Dresden

by Victor Gregg

  While were sitting and lounging about, another gang of around fifty men turned up and after a short conflab the General gets them into clearing the way to where it is thought the entrance to the shelter might be. The rest of us went on enjoying the break, but it came to an end when the General called over three of his German associates and signals to me, ‘Come Tommy’, then makes a sign for me to discard the shovel I’m carrying and hands over a long crowbar, about five feet of inch and a half thick metal with a claw at on end. The other gang had uncovered the entrance and marched off, leaving us, who were now considered as specialists. The General says to me, ‘In here very bad Tommy, very hot’.

  The door was a massive affair, it had been bolted from the outside which was the general practice to prevent overcrowding. This was OK in theory but if there’s nobody left on the outside to unbolt the door the people inside are in trouble.

  It took the whole of the afternoon wielding sledgehammers trying to prise an opening. It was so hot that, this time, the General changed us around at fifteen minute intervals. So finally there are two of us on the end of the crowbar when with a creak it moved. The door opened the first inch or so, there was a large hissing sound and the surrounding dust was sucked into the opening. As the gap widened, so a terrible smell hit us. Everyone moved back and the general gave us time to recover our wits. Then he signaled to his four chosen men, which included me, and we continued the job of opening the heavy metal door. Slowly the horror inside became visible. There were no real complete bodies, only bones and scorched articles of clothing matted together on the floor and stuck together by a sort of jelly substance. There was no flesh visible, what had once been a congregation of people sheltering from the horror above them was now a glutinous mass of solidified fat and bones swimming around, inches thick, on the floor. The General signaled us to get out and got the rest of the gang to close the door as best they could.

  Now we all understood what the cellars right in the centre of the city would reveal as there turn came to be opened. Although even on the fifth day we knew it was far to hot to venture into the area that we knew had been the central aiming point for the first two raids.

  Gone were the high spirits that we had experienced the day before when we had released the woman and girls from their living grave. Darkness began to fall and we marched back to the railway line. It was a very subdued and sombre lot that queued up for the nightly ration of soup, bread and the interminable coffee.

  Before we turned in for the night the General came over to me, ‘Tommy, morgan sie gefangenerlager.’ He was telling me that in the morning I would go back to the prison camp. I told him in my pidgeon German that I understood. After a moment I held out my hand to the man, it was not that I had fallen in love with him but I respected him. We shook hands and he said quite quietly ‘Gut Tommy’, and marched off. That was the last I saw of him, I never discovered his real name but I had the feeling that it amused him when I addressed him as ‘General’.

  Now I had another problem to think about, how to disengage myself from this party of men and make my way over the Bridge and try to walk eastwards. I had given up the idea of walking to the west, it was too far, whilst eastwards, during the silence of the night, you could hear the rattle of machine guns quite clearly, they couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty miles away. So that was the way to go, I had no alternative unless I took the chance that the Germans would not discover that I had been condemned to death for sabotage, and that was a chance I didn’t feel happy about taking.

  Chapter Nine

  Day Six

  I was out of the Railway yard before light the next morning and making my way towards what I thought must be the north side of the City. I made my way unchallenged through the flow of people moving westwards, pushing small handcarts, prams, anything on wheels into which they had crammed their most treasured belongings. They were trying to put as much distance between themselves and the vengeful and menacing soldiers of the Red Army as possible. It was this trail that I followed except that instead of travelling westwards with them I was moving against the tide. I was still in luck when I got to the bridge. I had expected to find it guarded by the police or the army, but no, just this never ending trail of people.

  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 an
other 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.

  Afterword

  Was this the greatest war crime of all?

  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. 2nd Battalion The Rifle Brigade & 10th Parachute Regiment, Army Air Corps. 1937 - 1946.

  Victor Gregg. Swanmore, Hampshire. 2013.

  A Note on the Authors

  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.

  Rifleman

  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

  King’s Cross Kid

  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.

  Discover books by Victor Gregg published by Bloomsbury

  www.bloomsbury.com/VictorGregg

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been

  removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain

  references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain in 2013, by Bloomsbury Reader

  Copyright © 2013 Victor Gregg

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  eISBN: 9781448211456

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