Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Charles Alfred Eastwood was born on November 10th, 1913, to Charles Boromeia Eastwood and Catherine Irvine Brown Veitch. However, in his later life he had needed to acquire a birth certificate which showed his birthday as April 23rd, 1914. 

Charles enlisted on the 10th of October 1939 in Keswick, Adelaide. Charles spent time in England and Scotland before he was transferred to Europe where he fought in Italy and was placed in Palestine before his unit moved to Africa. Charles was reported missing on the 9th of April 1941, he was missing from action for 2 months until he was declared a prisoner of war on the 10th of June 1941.

His capture was found to be unusual because of the circumstances and the people he was with. Charles was captured with two generals, General O’Connor and General Neame, and Captain Kroger. At the time, it was unusual for a man of his rank to be placed with Generals and Captains. During this time, Operation Compass, a British military campaign intended to invade Italian troops on the Western Desert Front, was commencing. General O’Connor was leading this campaign and believed he was set to win due to the British Army’s huge numerical advantage as well as having more artillery and weapons. During December 1940, Britain had advanced over 1,500km across the Western Deserts and had taken over 130,000 prisoners as well as 400 tanks and 1,292 guns. The Field Marshall Montgomery had reported that the Australian 9th division was the best fighting troops he had ever commanded.

Despite the triumph, this victory was short lived. The campaign had been ordered to halt in El Agheila in order to help troops in Greece and Wavell. At this time Charles was still serving in the Western Desert and his unit continued to guard the front lines at El Agheila. In March 1942, Hitler had called on General Erwin Rommel to lead practically defeated Italians. This proved to be a turning point in Britain’s chain of victories when he led the Deutsches Afrikakorps into the midst of the campaign. By April, Rommel had pushed the British forces back through El Agheila and back to western Cyrenaica.

 As Charles had written on his Prisoner of War statement; on the 7th of April 1941, Charles was driving General O’Connor and General Nieme back to the safety of their camp after a night investigation when they were ambushed by German soldiers dressed as British.

It is reported that General Nieme had taken control of the car and had begun driving in the opposite direction of the camp, which led them straight to the enemy. The Germans took hold of the group and handed them to the Italian military, who had them transferred between seven different camps throughout Libya to Italy, including Derna, Benghazi, Tripoli, Capua, Sulmona, Prato di Zicasso, Campo 57 in Gruppignano and Campo 106 where he stayed for the next two years tending to the rice fields.

Camp 106 was located between Turin and Milan, with broad rice fields and little shelter and resources. In his statement, he had described his conditions at the camp as “very bad”, specifically due to the lack of bedding, lighting, heating and sanitary facilities. The group of around 500 Australian and New Zealand soldiers spent years at the camp until Italy surrendered to the Allies. Most of the prisoners simply walked out of the rice fields with ease and were rarely held back. Many soldiers split into groups and journeyed through Europe in search of refuge.

Charles wrote in his statement that he spent time with Sergeant Edwin Barry and Major Graham Binns, the three reportedly trekked through Northern Italy and into Switzerland where they arrived at a camp on September 25th, 1943, and stayed for a year before leaving, assumably back to Australia, on September 22nd, 1944. Charles was formally discharged from the military on the 25th of July 1945 and was officially permitted to return home after 9106 days of unrelenting battle.

In 1945 Charles returned to Australia but instead of going home to Adelaide, Charles moved to Victoria. In Carnegie, Victoria he married Dorothy Gwenda Watson on August 11th, 1945. The couple had a son and two daughters between 1946 and 1949, before they moved from the small town to Gellibrand. The five moved to Deakin, Victoria, in 1972, where Charles lived until his death on September 4th, 1979.