Dresden

by Victor Gregg

  It had a centre arch, we could all see, which suddenly collapsed and still not one bomb had landed on the lines leading into the city. As if it was a great car park in the sky, the heavens were full of airplanes. As they approached we could hear and see the bombs falling, dropping their loads of death and destruction. On the ground me and my companions were all helpless.

  The second raid had been in progress for about a quarter of an hour when halfway between us and the station the ground erupted in huge clouds of smoke and flame. After the concussion came the enormous pull of the wind as air rushed in to replace the vacuum that had been caused by the blasts. It was a very testing time for those of us who could still maintain our composure. It was the officer who again stepped into the breach. He ordered us to move further down the line. In spite of the danger of staying where we were about half of the group, which now numbered about two hundred people, refused to move. We left them, there was nothing to be done for these people who were in a pitiless state, petrified with terror and unable to move their limbs.

  Not so our gallant leader, who I believe wanted to take us back into the furnace once the second wave of bombers had concluded their business.

  Chapter Five

  Aftermath

  After half an hour the second wave, much stronger than the first, started to thin out although there were still some stragglers. It was what was happening on the ground that made the difference. Everything was in full flame, everything that could burn was alight including a lot of stuff I thought could never burn. The metalled roadways were like burning rivers of bubbling and hissing tar. Huge fragments of material were flying through the air, sucked into the vortex formed by the hurricane winds.

  There were now less than a hundred of us in the group. The position we were in gave us a safe breathing space of roughly two hundred yards from the fires, in some places less. We could see people being torn from whatever they were hanging on to, picked up by an invisible giant hand and drawn up in to the ever deepening red glow reflected from the clouds of smoke that were swirling around. If we tried to help the heat drove us back, there was nothing we could do.

  Try as we might there was no way that we onlookers could bring any assistance to the tragedy that was being played out on the stage.

  A small group that had made it almost to the edge of the field tried to reach us, attempting to cross what once been a roadway, only to get themselves stuck in a bubbling mass of molten tar. One by one these unfortunates sank to the ground through sheer exhaustion and then died in a pyre of smoke and flame.

  We watched, as if looking at a giant circus act. People of all shapes, sizes and ages got slowly sucked into the vortex by the force of the winds and then, with a final whisk, they were lifted up into the sky and into the pillars of smoke and fire that carried on up until they disappeared in the clouds above, with their hair and clothing alight. And as if the devil himself decided that the torment the people were suffering was insufficient, above the noise of the wind and the roar of the inferno around us came the interminable, agonised screams of the victims as they were roasted alive. It was these fiendish visions that brutalised my mind in later years.

  Then, from out of the smoke and dust a new group joined us with the news that our position was completely cut off. The railway line that we had taken refuge along was now a tangled mass of twisted steel. As each of the buildings to our front collapsed a new, huge blast of heat enveloped our positions. What saved us was that we were on open ground with oxygen to breath. But we all knew that although the raids were over, the fires weren’t dying down, they were getting worse.

  Our leader had given up any idea he may have had about venturing into the furnace that was the once beautiful city of Dresden. The city to our front was now a mass of flame rising up into the night before finally disappearing into the cloud of smoke that filled the heavens above us.

  All of us present thought that our last minutes of life were not far away. The heat was intense, but the real horror was the effort it took to breathe, the air was so hot that it was painful to inhale. The leader realised that if we were going to die it was better that we died trying to get away and so with a flourish of his hand he signaled the group to follow him. We did so in silence because the heat made it impossible for us to open our mouths. He lead us out to an island of safety and there he called a halt.

  I am finding it impossible to describe the scene as it actually was, it had to be witnessed to be believed and those of us that were witnesses would be, for the rest of our lives, affected by the memories of that terrible night.

  Chapter Six

  The General

  As soon as dawn broke through the dark caused by the smoke and flame, we saw that new gangs of men had arrived and were now filling up the huge craters along the railway and relaying the track. By what must have been mid-morning a small line of wagons were shunted up to a position alongside us. You had to hand it to these Krauts, the first thing they think of is invariably their belly, sure enough in the centre was a kitchen wagon complete with hot soup, black bread and a forty gallon drum of their erzazt coffee, made from crushed acorns.

  Yet again our leader sorted out the men he believed would be able to attack his next move into the flames, and I was one of them. He approached me and said “You Tommy ya? To which I replied ‘Ya, ich bin Englander’. He gave me a grin, ‘Gut Englander Tommy, Sie Komm mit eins’. This meant I was to go with him which I didn’t mind as it meant food, possible shelter, but most of all he represented order amongst chaos, which I didn’t mind, even if he was the hated enemy. If he was brave and stupid enough to fight what I thought was the impossible then I, an Englishman, would match him.

