassion for everyone who suffered. 'My book is for all who lie in foreign fields. Those in shallow graves, the men we couldn't take with us. It's for those left behind.'