Stephen Crowhurst

CALAIS - Always & Forever Stephen Crowhurst

Set in wartime England, France, Germany and Poland this is a story of endurance and survival. Young, twenty-year old Charlie Crowhurst, after six months of training, had no idea what he was about to encounter when he sailed from Dover to Calais to take on the 10th Panzer division advancing towards the coastal town. He was part of Churchill's plan to stall the German army so that 300,000 British soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, stranded at Dunkirk, could be evacuated. After fours days of fighting most of Charlie's regiment had been decimated. The survivors ran out of food, water, places to hide and ammunition. After the Germans captured the gaunt, demoralized, hungry men, they force-marched them for four agonizing days through France into Germany then to POW camps in Poland where they would become slave labour for the Third Reich. Hundreds died during the journey from starvation, dysentery, exhaustion or a guard's bullet. It would be five years of lice-infested camps, a starvation diet, hard labour and guard brutality before the men would see England and their loved ones again, and only if they survived The Death March of winter, 1945.