  And so that morning of the Fourteenth of February, Nineteen Forty Five our work party of about forty men trudged across the short open field and into the smouldering embers at the edge of the vast bonfire that was still raging less than five or six hundred yards away from us. Other small groups were already digging and shoveling at the piles of fallen masonry, trying to clear a pathway through the rubble so that the rescue gangs could make a start on uncovering the cellars, in the hope that there may be some chance of finding survivors. It must be said that, even though these gangs were made up of different nationalities, everyone set to it with a will.

  We had been at it for about half an hour when our leader came over to me. He had noticed that I was struggling and was in pain. He gently lifted my coat and the dried out, brittle shirt from my shoulders to reveal a mass of blisters across my back. He called one of his mates over and must have instructed him to take me to one of the many aid centres that had sprung up just outside the city limits. It was while I was being attended to by a German doctor that the air raid sirens started up again.

  This started a minor panic as the little aid centre was right out in the open, with no cover whatever. But the doctor carried on smoothing cream over the blisters on my sore back. Then the third raid started. Now it was the Americans who were flying over us and we reckoned they been told about the lack of air defences which, after the bombers had completed their satanic mission, enabled the escorting fighters to come down almost to street level. This time it was the the railway yards that were the target. Only a few bombs landed in the burning city centre. It meant that the population who had survived and escaped the night before were now getting the same treatment from the Americans. Luckily the American bombs were much less destructive than the ones the British had used. But, even so, five hundred and one thousand pound bombs kill in the same way that their big brothers, the five and ten thousand pounders, do. In this last raid the tally of the dead continued to rise.

  When the raid ended everyone lifted themselves from the ground and by some quirk of fate or luck there were no dead bodies within the dressing station. The doctor arranged for me to have some food and a drink of the awful ‘coffee’ and then I had to find my way back to the group that I now felt was my family.

  I found them and duly reported to our leader who I
had named General with the emphasis on the guttural ‘G’. I thought he was going to give me a big slap on the back but he didn’t, he just said “Gut Tommy”, and I joined the rest of the gang in to the heart-rending job of opening up the cellars. We had to try and drag what was left of people into the open where they were examined for identifying marks and then piled up in huge squares. The final destination for these bodies would be one of the big water containers that had been built in various parts of the city. There they were burnt using gallons of petrol and oil. This was the only method of dealing with the huge numbers of bodies strewn across the rubble of what had been one of the most beautiful cities of Western Europe.

  We were split into teams of four who would burrow into the mountains of bricks and mortar, find a cellar door and prise it with pickaxes and crowbars. Inside we found the victims, in most cases the bodies were shriveled up to half their normal size or worse. Children under the age of three or four were impossible to identify at all, these tender human beings just melted in the heat of the oven they were sitting in. In the majority of cases the victims looked as though they had died peacefully through lack of oxygen, just losing conscious and falling asleep in the process. After which the terrible heat took over and shriveled them up. This was on the outskirts of the Altstade, the old city, and it turned out to be the easy bit. Even the hardest of us was going to flinch as we got near to where the centre of the firestorm had been and where fierce fires were still raging.

  The approach of darkness made the work impossible so The General called his gang to order and what remained of our forty strong group trudged back to our position by the Railway embankment. This night we were treated much better. The General has been in contact with the main big boss of the area and now came over to us to tell us that we would be sleeping in a couple of wagons for the duration of the exercise and that even some blankets were to be supplied. Talk about organisation, we had food, drink and somewhere to kip. We still had no water for washing and if you had to answer the call of nature then it was just a question of making a hole in the rubble. We must have stunk like polecats, but so what, we were alive. So the second day ended.

  The third day turned out to be a repeat of the day before. This was because we were still working in the same designated area, the main difference was there were more of us. Gangs had been bought in from far and wide, some on lorries and buses, others came along the only working railway line. Our sleeping wagons had been lifted off of the tracks, out of the way, by a giant crane. Everywhere I looked I could see men working in small gangs of up to a dozen men, usually escorted by a couple of armed guards.

  I think the reason that our ‘General’ and those of us in his crew were left to our own devices was because we were doing the real dirty work of entering the shelters. As far as I could make out there were only about six or seven gangs employed on this task. Once a shelter was located we had the job of clearing the rubble from the doorway, this could take a couple of hours before we could uncover an entrance. Then came the horrendous task of forcing our way in, carefully managing the stairs that led to the basement below, and there we met the sight that so many of the men were unable to stand, the bodies of the unfortunates, sometimes seemingly untouched and in a kind of peaceful repose, but more often than not burnt to a crisp and smouldering shell. These experiences were to get much worse the nearer we got to the centre of the city.

