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Survivor of the Long March: Five Years as a PoW 1940-1945 by Charles Waite, Dee Vardera (Hardcover, 2012)

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Title: Survivor of the Long March: Five Years as a PoW 1940-1945 Item Condition: used item in a very good condition. Publisher: The History Press ISBN 13: 9780752465197. Books will be free of page markings.

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Nothing prepares a man for war and Private Charles Waite, of the Queena s Royal Regiment, was ill-prepared when his convoy took a wrong turning near Abbeville and met 400 German soldiers and half a dozen tanks. a The day I was captured, I had a rifle but no ammunition.a He lost his freedom that day in May 1940 and didna t regain it until April 1945 when he was rescued by Americans near Berlin, having walked 1,600 kms from East Prussia. Silent for seventy years, Charles writes about his five lost years: the terrible things he saw and suffered; his forced work in a stone quarry and on farms; his period in solitary confinement for sabotage; and his long journey home in one of the worst winters on record, across the frozen river Elbe, to Berlin and liberation. His story is also about friendship, of physical and mental resilience and of compassion for everyone who suffered. Part of that story includes the terrible Long March, or Black March, when 80,000 British POWs were forced to trek through a vicious winter westwards across Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany as the Soviets approached. Thousands died. There are simply no memoirs of that terrible trek a except this one. CHARLES WAITE is now over 90 years old and lives in Kidderminster. He has finally decided to tell his harrowing story after 70 years, with the help of author, journalist a and friend - Dee La Vardera, She is the author of seven books and countless articles for publications as diverse as The Guardian, Farmera s Weekly and The Lady. She has painstakingly recorded (and authenticated) Charlesa s experiences. So moved was ex-hostage Terry Waite on meeting Charles that he immediately offered to write a foreword to this book. Dame Vera Lynn DBE, LLD, M Mus who is Patron of The National Ex-Prisoner of War Association (NEXPOWA) wrote in November 2011 about the book : I am pleased to see that there are books being written about the prisoners and this episode of a time when people suffered and tried to survive in such terrible conditions during WWII.