It was news that every mother in her street had been dreading.

As Hitler’s Panzers rolled across France towards Dunkirk in 1940, Alice Barber opened her local paper to read that her 20-year-old son Ron had been killed in action.

The article claimed a comrade had seen him fall.

At first, she was devastated, but then she refused to believe it, telling friends and family: ‘I’d know it if he was gone.’

After two years of desperately waiting for news, she was vindicated. Ron Barber was alive and being held in a German POW camp.

She would not set eyes on him until the end of the war – when he was liberated by the advancing Americans and flown home.

Last week, the veteran celebrated his 105th birthday at his care home in Middlesbrough.

He also revealed to his shocked family even more details about what had happened to him during his brutal period of captivity.

Last week, Second World War veteran Ron Barber celebrated his 105th birthday. Above: Cutting his cake at his care home in Middlesbrough

The family say he had been ghosted between multiple German work camps so the Red Cross did not catch up with him until 1942.

Ron’s name listed among the casualties in the local newspaper

While desperately waiting to be liberated, he and his fellow prisoners had been herded into a field near the camp and found themselves staring down the barrels of heavy machine guns.

Ron would recall years later: ‘We had heavy machine guns trained on us. We were there all day.

‘The rumour was that something was going on.

‘But it must have fallen through because at night, all of a sudden, they just stacked up the machine guns and went.’

The terrified POWs never did find out what the Nazis had planned, but it could have been a terrible end to an ordeal which began in 1940.

Ron and his comrades were among the first British soldiers to be captured by the Nazis during the fighting around Dunkirk.

The eldest of four children, Ron was starting a career as a baker when he joined the 4th Battalion, The Green Howards, as a fresh-faced 19-year-old in May 1939.

Ron Barber (pictured right with comrades) was presumed dead after going missing in Dunkirk in 1940

The eldest of four children, Ron (pictured seated, far right) was starting a career as a baker when he joined the 4th Battalion, The Green Howards, as a fresh-faced 19-year-old in May 1939

He was in a field at RAF Catterick Camp when war was declared, with the 4th and 6th Green Howards among the first to be shipped to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force.

Ironically, as the Blitzkrieg raged, Ron and his comrades found themselves fighting in the same trenches that had been dug in the last war.

As the Germans closed in on Dunkirk, the Green Howards fought tooth and nail to hold them back from the beaches.

Ron said they were desperately ill equipped. The officers had no bullets in their revolvers and apart from rifles the soldiers had nothing more lethal in their packs than smoke bombs.

In July 1940, Ron’s luck ran out and he was treated in a French church after shrapnel hit him in the back and head, denting his tin helmet.

He was put on an ambulance heading to Dunkirk but they could not make it through and he was returned to the church – where he was captured.

The Nazis marched him across Belgium to Germany and he was then interned in one brutal camp after another.

He said: ‘When they marched us through Holland and Belgium, the women used to put buckets of water out so we could have a drink but the Germans used to kick them over.’

Ron celebrating with his family at his care home in Middlesbrough

‘One morning, at the main gate, there was a big queue of POWs. Somebody had put a notice up saying “queue this side for Blighty” – so there was a great big queue waiting to go to Blighty!

‘The Germans could never understand our mentality.’

Over the years, there were times of unimaginable hardship. But then one morning everything changed.

Ron recalled: ‘We’d been marching – you just slept where you stopped – and one day, the Germans just disappeared.

‘They were there one night and gone the next morning, so we all just walked to the next village.’

Ron with his great-grandson. In later life, he became a guiding light of the Combined Services Association

Once back in Britain, Ron initially returned to work in a bakery, where he was a foreman.

He then started a career in insurance, which he continued until retirement.

But he never forgot what happened to him. In later life, he became a guiding light of the Combined Services Association. He was treasurer and chairman before being elected president in 2004 aged 84.

He was also a familiar face at military parades and Remembrance Day services, where he carried the standard for the association until he retired aged 98.

On December 8, 2010, he received the Middlesbrough Mayor’s Award from former mayor Ray Mallon and in 2015, he was named Middlesbrough Citizen of the Year.

A proud family man, he is a father, great-grandfather, and great-great grandfather with two happy marriages – first to Margaret, who died in 1972, and then to the late Dorothy.