  Once we found the bodies, the General ordered the men who had not taken part in clearing access to the shelter to go down and try to bring the bodies that could be moved to the surface. Some of the corpses were so brittle that any attempt to move them resulted in a cloud of ash and dried flesh, and yet so methodical were these Germans that, where it was impossible to manhandle the bodies, they were ordered to stuff any part of the corpse that help identify the victim into a sack. It was all so gruesome that to describe what was going on with any degree of clarity is something that I, for one, can’t do. I later heard that gangs of SS were used to gather these remains, I only heard about this through the chit chat in the evening so whether it’s true or not I don’t know. What I did know was that in spite of the fact that we were working day and night, our progress could only be measured in terms of yards per day. Even so, by the end of the third day we were so much nearer the fires that were still raging unabated, that nobody was looking forward to tomorrow’s tasks.

  There was a surprise in store for our gang when that evening we returned to the wagons, a shower wagon had arrived upon the scene and yet again I got special treatment. The General saw to it that I got first crack at washing and he also arranged for a medical orderly to bathe my bare skin where the blisters were breaking open. Why these blisters didn’t fester up I don’t know, perhaps it was the ointment that the German doctor had rubbed into my back. After we had our showers we had to put back on our filthy clothing, but it did feel good. I had a lot to thank our General for and I let him know that I was grateful even if we were unable to talk in anything but the most basic German words.

  Chapter Seven

  Day Four

  Up again with the first rays of light breaking through the dust and dirt. This morning instead of the usual men in charge of the field kitchen we were served by women which resulted in a lot of good natured cheering and calling out. Everyone formed up into a queue and the ladies doled out what appeared to be some form of stew, although I never came across anyone who had found even the smallest morsel of meat. To bulk it up there were these huge thick slices of black bread so much loved by the Krauts.

  The second surprise was that we had a new leader this morning, in fact two of them, along with a young boy dressed up in a SS uniform and carrying a schmeiser machine pistol. By the look of the lad he had never fired the thing, but experience told me that this might make him all the more dangerous if something untoward happened. This didn’t seem to worry our two new masters who told the crew that we were to tackle a new sector of the city where it was thought there was a chance of finding survivors still alive. This news brought a kind of fresh life to the gang. We set off to a part of the city where there was a small square where what had been grass was now a bed of ash at least four inches thick. The houses surrounding this square were less damaged than those we had experienced up to now. As usual the roads were piled with masonry and other rubbish and we still had to find the shelter openings. So without any instructions from our new masters the whole gang set to with a will that I am sure surprised the uniformed pair who were supposed to be instructing us. The General had trained us well to work together and it showed.

  The first three shelters we uncovered were empty, but further examination of the third one revealed a tunnel leading to another shelter, but we couldn’t get through because the roof had collapsed. We returned to the surface and one of our new leaders decided to have a look for himself. We could all tell that the man didn’t want to venture underground, probably because of the damage it would do to his nicely creased jet-black uniform. But his mate, who was obviously his senior, ordered him down. The result was that we were to try to clear the tunnel. Then came the job of scouting around for timber to shore up the tunnel.

  Later that afternoon three of our gang broke through and found these four women and two small girls huddled up together and still alive. Even the guards cheered themselves hoarse. It took an hour to get them to the surface but we all felt like heroes, there were no enemies, no hatred, just this sense of utter fulfillment that the rescue of these people had been down to us, that’s how I felt and I am certain that every one of us had the same reaction. Sadly this was a one-off event, in spite of all the backbreaking toil this was the only time our group found people alive. We returned to the wagons that evening to be greeted by the General who had heard about the rescue.

  After we had eaten the General came up to me with another short stocky German in an army uniform. This lad could speak really good English and, interpreting for the general, told me that tomorrow I was supposed to join a batch of British PO
Ws, but if I wished I could stay with the group for another day. My first reaction was ‘Good, can’t wait to get back to my own mob’. Then I began to think about the ‘what ifs’. What if they found out about me and Harry and that sentence that still had to be carried out. I told them I would like it better to stay with the group for another day. The General gave me a look but said nothing.

  After much thought I decided that come feeding time tomorrow I would try to stuff as much of the black bread as I could in the pockets of the German greatcoat I was wearing and await the chance to lose myself. Beyond that I had no plan.

  Chapter Eight

  Day Five

  Day five and we were back under the command of our General. There was no sign of the other two men and the boy. Today there were special orders: we were to try to gain entry into one of the main communal shelters on the edge of the Altstade. The General didn’t think it was possible because of the heat which was still very intense. However he had his orders to see if some progress could be made, and see he would.

  With the General leading the way, off we set in the direction of streets where sheets of flame were still shooting a hundred feet or so up into the sky. This time we were accompanied by a water truck with bags of wet rags and towels. The nearer we got, the hotter it got until the General called a halt and pointed to a still smouldering twenty foot high heap of rubble. The water-cart was still being manhandled over the piles of broken buildings, the path that had been cleared wasn’t wide enough and indeed the cart never did reach our position. The general ordered half of us back into the cooler air whilst the remainder set about the task of trying to clear a way through to the entrance door. He kept us working like this in twenty minute shifts and in this manner progress was made until we all retired some hundred yards back for a mid-day break.