Price: £6.55
(as of Dec 03, 2024 13:37:17 UTC – Details)
In April 1939 about 100 young men in the Shetland Islands joined the Territorial Army. One of them was the author’s uncle, Davie Slater, from the fishing village of Scalloway. He was among the 10,000 men of the 51st Highland Division left behind in France after Dunkirk and taken prisoner by Rommel at St Valery-en-caux in June 1940. After an horrific journey across France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, Davie spent the next four and a half years in Poland, working on farm camps attached to Stalag XXA. During that time he wrote more than 200 postcards and letters to his father and sister in Scalloway. This remarkably detailed correspondence is the basis of the book, which traces Davie’s life from a Shetland village childhood through his Army career, the battles in France, the PoW camps, the 340-mile forced march from Poland back to Germany, and his eventual liberation in the chaotic last days of the war in Europe. Using inspection reports on Stalag XXA by the International Red Cross Committee (held in the National Archives at Kew) the book puts Davie Slater’s personal experience into the wider context of a world war and looks in detail at the decline and fall of the camp administration. The many illustrations include family photographs, archive images and the author’s own pictures of Stalag XXA. The last chapter recounts Davie’s life in the post- war years: his happy marriage and four daughters, his daily work on the Lerwick waterfront and his love of trout fishing, as well as family tragedies and his untimely death at the age of 57. Here was a man well worth remembering.
ASIN : B0DJSM8833
Publisher : Independently published (10 Oct. 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 329 pages
ISBN-13 : 979-8333144850
Reading age : 10 – 18 years
Dimensions : 21.59 x 1.91 x 27.94 cm
