Dresden (4 page)

As the morning got lighter so did the mass of refugees get thicker, it seemed to me that the whole of Germany was on the move. And so, slowly, I continued my way east until I reached an empty building and slipped in and found some paper and rags and laid down for the rest of the day, sleeping in fits and starts and now and again taking a bite of the few crusts of black bread that I had managed to save.

On the second day I must have covered a further twenty miles or so, I was now off the main road, away from the lines of refugees and later in the afternoon I ate the last of the bread, and found shelter. That night I could see the night sky still lit up by the burning embers of what had once been Dresden. If I was captured by any group of Germans I didn't fancy my chances of survival when they discovered that I was an ‘Englander'. It was on the third day, the earth was stone hard with frost and snow, I was trudging over some fields, and then, almost as if it was on top of me, I heard the unmistakable rattle of a machine gun. There they were, about a hundred Russians climbing through the bushes at the side of the field. I waved my arms and realised as I started waving that this might well be the moment of truth but I was so tired and hungry that I don't think I cared.

They didn't shoot me. That night I was put in a sort of cage with some Germans and a mixture of displaced persons. Once again my luck held as I demonstrated my usefulness by applying my mechanical expertise to the problem of getting their American Chevrolet lorries started and under way. If they went wrong the Russians gave up trying to fix them and resorted to pushing them or towing them with horses. Fixing them was a simple matter of wiping dry the distributor leads and the internals and, hey presto, these utterly forgiving instruments of transport burst into life. After that I could do no wrong.

It must have been about two days after I made contact, I had my head in the bowels of Chevy five tonner trying to extract a set of plugs that had rusted in when one of the Russian officers approached me. He spoke to me in French, I recognised the lingo but nothing of what he was saying so I just said to him ‘Anglais, non comprend France'. These four words were my limit, but his eyes lit up and he offered me his hand, which, I might add, was spotlessly clean whereas mine was covered in grease and oil, but he shook it all the same. ‘Moment' he said, and disappeared to turn up half an hour later with another man who turned out to be German but was, like the Frenchie, dolled out in Russian kit. ‘Englander?' says the Kraut by way of greeting. ‘Ya, ich bin Englander.' Whereupon he gave forth in fairly good English. In answer to his questions I tell him the tale about my misfortunes and how me and Harry had escaped by the skin of our teeth but that, alas, Harry wasn't as lucky as me.

After we had finished chatting he took me back to the command centre which, unlike it would have been in the British army, was only about two hundred yards to the rear. Two women and a man dressed my blisters, which were still open on my back. Then they gave me a clean shirt, taking the German overcoat and giving me one of the super warm quilted jackets. Then one of the women escorted me back to the lot who had picked me up and from there on I assumed that I was expected to go on making myself generally useful to the Russian war effort, and having nothing better to do I got stuck in with a will, why not? I was being fed and watered which, above all else, was what mattered.

Any opposition to the lot I was with was only spasmodic, a brief exchange of machine-gun fire and the small forces of Germans were speedily eliminated without too much ado. I stayed with this mob of Russians for the next eight to ten weeks until unification occurred along a stretch of river where an Allied force was already in situ.

At last, with much handshaking and well wishes, I was finally ferried across the river to be stuck on the back of a dispatch rider's motor cycle and whisked off to another enormous transit camp. Where I was I don't know and never cared, my war was over.

I am now back in the present, I am ninety-three years old and have lived with this part of my life for a month, trying to remember and write about it. As I delve into my memory flashes come and go, I wake up in the middle of the night remembering sometimes disjointed phases of the experiences I went through. I remember the transit camp mainly because of one incident. The camp was brim full of displaced persons from every nation in Europe, stumbling about, looking at notice boards written in every language. There were huge marquees where people huddled together to keep warm and dry from the rain and sleet and there were the open-sided food tents, and it was in one of these that three big wooden casks of condensed milk were standing with their lids off, surrounded by people putting their hands into the gooy mass, then licking their fingers clean. My grubby hands went into the bin like the rest, everyone wanted to taste the sweet concoction. That night was spent huddled up on the grass floor of one of the marquees, freezing cold, but it represented food and shelter, and no bombs or machine-guns.

This all went on for two more days. Then I was suddenly plucked out of the crowds and given a brief interview by a British officer who put my back up so much that I stood up and walked out of the tent. Later, I was told by a sergeant that I was to stand by and be ready to board the next plane to Blighty.

