Battle of Arnhem: Snapshots of War

By Victor Gregg and Rick Stroud

After sweeping through France and Belgium in the summer of 1944, the Allies were poised to enter the Netherlands to secure key bridges and towns along the Allied axis of advance.

Victor Gregg and his fellow riflemen are asked to volunteer for the Parachute Regiment in an operation called Market Garden. The staunchly held maxim, 'once a rifleman always a rifleman', was overruled by a promise of extra leave.

The British airborne forces landed some distance from their objective in Arnhem and were quickly hampered by unexpected resistance. Only a small force was able to reach the Arnhem road bridge, and reinforcements were unable to advance north as quickly as anticipated, therefore failing to relieve the Parachute Regiment.

The troops had been up against unimaginable odds and after nine days of fighting, Gregg is captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Dresden, where the infamous and tragic bombings were about to begin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781448216819

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

Battle of Arnhem

Snapshots of War

Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud

Contents

Author’s Note

Battle of Arnhem

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

Battle of Arnhem

The Final Tragedy

Arnhem, 1944

The date was 4 June 1944 and I was standing in the Guv’nor’s office at HM Military Prison, Sowerby. I was supposed to be doing a twenty-eight day stint in the glasshouse for being AWOL – Absent Without Leave. In fact I had been granted leave to see Freda, my wife, but had over run it. The governor is furious because he has been told to send me and a dozen others back to our units for time still to serve, in my case two weeks. He’s ranting and raving about the army going to pot. ‘In my day…’ etc etc.

It didn’t do him any good, but a few hours later there were three of us on the train to Leicester, where a truck was waiting to take us to the huge RAF airport at Cottismore, where half of the 10th Para Battalion were encamped on the edge of the long wide runway. Anchored down on the grass verges among dozens of Dakotas sat the American two engine plane that served as transport for the various airborne units who were part of the allied armoury.

When I finally re-joined my section I was greeted with the usual army banter. ‘Hard luck Vic, thought you were getting away with it,’ Ribald remarked about ‘dodging the column, skiving off.’ I got the news that all leave had been stopped for over a week now and no-one was allowed outside of the depot. The big one was set for go but no-one knew when. The lads had spent their first night in the wet and windy open expanse of the airfield before some bright spark thought to erect three huge marquees for us to sleep in. And there we waited, twiddling our thumbs while D-Day happened and other airborne units did the death or glory stuff.

I had joined the airborne mob in Palestine after the fighting at Alamein. We had all been ordered to parade in front of the colonel who arrived accompanied by two officers covered in the red and gold bumf that means they are very important. We were asked to volunteer for the new Airborne Brigade and promised extra pay and the glory of wearing a red beret. Our colonel must have been hard put trying to keep a straight face. He was certain that none of his men would be stepping forward, after all, once a rifleman, always a rifleman. And sure enough, not a man stepped forward, until one of the two staff officers stood up on a box and told us that not only would we