Dresden: A Survivor's Story, February 1945

By Victor Gregg and Rick Stroud

'Victor Gregg is the most remarkable spokesman for the war generation' Dan Snow

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut fictionalised his time as a prisoner of war in Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut was imprisoned in a cellar while the firestorm raged through the city, wiping out generations of innocent lives. Victor Gregg remained above ground throughout the firebombing. This is his true eyewitness account of that week in February 1945.

Already a seasoned soldier with the Rifle Brigade, Gregg joined the 10th Parachute Regiment in 1944. He was captured at Arnhem where he volunteered to be sent to a work camp rather than become another faceless number in the huge POW camps. With two failed escape attempts under his belt, Gregg was eventually caught sabotaging a factory and sent to Dresden for execution.

Before Gregg could be executed, the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on Dresden in four air raids over two days in February 1945. The resulting firestorm destroyed six square miles of the city centre. 25,000 people, mostly civilians, were estimated to have been killed. Post-war discussion of whether or not the attacks were justified has led to the bombing becoming one of the moral questions of the Second World War.

In Gregg's first-hand narrative, personal and punchy, he describes the trauma and carnage of the Dresden bombing. After the raid, he spent five days helping to recover a city of innocent civilians, thousands of whom had died in the fire storm, trapped underground in human ovens. As order was restored, his life was once more in danger and he escaped to the east, spending the last weeks of the war with the Russians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781448211456

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

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To the women and children of Dresden

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Contents

1 Note of Remembrance

2 Grim Truth

3 Overture to Hell

4 Slaughter of the Innocents

5 Aftermath

6 The General

7 Day Four

8 Day Five

9 Day Six

Afterword: Was this the greatest war crime of all?

A Note on the Authors

Also Available by the Author

1

Note of Remembrance

I wasn’t new to murder and bloodletting, I had enlisted two years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. By the time I was twenty-one I had taken part in one major battle and various smaller ones. I had been in fights where the ground in front of me, as far as the eye could see, was littered with the remains of what had been, a few hours earlier, young men, full of the joy of living, laughing and joking with their mates. These young men were the enemy, or at least, had been.

As each year of the war went by the fighting got more ferocious, new weapons were introduced and fresh young men became the targets. Through all this I somehow remained a sane person. I returned to England in late 1943. After fighting in North Africa and then Italy I rebadged as a member of the 10th Parachute Regiment, bound for the shores of Britain.

Home in England and lauded right left and centre as a hero, which I knew I wasn’t, I got married to a girl I had met on my embarkation leave way back in 1937. I was full of beans with not a care in the world; I had experienced so much that I thought of myself as indestructible. After all, I was still in one piece, whereas a whole load of the lads I had joined up with were now laying doggo under a stinking desert sun.

And then, as if it was all part of some great plan, in September 1944 I was hurled from a plane with a few thousand other men, the majority of whom were much younger than myself and had never fired a shot in anger. We were to fight the battle of Arnhem. For the next seven days the small fields and hedgerows of the battlefield became strewn with the dead and mangled bodies of British and German young men, all going to their final resting place in the belief that they were offering themselves up as a sacrifice for the good of mankind. It all left me unaffected, my mind was conditioned by military life to accept that killing your fellow man was normal.

In the end we lost the battle and the lucky ones that survived were marched into captivity laughing and joking, not a bit downhearted. The fact that the fields through which we were marched away had become one huge cemetery didn’t cause me, or the lads with me, any undue concern. We thought that this was what war was all about – men killing men, each of us determined to be the last man standing.

Along with another small group of the lads captured at Arnhem I landed up at an Arbeitslager, a work camp in a small

Reviews for Dresden

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short memoir is by a British soldier who, as a POW, was caught up in the (in)famous firebombing by Allied (mostly British) planes of the city of Dresden in February 1945. He describes the horrendous process of uncovering the burnt remains of women and children trapped in shelters and witnessing the hideous firestorms that sucked up those trying to flee. After a few days of helping to find a very small number of survivors, he escaped, going East towards the Russian lines rather than west, as he was under a Nazi sentence of death for sabotage. After a few weeks with the Russians until the end of the war in Europe, he was transported back west and to home.The author has written several volumes of longer memoirs of his life before, during the after the war. His writing style is not polished, but is simple and direct. While not in any way a pacifist and not criticising the RAF pilots who carried out the bombing, he believes "that in the act of destroying the evil of the Third Reich we employed further and more terrible evils", though he acknowledges "that not everybody agrees with me". The bombing of Dresden is one of the most controversial incidents during the war, with many taking the view that the city was largely full of civilians and refugees by this late stage of the war, and not a justified military target, or at best only a minor one. The issue will always be hotly debated, but has unfortunately been misused by the likes of David Irving and Neo Nazis to posit an unjustified overall moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis. This short memoir is not, however, a political or military examination of the issues, it is one man's human observations of his experiences.

[martinbodek · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

War is hell. Here's more proof. It should have been edited, though.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ninety-three-year-old Victor Gregg sorts through his memories of surviving the dreadful firebombing of Dresden. Captured at Arnhem, he had escaped from several prisons, but then had committed an act of sabotage that resulted in a death sentence. He was imprisoned with many other condemned men in a long building with a domed glass ceiling in the heart of Dresden.He barely escaped death in the first wave of bombers; his co-condemned who had been sentenced with him was not so lucky. The walls of their building collapsed and all streamed out as the incendiaries began to fall. Luck was with him as he was conscripted by an extremely conscientious and organized German officer to fight the fires along with a group of soldiers. The task was worse than Sisyphean and they finally hunkered down in a field along the railroad tracks, watching in horror as people were sucked into the fires by extremely strong winds fanning created by the inferno. It wasn’t really what you could call a wind or even a gale, the air that was being drawn in from the outside to feed the inferno was like a solid object, so great was its force. The women were clutching onto the men sensing the danger of being sucked across the open ground into the centre of the enormous bonfire, that had once been the centre of Dresden. Further along the line the station was engulfed. I am not certain that this was the main Railway Station of Dresden but it was a station of sorts. I never got near it, so I cannot say. It had a centre arch, we could all see, which suddenly collapsed and still not one bomb had landed.Huge tanks filled with water proved to be an illusory haven as the fires heated the water and the slippery sides of the tanks prevented people from escaping leaving them to be boiled alive. Those not trapped in the buildings but who happened to be hit by the phosphorus used in the incendiary bombs became human torches as the phosphoros could not be extinguished.Their task then morphed into rescue attempts as he and others, soldiers, prisoners, refugees, anyone who could banded together under command of this officer whom he labeled the "General." Their efforts were for naught as they tunneled into cellars where people had sought refuge only to be suffocated as the oxygen was used up by the fires and then their bodies became but piles of rubble. They were hauled out and what remained incinerated in the tanks that had been filled with water.Told to report to a camp for prisoners, he decided not to risk being recognized as a man marked for execution and so walked east toward the Russian front. He reached it and his skill at getting American Chevy trucks going made him indispensable until he was repatriated to the British Army.His feelings about the episode remain strong and not a pacifist by any means argues against any future campaigns like those conducted against civilians in WW II. 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.