War hero Charlie Harding is taking to the streets today to launch the poppy appeal and recruit volunteers.

Charlie, 80, who was a prisoner during the Second World War, will collect money and sell poppies dressed in his full army uniform.

Volunteers, mostly pensioners, are selling poppies across the county to raise money for ex-servicemen and women who have run into financial difficulties or who need help in their old age.

Mr Harding, who served in the First Buckinghamshire Battalion during the war, joined the Territorial Army in 1938.

The next year he was called to war and stationed near Dunkirk in France from where he fired a one pound anti-tank gun.

Mr Harding said: "It was an artillery gun on three wheels and there were three of us operating it.

"All three of us were wounded by the Germans and I had injuries to my shoulder, arm and the back of my head.

"After that we were all captured and marched to Poland. I was held prisoner for five years."

Mr Harding was forced to walk 1,000 miles from Poland, through France and Belgium and into Holland.

The journey took three months and some of the 2,000 soldiers did not survive.

Mr Harding said: "We used to pinch the carrots and potatoes to eat.

"There were five men to every loaf of bread and we used to sleep in cow and pig sheds."

Mr Harding and his fellow prisoners were liberated at the end of the war.

He spent two years in hospital recovering from his injuries and fighting off dysentery, jaundice and tuberculosis.

Charlie moved to Brighton with his wife Cicely in 1957 and has worked on behalf of The Royal British Legion, which runs the poppy appeal, for the past eight years.

He said: "We need to help people. There are lots of men and women in the services who fall on hard times.

"The legion is there to help and that's what it's all about in the end.

"After this war in Afghanistan, there will be more people that need help too."

Mr Harding, who lays a Dunkirk veterans wreath at the Portslade war memorial every Remembrance Sunday, urged volunteers to come forward to help the appeal.

He said: "We really need volunteers to collect money and we don't have enough people in Sussex.

"We want people to turn up, just for half an hour, to help us collect a few bob. We're all getting on now."

Royal British Legion county field officer Mike Paine said the charity was celebrating its 80th birthday this year.

He said: "Thousands of people every year are helped by money raised from the poppy appeal.

"There must be hundreds of people who read The Argus who are ex-servicemen or whose family are in the forces.

They need to know that the legion is there to help with any emergency."