True stories from the Second World War, written from the papers families kept: logbooks, letters, telegrams and the memories of the people who were there.
by Ronald M Wade
RAF Bomber CommandA rear gunner goes back into a burning bomber for his navigator. Shot down over Holland in January 1941, Ron spends four years and four months as a prisoner, digs tunnels at Stalag Luft III and survives a five-hundred-mile march through a German winter.
Free archive: Ron's typed accounts of his war, his wife Amy's handwritten notebook and his official RAF record.
by Ken Cam
Spitfire pilot · Prisoner of warA Spitfire pilot flies out to Malta, crash-lands on a tiny Italian-held island and spends the rest of the war behind the wire, Stalag Luft III among the camps. He wrote it all down for his family half a century later.
Free archive: three of Ken's chapters that didn't make the final print, and his original manuscript.
by Jim Fuller
Horsa glider · NormandyNineteen-year-old Geoff Fuller crash-lands in Normandy by glider in the first hours of D-Day. Shot, captured and rescued by the Resistance, he is hidden by nuns in Paris while his family are told he is missing, presumed dead.
Free archive: Captain Wellman's letter to the War Office, Ian Fyfe's Daily Mirror pages, and Jim talking about his brother.
To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.John McCrae, In Flanders Fields, 1915
The generation that fought the Second World War is almost gone. What is left is in drawers and shoeboxes: a logbook, a telegram, a son's notes, a brother's memory of one night in a hospital ward.
Torch turns those papers into books, written with the families, so the stories are carried on instead of lost. Our line, "Tell them of us", comes from the Kohima Epitaph.
Chalk 66 began when a reader of Last Man Out got in touch about his brother. If your family has letters, a logbook or a story from the war that deserves telling, we would love to hear it.