The Wartime Memories Project - The Second War

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261290 Frank Norman Parker British Army Royal Warwickshire Regiment from:Coventry   Photo sent from Stalag XXB to my Nan and Aunty Anne by the Red Cross (my granddad is on the bottom row, 2nd from the right) Frank Parker was my granddad. He was captured at Dunkirk while serving with The Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who were given the task of defending the beaches during the mass evacuation of the British Expeditionary Forces in June 1940, and taken to Stalag XXB. He learned to speak and write in German and Polish while at the camp and kept a diary which briefly reveals some of the work he was forced to do, including one entry that wearily states “still plumbing”. He remained at Stalag XXB with thousands of other captured soldiers until January 1945 when the camp was evacuated to prevent the POWs being liberated and armed by the advancing Red Army. My granddad, like thousands of other POWs from camps across East Prussia and Poland, were then forced to march towards Germany. He was eventually liberated by American soldiers just outside Berlin on 11th of April 1945. During the Death March to Berlin, my granddad collected the dog tags of dozens of soldiers who had died and handed them into the British Army when he got back to Britain in May 1945. For many years after the war parents, siblings, wives and girlfriends of the soldiers who had died visited or wrote to my granddad asking about what had happened to their loved ones. After the war my granddad returned to his home city of Coventry and was reunited with my Nan. In addition to my Aunty Anne, who was born in 1939, they had two more children, Uncle Frank and David (my dad). They had 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, including my daughter Grace and son William. On 28 October 2019, my wife and I were privileged to visit the Stalag XXB memorial and the nearby Commonwealth War Cemetery to honour the thousands of brave soldiers who were imprisoned alongside my granddad and remember the sacrifices they made. David Parker Add to this record.  Related Content: Royal Warwickshire Regiment Battle of France and The Low Countries 1940 Operation Dynamo - The Evacuation from Dunkirk and nearby Beaches Stalag 20b Prisoner of War Camp POW Death March, Germany 1945 Can you help us to add to our records? Add a record to our website. The names and stories on this website have been submitted by their relatives and friends. If your relations are not listed please add their names so that others can read about them Did you or your relatives live through the Second World War? Do you have any photos, newspaper clippings, postcards or letters from that period? Have you researched the names on your local or war memorial? Were you or your relative evacuated? Did an air raid affect your area? If so please let us know. Help us to build a database of information on those who served both at home and abroad so that future generations may learn of their sacrifice. Contact us. Celebrate your own Family History Celebrate by honouring members of your family who served in the Secomd World War both in the forces and at home. We love to hear about the soldiers, but also remember the many who served in support roles, nurses, doctors, land army, muntions workers etc. Please use our Family History resources to find out more about your relatives. Then please send in a short article, with a photo if possible, so that they can be remembered on these pages.

The free section of the Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers. We have been helping people find out more about their relatives wartime experiences since 1999 by recording and preserving recollections, documents, photographs and small items. The website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.