227712 James Horatio Wills British Army Royal Engineers from:Barnet James Wills was 26 years old when he joined the Army in 1939. He was sent to France and was present during the retreat by the BEF to Dunkirk in 1940. He had a hard time fighting the Germans as the Royal Engineers had to rebuild blown up bridges etc for the rest of the army to follow. The fighting did not go well and he was shot in the leg. He and the rest of his company were surrounded by the Germans at St Valery in Northern France. This was at the time that thousands of men were rescued by the "little ships" and taken off the beaches.
After he had been captured, back in Britain he had been listed as missing, so no one knew if he was dead or missing. The Germans made all the prisoners walk to their POW camps. Eventually, they made it to Stalag XXB which was near Kisonburg. In 1945 the Russians advanced into Germany and they started getting very close to the POW camp, so the German soldiers all fled in fear of being captured. James and the rest of the POWs made their escape, not wanting to fall into Russian hands. They got on some cattle trucks and went all the way by rail through eastern Europe to Odessa, a port on the Black Sea, where they found a ship bound for England. James Horatio Wills got home in April 1945. He lived until the age of 53, dying in 1967. During his life after the war he travelled all around the world several times. There are not many places he didn't go to. I hope you have found this information interesting. This information is from my nan, Phyliss Wilmot.
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