I was PoW with your father – and we escaped!
THE Duchess of Cornwall has met an old soldier who was a prisoner of war with her father and heard first-hand how they escaped their Nazi captors, writes Camilla Tominey.
Camilla chatted to Edward Rose, 92, a former lieutenant with the Green Jackets, who was captured after D-Day and held in Spangenberg Castle in Germany with Major Bruce Shand and other fellow British officers.
The pair met on Friday when the Duchess and the Prince of Wales visited a vineyard near Toronto to meet wine producers. Their three-day tour of Canada ended yesterday after they joined celebrations in the capital Ottawa on the 150th anniversary of the founding of modern Canada.
Mr Rose, a 92-year-old retired stockbroker who emigrated to Canada after marrying a local woman, said: “I went in after D-Day in 1944 and was a prisoner for about six months.”
Mr Rose had been captured on the French-Belgium border. He said: “Spangenburg was supposed to be a place where you couldn’t escape from.” But they fled the guards during a march out of the jail and hid in woods.
Major Shand had said the two days in the woods were spent “dodging the hair-trigger adolescents of the Hitler Youth” before they met US troops.
Camilla’s father, who died in 2006, was with the 12th Lancers during the Second World War.
He was awarded the Military Cross in 1940 and again in 1942. The Duchess told Mr Rose: “I’m so sorry he’s not here for me to be able to tell him I met you.”