My father, William Maxwell, was born into an Anglo-Indian family in 1909 in Rewaree, North India. His father was an engine driver on the Indian Railways.
His early life was spent travelling around with his parents and siblings wherever his father was working, but at the age of eight he and his two sisters were orphaned and they were sent to an orphanage in Orissa, Eastern India, where he stayed until the age of eighteen. Life had been very harsh there and one of his sisters died at the age of fourteen.
He joined the Royal Horse Artillery in Meerut as a young man, serving seven years on the North Western Frontier before the outbreak of WW2 in 1939, when his regiment was sent back to England. This was the first time he had ever been to the UK.
My father took part in the British Expeditionary Force to France and was repatriated from Dunkirk. After this, he was sent to North Africa, where he was captured by the Italians at Gazala in 1942. He was initially transported to a camp in Capua, near Naples, then transferred to Campo 53 at Sforzacosta in the Marche region. I knew little of this period of my father's imprisonment until I received his war records and was able to do my own research.
My father died from injuries and illness in 1950, as a result of being on a Death March in the winter of 1944/5. I was three years old at the time of his death, so was never able to speak to him about his life.
After the Italian armistice, he became a prisoner in German hands in 1943, arriving by cattle truck at Stalag VIIIB in October 1943 and then being transferred to Stalag 344 (Lamsdorf) in 1944.
In the bitter winter of 1944/5 the Germans, fearing the advance of the Russians from the East, emptied the camps and forced all the prisoners to march westwards. Conditions on the march were appalling. Men died from dysentery or exhaustion, or were shot by their captors and their bodies flung into ditches. The prisoners had virtually no food and resorted to eating handfuls of snow to quench their thirst or tearing up grass to eat. They would sleep in barns, and sometimes pigsties, but if there was nowhere else, they would have to sleep on the frozen ground. They marched on for four months through one of the bitterest winters in years, across Poland and Germany, until eventually, they fell into the hands of the Allies, approaching from the west.
My father, gravely ill by this time, was airlifted back to Britain in April 1945 and sent to a hospital in Ashridge, Berkshire, where he was nursed back to health. This was where he met my mother, Joyce, who was a patient in the civilian wing of the hospital. They met at a dance organised by the hospital authorities to celebrate the end of the war and by the end of 1945, they were married.
They settled down to married life and by 1948 had two children, myself and my brother, David. When my mother was expecting their third child, my father became very ill and was admitted to hospital, where he died from kidney failure, directly attributable to his treatment as a POW and his experiences on the Death March.
He died aged 40, in April 1950 and my sister was born two months later, in June. Mum was only twenty-six years old and also profoundly deaf. However, she managed to bring up three children single-handedly, totally against the odds and later in life, was a Founder Member of the War Widows' Association of Great Britain, for which she received the MBE.
