About Charles Rollings

Charles Rollings has been writing and researching since 1978 and over the years has established a considerable reputation as an expert on the subject of Prisoners of War (POWs), especially Royal Air Force POWs and in particular Stalag Luft III. He has reviewed POW-escape books for a number of newspapers, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, and for numerous journals and magazines, such as Preview, The Officer and Military Illustrated. From 1984 up until its demise in 2010 he was a frequent contributor to Book and Magazine Collector, writing illustrated articles on ‘Collecting Books on…’: The Second World War, POWs of the First World War, POWs of the Second World War, Colditz, The Great Escape, The Fall of France and Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, The Bomber Offensive, The Desert War, The Long Range Desert Group, The Army Commandos, The U-Boat War, plus various non-military subjects as W R Burnett and Wilkie Collins. He has contributed articles of a military nature to national and regional newspapers, ranging from the Isle of Thanet Gazette, through The Kent Evening Post to The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and to specialist magazines in Britain and abroad. These include exclusive interviews with POWs, including Flight Lieutenant Ley Kenyon, the official artist of ‘The Great Escape’ for The Officer, seminal articles on Dulag Luft (for The Daily Telegraph and After the Battle), escapes from Oflag IXA/H, Spangenberg, and Oflag VIB, Warburg (for World War II and Britain at War), on the ‘Mole’ escape from Stalag Luft III (for Military Illustrated) and on the ‘Wooden Horse’ escape (for Military Illustrated and World War II). He has been involved in three television documentaries (Prisoners of War, Underground: The Great Escape and The Great Escape: The Reckoning) and is the author of three books that are classics of their kind: Wire and Walls: RAF Prisoners of War in Itzehoe, Spangenberg and Thorn, 1939-1942, published in 2003; Wire and Worse: RAF Prisoners of War in Biberach, Laufen, Lübeck and Warburg, 1940–1942, published in 2004; and Prisoner of War: Voices from Captivity During the Second World War, published in hardback in 2007 and paperback in 2008. All of his books and article are based on archival research and interviews and correspondence with survivors; all are either seminal or definitive; and all are well illustrated with maps and photographs, many never previously published.

Since 1990 he has contributed to, or written single-handedly, obituaries of several former POWs for The Daily Telegraph and The Times, among them Paul Brickhill and Bram van der Stok (both in collaboration with the late Edward Bishop), Ewen McDonald and Paul Royle (with Graham Pitchfork) and Alex Cassie. Obituary writers on all the major newspapers often draw on his first two books for information.

More recently he has delivered an important paper to the Royal Air Force Historical Society on ‘Air Force Prisoner-of-War Camps in the Third Reich’, along with a supplementary paper on ‘The Internal Administration and Organisation of Escape Attempts Within Prisoner-of-War Camps in the Third Reich, 1939-45’. In December 2015 he contributed to the hour-long BBC Radio Lincolnshire programme on ‘The Long March’ of 1945. On 24 March 2016 the Telegraph On-line published his illustrated feature ‘What Really Happened on the Night of the Great Escape’, which to date has attracted 3.3 million ‘likes’, whilst the newspaper itself published another of his articles, ‘The real story behind a movie myth’.

In the 1990s Charles Rollings also ran his own niche publishing house, re-issuing three POW memoirs – Moonless Night by B A James; No Flight from the Cage by Calton Younger, and Forced March to Freedom by Robert M Buckham – for which he wrote new Introductions, compiled Indices, and provided a new selection of photographs, and which he also designed. He then commissioned an entirely new memoir, Flak and Ferrets: One Way to Colditz by Walter Morison, again overseeing every aspect of production; it is considered to be one of the best books in the POW-escape genre and has never received anything less than one hundred per cent positive reviews.

It is no exaggeration to state that in his field of endeavour Charles Rollings is “the expert’s expert”. Numerous historians and biographers from Britain, Canada, Australia, the United States and Germany have drawn upon his articles and books and sought his advice. Among them are: Marc Stevens (Escape, Evasion and Revenge), S P Mackenzie (The Colditz Myth and Bader’s War); Midge Gillies (The Barbed-Wire University); Peter Green (The March East, 1945); Professor Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War); Stefan Geck (Dulag Luft/Auswertestelle West); Simon Pearson (The Great Escaper: The Life and Death of Roger Bushell) and Louise Williams (Great Escaper: A young POW in the most audacious breakout of WWII).