208233 Sgt. William Mole Leck British Army 5th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment from:North Shields My father, Sgt William Leck, served with the 5th Battalion East Yorks Regt. He joined the army at Beverley Barracks in about 1938. In 1941 the Battalion was posted from Poole, Dorset to North Africa and during one of the battles there was injured in his head by grenade shrapnel. He was captured by the Italians and sent to a hospital near Naples (I think). Some time later he was handed over to the Germans and sent to Stalag IVB where he spent the rest of the war until liberated by the Russian Army in 1945.
All this information was passed to me by my mother as my father never spoke about his combat experiences or his incarceration as a POW. On one occasion, however, on a visit to me in Germany where I was serving, we visited a British war cemetary near Venlo in Holland and he became visibly upset when he read some of the East Yorks names on the headstones.
My father died aged 81 and apart from the above I have no knowledge of his wartime experiences and would love to know if there is any way to obtain access to his Battlion's War Diary to find what action he was wounded in and if there is a definitive book or papers about Stalag IVB.
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