Operation Compass: Snapshots of War

By Victor Gregg and Rick Stroud

Operation Compass was the first large Allied military operation of the Western Desert Campaign (1940–1943) during the Second World War.

The Western Desert Force, composed of around 30,000 men from British and other Commonwealth forces, advanced from Mersa Matruh on a five-day raid against the Italian positions of the 10th Army. Operation Compass continued long beyond its original limitations in order to exploit British success.

Victor Gregg takes us behind the scenes of this unforgiving terrain, to the sangars rather than the trenches, in an astonishing first-hand account of warfare. Through tender friendships and tea runs, devastating news from home and visible enemies on the horizon, Gregg goes beyond the graphic descriptions of injuries and front-line action to show the psychological impact of daily life both on and off the battlefield.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781448216796

Victor Gregg

Victor Gregg was born in London in 1919 and joined the army in 1937, serving first in the Rifle Brigade in Palestine and North Africa, notably at the Battle of Alamein, and then with the Parachute Regiment, at the Battle of Arnhem. As a prisoner of war he survived the bombing of Dresden to be repatriated in 1946. The story of his adult years, Rifleman, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011, the prequel, King's Cross Kid, in 2013 and the final part of his trilogy, Soldier, Spy: A Survivor's Tale, in 2016; all were co-written with Rick Stroud. Victor Gregg died in 2021, aged 102.

Book preview

Operation Compass

Snapshots of War

Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud

Contents

Author’s Note

Operation Compass

Afterword

A Note on the Authors

Author’s Note

I am a Rifleman, and the series of stories that I am calling ‘Snapshots’ are all true. I have tried to describe what it is like to fight a war, living and not knowing from one day to the next when your last breath will be drawn.

The people I have written about were real men, my comrades. I hope that what I have written will help you feel their pain, bewilderment, frustrations and exultations.

I want you to travel the road alongside these men, some of whom were destined to be buried in a foreign field, while others survived to live a life of mental torture after the storms of battles have receded into the history books. This is a soldier’s tale.

Victor Gregg, veteran of the Rifle Brigade and 10th Parachute Regiment

Operation Compass

The First Victory

Egypt, 1940

The Second World War was a mobile war. Unlike the troops of the First World War, the war we were fighting was one of movement. Armoured forces could travel up to fifty or sixty miles in a day’s fighting. But, though tanks can break through a defensive position they cannot capture it – this has to be the job of the infantry, and once in position we have to stand and fight, hold out position and then, we hope, advance.

We had been ordered to a new position on the road that joins Benghazi to Tripoli. While we were moving, a couple of Italian CR.42s (a light, twin-winged aircraft) chanced upon our by now straggling force and proceeded to distribute baskets of their peculiar brand of hand grenades – we called these Thermos bottles because that’s what they looked like. They didn’t explode when dropped but exploded upon any subsequent handling. Filled with small metal pellets they could cause considerable damage to any human within their twenty foot range.

It was a tired and weary force that eventually reached the point on the road that was our destination, and the order came to dismount from the trucks, unload the gear, all transport to the rear and start digging in.

We learnt that the whole Italian Army had come to a halt at Benghazi but was