There is so much that I have missed out in this narrative. Memories still flash back to me. In Dresden, during the bombing, I remember arriving at what must have been a lovely open space, grassy and slightly wooded. I remember that the branches of the trees were starting to smoulder, people were milling around and that I left it because I thought it was getting too crowded for safety. I cannot remember which day this happened, I was on my own, so much happened and it was so long ago. There were other instances of which, while I can get a shadow of a memory, nothing concrete remains. Everything was overwhelmed by the gruesome tasks that we performed. It is the sheer horror that remains burned into my memory and, like the the fires themselves, impossible to extinguish.

The only reason for keeping this atrocity in the public eye is to horrify people so much that they never again allow their representatives to order such crimes. There is no excuse for the men who ordered this terrible event to be carried out. From the moment they bombed Hamburg they collected plenty of evidence as to what would happen to the civilians who were to bear the brunt of the raids. By the time of the bombing of Dresden the formula for the mass murder of civilians had been bought to a fine art. The commanders had developed a technique: first of all fires are started; then canyons of devastated buildings are created to draw the air to feed the inferno thus creating the winds and the fire storm; finally come the blockbusters that demolish everything and trap the helpless victims inside shelters that turn into ovens from which there is no escape. Ironically the ghastly events that I have tried to describe in these pages took place on the Christian holidays of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.

I have every respect for the brave lads of the RAF who flew the bombers, they were under orders and, as a soldier, I know that orders are there to be obeyed. But, it is my belief that in the act of destroying the evil of the Third Reich we employed further and more terrible evils, although I know that not everybody agrees with me. As a nation I feel that the British people still have to face up to the satanic acts that were committed in their name. Above all else I wish to live to see a doctrine enforced by law that this nation will never again turn civilians into targets to create terror. I could say that I wish to live to see that war between nations stops for ever, but I am a realist and a firm believer in that if an ogre like Hitler rears its head then that head should be cut off as speedily as possible. I am not a pacifist.

Rifleman V J Gregg 6913933. 2
^nd
Battalion The Rifle Brigade & 10
^th
Parachute Regiment, Army Air Corps. 1937 - 1946.

Victor Gregg. Swanmore, Hampshire. 2013.

Victor Gregg
was born in in London in 1919 and joined the army in 1937, serving first with the Rifle Brigade in India and Palestine, before service in the Western Desert. Later, with the Parachute Regiment, he saw action in Italy and at the Battle of Arnhem, where he was taken prisoner. He was released from the Army in 1946.

He has written the acclaimed memoir,
Rifleman,
about life on the front line in World War Two and after, and a second book,
King's Cross Kid,
about his childhood and adolescence between the World Wars.

Rick Stroud
is a writer and film director. As well as working with Vic Gregg on Rifleman he is the author of
The Book of the Moon
and
The Phantom Army of Alamein: How the Camouflage Unit and Operation Bertram Hoodwinked Rommel
. He lives in London.

A Front-Line Life from Alamein and Dresden to the Fall of the Berlin Wall

On his eighteenth birthday in 1937, Victor Gregg enlisted in the Rifle Brigade and began a life of adventure. A soldier throughout the Second World War, he saw action across North Africa, was a driver for the Long Range Desert Group and fought at the Battle of Alamein. Taken into captivity at the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, he was sentenced to death for sabotaging a Dresden factory; he escaped only when the Allies' infamous air raid blew apart his prison and soon encountered the advancing Red Army. Gregg's fascinating tale does not end with the war - he also recounts his later adventures behind the Iron Curtain, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage.
Rifleman
is the extraordinary story of an independent-minded and quick-witted survivor.

‘Completely fascinating … It has an immediate power throughout that makes war fiction a pale shadow of the real thing'
Conn Iggulden, author of the bestselling
Conqueror
series

‘A gripping life-story: an incident-packed account of heartache, violence and cunning by a man whose will to survive and unbreakable optimism are a true inspiration'
Independent

Discover books by Victor Gregg published by Bloomsbury
www.bloomsbury.com/VictorGregg

A London Childhood between the Wars

Ninety-three-year-old Victor Gregg has had a rich and fascinating life.
King's Cross Kid
follows his London childhood from the age of five, when life was so hard that the Salvation Army arranged for young Vic to be taken to the Shaftesbury Home for Destitute Children. Home again a year later, the scallywag years of late childhood began. Then, after the years of street gangs and run-ins with the law, Vic leaves school at fourteen and his real adventures start, and with them a working-class apprenticeship in survival.

Ending with his enlistment in the army on the day of his eighteenth birthday, this prequel to the bestselling
Rifleman
will appeal to the many readers who were charmed by Victor Gregg's engaging, honest and warm voice.